Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Tracking Tactical Movement

Back when I was playing Battlespace and Aerotech 2 on my MondoMat, we always drew a line on the battlemat when a ship moved.  This was critical information for us; last turn's movement was this turn's inertia.  At the end of the game, we invariably had these very pretty line patterns draw out that showed the entire course of the game, neatly laid out and numbered.

When we ran the arrest scenario in Montana, we did something similar, only because the only printout of the map that I had was too small to properly handle coins for each player.  The result is now I have a well-detailed and laid out record of that session.  I'm considering my accidental discovery here, and thinking about how I can enhance what I did to make it work better.

Obviously, a bigger sheet of paper would be nice for the players, but anything larger than about A4 won't fit nicely in my GM binder.  Making sure I have a pen or marker color for each PC and a black one for the NPCs would be good -- in our test case, I just used different symbols (Circle, Triangle, Square, and X) for each PC.

It is possible that this technique will track well into online A Time of War games, but I'll leave that consideration for GMs better briefed on that medium.

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