Thursday, 20 February 2014

Coffe table campaign - Programmed Leaders



The first iteration of DBA is now available for free here: http://www.wrg.me.uk/WRG.net/History/OLDWRG/DBA001.pdf

So if you’re the person who doesn’t know how the DBA campaign works or even what DBA is (almost 25 years old now) then it’s worth having a look at the little book.

The good old Fanaticus web site has lots of suggestions for DBA campaigns.
http://fanaticus.org

One particularly good idea is the Programmed Leader. An idea originally devised by P J Raper in Wargames Illustrated it is designed to automate the running of a nation or nations that do not have a player to manage them. I think I can run the campaign by automating all the conflicting nations.

A dice is thrown to determine the character of each nation’s leader. 1 Weak, 2 or 3 Incompetent, 4 or 5 Skilled, 6 Rash. The results of this determine map movement, invasions, withdrawls etc during the campaign based on dice throws and reaction tables. I’m not going to repeat those here as they are freely available on the Fanaticus site.

Before the dice determines the fate of nations I must note that I will rethrow for these at the start of each campaigning year to reflect changes in command, government or ruler and just in case I get six weak leaders.

The leaders for 1801 are:
France; rash
Great Britain; weak
Prussia; skilled
Russia; incompetent
Austria; incompetent
Bavaria; rash

1 comment:

  1. I was playing around with this, but was a little unsatisfied with it. I felt it got a little too simplistic. What does weak mean? Or incompetent ..incompetent at what? I decided to split it into 2 categories, character and ability, and made up characters traits like: agressive, passive agressive, passive defensive or defensive leader and gave them an ability rating of incompetent - competent - skilled - gifted, which could translate into the amount of PIP's the ruler gets, to be used acording to character, of course.

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