Event Retrospective; Dark Ascension.

Some brief reflections. Back in June I read started reading through a few biographies by U.S. soldiers who served in the 2nd war in Iraq. As an elder Zoomer, I have only limited memories of the early part of the war and thought to broaden the Politics and ethics aside, my mind was captured by the scenes of war and I wanted to a make a war game scenario tangentially based on my readings and some other sources to pander to my players. The other main design goal was to make a co-op style campaign, to avoid encouraging arguments between my players. This led to a setting where the players were running the spilt command of a mercenary brigade against multiple units from various hostile factions under my control.

 

Note the tastefully misspelled words and 'intentionally' bad camouflage!

 The actual game was meant to differ from what we usually play and instead of using a D20 to hit, I chose a D12 to hit and a D10 chart unconsciously based on Warhammer’s armor grade system.

Armor chart picture. NIL only technically implies that a hit could not damage. I had a further dice roll to confirm, not pictured.

The actual event was to be organized as three mission carried out over the phone (I was in a different country from the players) in three sessions. It worked out being at least four sessions as the last mission took longer than intended. Mechanically, everything could be handled with a free art-program (GIMP) a free dice roller and Telegram.

The second operation map, 'clean' as the players would have seen it.

The third operation map, with my view of forces; yellow represents IEDs or car bombs, the other colors represents the opposing force. 

This was easily the toughest fight that the unit had to contend with. Scaling the game was perhaps the most important element to a player co-op vs. a GM controlled game. The missions were scaled to generally favor the player forces by what I would ordinarily consider a ludicrous amount, but I was attempting to partially simulate the successes of U.S. forces in tactical operations and explained as much to the players. These goals were generally met and generally exceeded.

Final view of the third operation map. Note, the tasteful breaches in the city wall (which was part of their ROE) and crushed city blocks.

Further operation pictures. The players generally relied on their armor and mechs and eschewed support from local forces, both to my amusement and distress. We technically had records on each of the officers and where they were like deployed and their service record, but barring one court martial the particulars escape my mind.

My hurried memes on the value of artillery did not successfully get the players to exploit their off-table artillery.

In conclusion, while this was a very fun event for me (and I think for the two players as well), but it is just about the opposite of the BROSR principle of no-prep. When I attempted reset the system for a player-vs-player session., its flaws became obvious when I realized that each round would be comparable to that of a BattleTech round. This was unacceptable and something of a point of realization for me that I had failed in some of my unstated design goals.