Specific Scenario Game Likes/Dislikes

[FaSSt]

A local field will be having a relatively large scenario game sometime in the future. The field owners are very cool, and I often talk with them.

They are very conscientious people, and want to provide the best player experience possible.

Could you share some insight into some things that you think make a scenario game event good (worth going to) or bad?

I mean primarily in terms of organization, planning, and player experience.

Thanks.

[Skyssx]

Well, i've had good and bad experiances. First, make sure everything is planned ahead of time, it sucks to drive 8 hours to a scenario to find out it has been canceled. Make sure to have a story and structure to your game. MMG had crappy refs, probably because they needed so many and they were spread thin. Most every battle consisted of you walking into the front village then dumping a ton of paint at a mass of opponents, and it was worth the least amount of points too. MMG was great fun but just for the "I just shot a charge of 50 people and hit 75% of them" cool factor. 40 theives in georgia had a great story to it, they had a whole crew of roleplayers and spies were inserted onto each team. Reffing was great and I didn't encounter too many unhappy people, mainly they were *****ing about nothing.I've heard nothing bot good things about PBLI's scenarios, but I can't comment on them myself.

[Thordic]

Well, a few AOers were witness to the problems that plagued Replicant Runner, so let me try to give you a heads up on what to avoid.

1) Tell your refs not to sit on thier butts and talk to each while there is a game going on. All too often there were people getting hit and wiping while refs stood 10 feet away talking to each other not paying attention to the game.

2) Make sure the refs communicate. On many missions the ref already in place didn't communicate with the mission refs, and it caused problems. For example, we spent 30 minutes trying to defend a castle that turned out to have been demolished before we got there. The castle ref had simply never gone to our mission ref and said "This castle is already demolished, you can't complete the mission unless you find an engineer with a rebuild card." Instead there was a huge arguement outside the castle, and lots of people lost thier heads. (Kudos to Chaz from Skirmish for TRYING to get the situation recitified, if anyone knows Chaz from Skirmish, he is one of the best refs they have, even if he does lose his temper pretty easily :D )

3) Have the fields clearly marked. Another dispute arose because we were supposed to blow up a building, and it wasn't marked, and it wasn't even a building, it was a mesh tent, which looked exactly like one of the R&R tents (Dead zones) that were spread all over the field. The refs themselves even thought it was an R&R center, so we bypassed it without blowing it up.

4) Lastly, and this ties into the other points, keep the refs knowledgeable to whats going on. Make sure they know the field, make sure they know what you are designating as what, etc. At Replicant Runner, it seemed the Refs were never properly briefed, and most of the time had no idea what was going on. That's not thier fault, thats whoever was running the shows fault. A ref who doesnt know whats going on cant make good decisions ono the field during missions.

Thats about all for now.. maybe MagDog68 or Hasty8 has some more suggestions from problems we saw at Replicant Runner.