GrogNews Wargaming - Modern Wargaming Engine

So far here at GrogNews, we’ve talked a lot about current military, defense, and security news, all around the world. Unlike a lot of US mil-blogs, we try to give a more international perspective to go with the news and photos we share. We’ve got our regular and recurring features starting to nail down, and we’re ready to embark on a new (and quite ambitious) project.
We’re looking at creating an open-source based current events wargaming engine for our readers and correspondents to rapidly develop and prototype some interesting scenarios about current events and throw them out on the tabletop to push their way through the current and potential conflicts we report on.
The initial outlines of such are madcap fantasy look like this:

1. The Rules: we’re going to start with a basic set of guidelines, numbered and segmented, as blog posts that people can read and comment on for now. Once they get detailed enough, we’ll look as some other mechanism for posting them, be it a Wiki or online document repository, or something similar. The basic mechanic is going to be d10 based, because it easily segments into 10% increments, and offers a decent spread of results without requiring a bucket full of dice (not that there’s anything wrong with buckets of dice, just not for this project).

2. The Counters: We’ll start with a few mockup options by Brant, and let folks make their comments on some design ideas. The values and ratings will be fluid based on the rules changing as we go, but once we stabilize them, we’ll do our best to churn out the ORBATS based on known units in the areas under consideration.

3. The Maps: We’re actually working on a pretty nifty little tool for maps right now. Stay tuned, and prepared to be impressed – we hope!

4. The Scenarios: We expect lots of people to pitch in here. If there’s a current event out there that looks kind of compelling, then we ought to be able to rapidly prototype some scenarios for people to push counters around with. For example – Venezuela’s military is moving toward the Colombian border right now. Someone could quickly develop a scenario that involves the Fighting Chavez’s rolling right over the border, while someone else puts together one that involves sporadic artillery exchanges and insurgent raids before the two sides trip into an escalating fight. Getting more people involved gets more ideas in the discussion.

The idea here is not just to wargame what *is* happening, but what *might* happen and what *could have* happened. If we can do it within a robust set of rules and with some standardized counters, then we’ll have all sorts of fun to play with.

Stay tuned for the first cut at the counters, and some comments about mechanics.

But first things first - we need a better name for this thing that the GN MWE. Vote for an option here, or put your suggestions in the comments.

poll by twiigs.com

By: Brant