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Saturday, January 05, 2013

Scenario Bounced by Timeline

This is Steven Petrick posting.

I have said this before, but I am going to take this opportunity to say it again.

When you write a new scenario, always have someone else read it before you actually submit it.

One of the constant stumbling blocks is things that are missing or simply wrong.

For example, we had a scenario submitted for Captain's Log. Everything was hunky dory, until a check revealed that the key ship in the scenario was unique, as in only one such ship was ever built, and that one unique ship had been destroyed a decade before the year the scenario was set.

At that point the scenario was beyond salvage. We could not revise the year, to say the same year the unique ship was destroyed, because doing so made the background for the scenario impossible (not to mention playing hob with the selected drone speeds). The background absolutely required the incident to occur during the General War, as that is the only way all of the particular empires participating in the scenario could be present in the location where the scenario was taking place. We could not change the background because if there was not a war going on, the mission made absolutely no sense. Replacing the unique ship with the next nearest equivalent so severely unbalanced the scenario as to make it unplayable.

The result ultimately is that (after briefly reviewing the idea of making the scenario an "Olivette Roche Presentation") had to be bounced from the issue. The only way to make it playable is to completely revise the order of battle, and there was not time to do that.