There's a good argument that when you play a wargame, you're the General of your army. You have a seemingly god's-eye-view of the whole battlefield because you're getting constant updates from your soldiers on the ground. And yet, for me, I tend to willingly fall back on RPG tropes like "but my character wouldn't know that" and "that thing over there looks shiny!" to ensure that my game is driven not just by tactics but by story. Often, part of that experience is choosing a character within my army to be "my" character, the one whose eyes I'm seeing the battle through. I follow this character's career, as if I'm the bard or journalist recording pivotal moments in the life of a hero for the history books. Focusing on 1 character out of an army of 30 miniatures might seem overwhelming to you, if you're used to an RPG game where your character is 1 of a party of 3 or 4 other characters. Here's 5 tips to help you roleplay a character in a wargame.
The phrase roleplay in wargaming has special context. In an RPG, players tend to think of "roleplay" as the act of speaking the words that you imagine coming out of the mouth of your character. Some serious roleplayers even feel the emotions their character is experiencing.
I don't think a wargame can stand in for that kind of roleplay, but I do think a wargame is a spot on implementation of video game roleplay, or the roleplay you get from a gamebook like Lone Wolf. When you roleplay in these media, you control the actions of a character, you make choices based on what you feel your version of this character would believe to be best, you track the character's progress across individual adventures by leveling up skills and attributes, and so on. You're not walking in the character's shoes so much as you are pulling the character's strings.
So you pick a miniature out of your army and decide that's your character. You give it the soldier a name, a backstory, you make note of any special weapons and loot, and you can hardly wait to see what your character finds in a loot box during the next battle. Then the day of the big battle arrives. Your character's literally leading the charge, or at least that was your intent until your character steps on a land mine in Round 1 and is removed immediately from the board.
To make up for an insta-kill, you can decide that your character is maybe uncommonly lucky, or just plain immortal. Pragmatically, that means you get to follow your character through a bunch of battles no matter what. In game terms, it means that when your character steps on a land mine, or gets shot at, the damage goes to some other soldier within your character's squad.
Whether or not you have a threshold for just how immortal your character is depends on you. If losing death as a consequence of your actions spoils your immersion, then you can rule that your character dies when damage affects your character's squad but there are fewer soldiers to absorb the damage than there is damage to assign. In other words, when an enemy battalion opens fire at your character, the shots that hit first remove soldiers all around your character, and once all of those are gone the shots start hitting your character.
Either way, after a battle your character has survived, either by full immortality or by letting a friend take a bullet, you ought to reflect the battle on your character sheet. If your character should have died, but for the sacrifice of unnamed red shirts, then do the right thing and give the character a permanent injury, or destroy your favourite weapon, or don't take the XP you'd have otherwise earned. Conversely, when your character took no damage and rescued a puppy, reflect that on your character sheet.
Don't force yourself to conform to a game trope that forces you to continually invent a new hero, and reset your emotional connection with your character and possibly the game. I've made that mistake before, out of an imagined obligation to see how the game plays out "honestly". In extreme cases, I've lost interest in games because I "lost" my favourite character. In retrospect, it would have been healthier for me, the game, and our relationship to do whatever it took to keep my character. It's what we do in most video games, so why not on the tabletop?
There are lots of alternative game mechanisms to death. Use them!
Unlike in an RPG, wargame characters have 1 or 2 or 3 wounds or health points or life points (or whatever your game of choice calls them). The assumption is that you've got lots of soldiers to soak up damage, so each soldier only lasts for a few hits. (It's also arguably a lot more realistic.)
But that's not how it happens in the movies. You don't lose the main character of a movie five minutes after the opening credits. You don't lose the main character half way through. Or at the end. The main character is impossibly resilient, essentially a superhero or demigod. It's the same trick roleplaying games use, and actually some wargames.
Roll a d6 at the start of each battle. Assign that number of extra health to your character for the duration of that battle. Call them hero points.
This is riskier by nature and by design. Your character isn't immortal, just more durable. When you roll high for hero points, your character might take a few extra risks. When you roll low, your character might play it a little safe. But of course even the best plans can't withstand actual gameplay, and using this method there's still a good chance that your character could die. If that's the kind of on-the-edge-of-your-seat gaming experience that satisfies you, this is a great way to balance a boring character that just can't die and the potential of losing your character to literally one lucky shot.
"I thought you were dead," says literally everyone when they meet Snake Plisskin in John Carpenter's Escape from New York. You can use this trick in your game. It's the trick of rumour, hearsay, and unreliable narrators.
Just because you got a report saying that your star soldier fell in battle doesn't mean your star soldier actually fell in battle. War is hectic, people get confused about what they see, wires get crossed, reports are muddled.
When you remove your character from the board during a battle, it doesn't mean your character died, it only means that character is missing in action. If you enjoy a little bit of tension, roll a d6 after the game. On a 1, your character is actually dead, but otherwise your character turns up at headquarters, a little worse for the wear but still alive and ready for the next game.
In Space Station Zero, there's a potential penalty for removal that forbids a miniature from participating in the next scenario. This system forces you to switch over to a secondary character temporarily while your primary one is in recovery, but you get your primary character back the next time you play.
This all assumes you want to consistently roleplay 1 character. Sometimes that's what I want, but for games I really love, I have to admit that part of the joy is getting to play lots of different characters in that game world. When one character dies, it's a great excuse to pick up another one, adopt a new play style according to that character's backstory and stats, and get back in the game.
Regardless of which method appeals to you, there are lots of options for roleplay in a wargame. If you're not sure where to start, read my blog post on how to get started in wargaming.
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