Airsoft Milsim How To: Part 2 – The Scenario

A good mission starts with an idea about objectives. Take that hill! Capture that bunker! These are good objectives and very realistic, but when you stop to think about it, you might wonder why am I doing this. Why do I have to take that hill? It’s hard staying motivated when you don’t have any real motivation for the task at hand. So where does this motivation come from? Ultimately it’s the mission that should be inspiring and the best way to form great missions is through strong well developed scenarios grounded in reality.

The scenario is your back story. It’s the setting for your plot and will help you develop all the missions and objectives. If you have a great back story it becomes easier to create the situations that will dictate the missions and objectives and provide the motivation for teams to complete them. Let’s take a look at a basic form of game play and apply the scenario to change the dynamics. Everyone suggests capture the flag as a good start point for a game. Sure, it seems reasonable, but we can make it a lot better. It’s an entirely different game when the flag is an international terrorist.

It wasn’t a game, but Bin Laden was the flag for Seal Team 6. Capture the flag changes completely when the flag can run and hide, but if the flag is hated and can shoot back now you have a scenario everyone can get into. Suddenly you have motivation. Changing the flag makes the game dynamic and adds an element of the unknown. You can take almost any simple game form, throw in a bit of real world drama and you’ve transformed the boring into the dynamic. Here are a few simple games tuned up into Milsim:

Death-match

Search and destroy – a standard for probing enemy activity and strong holds. 

Capture the Hill

Assault enemy position – Capture and hold key ground.

Defense Position

Defend and hold a key position, conduct a fighting withdraw if overrun, conduct a counter attack to take back the position.

Force on Force

Advance to contact a method of probing the enemy, or patrolling for denial of force, or recce patrol (find the bad guys without being seen), and ambush patrol.

            You can see the only real limitation is your imagination.  Once you’ve settled on the format of play you want to run, it’s just a matter of finding a real world example that fits with it.  In section 3 we will take a look at how the mission fits in with the scenario, and how to develop it into something the players can get into and lose themselves in the moment.