The Wargamer

Remember when there were only two Rocky movies? If so, you might remember a certain WWI dogfighting game called Dawn Patrol. My friends and I loved playing it back in the day because it kicked down more laughs than Apollo Creed’s star-spangled shorts. Nearly 30 years later, the box still sits on my shelf. I pull it down occasionally and leaf through old flight logs just to remember the hokey pilot names we used to cook up for ourselves. Baron von Schnapps, anyone?

It’s been ages since I’ve last flown a mission. Dawn Patrol, as you can imagine, really plays best with a flock of gamers—where the action looks like a bunch of bees buzzing around a lollipop that’s been dropped on the sidewalk. Sadly, it’s tough getting that kind of participation going outside of a convention or a highly dedicated local group.

Now, three Rocky movies later (or is it four ... whatever ... it was all downhill after the one with Mister T), enter the VASSAL Dawn Patrol community that's recently taken flight-a collection of gamers who are showing what makes our hobby so great by giving an old favorite new life online. I caught up with Rex Morton, one of the community's key members, to see how it all came together and how the rest of us can get in on it.

Pete Gade: Talk a bit about the kind of response you’re getting as you build this new online community of Dawn Patrol gamers ­and some of the ways you’re driving it.

Rex Morton: For myself, and I think most of our initial group of Vassal Dawn Patrol (VDP) players, that is exactly the case.  I have been looking at my Dawn Patrol box for 20 years, remembering how much fun it was last time I played.  Back when Reagan was president.  I had been searching online and following the few attempts to get Dawn Patrol on-line in the last ten years. 

There has always been an active Dawn Patrol community in the American midwest.  This small group of players, centered around the Fight in the Skies Society, have kept the Dawn Patrol torch burning for over 20 years. I had been aware of these groups ever since the early '90s when I first started looking online for information about Dawn Patrol. However, being from California, traveling to any of the several yearly events was not really feasible for me.  It wasn't until I stumbled on VASSAL at the beginning of this year that everything started to come together. 

Logging into Vassalengine.org for the first time, I went straight for the Module section to look for Dawn Patrol and there it was.  No one was really playing online at the time even though the framework of the community already existed.  So I went to the most active Dawn Patrol site that I knew of, The Indy Squadron.   Stephen Skinner, the site’s Editor in Chief, has done an outstanding job writing articles and organizing events for many years, so it followed that this would be the best place to drum up players for on-line games. 

The responses to my first post on the Indysquadron.com forums made it clear that I had come to the right place.  Because Dawn Patrol is really a role-playing game where pilot progression is a big part of the fun, getting at least four players in a game, and thus getting mission credit for your pilots, is really important.  I played my first online game in early April, and since then we have been able to draw enough players to get a weekly VDP night every Thursday.  And the games keep getting bigger. 

At first, players were both long time face-to-face players from the many active DP squadrons around the world and players like me who own the box set but don't have a local group they can play with.   Now we are starting to see interest from new players who have come across us on the VASSAL server and have never played before.  Because the game has been out of print for years, it’s harder to pick up brand new players.  But thanks to eBay, there is a steady trickle of games available and the prices are usually very inexpensive. 

The support from the existing Dawn Patrol community has been amazing. These guys have made us all feel at home.  Stephen and the Indy Squadron have been instrumental in the success of our VDP community.  He dedicated room on his Web site and forums for VDP.  He has helped drum up interest by featuring VDP articles in the Indy Squadron Dispatch, his on-line Dawn Patrol magazine.  Without this kind of support I don't think we would have amount of activity we enjoy today.

PG: The way you and your crew were able to tap into the foundation of a face-to-face club structure is really quite encouraging.  I suppose it shows how applications like VASSAL, Cyberboard, and the like can really extend some of the dedicated, local pockets of gamers into larger, electronic communities.  As your games get larger, where are you seeing some of these people coming from, and what kind of responses are you getting from them when they realize, “Holy cats­, someone’s still playing this.  Yes!”?
 
RM: When we started getting the online game community for VDP going a few months ago, I started by sending out a mass email to any players I could find addresses for.  This included the people who listed themselves in the players section of the VDP module page on Vassalengine.org, as well as a large mailing list Stephen had compiled of FtF players around the world. I also posted messages on the Dawn Patrol Yahoo group and Boardgamegeek.com in the DP section.  The responses have all been really positive.  We have had players from most of the active DP groups or "squadrons" around the U.S and one of the players from the English squadron played in one of our weekend pickup games.  I'm hoping we can do more to include the players in England and Australia into our regular games. 

PG: DP is one of those games that involve a lot of table talk and fist-shaking ala Chuck Schultz’s famous, “Curse you, Red Baron!”  What’s it like managing all that action online?  Do your games make use of VoIP applications like Skype? 

RM: Voice communication in any online game really makes a world of difference.  I use both Skype and Teamspeak regularly for other games.  More and more VDP players are starting to pick up headsets and get themselves set up with VoIP apps.  It’s still just a few of the players, but those of us that do have it are really pushing to get as many others as we can on board.  Our VDP games tend to run more slowly than face to face games, so one of the things we think will help speed things up is voice communication.