For a ‘more interesting’ scenario it takes the game author to have ideas rather than objects that enhance the game
When I began (in paintball) I began with basic rental games under which the site staff would run basic missions but apply some tweaks here and there for the returning customers. I looked around and was introduced to scenario paintball, this was in the heyday of UK scenario just in time for a boom in games across the country run by players for players. Most scenarios would have ‘special’ props which could be a few pipes and a circuit board to be found and ‘assembled’ into a super weapon
As a team we decided that we could do it as well as the others and put on our own games, we quickly got into building working props in preference to pretend props.
Flashing lights, sounds etc just made a prettier prop than slotting some pipes together or glow sticks in water bottles with coloured water but still needed an overall scenario that had to be simple enough to understand, complex enough to gather some interest and to have different angles for different players wants - there are always those who want to just shoot, those who want to search in bushes and those who want to solve a puzzle, and those are the hard core scenarioists LARPing with guns
We are known for our events and devices, but our ‘best’ loved ones perform an actual function which contributes to enhancing the game experience - for example a Hollywood style bomb device that triggers remote pyro, we used one in a game letting teams acquire the device and set it against other teams in a 3 faction game - our tech guy was rushing back and forth as teams would set alliances to capture a key location at a key time for points and then double cross each other by settting the device and detonating to ‘destroy’ the location and eliminate their temporary allies for bonus points
Airsoft has a loose match with scenario paintball, but the typical game on site is a crossover between rental, site regular, scenarioist/LARPist and cosplayer just dressing up
When we began to run games for airsoft a few players said they wanted more complex games than the basic site ones, but then many quickly disliked the full mission - they talked a good game but just wanted a dressed up gun fight
Real time tracking is a possibility, but introduces technological problems of making sure it works and is reliable.
Our tech guy won’t touch it with a barge pole, they don’t meet his perfectionist standards
We’ll plant tracking devices in some devices / props but they are to aid us in knowing where they are
Theres also a recent video by another tech guy in a different industry - he demonstrates using a real time tracker, but as he goes on the reliability gets worse and worse giving false readings which he begins to resolve with error correction but they repeat inconsistently and give false positioning
A commercial GPS device will do the job, as long as you can get good enough signals and can pass that information on to a receiver.
If there’s a device to be made and sold then there’s a limited customer base (sites / event organisers) and those customers are limited down to those who can apply a device into a good game, then slice them right down to those who don’t have a geek on call who can make something good enough putting their time into it for the fun of solving a problem and making some code (plus copy / paste from free online demos with a little tweak)
I spent some of lockdown one working out the hidden menus from an undocumented commercial ‘device’ and building a series of custom devices plus my own code drawing from a a few free online examples and my rewriting to my own game plans.
