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Good whatever time of the day you've got there.

Recently my friends suggested to run a small campaign of sorts to diversify the gameplay. However, the goal of it is not to make some narrative-based set of games, but rather some scheme enabling some global goals for players to aim for, something to goof around with between gaming sessions and a sort-of matchmaking system in one.

Basic idea right now is to run it in a way campaigns in DoW video games (namely, Dark Crusade and Soulstorm) work. There's a global map (a set of locations linked together by routes armies can navigate), place a single army marker for each participant over there and let people move them every global turn, resolve battles when they meet. Allow to use small bonuses for controlling territories with useful infrastructure. Simple.

In order for that to matter further, there will be a system in place that will generate additional objectives during tactical battles; irrelevant to main goals (games will be played as maelstrom missions most probably), it will be tied to what people do on global map and will allow them to include small advantages into their list for no additional point cost (like extra randomly generated gear choices, non-codex characters and the like; we will try to avoid making them considerable force multipliers, of course). We will also put further restrictions on stacking global bonuses for different point ranges to avoid someone snowballing out of control.

On the other hand, we are not intending this system to matter way too much. Primary goal is still to play games using mostly normal 40k rules with whatever people have. Because of that we are not intending to use various campaign rules offered by GW that include things like battle honours, global resources and attrition.

So, the question is: do you guys know / have experience of similar metagames, what to watch out for, where to look up for additional ideas? Share your thought, people!

Back in the day we used to do a lot of narrative gaming (that usually ended up going down the competitive slippery slope). We tried the map route, but finally eschewed it for a branching tree of missions, sometimes official, sometimes fanmade, sometimes written by ourselves.

What mission to do next was decided by the winning side of the previous battle. The battles in the coming round had been chosen so that at least one of them gave one of the two armies a slight advantage over its foe. Nothing drastic, just things like night fighting for Dark Eldar, or deployment or mission types that favored certain armies or builds. Choosing the "right" mission was up to the players' "strategic acumen"

Later on we tried a different approach using assymetrical information flows, such as showing the missions only to the choosing player so that he could tailor his list accordingly, but that didn't quite work out as expected.

We also had a "strategy card" system similar to the one you devised. Sometimes the use of said cards was restricted to a specific mission just to balance things out. We talked about incorporating Kill Team "commando raids" so that a player could neutralize an enemy strategy card, but never got to implement it.

Another thing we also partially implemented was a levelling system for player HQs. In the end we went with custom-built characters that could gain additional rules as the campaign went on. I recall one of my characters was a Big Mek that could upgrade a single Battlewagon to a fast vehicle!

If I had the time, I'd translate some of those old campaigns, put them up to 7th ed standards, and release them somewhere. In the meantime, hope this gave you some ideas!

So it sounds like instead of a not-quite narrative game, you want to play a not-remotely-at-all narrative game (you have a map, rules for moving on it, and you want rules for missions and bonuses based on the map, it doesn't get any less-narrative than that).

The first thing I want to point out is that, in my opinion, you probably shouldn't bother using the Maelstrom missions for this, certainly not as written in the rulebook (warning: rant incoming, but I think it's relevant here). They completely fail as a set of wargaming objectives; instead they turn 40k into a massively expensive and time consuming tabletop version of Simon, for those that remember that game.

Instead I think thematic missions should be one of the key ways to differentiate map locations and make it matter which army is attacking or defending. The 3rd edition rulebook had a fantastic set of 12 or so missions that were broken up into themed groups and covered a wide variety of scenarios (all-out assault, fortified defenses, rearguards, meeting engagements, ambushes, etc). Some of these were even highly asymmetric and allowed for a smaller or otherwise outmatched force to "lose" the overall battle but still win on points or objectives. The exact mechanics of those missions are pretty outdated, and they weren't always balanced, but the concept behind them is rock-solid and is sorely missed. The trouble is finding appropriate missions that are balanced for 7th edition, but at the very least I recommend looking up some of the tweaks people have made to turn the Maelstrom cards into more coherent missions, and figuring out which missions are more appropriate for attacker/defender vs skirmish or meeting engagement scenarios.

Second, I would advise against giving many (or any) real bonuses at all for controlling territory or successive victories. This will likely turn your campaign more competitive than you'd like, and it will probably snowball quickly too.

So here's what I would do. I'd set up the map and work out which map locations are which type of terrain (hopefully you at least have a few different terrain sets, like urban and countryside) and how open the terrain is, and whether there are any easily defensible features like rivers or fortifications (if you have models for those). I would only let people use a fortification in their army list if the map location had one, and if they were the defender in that location (and obviously if they paid the points for it for that battle). Also, you could pick out some appropriate Mysterious Terrain features if you have the 6th edition rules, and apply them to select terrain in certain locations. I would do this sparingly, but it could be fun to have some of the forests or whatever in a certain region of the map be carnivorous, or something like that. Hooray for forging the narrative.

Next, I'd work out a method for issuing orders to your armies. I think the Diplomacy method works best here, where everyone writes down their orders in secret and reveals them at the same time, so all orders happen simultaneously. I think you want to avoid any crazy maneuver-type map rules, so Advance or Hold should be fine as far as orders go. Two armies Advancing into the same location should fight a fairly even meeting engagement. For two armies Advancing toward each other's location, you can randomly choose one as attacker and one as defender in a mission set up for attack/defense, or you can let them fight a meeting engagement. Maybe flip a coin and let the winner choose. And obviously if one army Advances into an army that's Holding, the Advancing army is the Attacker and the Holding army is the defender, again in a mission suited for attack/defense.

Sadly though, I don't think the Maelstrom or Eternal War missions are well suited to this at all, so some improvising might be required. It could be as simple as giving the Attacker an advantage in choice of mission, and the Defender an advantage in terrain placement, and leaving it all random/even for meeting engagements. Or you could get more elaborate.

Finally, when it comes to rewarding victory, you might want to stick with something simple and unlikely to affect balance that much. One example: the winning side's Warlord, if they survive, has the option of keeping whichever Warlord Trait they rolled. Maybe let them "learn" it, so in the future whenever they roll, they can choose the rolled trait or select one of the "learned" traits. Set a cap on the number they can learn, and have them lose a random learned trait every time they're killed in battle. Special characters who have a fixed trait could learn a random trait after each victory, and have the option of swapping a learned trait for their fixed trait before any mission. Something like that.

The last big trick with map campaigns is the map itself and the objectives on it. With a map campaign like this you have to be careful lest you end up with stalemates where no one can move, or people are just fighting the same person over and over. If you make your map big enough, you can give each person a number of armies on the map and only fight out certain battles and resolve the rest with a simple roll-off (so everyone gets to fight at least one, but they aren't fighting 5 every week just to keep the map moving). The objectives can be enemy capitals, or a series of key locations which you have to control a certain number of for victory, or destroying enemy armies by giving them nowhere to retreat to and defeating them in battle (harsh but could be interesting), or some combination of the above. Again though, I wouldn't give any actual bonuses for controlling territory, even small buffs. If this is really just a way to spice up your normal battles, you want each encounter to be basically on even terms, otherwise even a slight edge can start to snowball.

Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully this spurs some ideas!

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
So it sounds like instead of a not-quite narrative game, you want to play a not-remotely-at-all narrative game (you have a map, rules for moving on it, and you want rules for missions and bonuses based on the map, it doesn't get any less-narrative than that).

Yes, that's kind of the point, maybe I wasn't really clear about intentions. Some of our group play since like 3rd ed, including tournament environment and stopped caring about anything in WH books that isn't rules during something like 3-4e, others only really care about modelling, closest we have to fluffy dude is someone who picked his faction for their background, but he still sticks to parts of the codex that work on TT.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
The first thing I want to point out is that, in my opinion, you probably shouldn't bother using the Maelstrom missions for this, certainly not as written in the rulebook (warning: rant incoming, but I think it's relevant here). They completely fail as a set of wargaming objectives; instead they turn 40k into a massively expensive and time consuming tabletop version of Simon, for those that remember that game.

Well, I have to say that it's exactly the point - to play more or less normal semi-competitive 40k, just with some additions. If I could afford / was competent enough to make full-fledged campaign, complete with narrative part, specific terrain and special missions that are actually fun - I'd probably go for that instead. Or, rather, in addition to what we are doing right now.

As for mael, we stick to it because even though sometimes it doesn't make sense, it works for us better than killpoint games for reasons you probably are aware of, so yeah...
Although changing that to some appropriate alternative could work, I'll look into ideas you've presented.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
Second, I would advise against giving many (or any) real bonuses at all for controlling territory or successive victories. This will likely turn your campaign more competitive than you'd like, and it will probably snowball quickly too.

That is something I will be monitoring closely. I'm of the opinion that at very least those shouldn't stack. At most, warzone control will give variety of options to use in a particular game, but not number of those.

That said, "more competitive" is not a real problem here, everyone already use their models for one of the two reasons:
- to test their performance;
- to win.
So while those who have access to tournament cookie-cutter armies will favour something else (if you play friendly games where nothing is at stake, can as well try to learn something new instead of using that one list for the umpteenth time), they will still try to optimize their list as much as they can accordingly to their vision of how that particular list should be played.

The goal is not to completely change that meta, but to add something relatively small to it.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
So here's what I would do. I'd set up the map and work out which map locations are which type of terrain (hopefully you at least have a few different terrain sets, like urban and countryside) and how open the terrain is, and whether there are any easily defensible features like rivers or fortifications (if you have models for those). I would only let people use a fortification in their army list if the map location had one, and if they were the defender in that location (and obviously if they paid the points for it for that battle). Also, you could pick out some appropriate Mysterious Terrain features if you have the 6th edition rules, and apply them to select terrain in certain locations. I would do this sparingly, but it could be fun to have some of the forests or whatever in a certain region of the map be carnivorous, or something like that. Hooray for forging the narrative.

Well, this is probably to be used next, when we adapt to running entire thing.
It's important to note that terrain availability really depends on where particular game takes place as we scattered throughout 12mil city and RL dictates our meetings more than anything, but that's definitely something to look into.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
Next, I'd work out a method for issuing orders to your armies. I think the Diplomacy method works best here, where everyone writes down their orders in secret and reveals them at the same time, so all orders happen simultaneously. I think you want to avoid any crazy maneuver-type map rules, so Advance or Hold should be fine as far as orders go. Two armies Advancing into the same location should fight a fairly even meeting engagement. For two armies Advancing toward each other's location, you can randomly choose one as attacker and one as defender in a mission set up for attack/defense, or you can let them fight a meeting engagement. Maybe flip a coin and let the winner choose. And obviously if one army Advances into an army that's Holding, the Advancing army is the Attacker and the Holding army is the defender, again in a mission suited for attack/defense.

Sadly though, I don't think the Maelstrom or Eternal War missions are well suited to this at all, so some improvising might be required. It could be as simple as giving the Attacker an advantage in choice of mission, and the Defender an advantage in terrain placement, and leaving it all random/even for meeting engagements. Or you could get more elaborate.

I've overlooked Diplomacy, and it's definitely something that can be useful to see what players could do on global map as I'm not sure what possibilities should be beyond "move simultaneously, resolve contacts". As for particular missions, tweaking existing systems is what we should probably do. I will definitely loo what I can do with it.

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
Finally, when it comes to rewarding victory, you might want to stick with something simple and unlikely to affect balance that much. One example: the winning side's Warlord, if they survive, has the option of keeping whichever Warlord Trait they rolled. Maybe let them "learn" it, so in the future whenever they roll, they can choose the rolled trait or select one of the "learned" traits. Set a cap on the number they can learn, and have them lose a random learned trait every time they're killed in battle. Special characters who have a fixed trait could learn a random trait after each victory, and have the option of swapping a learned trait for their fixed trait before any mission. Something like that.

That's the approach I was going to take. I don't really want to go too much into things that aren't already in the game. The idea about warlord trait is definitely one I'm interesting in btw, so thanks for the idea

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
The last big trick with map campaigns is the map itself and the objectives on it. With a map campaign like this you have to be careful lest you end up with stalemates where no one can move, or people are just fighting the same person over and over. If you make your map big enough, you can give each person a number of armies on the map and only fight out certain battles and resolve the rest with a simple roll-off (so everyone gets to fight at least one, but they aren't fighting 5 every week just to keep the map moving). The objectives can be enemy capitals, or a series of key locations which you have to control a certain number of for victory, or destroying enemy armies by giving them nowhere to retreat to and defeating them in battle (harsh but could be interesting), or some combination of the above. Again though, I wouldn't give any actual bonuses for controlling territory, even small buffs. If this is really just a way to spice up your normal battles, you want each encounter to be basically on even terms, otherwise even a slight edge can start to snowball.

Exactly, I do understand that in the end it's about playing relatively even matches, so I will try to ensure that.

Map activity and end objectives are bigger concerns tbh. I plan to add more than one objective so that different people could aim for them depending on situation instead of dogpiling on a single one, be it some location, a player's army and whatnot. I will also have to keep it flexible enough to allow events happen even if RL puts us in tricky situations.
Persistent control points (even territory itself), items players can acquire and move, some "military rating" (maaaybe...) are on the list of what those objectives can be.

Multiple armies for a player can be tricky, as well as battles with more than 2 sides (accordingly to more experienced folks in my group, they can be very messy and they probably wouldn't want to play them as such). Maybe there will be smaller task forces that generally don't interact with large armies normally if we feel we need more action of all sorts (again, depends on RL).

 CalgarsPimpHand wrote:
Sorry for the wall of text, but hopefully this spurs some ideas!

No problem, in fact I'm happy that someone finally posted here, and it definitely was useful!

Well, it could be interesting to add bonus sqauads that you'd not normally bring, yet, that don't cost too much. It might depend on models you guyz own but don't field.

For example, a chaos player has a bunch of possessed he struggles to find any use to. And a tau player has vespids he never fields. Just add them as a free squad if they win. If a chaos player wins, he gets a squad of, say, 3 possessed. If tau player wins, he gets 5 vespids.

It's up to you to ballance things out. Maybe add some handy but not ott bonuses. Like master-crafted for one weapon on a couple characters. Or +1 WS to your warlord.