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 catbarf wrote:
Depends on your perspective really. I've made the argument before that Crusade is a progression system, not a campaign system, but for some people just having progression for Their Dudes is all they're after. It's certainly conducive to a drop-in, drop-out local shop hobby environment.

When I play a campaign with my buddies, we want the narrative to be an interactive thing with stakes for each battle beyond progression. Crusade never did that, so I'm open to seeing what the new system does.

I don't think any preference is right or wrong here. And as always, if you're playing with a group of like-minded friends, you can homebrew the experience you want.

Apparently in early D&D it was normal for a player to bring their character around to different tables, keeping the exp and magic items from previous games run by other DMs. You could say Crusade was the wargaming equivalent.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I'm in a weird place. Because I *liked* Crusade and enjoyed it whenever I played it, but also it felt like it was getting in the way of something better.

The bookkeeping and the way it tended to work better if you had people all agreeing to do a Crusade starting around the same point, etc. just made it really rare for me to actually see people Crusading. It was basically impossible to do a casual pickup game with a Crusade army.

But because Crusade existed, it felt like GW was reluctant to do other forms of more narratively-inclined game modes. So instead of getting a bunch of different cool narrative mission rules throughout the years with different strengths and weaknesses and levels of accessibility, we got the hard-to-arrange Crusade rules.

I'm also still amazed that GW never just, like, did a big book of Crusade variant rules. Rules for an attrition campaign where your forces are slowly rendered incapable of continuing. Rules for leaning into the faction-specific crusade rules, but making them engaging for both parties. Etc.

Not disagreeing, but again pointing out the importance of remembering that Crusade was always (and by design) campaign agnostic. It is a progression system designed to work with whatever campaign system you use. In 9th, I think there were four or five campaign systems provided in both the hard-backed campaign books and the coil bound mission packs.

Crusade never prevented GW from creating campaign systems, nor did it prevent players from using their own. I think a lot of people EXPECTED Crusade to be a campaign system, and complained about it not being one without ever realizing that this was by design, because creating a single "must-use" campaign system and chaining it to Crusade would have been profoundly limiting, and a colossal mistake. This is why ALL of the campaign systems that were released alongside Crusade were all at least slightly different- to explicitly communicate the campaign agnosticism of the Crusade progression system. As I've mentioned earlier in the thread, I got a lot of mileage out of the 8th ed Urban Conquest campaign system in my Crusade games.

Similarly "Missions" claim to be designed for use with either Crusade or Matched modes... But the truth is you could just as easily use Matched mission in Crusade games or Crusade missions in Matched games. Missions are designed to be made with a best-fit approach, rather than be shackled to a single Must-Use rules set.

And I can use Crusade rules with the Crucible rules and the new campaign card deck; I'm definitely doing the Crucible stuff in Crusade games... I'm not sure about the 11th ed campaign deck yet.