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Im writing this to ask what are some elements that keep you coming back to playin a campaign? Ive been in several campaigns which fail to keep my or anyone elses attention and just fall apart. I would like a campaign that has a story to it and special missions not just playing a bunch regular games with a bunch of people. So i ask again what makes campaigns interesting to you?

The players.

If you have a bunch of flakes, donkey-caves, WAAC players, or other issues, then the campaign will fail.

 kronk wrote:
The players.

If you have a bunch of flakes, donkey-caves, WAAC players, or other issues, then the campaign will fail.

This. If the players aren't hooked, or willing to play narrative games the campaign with fail.

I've worked on a lot of campaigns and campaign systems (most notably I put out a book a couple of years back through another forum). The thing I found, even after that point, is that the story needs prompts. If you are just fighting over tiles on a map and it's all numbers, that just gets trite very fast. So here's what I found works well.

You have a map, with different locations on it. The planetary level or the city level works best. The locations' names should be evocative, in such a way that they will be obvious to players ("Malcador's Landing" is better than "Space Port", etc.).

You make each place have its own little backstory, just a couple of sentences. But just enough to make people interested. "Malcador's Landing is said to be the place where the Sigillite first stepped foot on this world. It is considered a holy site and largely only Inquistorial vessels may pass through its' immense security measures."

Then the players will do the rest.

I'll give an example: in a campaign I ran the most hotly contested space was worth almost nothing, but the space represented a holy shrine site to the Emperor. Chaos immediately went after it, and it was immediately defending by Sisters and Grey Knights. They were playing the roles but it was forced upon neither side; it was the site. Use the sites as story prompts and the players will fight over them on their own and stories will get created.

Players are important as well, but I find that having something to fight over that is story-based and not just points-based really helps players build a narrative with one another.

 Fenris Frost wrote:
I've worked on a lot of campaigns and campaign systems (most notably I put out a book a couple of years back through another forum). The thing I found, even after that point, is that the story needs prompts. If you are just fighting over tiles on a map and it's all numbers, that just gets trite very fast. So here's what I found works well.

You have a map, with different locations on it. The planetary level or the city level works best. The locations' names should be evocative, in such a way that they will be obvious to players ("Malcador's Landing" is better than "Space Port", etc.).

You make each place have its own little backstory, just a couple of sentences. But just enough to make people interested. "Malcador's Landing is said to be the place where the Sigillite first stepped foot on this world. It is considered a holy site and largely only Inquistorial vessels may pass through its' immense security measures."

Then the players will do the rest.

I'll give an example: in a campaign I ran the most hotly contested space was worth almost nothing, but the space represented a holy shrine site to the Emperor. Chaos immediately went after it, and it was immediately defending by Sisters and Grey Knights. They were playing the roles but it was forced upon neither side; it was the site. Use the sites as story prompts and the players will fight over them on their own and stories will get created.

Players are important as well, but I find that having something to fight over that is story-based and not just points-based really helps players build a narrative with one another.

Exalted for being full of good ideas and suggestions.

Great ideas Fenris, do you have a handout I can borrow to show this to my donkey cave local gamers who have 'ideas' on how to run a campaign?

The last few we ran were flawed, but had the idea I described above at a forefront.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54799709/Evil%20Dice%20Campaign%20Pack.zip

This campaign pack contains most of the campaigns I wrote, more or less. They all have flaws but I will share what I learned from each:

There Is Only War was my first attempt, and it was more than just a campaign for the club; the idea was to make a campaign system which could be used by everyone. It was, of course, far too ambitious. Highlights include a lot of cool missions in the mission generator, but beyond that there is far too much there. It's incoherent, there's a lot of numbers to crunch, and though it got downloaded 7000 times before I took it down, I ultimately considered it a failure -- it didn't run smoothly, players were often confused, and it was just generally very messy.

The next attempt was the overly simplified Opposing Fronts, intended to be an amped-up version of GW's Planetary Empires system. It was in the bad place of similar enough to not merit existing but different all over simply for the sake of it. However in the back of this book, were three simplistic "storylines" that you could end up playing out under the right in-game circumstances. People LOVED this, much more than any of the numerical or systemic elements.

My next campaign was one of our biggest successes; I opted for bone simple mechanics and went with GW's own Vogen map and rules, which are basically "stick a pin in the next space over from yours and fight to see who gets to keep their pin there." But I went all out in the locations, as GW did, but I reworked the map to make a much more interesting location, the City-Fortress Atmos.

I learned a lot from Atmos, namely that people loved having a map and that, as I mentioned earlier, having places to fight over created its' own stories. This was a wildly successful campaign.

Our next attempt was The Battle of Essex Prime, one that the entire club could play in week to week if they chose. We opted for a similar format but a set of two teams instead of individuals. Players signed in and pledged to one of the teams, and then the team captains deployed them to the various locations and granted them bonuses. The rules for this one are very messy as we had a lot of issues with one of the captains asking for a lot of rewrites (and this would be my number one piece of advice, by the way...NO REWRITES until it's over!). However the general concept worked out, allowing us to have a campaign where whoever showed up each week was able to play each other over various locations. For the players, it was a brief read of some text, but even someone who walked in off the street could appreciate the story element that having a location granted to the battle -- even if they didn't have any concept of the greater war being fought.

This campaign was the one that yielded another effective idea for concluding these sorts of things: you make the campaign spaces grant storyline-specific bonuses during an Apocalypse battle at the end of the final run (things like strategic assets, the ability to take a super heavy, a special made-up unit, etc). For instance, in the one I am writing now, if the area the Tyranids are spawning from is controlled by imperials, then the Tyranid players in the final battle have restricted units, etc. In one of these campaigns somewhere, there is actually a shrine that once defiled by Chaos gives all Chaos players ATSKNF ( ).

Don't worry about balance. War isn't balanced. It will feel more like a war if it's a little lopsided. Don't let it get TOO one-sided, but a little bit is okay. We had an Apoc battle where one side was loaded with super heavies and the other had none, I was on the latter team and it was one of the most fun games I've had.

Make sure the mechanics are simple (many of mine fail at this rule!). If you are doing it right, the players will be thinking of it like a military strategist ("we need that Manufactorum so we can have the Baneblade on the field in the final battle") than a number cruncher ("We will be ahead by X campaign victory points").

Immersion is EVERYTHING in a campaign and that is my biggest understanding of why they often fail so hard and why people lose interest...you could have the best meta game built around 40k imaginable, but if it doesn't "feel" right no one will care about all the meticulously planned numbers.

Feel free to take these ideas and run with them. They aren't presented perfectly but if you want to run something easy I recommend using the Atmos mechanics with a map and locations of your own, with a final battle planned for the last day. It will be solid, at the very least.

Wow, so much good said.

The one thing I'd echo is that the things that make a good role-playing group are what make a good campaign group, and if you have players that are the kind that make RPGs fall apart, they're going to be the kind of players that will make campaigns fall apart.

The one thing I'd add is that what makes campaigns good is that you're not playing the same, boring, ultimately boiling down to first blood the game missions that are in the back of the book.

What makes a great campaign is if good or bad player choices don't revolve solely around winning games. Whether this is by engineering missions where how well a person loses a game determines how the plot progresses, or whether it's because you create strategic incentives for retreating (calling a game by giving up so that you can preserve forces), or other inroads for player skill that actually make an impact on the story of the campaign.

And it's that story that's important. Having a campaign that ends with "And player A conquered the most tiles, therefore he's the winner" is going to be way too bland to keep up interest over time. Meanwhile, having interesting things that actually drive a real plot, aren't.

Off the top of my head, some small possibilities could include having a game where the loser was forced to switch teams to be on the winning side or losing means you need to keep on playing that same person in grudge match after grudge match where the opponent's team gets some plot-based benefit until the other person wins, or making it so that when you ally another force in, your secondary FOC can only be played by a second player, and the two aren't allowed to talk to each other (or at least, not about strategy).

Crazy stuff like that that actually matters and that actually increases input for players to do stuff.

Adding in some other RPG elements wouldn't be bad either. It would be a very interesting game (like The Quiet Year, for example) if after every week, a different player in the league wrote up a two-page story about what happens next based on how the results of the game went. Like collective, game-based storytelling.

... or like 40k telephone, sort of.

I've actually been toying with the idea of our next campaign having losses deplete the number of points your team has in the final battle, as a way to make it more realistic and add some more tactical consideration besides winning all the time. A win where you lost 1900 points of your teams 10,000 is pretty bad...

I like immersive campaigns and things like that, unfortunately my meta consists mostly of filthy casuals. :[

 Fenris Frost wrote:
I've actually been toying with the idea of our next campaign having losses deplete the number of points your team has in the final battle, as a way to make it more realistic and add some more tactical consideration besides winning all the time. A win where you lost 1900 points of your teams 10,000 is pretty bad...

Im doing that now

http://theimperialpatrol.blogspot.co.nz/p/the-campaign.html

Seriously, it sucks losing just one squad. The games are very tactical (as in nobody takes silly risks... yet) and so on. But yea its a lot of fun. I am acting as Game master 9while playing) and so im adding in RPG elements and a story as time goes buy. A lot of fun. Units upgrade if they do things and so on.

Well worth the effort. Next year I will be doing another one but with fleet battles as well as ground battles.

I am currently running an immersive (Risk-Based) campaign.

Each player has his own planet which is composed of territories which have various planetary infrastructures.

I have a folder per player and a set of map per players.
Players can recon one planet per turn and can make one move per turn.

There are various rules which I will skip, as the campaign is complex BUT takes the players out of their comfort zones.

There are regular games but if a player detects another moving towards his planet he can face his enemy on the ground or intercept the spaceship via a Zone Mortalis game to simulate ship-boarding action.

If a player wants to take away a planetary infratrsucture without a mass assault he can attempt a sabotage via Kill Team format.

If 3 players are heading for the same spot...I will let them and throw them all on the same map because war is like that. Fight it out 3-way.

For me the most rewarding thing about a campaign is the fame, glory, booze, and women!