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G00fySmiley wrote:some of this is borderline personal attack man assuming a lot about me forcing players... not the intent. the group wanted something different, asked me to write it and formalize some rules. within that I asked for feedback on rules that would specifically make this more infantry less repetitive units more possible and avoid cheese). If you do not want to play in this format more power to you then don't, why are you even responding if this format does not interest you?

I didn't mean to cause any offence, but if you thought me criticising your idea was a "personal attack", then I'd encourage you to call up a mod and let them be the judge. As far as I see it, I didn't attack you at all - only your idea. This IS a public forum, just because I disagree doesn't necessarily make it a personal attack.

Referring to the "force players to play this way" part, I think you may have missed where I said "Unless" at the start of the sentence. I wasn't implying that you WERE, only that, as far as I see it, if your players were already going to play that way, why did it need to be said?
It would be like me saying to all my friends who only play Space Marines in a narrative 30k game we have "You can only play as Space Marines". They're already going to follow those rules. If that changes, then maybe I would have to write it, but in your situation, it seems like everyone is going to be playing by those rules anyway, regardless if it was written or not.

I don't know, that's just my opinion.

If your response is "if you don't like it, why bother commenting" - this is a PUBLIC forum. If you want an echo chamber, then I would recommend just talking this over with your players. They know what they want, and that's all fine by them. However, if you're going to put this publicly, I believe there is a degree of being able to take on critique of your ideas.

If you ARE purely after "more infantry, less tanks", then consider this - no model with more than 6 Wounds can be taken, unless they have the Vehicle or Monster keyword, in which case they may have up to 10 Wounds.
Again, not very fluffy for a narrative campaign, unless you set it in a position where big things couldn't access (a Space Hulk or underground caverns) or the only battles you play are fringe skirmishes, but it does the job.
I still vehemently disagree with arbitrarily limiting duplicate units - like a lot of these ideas, they're not narrative. I think that's my biggest issue. These rules aren't to create a Narrative, it's to encourage a certain style of play amongst the participants.

Tristanleo wrote:Off-shoot idea, but why not just have the game where you build one large list (Think using Brigade) and then when you come to a game, select a number of forces from that. The Brigade acts as your military pool to draw from. so you COULD bring an entire terminator army, but once a unit suffers damage, it's damaged for the rest of the campaign. no force replenishment, once you lose the unit, it's dead. This will encourage a more varied list where you actually try to bring troops in order to have expendable bodies.

It's a solid idea, but because 40k has such a massive casualty rate, you'd very quickly lose forces. Unless you played VERY small games at first (so 750 or 500 point games) and then building up until EVERYTHING you have left gets deployed in a final battle might work, but even that would require massive armies to choose from, and, without reusing units again, not many players would have the models to afford this kind of campaign.

Perhaps this could be tweaked with units that are wiped out/half-damaged have to take a game out as they recover? So a combination of yours and AndrewGPaul's idea?

Peregrine wrote:Coming up with rules to play 40k at a lower power level, with certain disliked classes of units banned, and then coming up with a flimsy pretense of a "story" to justify the rules is not a narrative game. It's a random pickup game with weak lists. If you want a narrative campaign then come up with a good story first, and only then start thinking about what (if any) rules are needed to make it work.

Absolutely agreed.

 Marmatag wrote:
There is no way to protect a narrative campaign from people powergaming and attempting to win in list building.

Your opinion, not automatic truth. You know people can actually self police. Seen it before, see it currently in pl based campaing i'm at. Armies are hardly minmaxed cheese.

Remember also not every player has enough most expensive upgrades they even could max out even if they want and few can afford to buy and paint at will to take advantage

It can be done but it is indeed very difficult to protect a narrative campaign from powergaming. I've had to do it in all of my narrative events pretty much since day one back in 3rd edition (protect from min/max powergaming)

It does depend on the group.

tneva82 wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
There is no way to protect a narrative campaign from people powergaming and attempting to win in list building.

Your opinion, not automatic truth. You know people can actually self police. Seen it before, see it currently in pl based campaing i'm at. Armies are hardly minmaxed cheese.

Remember also not every player has enough most expensive upgrades they even could max out even if they want and few can afford to buy and paint at will to take advantage

If your group can self-police you don't need these rules that eliminate a bunch of fluffy and non-OP armies.

If your group can't then these rules won't stop them because they don't address the handful of units and combinations that are actually a problem. I'm never quite sure why people are afraid to come out and point at those specific units. The no-FW is a great example. Pre-CA there were only a handful of OP FW units, post-CA it's only a couple. Why not just ban those specific ones?

If you want to avoid cheese, just have scaling built-in

ELO type of ranking, with points reduction according to it.

2 and 5 will just make Guard good and other armies with lots of units.

I would also suggest keeping the games and points levels small, with an emphasis on progressive scoring. You might be down to 2 units overall but can still score. Also, don't have the game automatically when someone is tabled. Games go to turn 5. So if you can't outscore someone you tabled on turn 4, you lose.

===> '' No Forge World''
/ thread

 godardc wrote:
===> '' No Forge World''
/ thread

I honestly don't get the blind disregard for FW I often see around here.

How to avoid cheese during a narrative campaign?

Play with like minded people.. profit?

 AaronWilson wrote:
How to avoid cheese during a narrative campaign?

Play with like minded people.. profit?

Yeah this. I'll never understand doing ANYTHING narrative with strangers. You're basically asking to have your dick slammed in a door.

 Kirasu wrote:

 AaronWilson wrote:
How to avoid cheese during a narrative campaign?

Play with like minded people.. profit?

Yeah this. I'll never understand doing ANYTHING narrative with strangers. You're basically asking to have your dick slammed in a door.

What are the odds of such an experiment going *right* ?

12.2%

I said it on the first page...anything narrative needs to be played with like-minded players. In fact pre-campaign you should have a small sit-down with everybody and discuss the intent and nature of the game.

If someone's not on board or is going to cheese it up, ask them to leave, etc. Or make it clear as a kind of GM, you're going to hammer people who try to cheese stuff. At the end of the day it's really not something that should even come up. But, putting random players or strangers into a narrative setting will not work.

I actually think narrative battles with strangers are fun launchpads for different interpretations of the narrative.

You get cool discussions about genuine issues such as the use of special characters (is "Designate 17 of the Penitent Forge" being the same thing as Belisarius Cawl of Mars ruleswise a problem? Or is that making good narrative use of a model?), or different & interesting discussions about headcanon (are Imperial tanks crude vehicles outpaced by hammerheads who got to the battlefield first and could set up ambushes? Or are they able to compete on at least a somewhat even field, turning the battle into a meeting engagement?)...

... I agree that a narrative campaign with strangers is likely to go poorly, but a single narrative game can be lots of fun. If your store has enough terrain, perhaps next PUG propose playing Power Levels and a narrative Stronghold Assault mission and see what fun & interesting discussions crop up!

I have run narrative events for several editions now and here is what I learned:

1. No matter what restrictions you think are sensible, players are going to question and/or cry about them. Just scroll up to see the responses so far to get a taste of what you will hear.
2. The narrative missions in the rule book are unbalanced and frankly suck. Some lists will win easily, others cannot win at all.
3. Players will game any system you try to impose on them.

I would never run a narrative campaign again without players submitting their lists first. You absolutely need to do this to avoid all the pitfalls already discussed. Ask the players to come up with a theme for their army and what they will run.

I will never try out "fun" "gimicky" missions again, especially those with board effects like "lava planet" that causes LOL random effects. I would stick to as clean, simple, and concise a mission as I can, think tournament missions.

I always have a writer more talented than me write the story. The story elements are in the introduction, the start of each mission, and then the results of each round, and finally the end of the campaign. This is the secret sauce that gets players excited.

Good luck!

 auticus wrote:
Check out the grand crusade ruleset I wrote. narrativewargaming.com

2nd edition link. The first edition is a lot more complex and deals with map campaign.

Some awesome ideas in there, I especially like the resource system based on worlds and the CP-based comp. While there are some things I definitely wouldn't use (like adding 7th ed rules to 8th), I will definitely try to build a campaign based on your ruleset. Thanks for sharing!


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morgoth wrote:

 Kirasu wrote:

 AaronWilson wrote:
How to avoid cheese during a narrative campaign?

Play with like minded people.. profit?

Yeah this. I'll never understand doing ANYTHING narrative with strangers. You're basically asking to have your dick slammed in a door.

What are the odds of such an experiment going *right* ?

Well, I attended two open narrative events at GW stores and one was awesome with awesome players on both sides. The game ended with a black templar player using a whirlwind to shoot initiates at my battlewagon, Sgt. Telion kicking a hive tyrant down a well (named characters are OP), and a unit of lootaz accidentally teleporting a secret tau lab into a crimson fist landraider and causing an apocalyptic explosion in the process. And yes, that all happened and it happened in one turn. Thanks to the awesome GW manager who organized that event.

In the other one, we had the WAAC TFG IDKR YOLO ASDF WTF LOL GG EZ (and probably some other letters) player on our side of Hive Hades and the narrative players tabled him due to him completely being overwhelmed by random ork tactics. He rage-quit after he blew up his own baneblade because he scattered off the koptaz assaulting it. Good times.

Just think of the poor newbie SoB player trying to take out a second mortgage just to cover the cost of fielding so many BSS squads. You played one squad of Rets, Doms, and Seraphim last time. Now you need to invest in an Exorcist, Repentia, Imagifer, Hospitaller and Dialogus just to have other units to take besides more BSS. Good thing you banned two of their three HQ choices. If I play a Canoness this week, what will I field next week? Such a good idea to ban Forgeworld too. That one lone Repressor your newbie SoB player could field half the time would really have been OP against Craftworld Eldar.

If you feel like you are better at balancing than GW/FW, why is it so hard to do so without destroying at least half of the armies in the game while leaving the top tier armies virtually untouched?

If you want a narrative campaign to work well and don't want it bogged down by cheese then you have to have some limitations otherwise the same army shows up and it really doesn't help in building the story.

But instead of limiting what people can take 'as Bob may only have access to a certain few units' instead formulate a rule to all players that troop choices are always available to the armies but if a unit of fast attack, vehicle, HQ or Elites is destroyed then that army will not have access to it again ... (until a particular narrative plot comes up that could allow them to take those units again.)

So for example say in an Imperial Guard vs Orks scouting party encounter ... Imperial Guard win but the Orks managed to destroy the Manticore the IG had. Now the IG can't field a Manticore until later in the campagin they get the opportunity to capture a Tau supply line which as a possible win condition they can rebuild a vehicle option they have lost.

Or if an HQ is killed in one game, later the narrative can be open to that HQ not being dead but being captured by the enemy. If a dreadnought is destroyed have it be forced to appear on the players 2nd turn due to Tech-marines having to fix it first.

This kind of thing means even if the cheese player turns up, the losing player may still get a morale victory in denying the cheese player from using something in the future.

Another narrative solution to the cheese player always winning is that they have stretched there resources to far without consolidating, so they have to defend some area with less points and maybe no units used in the main battle they just had as they can't get back in time.

These are all options you can use within the narrative to make natural limits.

If you have a river terrain. Use that as a way of cutting off supplies or units.

If you still have a problem with cheese make the world building hamper his usual army choices. Maybe an ion Storm has made machines/flying inoperable until it passes or the recent Ork victory over the Eldar near the Hydro Damn has flooded the area indirectly destroying the farming units for some other army. The opportunities are endless

 Shuma-Gorath wrote:
But instead of limiting what people can take 'as Bob may only have access to a certain few units' instead formulate a rule to all players that troop choices are always available to the armies but if a unit of fast attack, vehicle, HQ or Elites is destroyed then that army will not have access to it again ... (until a particular narrative plot comes up that could allow them to take those units again.)

Aaaaand watch already weak armies gets creamed by that rule for same reasons that highlander screws armies. And weak armies like orks could get in game or two situation where they CANNOT take anything but boyz.

Seriously why people come up with ideas to get rid of cheese that actually work best to help all the power build armies?

 Jidmah wrote:
Well, I attended two open narrative events at GW stores and one was awesome with awesome players on both sides. The game ended with a black templar player using a whirlwind to shoot initiates at my battlewagon, Sgt. Telion kicking a hive tyrant down a well (named characters are OP), and a unit of lootaz accidentally teleporting a secret tau lab into a crimson fist landraider and causing an apocalyptic explosion in the process. And yes, that all happened and it happened in one turn. Thanks to the awesome GW manager who organized that event.

That sounds much less like a narrative game and much more like "LOL HAY GUYS LETS ROLL SOME RANDOM DICE IT WILL BE SO RANDOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Nothing about that sounds like an interesting or coherent story.

Actually, it was about Nazdreg trying to steal tellyporta technology from a planet the Tau had abandoned due to an incomming hive fleet, while half a crusade of imperial fist successors were on his heels.

Also, everybody was having fun, you should try that sometimes.

 Jidmah wrote:
Actually, it was about Nazdreg trying to steal tellyporta technology from a planet the Tau had abandoned due to an incomming hive fleet, while half a crusade of imperial fist successors were on his heels.

I rest my case.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
Actually, it was about Nazdreg trying to steal tellyporta technology from a planet the Tau had abandoned due to an incomming hive fleet, while half a crusade of imperial fist successors were on his heels.

I rest my case.

What do you call a narrative campaign then?

A narrative campaign is a series a battles with a coherent ongoing plot where the results of battles effects future battles.

It doesn't need daft rules made up as you go along (like firing aspirants out of a whirlwind launcher because lol).

Story driven campaigns can be that way because of the players creating their own narratives.

A GM shouldn't have a heavy hand in creating the story, he should simply guide the players and help establish scenery that fits them.

If someone wants to fire people out of cannons in their narrative and have that be impactful in the story, the GM shouldn't be the one to deny it. If people don't want tongue in cheek gaming that's a whole different conversation, but the GM shouldn't decide what happens and why, regardless of player input.

"I want to buy fruit."
"You notice a hand-made sign hanging from the edge of a lamp post, reading "Farmers Market," with an arrow pointing east. Upon further investigation, you see a street full of vendors, peddling various different kinds of fruits, vegetables, and meats. The stand closest to you appears to be selling bananas."

or

"I want to buy fruit."
"This is a fruitless universe. You're kicked out of my campaign."