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I am working on creating a 2 person narrative, it will begin at 200pt kill team, and escalate all the way (hopefully) to 2000pt battles. I will have flowcharts that have potential story outcomes for the basic win/loss to point to the next style of battle, and there will be objectives that can determine additional outcomes. I've got a very nice and fun opponent and this should be a good time! The biggest hurdle for me is to create a set of balanced bonus tables. This week we will be sitting down to discuss the basics and I would like to set up these tables, but I want to go in with a foundation, I was hoping I could get some brainstorming from this community though.

My first thought was to have 4 tables to choose upgrades from, mimicking the warlord trait tables. Strategic, Command, Personal, and Army Specific. Then, based on mission performance, you get points that add up throughout the mission which can be spend on upgrades. Rewards can be used on any mission throughout the campaign. So again, for simplicity sake. I was thinking of the rewards being number based 1- 6 or whatever, maybe 5 so there can be a cool chaos objective that gives you a D6 roll on a chart for a mission or something. 1 would be something basic, simple, and not too awesome, but useful, like re-roll an armory save once a game. While 5 would be very very good, something like FnP+4 or eternal warrior. For army specific, the top level ones would be reinforcements, for blood angels it could be a drop pod full of marines or a dreadnought, for renegades, it could be demons.

The characters would stay throughout, but wouldn't have to be used in every game, so personal upgrades could get multiple uses. While some upgrades might stay throughout the campaign, others would be single use only, which makes balancing them a little tricky. I wont want the upgrade points being horded because the +3 upgrades are so much nicer than the bottom 3. I was also toying with the idea that I keep the upgrade table locked to the bottom 3 until we hit the 1000pt mark, then it opens up to the top levels, as we will be getting upgrade points at a faster rate.

The armies playing will be Renegades and Heretics (myself as the baddies) and Blood Angels. The story will escalate from BA detaching some scouts for a small cultist uprising, to the activation of a Renegade detachment within the hive city, depending on the outcome of the fights, there may or may not be demons involved, and hopefully ending in either the R&H assaulting a hive capitol, or the Blood angels assaulting the Renegade fortress. Either way, it should be a good time.

I think there was something along these lines in the back of the 4E rulebook, though they may have been unit rewards as opposed to character rewards.

 Vaktathi wrote:
I think there was something along these lines in the back of the 4E rulebook, though they may have been unit rewards as opposed to character rewards.

Yep! There are a few odd challenges that come with the "upgrades" approach to a campaign though.

* If characters and upgrades are persistent (even if the character dies), and if one player has an early winning streak, then you potentially end up with one player snowballing as his early wins give him advantages in future games that give him more wins that give him more advantages.

*If you have upgrades go away after a unit dies, then you kind of lose the sense of continuity/continuation.

*It can be really tricky to make balanced upgrades. Giving a character a warlord trait equivalent is fine if we're talking about Night Attacker, but giving him Master of Ambush in an army with a corpse thief claw is a huge game changer.


An idea I've been kicking around is to have each mission's results grant advantages that only effect the very next mission and then go away. So if you won the last mission, you might get an extra unit that costs 100 points for the following mission, or you might gain Master of Ambush for the next mission only. The advantage gained could be based on a random roll or it could be based on the mission you just played. Example: A game of The Relic is fluffed as trying to rescue the last member of a friendly scout squad. If Player A controls the relic at the end of the game, he gains Master of Ambush in the next mission as the scout spills the beans on the enemy location.

If you're doing a highly-structured campaign where you know the order of the mission you'll be doing, you can have the advantages tie into that mission. For instance, if you know mission #2 is going to be an "endless tide" mission where Player A is trying to hold out against Player B's wave after wave of gribblies, then the reward for mission #1 might be that Player B's respawning gribblies gain outflank.

I think I have the 4E rulebook, I'll check the back, if I do, thank you!

 Vaktathi wrote:



An idea I've been kicking around is to have each mission's results grant advantages that only effect the very next mission and then go away. So if you won the last mission, you might get an extra unit that costs 100 points for the following mission, or you might gain Master of Ambush for the next mission only. The advantage gained could be based on a random roll or it could be based on the mission you just played. Example: A game of The Relic is fluffed as trying to rescue the last member of a friendly scout squad. If Player A controls the relic at the end of the game, he gains Master of Ambush in the next mission as the scout spills the beans on the enemy location.

If you're doing a highly-structured campaign where you know the order of the mission you'll be doing, you can have the advantages tie into that mission. For instance, if you know mission #2 is going to be an "endless tide" mission where Player A is trying to hold out against Player B's wave after wave of gribblies, then the reward for mission #1 might be that Player B's respawning gribblies gain outflank.

It's not straight up warlord traits I will be giving, but rather reward tables based on the warlord trait tables. Command, strategic, and personal. The actual warlord traits will not be handed out. In the flowchart for the kill team bracket, there will be 4 missions played, and 6 possible missions (its a small one, sort of a prologue) each one has somewhat of a forward into the next mission. If renegades win the first, it goes to a different mission where the renegades get a bonus and so on. The exception is if the renegades win the Ambush, the blood angels get a bonus, and if the blood anges win the ambush, the renegades get backup. As either side is now going "oh crap, we have to double down!" The point of the reward tables was to be so we could choose if we would rather have say, outflank on a unit for the next mission, or maybe a unit can get a light transport, or infiltrate instead, or just take the mission as is and get an upgrade in the next one. Just about all, if not all the missions will be custom missions.

This sounds like a fun way to run a narrative game. You may want to add some sort of "comeback" mechanic, to prevent one army gaining enough benefits each game to guarantee the same benefits. Alternatively you can make each benefit accessible only once per army, or make their accessibility inverse to their cost (5 point ones are usable once, 4 point twice, etc).

As for what to put on those tables, the strategic traits in the BRB are pretty easily adapted. The "stealth in ruins+move through cover in ruins as an army-wide rule" seems like a good one for a 1 or 2 point benefit because you can agree on how much relevant terrain is used beforehand, negating some of the randomness. The one that makes the game night fighting seems like another good one. The infiltrate one seems like it could work too, maybe you could change it to 3-ish units with characters from the last battle in them or something.

As mentioned before, the only bonuses that will stay throughout the entire narrative will be the personal ones for characters. There will never be a time when one player constantly has more points than the other because they have purchased several upgrades for their army. It could imbalance the kill team level, but HQ are not allowed, so it should be fine at that point. I also think we will just do the entire prologue in one day, and reward X points to the overall winner and Y points to the loser, so we have something for the first game.

Though I do like the idea of having once per army rewards, maybe some that are not tied to the reward table, or maybe the high tier ones, like the high tier personal trait could be "choose a relic from your codex" once per army. Adapting some warlord traits is a good idea too, I was just going to discount them completely, but watering some down could work really well!