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Hi everyone, I'm planning on setting up a local tournament with a campaign to go with it and am hoping to get some ideas and theory out some rules.

I want to run the campaign side of things by setting up a sort of world map to decide battles, Dawn of War style. The campaign would be run through my area's 40k forum, I would be posting updates of the campaign map, players would make campaign decisions on the forum and then battles would be played out in-store. I'm not sure exactly how I want to set up the map or decide battle order, but here's what I'm considering:

1) Getting a Planetary Empires equivalent (eBay doesn't have a lot of good options for an actual PE set and GW doesn't make them anymore) and play it out with PE rules. Maybe use my own custom hex map.
2) A modified version of Risk, maybe using a modified Halo Risk board or designing my own planet map. The campaign would be a modified version of Risk, battles would be played out on the tabletop, each Risk troop would be worth 100-150 points, and I'm thinking instead of normal Risk deployment each player would start out with so many 40k points (15k-20k?), roll for the territory they start out in (maybe everyone starts with 3 territories?), then play out the campaign with Risk movement rules. The point cost of troops killed in combat would be deducted from the points they started out with, when you don't have enough troop points to deploy anything you're officially out of the tournament. Maybe a fixed number of reinforcement points each turn, maybe roll for reinforcement points, maybe Risk reinforcement rules, maybe no reinforcements for anyone (which would simplify things but not fit storywise). I'm thinking battles of under 300 points would be played out with Kill Teams rules?

I'd love it to be able to have the terrain for the battle (and maybe some battle rules?) reflect the campaign map. I'm thinking (for either game type) that there would game setup rules for each different type of terrain, like:
CITIES have a minimum of 12 terrain buildings
Infantry and vehicles subtract 2" from their movement characteristic while in SWAMPS
Maybe 7th edition Night Fighting rules apply in JUNGLES?

The campaign battles would be played at my local store, and I'm thinking about offering prizes (1st place gets a £100 gift card to the shop, 2nd gets £50, 3rd gets £25, all three get an Imperial Credit coin from Warhammer World). Any thoughts on all of this? Does it sound feasible to set up? Any recommendations for how to improve it or at least make it work? Thanks!

Sounds like an awesome idea! Here's some map campaigns I've run:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/584361.page

The only advice I'd give is to avoid extra rules the first time you run a campaign; focus on the basics and then add extras the second time through.

Advice: don't. Campaigns and tournaments have conflicting goals, trying to do both at once is only going to make people unhappy.

The main issue with campaigns is that they can heavily punish early losses and reward early wins. If a player loses one or two early battles they can often fast fall behind those who have won and the point difference and difference in unit selections can mean that the player who wins a few early matches can steamroll over many latter matches; whilst those who lost earlier games are either unable to rise to win overall.

It's why many campaign systems often have an advocate or organiser (who might or might not also play in the campaign) who are there to issue out balance. Necromunda has this in that a faction that loses a good few early games might get missions that favour them with a quick boost. There's still challenge, but its balanced to their gear level and gives them the option to be able to then equip back up to full strength to compete with the other factions.

Another option is that as the campaign progresses the groups that lost multiple games play against each other and those that won play against each other -ergo the team divides (works better with much larger groups, less good in small groups as you could end up with people playing the same person over and over).



Adding in a prize element can thus be tricky. If you look at many campaign competitive events they are basically a normal tournament with story based elements affected by the progression of the campaign. Army choice and deployment and points are all left untouched.


By all means experiment, but perhaps leave the prize out the first two or three times you run it so that you can see what happens. Last thing you want is to have people getting bitter because they lost one early match and were left unable to even compete for the prize.

 Overread wrote:
It's why many campaign systems often have an advocate or organiser (who might or might not also play in the campaign) who are there to issue out balance. Necromunda has this in that a faction that loses a good few early games might get missions that favour them with a quick boost. There's still challenge, but its balanced to their gear level and gives them the option to be able to then equip back up to full strength to compete with the other factions.

And this is why it isn't suitable for tournaments and prizes. A successful campaign requires actively working to prevent the snowball effect from ending the campaign in all but name and having everyone lose interest in slogging through the process of making the winner's victory official. You have to essentially hand the losers free stuff to keep them in the game, and maintain the delicate balance between keeping them competitive and not giving so much that you just undo the winner's accomplishments. That sort of works in a casual campaign with nothing at stake, but start handing out cash prizes for winning and you're going to make people unhappy about who is or isn't getting free buffs. You can look forward to getting (justifiably) accused of rigging the system and picking who gets to win the cash at the end.

 Peregrine wrote:
Advice: don't. Campaigns and tournaments have conflicting goals, trying to do both at once is only going to make people unhappy.

As much as I disagree with Peregrine, this is 100% spot on. Do not mix campaigns and tournaments, especially not with prize support. You'll either:

A) Get people trying to "win" at the cost of enjoyment and disregard any campaign things (e.g. you'll see ITC-style meta lists rather than themed or fluffy lists). So you end up with what is a tournament with a backstory, that often summarily gets ignored because it's not relevant.

B) If it's a GM'd campaign, you will face accusations of bias/rigging/cheating if you ad-hoc things to make the campaign more interesting because it's "not fair". This can be up to and including using narrative missions instead of matched missions down through specialized scenarios that could favor one army even if the reason makes sense. If it's not GM'd then you end up with A above (which likely happens anyway)

The two are really mutually exclusive. The most I suspect you could hope for might be a themed tournament where like every round has a special rule in effect to represent something happening on the world they're fighting over, but even that could result in "it's not fair" complaints and you can't really expect people to not bring optimized armies if it's advertised as a tournament with prize support.

I suppose one way to think of it is that both in campaigns and tournaments the objective on a per-battle basis is to win the fight. Or at least to leave with the most victory points/least amount of losses etc..

In a Tournament this carries through to each battle and the objective is to win as many fights as you can regardless of anything else.

In a campaign whilst each player still wants to win as many fights as they can; the overall objective isn't to keep winning. Instead its more about generating more games. A player who wins a lot of matches might well find themselves outclassing other players and thus they might suddenly suffer a campaign event that strips them of their bonus or ends up in a threeway game etc...

This flexibility is what makes campaigns work, but it clearly can't function if you're giving out a monetary prize (unless its the kind of prize which, by the end and without too many weeks between, everyone wins).

Best way i can think to make it a bit competitive make the campaign into a sort of league.

The armies gain pts in the league for points in the campaign missions, maybe have some risk / reward games

e.g. part of the campaign might be a withdrawn action the army is caught off guard so has half the army pts of the enemy and needs to get something of the board or some sort of hard goal... if they pick this and do it they get a certain amount of league pts

normal battle games are a smaller league score etc...

you could even keep track of the mission levels attempted in another column e.g. 1-5 5 being hardest, win or loss you can tot that score up divide it by games played and you could have a prize for 'against the odds player' etc etc

lets players make their own narrative within the bounds of the campaign too.