Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Greetings Fellow Designers,

Today, let's talk about how to mechanically add campaign elements to a game. I think most of us are familiar with the idea of linking a series of games together into something greater. However, I think different periods and styles of games offer different challenges. What is a good way to implement cmapaign element into Company+ or mass battle games?

For skirmish games, many of us are probably familiar with the Necro/Mord/BB model pioneered by GW/Specialist games. Since then, this model has been used in a variety of game systems and tweaked with games like Last Days, Outremer: Faith and Blood, This is Not a Test, etc. However, are there some ideas that you have run across that really break this mold?

Thoughts?

I think ladder campaigns are a great structure for linked games. It's also worth considering that the kind of balanced games stuff like Warhammer 40k represents are those knife-edge spur-of-the-moment instances where fate can go one way or another rather than relatively procedural events involving more asymetrical forces.

I'm actually really impressed with Warmachine's new Oblivion campaign structure. It's more of a branching narrative than a secondary game of resource management or anything like that, but I really like how its structured. Each player plays through the story essentially on their own when they play the missions as the protagonist, with their wins and losses determining which branches the follow. Opponents are given cards that can be played in later games for beating the protagonist, but otherwise serve as the villains in that section of the player's story. All the paths converge at the end in a mass event battle, with players using what they've acquired as they've progressed up the tree.

It's a pretty clean system without a lot of tracking. It's fairly limited in that you're running 8 or so games tops to complete it and it depends on people designing missions for the tree, but honestly that just means it ends around the point most campaigns fall apart anyway. If PP continues to put out missions packs for the tree, I think its a system with a lot of potential and we've been having a lot of fun with it so far.

I always enjoyed the GorkaMorka campaigns, where you gain teef and improve your stuff as you go. The good design of Gorkamorka was that it was a rolling campaign - you could play the same one continuously for years if you had dedicated enough players.

Basically, if a mob got too good, it retired and you had to start a new mob. If you faced a powerful mob with a weak one, you got loads of bonus XP even for losing, which could bring things back into balance quickly - the powerful mob would get barely anything.

not great if you like a game which "ends", but for a drop-in campaign where people might not be there each week, it works really well.


for 40k I used to enjoy writing mini-campaigns, where 2 players would engage in some set battles, which are determined by previous ones, EG the first 2 missions are raid missions (alternating attackers) which will determine things like starting armies or one-use events in the third game (EG disable comms and they only have 1/2 forces for first 2 turns, take out radio tower or they get an airstrike, that sort of thing).

I imagine that it would be an effective method to combine a pair of dungeonmasters with the players. The DMs would play against the players in the smaller games, and so you could have secret outcomes of the mini missions. You could even have several options for mini-mission, which the players choose, so even if you overhear if the other game is a win or not, you have no idea what they have accomplished.

By having 2 DMs and 2 players, you could, in theory, run 2 separate campaigns simultaneously, with secret results. I think that would be awesome!

I've never played a tabletop wargame with a particularly fantastic campaign. Warhammer Quest was pretty good, but that's a dungeon crawl. Likewise, Mordheim (which eventually had over 800 printed pages of material from all "official" sources), and Necromunda had a lot of depth but they're both skirmish games.

I've found the balancing act in Mordheim and Necromunda pretty poor, so I can't agree with the above user. The "bonus money" mechanic just makes for very uninspiring games, which are still terribly unfun to play. I would have preferred a shift to special scenarios aimed at heavily imbalanced games. You could have still kept some of the benefits of bonus XP/money/wyrdstone, but going into a game where you're severely out-gunned/overpowered just isn't fun, regardless of the payoff.

For proper wargames, I generally like the idea of previous victories securing resources. You could easily create 4-5 types of "areas" or "resources" that the generate bonuses for your army going forward. I'm actually fine with an army benefiting from winning (as it should). I'm comfortable with a campaign ending when one side simply wins. In a game where you have an opponent (unlike, say, a co-op game such as WHQ) we don't need a never ending campaign. If someone wins five games in a row...cool, campaign won, set up a new one, etc. If you happen to have a constant back and forth, excellent....let it go on for months if the players are that heavily invested in it.

I would like to see more wargames provide heroes or characters with traits, bonuses, etc...while at the same time allowing said heroes and characters to suffer penalties if they die. A lot of games suffer from the god-mode and suicidal nature of their players. Players seldom have a vested interest beyond the game they're playing. It's why wargames rarely represent war. In a "real life" scenario, even in the Warhammer 40K universe, armies would meet, a handful of units would suffer 30-50% wounds and one side would likely withdraw or seek reinforcements, or full-on retreat.

I like the idea that some consideration must be paid to fighting the war in the future...so systems which apply solid punishments for you losing a unit, or a great hero always appeal to me. I've done up "battle weary" tables for use with 40K to help represent a force which has been in the actual field for several days, weeks, months leading up to the fight, etc. Maybe if you lose and the same army is drawn into conflict again they suffer a result on this table, etc.

Linking benefits to locations on a map is always a solid idea. Did you secure the space port? Cool, you get better reinforcements, or you can heal units, or you can gain a small bonus when army-building, etc.

The main issue with any campaign system continues to be the players, the lack of interest in the scope/scale that a campaign can represent, the lack of longevity and stamina with players bailing after one or two games, or losing interest etc. I think this difficulty is what leads to the lack of actual campaigns in many games.

Personally I don't like resource driven campaigns - rewarding victories and punishing loses that way really escalates fast and games stops being fun. Oldcromunda realy suffers from that when playing in a smaller group without altering missions to have a cap at gang rating discrepancies. For large scale wargames what I like instead is combining meaningfull narrative branching of linked games with very slight, flavor focused benefits on model level for in-game achievements and permanent loses. This way you get attached to well performing units/characters/individuals because of continuity not power, so their eventual loss isn't gamebraking. Between games reinforcements being dependend on win/loss but imposing nature of reinforcements not size of reinforcements also results in a lot of diversity in games, but that requires collections to be vastly bigger than game size so cannot be easily incorporated as a basis of universal campaign systems.

That's the great thing about a ladder campaign is pushing up and down the ladder defines your next mission. Essentially it's like you win at mission x, then you play mission y, and if you lose, then you play mission z.

Well, there are campaigns and there are campaigns.

The Necromunda/Gorkamorka style of campaign is essentially a series of linked battles in which success is (mostly) rewarded with more stuff and failure is (mostly) rewarded with less stuff.

These campaigns have the advantage that you can dip in and out easily, playing a few games back-to-back then not playing for a while as long as the game keeps going. Players can join or leave the campaign at any time.

The down side is that there is a basic connection between longevity and success. Win or lose, the more games you play the tougher your force becomes (assuming they don't all just die) so new players can struggle to get a toehold and become discouraged by a series of crushing defeats at the hands of longer-serving opponents. This problem can be mitigated with good design and a simple handicap system.

The other problem, though, is that such campaigns lack a narrative "hook": there's no actual compelling reason to play the game except to play the game, and at that point you might as well just play regular pick-up games without worrying about the tedious inter-game book-keeping of "going to market" or "tending the wounded" etc.

A more compelling form of campaign has a narrative arc.

The problem with these campaigns, though, tends to be that they either have a "ladder" or a "branching tree" approach. Ladder campaigns "unlock" the story as you go from one battle to the next but although you may carry an advantage or other from a previous victory or defeat, you are basically on rails, plodding from chapter to chapter. Unless you literally have to play a game to find out what happens next, the easiest way to find out the end of the story is just to read the campaign book and get back to having fun.

Branching trees are slightly more interesting, but tends to run into the problem that you have to decide, when playing an opponent, whose branch you're on. It's rare that you are able to find the opponent on exactly the same branch at exactly the same time as you and you don't play that person all the time and you didn't just play that person to get to this branch in the first place. As a result, you have to occasionally be the antagonist in some else's story, which is fine if you have the free time and availability to play two games for every step forward (at least), but sustaining momentum in such a campaign is incredibly hard.

Branching tree campaigns are best served by cooperative games, like Descent or Imperial Assault, in which the participants want to all be fighting the same battle at the same time.

The third option for a narrative campaign is to have a Game Master. This requires there to be a campaign organizer who writes a narrrative for each and every battle, making sure that it both advances the plot and provides the kind of tactical challenge and pay-off that the players are looking for. Obviously, this is best suited to pure RPGs, but if you have someone who has the time on their hands, the skill and the imagination, this can be the most rewarding kind of narrative campaign (Inquisitor was really good for this).

Mechanically, there are all sorts of ways of approaching these campaigns.

In Horizon Wars, I made an attempt to square the circle by providing a system for generating random missions for players, so they wouldn't know in advance what they were doing, but the mission provided a "hook" upon which to create their own narratice arc if they were so minded. The system in the core book, though, suffered a bit from a lack of playtesting and created some horribly one-sided situations - a problem I addressed with an updated version in Over the Horizon. Still, even that requires the players to do some imaginative work, trying to establishing what the narrative is that takes them from one mission to the next.

The important thing for the game or campaign designer, though, is that they tailor the campaign's structure and mechanics to the expectations of the players. And you also need to accept that most campaigns don't finish. A campaign of any sort is a significant time-sink commitment. IMO, then, the most reliable sort of campaign is the one you can play through in a single, dedicated day of gaming. And with most tabletop games that is going to mean 4-6 games, maximum, before most players are burned out.

But these one-day campaigns are great for Game Masters willing to put in the time. With a little organization, you can combine both the resource-management kind of campaign with a free-flowing, part-improvised narrative arc that gives everyone a story to pursue. Again, Inquisitor was a superb platform for this kind of event, and some people are running similar events for Infinity the Game, these days.