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Well, you're considering a Necromunda campaign only in terms of cash. Which is not unreasonable in Newcromunda.

Newcromunda - gangs tend to get cash rich quite quickly. In the base campaign, everyone gets d6x10 creds from their settlement every game, and a free fighter every third game. Scenario rewards are often quite high compared to territory income.

Oldcromunda had the issue that you were constantly strapped for cash, and getting any much better gear after gang creation tended to require a bit of luck.

There's an awful lot of REALLY EXPENSIVE stuff to spend those creds on now. Most of this is "very cool" rather than "very effective". Servo harnesses, Brutes, great big guns - certainly one-on-one they'll be good, BUT:

- A lot of the scenarios have restricted numbers of fighters

- A lot of scenarios have randomly selected fighters

Are your cool things going to turn up every game? If they take an unlucky ping from a Juve and end up sitting out a game, does your gang's game plan revolve around one fighter (lookin' at you, Overseer leaders...)? Does your gang have depth?

What more creds can, and will, buy you is durability. If you have a gang of 10, and 2 of your guys are out of commission you hit the point where you can't field a full force. Having more bodies in the gang is a definite advantage. But, if you've considered what I say above, you've spread the cash around a bit so as not to leave yourself without The Very Important Fighter who represents 1/2 your gang rating.

The main campaign problem with this is that advancement in Newcromunda is really slow. The disadvantage of having more gang members would be to spread out the xp, and so your gangers would quickly be out-classed by their opponents. Since basically nobody advances, this can be fairly safely ignored.

In Oldcromunda skills and XP were king. Having a guy with a pair of master crafted plasma pistols was nice, but going up against a rapid-fire-3-attack-gunfighter with a brace of Laspistols would get him shredded.

I think this is at the root of runaway gangs in the current version (which certainly can exist) - it's not that rich gangs have better gear, it's that they've got more durability due to a deeper roster.

But is that a "if you win the first game you win the campaign" problem? Not really. It's more of a "if you lose the first game, you have to play the second game very carefully and probably take a loss without many casualties" problem. After that you're back up to full fighting strength.

This can certainly become more problematic in a campaign which only has two players (which, full disclosure, is the only type of Newcromunda campaign I've played). But if you've got, say, 3 players:

Game 1 - A vs B. A wins. B gets mauled

Game 2 - B vs C. B plays it safe, gets in a few licks against C, takes the lose, back up to full strength

Game 3 - A vs C - both have take a few hits in their fight against B, so it's fairly even. Lets say it's a bloody slight win to A.

Game 4 - A vs B, the rematch. On paper, A is in a good position, as he's won his last two games, is now rocking 3 territories and has bought some better gear and an extra guy. But he's a couple of guys down from his fight against C, while B, who's lost every game so far, is fighting fit on a full roster. It's probably a fairly even match.

Runaway gangs are going to kick in much later in the campaign than gang creation (and always did, in Oldcromunda as well) once someone's managed to assemble a gang which doesn't have one or two good fighters, but a core wrecking crew of 3 or 4 guys who you can consistently expect to turn up and have (Oldcromunda) terrifying skills or (Newcromunda) gear that would make a space marine look underequipped. If one or two of those guys are out of commission, it's an issue but not a catastrophe. This is one of the reasons Spyrers were so dangerous - they started out as this. The rest of the gang becomes essentially filler. Campaign problems arise when one gang has reached that stage.

An issue that Newcromunda does have that exacerbates this is that the underdog system it has is a bit rubbish. I think this is meant to be mitigated by Newcromunda campaigns being generally short, with a group running half a dozen campaigns during a year (possibly linked - i.e. run a Territories campaign followed by a Rackets campaign followed by a Law and Misrule campaign, with each gang starting fresh each campaign with "splinter" gangs. Oldcromunda basically assumed that you'd be running one campaign for ages, so the underdog system allowed newer gangs to get up to the campaign's power level relatively quickly. The way the campaign is written, with the 3 weeks/1 week/3 weeks split seems to be based on the assumption that most players will be in a club with one or two game nights a week, with each gang therefore playing 6 to 12 games. By the time it's getting really unbalanced, the campaign is over.

Why does this matter, and how does it compare to other campaign games?

Well, Blood Bowl for instance is a REALLY bad counter-example. Blood Bowl will usually be played in a league or tournament, and in addition to your team's advancement there's the league position to consider. Each game in Blood Bowl matters. If you're through to the Quarter or Semi finals of a tournament, if you lose you're out. Therefore you need a fairly robust balancing system to ensure that, in any given game, both Coaches are competing based more on skill level rather than how advanced their players are. It'll never be perfect - and the fact that Blood Bowl has Tier 1, 2 and 3 teams is an open acknowledgement of this - but due to how the game is played it's important to have this sort of short term, game-by-game balancing in place.

Necromunda, however, one game doesn't matter. Not really - it's a true campaign. If you're powergaming, you should be powergaming to try to build up that wrecking crew. More likely you're in it for the ride, and the concept of "winning" a campaign doesn't actually make sense.

Do I think the Necromunda campaign system as written works well for long-haul campaigns? No I don't.

Do I think older games did a better job of balancing this (Oldcromunda, Gorkamorka, Mordheim) - Sort of? But only in the sense that, particularly in Mordheim, the "out of game" campaign bit, which was almost completely random, would produce such huge swings on the players that it was essentially disconnected from what happened on the table. You could tip the odds, but everyone was pretty much equally at the mercy of the dice gods.

Blood Bowl, as discussed, is a completely different thing.

Baxx wrote:
As I've said, I need a common understand of the facts.

Would you say a campaign could be designed to be exponential?
Would you say a campaign could be designed to be linear?
Would you say a campaign could be designed to include self-balancing mechanics?
Would you say a campaign could be designed without self-balancing mechanics?

Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

Now, the more complicated answer to these - is Necromunda any of these things?

If my reading of your first post is correct, you're assuming essentially a triangular distribution for for the income of the gang that wins every game, with a cumulative income of:

((g^2 + g)/2)*10+10+5

Where g is the number of games played. 10 is the income per territory, and 5 is the game reward.

This is, obviously, an exponential distribution - it has an exponent (g^2)

This only works when you have the assumption that after every game, you get a territory. Given that there are generally a limited number of territories in a campaign, number of players x 3, this can't be true. In the worst case in a campaign of, say, 3 players:

Assume Player A never loses
Assume Player B never wins against A, but always wins against C
Assume Player C never wins and somehow doesn't get massively annoyed and go do something else

After 9 games, assuming everyone plays each other at the same rate:

Player A has 6 territories, B has 3 territories, C has none. (Starting settlements excluded)

The (g^2) link is now broken - at this point, there are no more territories to hand out. Income becomes linear. Unless A keeps winning against B in the "takeover" phase, at which point income becomes linear after a further 3 games between A and B.

So yes - given this very specific set of circumstances, and mainly during the initial stages of a campaign, the growth will be exponential. After that it will become linear, though the linear growth gradient of the the gang which "won" the exponential phase will be greater than the gradient of the other gangs.

So - how did older and other campaign games avoid this and what can be done about it? What does this mathematical nonsense actually mean?

If we assume that other campaigns have a linear slope, it's a relatively simple matter to balance the campaign. Give a "new joiner" or somebody who's fallen way behind (maybe they were ill or on holiday) a large injection of territories so that their income graph gradient will roughly match the gangs already in the campaign, give them an initial cash boost so that they've got roughly the same gang cash as the gangs which have been accumulating since the start of the game.

Who does this? The GM.

"But wait, Graphite!" you cry, "You've entirely missed the point! Our campaign doesn't have a GM! Our campaign shouldn't need a GM! And anyway what about the runaway gang who are dominating the campaign because they came out on top in the exponential growth phase!"

To which I reply - you do have a GM. Who's letting this extra player join the campaign? The existing players. The GM duties are spread between them, they are a Gestalt. A GGM if you will. I'm assuming that since you're playing a campaign together you're talking to each other on at least a semi regular basis! Does this require everyone's agreement? I dunno, I've never met the people you play games with.

Equally, if somebody's absolutely running away with the campaign - Surely the GGM is going to notice? Who is this player in your group who derives joy from totally stomping on everyone else? Why on earth does anyone still play with them?

And if somebody's gang has been absolutely banjaxed through no real fault of their own - surely they will speak up to say "My gang is crippled, guys, can I start over?" Are you, as a group, going to say no? Do you like your fellow players to be miserable? Of course you don't.

So how did Old Necromunda avoid this? Well, firstly - there was no exponential phase - for income. Territories changed hands extremely infrequently, and even then it was fairly rare that you had enough gangers to work all the territory you. The game on the table had very little connection to your campaign income etc. If everyone started off at the same time (ish) time, generally everyone would have the same income.

However, for XP - the individual gangers would absolutely gain XP exponentially. The more experienced you were, the more likely you were to do things that gained you XP. So in some ways, old Necromunda was even more exponential!

Also note that the underdog bonus as implemented in the previous version of Necromunda does not help you win that individual game - it grants you additional rewards for playing a game that you are likely to lose. Most importantly it gave your gangers additional XP (because let's face it - nobody EVER got a worthwhile "giantkiller" bonus payment).

So I think your argument that "Necromunda is exponential now but it wasn't before" is flawed. It was always exponential - just on XP rather than on cash. And as I've previously stated, I think the current underdog system is less good than the old one was, and needs more GM or GGM intervention. Given that the fact that cash is king in New Necromunda and XP is less important - if anything it should be more easy to balance a campaign now than it used to be!

I think GW tried to use Rep as another balancing factor, but I don't think it quite works.

I do agree with that yes.

I think it's agreed that GW's rules as written currently don't solve the issues with the campaigns that people want to play (long campaigns with gangs dropping in and out)

I think this is less because it's impossible to do, and more because GW's intention was to have multiple sequential short campaigns.

(This also makes sense from a sales point of view, incidentally - you're more likely to buy and start a new gang for each campaign, which will make them more money than gradually evolving one gang for years)

I think we're possibly having difficulty framing exactly which problem we're trying to solve in a long campaign by framing the discussion in terms of Necromunda having exponential gang experience game and no other game ever having that. I don't think that's true.

I think it's just more obvious in Necromunda because the current exponential part of a campaign results in a gang having obvious on-table bling, rather than in other games where the bling is hidden on your roster sheet in terms of skills, stat boosts and XP.

Baxx wrote:

 Graphite wrote:

Now, the more complicated answer to these - is Necromunda any of these things?

Amazing, an honest answer - I'd almost given up hope earlier. You understood my argument and improved upon it. Yes, you show clearly that the whole campaign is not exponential, but there are an exponential component to it. Well done. To my defence, I didn't set out to make it perfect, but to prove a point. A point someone here probably still haven't understood properly.

I like having a good ol' root around in the mathematics. I started out convinced that by mathematical usage what you were describing wasn't exponential growth, banged together a spreadsheet and looked up the formulae for a triangular distribution and discovered that to my surprise, yeah, it is exponential. Which was a neat thing to work out.

I still think there's a large degree of "wobble" in it even before we reach the linear phase as I don't think the campaign leader will win every single game, but for the purposes of our discussion - yeah. It's exponential.

Is that bad? When everyone follows the same exponential curve (roughly) - no. It's just a thing. Once you can see a thing you can try to work out what to do about it.

When you say "who enjoys stomping everyone else", it's one of my best friends going back 20 years of wargaming. And it's not something they wanted, but it happened accidentally when they made their new plastic van saars with plasma, and I made my goliaths with various loadouts including many pistols and close combat weapons from the FW weapon packs. That's not a topic I'm interested to discuss here, suffice to say it ended exponentially bad from my perspective. It didn't affect our friendship, just putting necromunda on pause with a fading enthusiasm. Because who am I to say to my opponent that he can't have all those plasmas? That he can't have all that BS2+? We don't play like that in any other game. That's not what my entire gaming experience is about.

Ah. Fair enough, criticism withdrawn - an unfortunate case where modelling for theme happens to coincide with modelling for power. That's really difficult to mitigate against in any setting or game, where powerful things tend to act more as force multipliers (exponential again!) rather than a linear increase in power. A classic example I came up against in 3rd/4th edition 40k was a guy with three Hammerheads. This is not an insane army by any means - it's a light tank squadron with backup - but I had a foot troop and light vehicle Ork army. Taking down 1 hammerhead? Sure. Three? Against that many submunition pie-plates? Not a chance in hell.

I don't know what you can actually do about that, (well, OK, I have some ideas) but as you say it's not the topic of the current discussion.

Vorian wrote:
The short campaigns suffer from snowballing too though? I don't want to get bogged down in a discussion over what is exponential or not, but you can snowball.

Solving it for short campaigns then allows perpetual campaigns.

The point about skills/xp contributing to the balance problem is valid, hopefully no one is suggesting BB, Mordeheim, old Necro campaign rules couldn't be improved upon - its just that lack of an upkeep mechanic is a pretty major flaw that they don't suffer from.

Whether snowballing is due to an exponential distribution or otherwise doesn't matter too much, until you're trying to develop a mathematical way to fix it.

I'd actually think of it the other way around, though - if you solve it for long campaigns it will automatically never be a problem for short campaigns, except that if you push it too far so that (for example) nobody will be able to deploy an Ambot until they've got a couple of dozen games in, it could get annoying. People have the shiny plastic toy soldiers. They want to be able to put them on the table without having to wait months to do it. It's not necessarily as simple as "A long campaign is just a short campaign that lasts for ages".

I don't think the upkeep mechanic is necessarily the problem. As I've said, I think that in Oldcromunda income was essentially flat, with a slow increase. Newcromunda XP is essentially flat with a slow increase. They're both throttle back by either being "taxed" (Old) or really slow to gain (New, with tax included in the fact that you gain advances slower the more XP you have)

I think the problem is that the exponential XP in Oldcromunda was counteracted by massive underdog XP bonuses. Newcromunda doesn't have an equivalent where the exponential (ish) income is counteracted by big underdog cash bonuses.

Essentially, it looked like Old Necromunda was balancing a campaign by penalising high performing gangs to prevent them getting too far ahead, while in fact it was balancing a campaign by giving extremely high rewards to lower level gangs until they caught up.

Vorian wrote:
Old Necro had normalised income - which was then also reduced by gang size. As Baxx was alluding to above, it was very different and with far less income once you got going.

Sort of? It certainly wasn't a cap on higher rated gangs compared to lower rated gangs since no one, EVER, took a gang over 9 if they could avoid it (except outlanders) so everyone's income was fundamentally flat.

The XP in Old Necro does have diminishing returns though. The XP required between each level grows exponentially so you gradually improve less as you accumulate xp, until ultimately you hit the max cap.

The system in new Necro diminishes less because its only repeat characteristics that gain the 2xp tax

In Old necromunda that took a while to kick in though - Juves levelled up FAST - the first 4 levels were 5xp bands - and gangers kept levelling up pretty quickly (The next 4 bands). That's 7 advances before you start to see diminishing returns kick in and the next 7 advances are 20xp. It's only once you've got 14 advances that you start to reach the point where you need 40 xp to advance. And old Necromunda handed out XP like sweets - You got D6 just for showing up. A first game juve, who showed up and did a wounding hit (unlikely, but not unachievable) against a gang with a rating 200 higher, would go up 2 levels and possibly 3. (And that's assuming they lose! D6 + 4 + 5 - a juve who did NOTHING would gain an advance on a roll of 2 or more). Hell, in that circumstance the majority of your gangers would gain 1 advance.

200 difference in gang rating would be far from uncommon in a busy campaign. The rate at which underdog gangs could level up was meteoric. In the above example, a fresh juve in the higher rated gang would level up on a D6 roll of 6!

New Necromunda is a bit different, in that (as you say) there's no diminishing returns mechanic except for Stat improvements, and not even that for Juves. But good grief you have to work for those XP. You get an XP for putting someone out - not wounded, not downed, you actually have to take 'em off the board. And you get 1 XP for turning up. If you're a ganger, or a Juve/Prospect/Champion/Leader who wants to spend their XP on something actually useful you're looking at 6XP. That could, very easily, be 6 games before you even get your first advance. In Old Necro, with no underdog bonus, a ganger who has never achieved anything could reasonably expect to have gained 6D6 XP = 21 on average, and gained two advances. And he'll have been in 12 games, doing absolutely nothing, before his rate of advance slows. Just by existing he'll have added +42 to the gang rating.

Does that illustrate what I'm saying? Income and XP have effectively switched which one grows fast and which one remains fairly constant.

Baxx wrote:

Racerguy180 wrote:

The reason I see a need for an Arbiter is that they are the balancing tool & represent the unseen hand of Lord Helmwar.

One Gang gets to big for its breeches, Arbiter sends in a Palanite sweep thru their territory

Someone at yaktribe described this as the blue shell

That is absolutely a blue shell

Vorian wrote:

 Graphite wrote:
Snip

Yes, so you had virtual caps at 9 or 12 members and then those members would start to level much more slowly once your gang was mature, so a gang would start to level out in power.

Meanwhile a gang far behind the average gang would a) not be too many members behind, b) would have their power catch up much quicker and c) not be that much behind in income.

I don't want to say old Necro campaigns were good at preserving competitiveness between the gangs because these mechanics weren't perfect. You could still get huge disparity. But there was an effort to combat snowballing.

Thinking about it a bit more, you're right - the campaign system didn't just have a good catchup mechanic, the effects of higher XP causing slower levelling would kick in for higher level gangs. So both sides tend towards the middle, but I think crucially - the balancing mechanism to get lower level gangs up to the same level as others kicked in immediately, while the mechanism to slow down higher level gangs only kicked in later in the campaign. That allows everyone to feel that they're making progress from their starting point.

 Easy E wrote:

Baxx wrote:

 Easy E wrote:
So what's your point?

What is your proposed solution?

As I said, I want to establish the fact that current Necromunda has a fundemantal flaw compared to all other campaigns from the most comparable games. It's not evident that everyone agrees with this, as can be witnessed in this thread.

What are the comparable games? Do they NOT have this flaw? Do you have the "proof" of that as well?

Edit: Also, your proposed "solutions" all ready exist in the old rules, so I am really confused about the purpose of this thread again?

Yes, other games do have this flaw. But they had better counterbalancing systems.

And the purpose of this thread seems to be to discuss if this flaw exists and to try to frame exactly what the flaw is, and if a significant number of people think that it's fixable or indeed needs to be fixed. I don't think the subject of this thread is to find a solution.

(Because that would require house rules. And therefore the dreaded GM. Unless GW themselves develop a better campaign system, which they have shown absolutely no interest in doing)

Oh GOD we've hit the point of "git gud"