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Heyo everyone,

I've got into a long-running set of games with some friends, and I've got the idea to actually turn our regular games into something of a campaign with upgrade progression and some form of character growth. The problem is that my experience in campaigns is more along the lines of a WFB/40k campaign, and those systems are very different than those of X-Wing. So I'm fishing for some feedback and ideas that I might cobble together into a system. First, though, here's the thoughts I have had:

Every player in the campaign takes the role of their own named pilot and we come up with a special ability for them. This would be mostly be done with mutual agreement, and in some basic ship for whatever faction they play. So nobody is going to be starting out in a tricked out Decimator or what have you.

Upgrades, ship changes and hiring new pilots are handled through a basic credits system. Credits are earned in games, but also a certain amount would be generated in a map campaign. Let's say you win a game over Tatooine, that nets you influence on that planet and it gives you 10 credits (credits being a 1:1 ratio for points) to spend on a game, and it generates new credits every campaign turn or the like. The biggest issue I see here is that there's a risk of momentum in victory, where a few wins gets a person so many credits that they will always have a massive points advantage over the other, need some thought on that.

Another issue brought up is what happens if your character gets shot down. My initial thought is to adapt or create an injury/damage table to be rolled on after such an event. I don't want to meat-grinder characters, so it might look something like this:

If a character is killed in a game, at the end of the battle, roll 1 attack dice and consult the table
Blank - Ship is destroyed, the character must either use a new basic ship or buy a new one
Hit - Ship is damaged and under repair for the next game
Crit - Ship scrapes by and may participate in the next game, but loses a random upgrade card


There needs to be a lot of work, still, but I'm hoping for some inspiration from the feedback here.

What if I roll an eyeball?

 Crazy_Carnifex wrote:
What if I roll an eyeball?

Hmm...good question. Any ideas?

Perhaps a pilot injury? Lowered PS for a game or loss of any pilot talents?

I think that your other major risk is going to be the frustration of losing your character pilot too often. X-Wing is a game where ships die very frequently, especially if it's a fair game and not a one-sided massacre by a much stronger player. So you're going to be rolling on that "dead pilot" table very frequently, with the potential to lose any progress you make. And not being able to use that awesome list you came up with because your key pilot is dead can be very frustrating and not enjoyable at all. IMO it's better to just track pilot experience/kills and handwave it as "they always eject and are recovered because they're the hero of the story". That way even when you lose 100-0 the worst that can happen is that you stay where you are.

Have you had a look at Heroes of the Aturi Cluster? http://dockingbay416.com/campaign/

We have been using this (with tweaks) in conjunction with Rebellion to do pretty much the same thing as you are looking at. We had to broaden out the basis for which ships can be chosen (as well as for using the other two factions) and the addition of a GM. We use Heroes exp. gain as credits as well as controlling tiles on the board.
Major problems we encountered were ships becoming too powerful (Ghost with shuttle, 2 EPTs each and six mods between them!) but that was taken care of by the sudden appearance of an Impstar Deuce (hence the need for a GM) and ships remaining too weak either through lack of credits or getting blown up a lot, after the campaign had been on for a while we found that starter ships and pure support ships became next to useless. We have yet to find a good way of balancing this.

Edit: We play as two teams of three for Rebs and Imps, with two scum players playing individually and the GM.

Why not just have the named pilots, if destroyed during the game, have to miss a game or two. Keeps people using different ships and pilots while the ones destroyed are recovering after "ejecting".

Instead of an experience system, have you thought of a campaign map? You can have the map/amount of territory controlled do different effects like making the recovery time of destroyed named pilots be faster, have lower PS ships deploy later than they would. Just little things that won't swing the balance too far towards one side, while providing a narrative to make it feel your games matter.

For player death, I quite like the Arcadia Quest system where you get a Death Curse next game, which is annoying but not game breaking. The obvious analogue in x-wing would be starting the game with a random critical damage. Some are brutal like Injured Pilot, others are fairly inconsequential, like Thrust Control Fire. The ones that require actions to get rid of are all pretty good. It would also make pilots that flip damage cards a bit more valuable.

To prevent players from becoming too overpowering, one solution might be to keep adding bounty to their head as they score victories (or you could even let the other players set the bounty themselves out of their own purse). Players are usually quite good at identifying who is most dangerous, so it's a self correcting system. You could also weight it by having the bank match peoples pledge. So for example, everyone realises that Jim is getting too powerful, and needs to be taken down. So five of the other players each chip in 4 credits out their own purse, as a bounty on Jim, then the bank matches their pledge. This means that the bounty on Jim in now 40 credits. The next player to battle Jim then has the option of spending some or all of those credits on a bounty hunter for that game. Anything they don't spend gets carried to the next game.

Obviously, with the pledge matching, it would work best if people didn't know who their next opponent was going to be, else they'd be able to cheat. It might also be a fun way for people to get revenge, by sticking 5 points on someone who beat them. Slowly the bounties would increase throughout the campaign, until a Bounty Hunter joins.