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I dislike characters getting a separate treatment to other units when the die. It heavily punishes fragile and melee characters and rewards those characters sitting in the back a acting as buff bots.

As ork player, I have been on the receiving end of rules like this many times - a warboss is very easy to kill, but has to be on the front lines to do anything. He dies pretty much every game and you can little about it unless you just hide him all game.
If a campaign has a rule like that, I can mitigate it by making a big mek my warlord (what warboss takes order from a big mek?), but in the end characters like elder farseers or space marine captains tend to be drowned in buffs, while I've lost my big guy every other game.

The trap you're falling into with rules like this is pretty much the same that GW is sitting in with many, many army traits - the rule itself sounds fluffy when read, but it actually rewards unfluffy behavior on the tabletop.
With a rule like this, you are punishing all the champions of khorne, daemon princes, warbosses, hive tyrants or captains from melee focused chapters like Blood Angels or Space Wolves for acting the way they do in the fluff. Any character that is targetable due to their wound count is a liability right off the bat, not to mention psykers which regularly blow up.
You make people shy away from epic duels you actually want to happen, because there is a good chance they might lose their character for good.
Instead, it incentives hiding characters, non-interactive play and buff bots, forging a narrative of "and then Captain Falsus Latinom of the Imperial Angels heroically stood behind a container until the battle was over".

When writing my campaign I have looked into what behavior in the game I want, and worked on things that rewarded that kind of behavior.
For example, I wanted to have generic characters be the stars of their army, not a named character who already is a legend and has his story told. Instead of forbidding people from using named characters (some armies can't do without), I made sure that these generic warlords would eventually become more powerful than them and steal their thunder.

Yeah, I'm usually not fond of characters dieing. Many things die in a 40K game and aside from Tau Commanders most characters want to be in melee - and therefor they get hurt most of the games or die. So in order to play a campaign and build up a story I just ignore them dieing on the battlefield, what matters is if they won or lost and if they did something interesting. You can then add a line of how they were safed after the battle or how they retreated if you want. But I don't let the characters that me and the guys in my playgroup invented, wrote a background and a profile for, die.

 Jidmah wrote:
I dislike characters getting a separate treatment to other units when the die. It heavily punishes fragile and melee characters and rewards those characters sitting in the back a acting as buff bots.

As ork player, I have been on the receiving end of rules like this many times - a warboss is very easy to kill, but has to be on the front lines to do anything. He dies pretty much every game and you can little about it unless you just hide him all game.
If a campaign has a rule like that, I can mitigate it by making a big mek my warlord (what warboss takes order from a big mek?), but in the end characters like elder farseers or space marine captains tend to be drowned in buffs, while I've lost my big guy every other game.

The trap you're falling into with rules like this is pretty much the same that GW is sitting in with many, many army traits - the rule itself sounds fluffy when read, but it actually rewards unfluffy behavior on the tabletop.
With a rule like this, you are punishing all the champions of khorne, daemon princes, warbosses, hive tyrants or captains from melee focused chapters like Blood Angels or Space Wolves for acting the way they do in the fluff. Any character that is targetable due to their wound count is a liability right off the bat, not to mention psykers which regularly blow up.
You make people shy away from epic duels you actually want to happen, because there is a good chance they might lose their character for good.
Instead, it incentives hiding characters, non-interactive play and buff bots, forging a narrative of "and then Captain Falsus Latinom of the Imperial Angels heroically stood behind a container until the battle was over".

When writing my campaign I have looked into what behavior in the game I want, and worked on things that rewarded that kind of behavior.
For example, I wanted to have generic characters be the stars of their army, not a named character who already is a legend and has his story told. Instead of forbidding people from using named characters (some armies can't do without), I made sure that these generic warlords would eventually become more powerful than them and steal their thunder.

This is all very good stuff. I will scrap the idea of characters being excluded from the KIA list then, and instead go for:

1: models and weapons which die in the game are removed from your roster (bit of bookkeeping but it should be worth it)
2: your main character can't die, IE if you're chronicling the efforts of Big Mek Tank Krusha, even if he "dies" in every game, you can say he was just wounded and returned to base camp.

I want to interfere with the actual game itself as little as possible, so I will probably remove any bonus abilities etc and just stick with the rewards for battle being to your Roster.

I'll see if (once the lockdown's unlocked) I can get a small campaign run like this, and then start adjusting it for future campaigns!

 Elbows wrote:
No one is intentionally taking mega-strong lists...and that's the problem. Bog standard, non-tournament armies are still strong enough to make narrative scenarios very difficult. I'm not playing with random strangers. I'm playing with my friends.

There is a difference between "don't take a meta-tournament list", and "hey could you not play with 30% of your codex, or not use those new marine rules...or not use those particular stratagems or buffs..."

I'm all about hacking 8th edition, and have been doing so since the start. No one in my group is even a power gamer, but the conversation is simply becoming too long to set up a game where scenarios work out. Heck, we've gone back to playing a hack of 2nd edition instead lately, first 40K I've played in six months or so.

I've found that taking non-competitive lists and completely forgoing detachment bonuses greatly reduces lethality. Another thing that helps is using Obscured from CoD, which is super quick to add to the game and greatly reduces across-the-board shooting lethality.

One of the lethality mitigation strategies for campaign play is to use the "out of action" concept, where "dying on the battlefield almost always leads to recovery, but does still have a chance to kill, or have to sit a single game out, or a persistent wound, or insane bravery, or whatever.

It's really important in my campaign, because the cult armies have to grow from 5-member Kill Teams to full fledged armies over the course of the campaign.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Elbows wrote:
No one is intentionally taking mega-strong lists...and that's the problem. Bog standard, non-tournament armies are still strong enough to make narrative scenarios very difficult. I'm not playing with random strangers. I'm playing with my friends.

There is a difference between "don't take a meta-tournament list", and "hey could you not play with 30% of your codex, or not use those new marine rules...or not use those particular stratagems or buffs..."

I'm all about hacking 8th edition, and have been doing so since the start. No one in my group is even a power gamer, but the conversation is simply becoming too long to set up a game where scenarios work out. Heck, we've gone back to playing a hack of 2nd edition instead lately, first 40K I've played in six months or so.

I've found that taking non-competitive lists and completely forgoing detachment bonuses greatly reduces lethality. Another thing that helps is using Obscured from CoD, which is super quick to add to the game and greatly reduces across-the-board shooting lethality.

Yeah, we've done a handful of lethality mitigation things when we were playing 8th edition. I take crap lists and I play Eldar so they're oddly not super strong (I don't play Alaitoc, etc.). I don't have flyers, etc. But I never want to be the guy who is asking other people not to use models they own/have painted, etc. That's where the rub comes in.

My buddy plays Dark Angels. Against fragile Eldar, his flyer with bolters that hit on 2+ (it's their basic rule, not a stratagem) means he can get anywhere and kill anything relatively easily. If he brings a 5-10 man Deathwing squad, I don't want to tell him he can't use the shoot-twice stratagem (again something that wipes out fragile Eldar easily). If I take Wraithguard (I have three units of them), I don't want to ask him not to take any plasma units - which he has plenty of. Dark Angels get to re-roll 1's when sitting still and can simply pop that +1 damage stratagem for plasma, meaning a single shot wipes out a hugely expensive Wraithguard model. My 15 wraithguard will disappear in a single turn, etc.

None of this is particularly meta/power gaming...it's just the basic rules of 8th edition. But this level of destructive capability makes it damn hard to "get a character to survive", etc. If we play a mobile scenario, it's tough not to take some of my 10+ Eldar skimmer vehicles and just dominate, etc.

This is why we're heading back toward 2nd edition right now. Where cover immensely aided survivability, and you could do things like "hide", and being forced to shoot the nearest units meant you couldn't skip all the threats and just target the scenario vehicle in the background, etc. I'm not saying it can't work in 8th, but we simply gave up trying.

We did find that scenarios and narrative games worked far better in Indexhammer, but that was a long time ago.

For characters we use experience points to access to different upgrades (Basically the upgrades from Chapter Approved 2018 of custom characters). Each player in our campaing selects a generic character as his Warlord for all of the campaing.

Each upgrade costs 1 Experience points + 1 Experience points for each 50 points the character costs, not counting the first 50. So basically a 152 points character would need 4 Exp (1 Exp base + 1 for 51-100 +1 for 101-150 +1 for 151-200) points for each upgrade, so "cheaper" characters warlords are balanced agaisnt more expensive, powerfull ones.

One can't chose a named character to be his warlord, and gain those buffs.

One character gains:
+1 Exp after each battle
+1 Exp after victory
+1 Exp if he kills (Shooting, meele or psychic) the enemy warlord
+1 Exp if he has two consecutive loses (To avoid snowballing)

If a character dies in battle, we roll a d6 dice:
1- Greviously wounded: The lord of war can't play in the next battle
2-3 Lighly wounded: He starts the next battle with -1 wound
4-5 Small wounds: He recovers as normal
6 Learning from your mistakes: He recovers and gains +1 Exp.

When it comes to campaign play I am a big fan of rewarding endurance and rubber-banding.

I find one of the most difficult issues with campaign play is continued interest in the campaign itself. So I like the idea of increasing the amount of campaign victory points week to week. That way if someone has to miss a week it hurts them, but not so much they can't be in it to win it except toward the very end of the campaign where I am hope they are invested at that point.

I also like to to allow for the first part of the campaign the ability for players earn the maximum amount of campaign victory points even if they don't win a game. They just have to play more games. Example: Week 1: A maximum of 3 campaign victory points can be earned for the week. A player earns 3 points winning a game. A player earns 1 point for each loss. That way a player doesn't fall behind but does have to play more. This prevents a player from believing they don't even have a chance from some early losses and throwing in the towel which I have seen over and over in any the stronger get stronger campaigns. However, as the points cap increases as the campaign goes on, there does become a point where just playing more games will not get the cap. Example: Week 3: A maximum of 9 points can be earned for the week. A player earns 9 points for winning a game. A player can earn 2 points for playing up to 3 games. So a player that does not win any games can only earn a maximum of 6 campaign victory points. Eventually, even winning a game doesn't allow for the point cap so a player has to win multiple games during the week to reach the cap. Example: Week 6: A maximum of 18 points can be earned for the week. Only 3 games are scoured for campaign purposes. A player earns 9 points for each win and 4 points for games the player does not win. So a player must win 2 of 3 games to reach the cap. 1 win and 2 non-wins yields 17 points and no wins yields 12 points. Again, the idea is to reward endurance almost as much as winning especially early on.

As for rubber-banding, my thoughts are the players at the top of the ranking should be playing tougher (and definitely not easier) games to maintain control of that lead. This doesn't mean players at the bottom of the ranking can rocket toward the top or even become king makers. Only that no player should play to the finish of the campaign and not have at least a couple of wins. This is much tougher to accomplish. A campaign can attempt to give additional points based on relative distance from 1st place, but that can get convoluted very quickly and is not necessarily going to help a player win more either. The same can go for awarding additional CPs, mission selection or table selection. I still lean on giving extra points based on how many campaign victory points a player is behind first for the week, but, I admit, it still has issues.

I play fun narrative campaigns with my adult son. We are both on the same page and the story of our dudes is what matters. We tweak the rules to make the story work. If a dude dies then he dies but another hero arises. Great fun on my basement table.

I have played in several campaigns at our FLGS. They start with great intentions/energy but then break down. It takes a lot of coordination and shared vision to make them work. At the end of the day, Matched Play rules Saturday afternoons.

Our general campaign system was essentially: post game, each player would pick an MVP which SURVIVED the battle. This could be anything from a squad leader (i.e. a unit leader with a differing stat-line to the squad, so a sergeant, exarch etc.) up to a normal character.

We had a handful of upgrade tables they could roll on, and a limit was set for each character. A squad leader could only ever have one upgrade, while a full blown character could have up to four eventually.

We have a deck of storyline cards as well, which are simple narrative suggestions for whether you won or lost your battle, to create an organic storyline. We never bothered with a hex map, etc. Our games/story was developed as we played games, and we had only a simple map of our area, a planet, a moon and a space station, etc. We weren't going for a winner or loser, but merely crafting the story as we played - letting the games dictate what was happening. If you lost several games in a row, this was reflected in the games you'd be playing and your story. "Well, we're probably trying to leave the planet, so we're heading for this space port...amidst the madness", etc.



There was no meta to game in the storyline. We played a game where some CSM renegades had to ditch a ship which entered the system covered in Tyranids. They managed to escape a few...so the next game was the CSM renegades recovering the drop pods on the surface (combating the Dark Angels on the planet to do so), etc.

We had a system for named characters if they were killed in a game - so that they didn't recover and show up in consecutive games, etc.

Those cards look great

Agreed, really nice quality to them.

PenitentJake wrote:
1. Do you use Urban Conquest rules (Cities of Death and especially Streets of Death, which is the map based campaign system that comes with the kit)

I don't. I use the Kill Team rules, incorporating the 40K rules when needed for vehicles and such.

2. Do you cross-platform, and if so, which other systems do you incorporate into your campaigns?

Currently no, but I may expand into 40K proper later in the campaign.

3. Do you use a referee/ GM/ narrator system.

Yes. I am the GM and my son runs an Inquisition warband.

4. Do your characters earn their promotions? (ie. Did any of your troops ever work their way up to Commander level?)

Not so far, but I suppose it could happen.

5. Have you ever played a quest game to earn the right to use one of your Relics in the remainder of the campaign?

N/A

6. Do you have persistent maps/ terrain that can be affected by game play?

Not exactly. We use persistent terrain setups if one battle takes place in the same location as a previous battle.

7. How many of you write your own fluff/ fanfic/ background based on game play?

Yeah, I write fluffy battle reports here:The Adventures of Maximillion Parris, Ordo Xenos Inquisitor