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Reading some of the discussions about narrative vs. competitive play made me think about ways to run narrative campaigns that would be largely noncompetitive. Has anyone ever run a D&D style narrative campaign, with a GM in charge of NPC forces? Creating scenarios where the players fight cooperatively would obviously require a decent amount of models, but you could also recycle stuff back into action. It would probably be easier to set up scenarios where the players are not aligned, but their objectives are totally different from those of matched play. Would it just end up as Apocalypse games strung together with a plot? If you had the right group it could be a fun, though fairly involved, thing to try.

Warhammer 40k happens at a scale that does not really allow for intimate, character driven campaigns like DnD. Unfortunately, GW doesn't even really seem to understand what 'narrative play' even really means, or how to outline it as a specific goal outside of using it as a buzzword.

Your best bet would be to have players restricted to a Kill-Team style setup, with very small compositions (like a single squad led by a single character) working together against a common threat. Any bigger, and things just become unmanageable for anything beyond a handful of games.

Miniwargaming does this quite well. I would look up their Deathwatch narrative campaigns, lots of fun and full of great ideas. The two you would probably want to look at are Augustine’s Station and then Space Hulk Deathwatch

Alternatively, an option you might like to consider is running one of the 40k RPGs but when the narrative allows for it, fighting a battle out on the tabletop as a proper game of 40k.

For example, you're running Deathwatch. After doing some infiltration and recon, the team comes to realise the force of (insert enemy here) they're up against is going to be too much for them to take on alone, so they're going to need backup. At this point, they return to the nearest Imperial ship or settlement to acquire reinforcements for a larger battle that you then play as 40k with the players each represented by unique characters, then plenty of IG or Scions or AdMech troops under their joint command, vs a force of enemies controlled by the GM.

You could even go one step further and say that the army they can bring to the table is determined by their actions in the RPG element, for example if they are more successful at convincing a local governor that his city is going to be wiped out without their help, they get an extra squad or two of conscripts. If they have a Techmarine, perhaps he can fix up some additional tanks that the local forces lacked the expertise to repair. If they can make contact with the planet's orbital defences, during the game they can call down a powerful bombardment from orbit on the enemy force.

Of course, this is going to the fiddly to set up, and you have to make it clear to the players that the arc will feature a 40k battle (and one that will in no way be balanced), but it could make a great climax for an arc or campaign.

Fafnir is right. Give each player a "commander" with leveling and customization options, and allow them to have a small force that they can customice, expand or reduce and chose before each mission.
The GM should control the npc forces, and create custom scenarios. Secondary objetives are cool. Like, having a Ogryn on a cage in a cultist base that they can try to rescue to add to their forces.
But all of that requires you to made a system from scratch. Here on dakka you have in general discussions a pretty complete system for deathwach, "into the maws of the abbys" I think is called.

Written on my phone, apologies.

I love this idea. I’m an avid dnd player and there’s certainly a personal element I’m not getting when I play with Space Marine #37 on the tabletop.

As above, give each player a small amount of points to start (50-100?) - it needs to be few enough that they’re personally connected to the models; target max 3 models. Indicate to them that, like in rpgs, rewards will be given to those players with interesting characters. Vanilla Optimal Killer Marine #37 is boring. Obviously toss out concepts like squad size requirements. If Steve wants his squad to be an apothecary and 2 scouts, Steve gets that.

Use milestone leveling system maybe? Allow models to be upgraded to the sergeant/veteran version or armed with new weapons after a period of time?

I think you want to leave combat to be as much like 40k as possible. Perhaps though steal the death-save / stabilisation mechanic from dnd. Other things you may want to steal from dnd include inventories and skill checks.

For skill checks, have each model choose 1-2 skills from dnd that they’re trained in based on their army, and role within that army. No hard rules on what to pick, it just needs to make sense. Dungeon World has a great system to deal with any sort of check simply. You roll 2d6 and it’s something like:
1-6 you don’t get what you want, and something else happens
7-10 you get what you want with a set back
11+ you get what you want with a bonus
If you’re trained, you get +2 on the roll. Alternatively use the d20 system and being trained gives you advantage.

And there it is; a basic role playing game.

I'll be attempting something similar to this - and have already considered running a narrative co-op game using our revised 2nd ed. rules (which are far more suitable to something like this).

It sounds silly, but 40K is currently far too killy and free-to-kill for small narrative stuff if you want to keep the stat lines and rules from 8th. You need to change the system, the game mechanics, the difficulty or just write your own kind of stats/game.

 Elbows wrote:
I'll be attempting something similar to this - and have already considered running a narrative co-op game using our revised 2nd ed. rules (which are far more suitable to something like this).

It sounds silly, but 40K is currently far too killy and free-to-kill for small narrative stuff if you want to keep the stat lines and rules from 8th. You need to change the system, the game mechanics, the difficulty or just write your own kind of stats/game.

Agree that the killiness is risky for an rpg. On the other hand, players can have more than one model, and high-risk combat may encourage players to role play for avoidance or at least combat advantage.

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/524342.page

Check this out.

Check out Inquisimunda.

Not sure how that might translate to DnD but may give you some ideas.

I'd thought about it in the past and wrote some scenarios but I never got players to go for it.

M.

Great ideas from everyone. Something like this would definitely take a lot of development on behalf of the GM, who would basically have to make up all of the campaign systems and scenarios from scratch. I do like the idea of having commanders with persistent traits that carry over and level up, as well as each player having a pool of units they can earn and take depending on the scenario. In my mind, the killiness of 8th edition could be worked around, as long as you accounted for it. For example, you could consider basic units to be more or less expendable and replaceable from mission to mission, so it wouldn't really matter if your rank and file die as long as it was in service of your objectives. Maybe you could have minor penalties for character deaths, or an economy system for requisitioning units. The general purpose of the games wouldn't be balance by any means, but just creating interesting and challenging scenarios for the players and trying to encourage things that would normally never be the focus of a typical matched play game.

I didn't go into detail but Kestral used a system similar to Gorkamorka or Oldnecromunda which is detailed in the post somewhere which delt with the effects of being put out of action . Kestral did put a lot of effort into the setting and set ups. The nice thing is, at some point, you can sort of wing it when running these types of scenarios. I made an attempt at running a NecroGorka RPG miniatures game and simply using wysiwyg it's pretty easy to set up a scenario. The biggest hurdle to overcome ( if one player controls one character) with the rules from say SWA or Necromunda is if your players are getting pinned and can't take actions it's no fun.

Hm, I think I have at least one picture somewhere

I checked out the ruleset linked in the thread you shared, Insurgency Walker. The campaign you guys ran is just the kind of thing I'm thinking of. Really, you can make it as simple or as complex as you want it. I like how you guys adapted the 6th edition rules.