Originally written by yakface. Re-formatted and edited into an article by Teeef (thanks for that!).

Daemonettes desperately try to hold a mission objective in a tournament 40K game

Multi-tiered Goals for Missions

To develop missions for a tournament it is essential to try to balance the goals of those missions so that every Codex and every build have an opportunity to score points. In 40K the strengths and weaknesses of each Codex are different. Armies are better or worse at accomplishing a single goal from any type of mission. By using various goals you can enable each army to have a chance of success and force both sides to play a little out of their comfort zone. To create engaging missions it helps to have multi-tiered goals. If each mission has three goals (Primary, Secondary and Bonus) it can be made to challenge strategy and tactics without being too complicated.

Each goal provides battle points to the final score. The actual amount of points is not important. It is the relative difference of points between goals that affect the final score. The mission goals can vary greatly but it is important to understand the how the goals are achieved to create balanced, multi-tiered goals.

Disciplines

For our purposes there are two different 'types' of discipline that make a basic mission in 40K: area control (table objectives); enemy destruction/preservation of your own forces (kill points). On a tournament level there are many, many variations of these two types. When developing missions it is key to understand which one of these two disciplines each mission will feature. In order to have a good, varied mission, you need to make sure you don't make a mission 'tripled up' on one of these two types of disciplines.

Discipline A – Area Control (table objectives)

• Seize Ground and Capture and Control from the Standard Missions in the rule-book (variations on these).
• Table Quarter or Deployment Zone capture or hold.
• Terrain Feature capture or hold.
• Center of the Table (or specific non-deployment zone) capture or hold.

Discipline B – Enemy Destruction/Preservation of Your Forces (kill points)

• Annihilation from the Standard Missions in the rule-book (variations on this).
• Kill Points from the rule-book (variations on this).
• Victory Points from the rule-book (variations on this).
• Destroying particular units in the opponent’s army (such as certain FOC choices or the most/least expensive unit).
• Keeping certain units from your own army alive (such as certain FOC choices or the most/least expensive unit).

A good mission is one that is varied enough that every type of army is challenged by at least one of the mission disciplines in every mission regardless of what enemy they're playing. The best way to ensure that this happens is to make sure that you never 'triple up' on disciplines. With three goals you always have at least two goals coming from one discipline. Make sure the third goal is from the other discipline. That third goal should award either the most or 2nd most battle points. You never want to make the odd mission goal the lowest battle point provider because then again you're weighting the points available for the mission too heavily towards a player who has a good opponent match-up rather than to someone who is able to overcome weaknesses in their own army.

In a tournament there should be a split between missions dominated by discipline A and B. This will make the tournament well balanced. But you must include the same kind of balance within each mission. Otherwise what type of opponent you draw in which particular mission will have an elevated impact on the tournament (i.e. the luck of the draw will play an even bigger factor in your tournament than it should).

Other Considerations

Interesting and challenging missions are not assured just because you have multi-tiered goals. There are some other problems to avoid that can really help make a tournament mission either great or not so great.

Remove unneeded randomness

We all know that 40K is a game that can be dominated by randomness (i.e. luck). The single roll for first turn has a major impact on every game. Introducing further randomness into the game by creating non-player controlled events can be okay, but only it needs to be combined with some sort of tactical or strategic element for players to interact with.

For example, inserting a 'preliminary bombardment' event in a mission. An event like this doesn't always serve to create any tactical choice. There are some armies that will gladly keep all their units off the table before the start of the game and there are other armies who lose too much if they do so. An event like this has zero effect on some armies and possibly could lose the game for another before they even play. However, give the preliminary bombardment event to the player who goes second...now all of a sudden you're giving players more of a tactical choice which suddenly makes the random element of the 'preliminary bombardment' a whole lot more interesting from a game play perspective rather than just a random element which can screw one player who gets really crappy luck.

Don't penalize players for their Codex

Not all codices are created equally or with the same rule-book in mind. In some codices, the Heavy Support choices are dynamite while the Elites choices aren't all that hot. In other codices the Troops choices are amazing while the Fast Attack choices kind of suck, etc. At the end of the day a player should be able to select his army, as he likes to play it and expect to be able to accomplish the mission’s goals with the tools he has selected. The only force organization recognition the mission rule-books recognize is that 'Troops' are the only scoring units, so this is really the only mandate that tournament missions should stick with as anything else will always have the side effect of punishing certain armies and rewarding others simply based on what units in the codex are quality or not.

Having objectives based on the most expensive or least expensive units are fine, because across the board every codex follows the basic idea of more points = more powerful unit and less points = less powerful unit, so basing objectives around this mechanic will always be more or less balanced across every codex. Also sometimes you need to let them have there own army-don't scare them of!

Avoid using the Force Organization Chart (FOC) when Setting Goals

Some Tournaments have comp scores. If the tournament already has a comp score built into total battle points these comp restrictions in the missions themselves create arbitrary bonuses/penalties that really do affect different codices completely differently. If the tournament has no comp score then make sure FOC goals are only in the Bonus goal category. Never, make them the Primary or Secondary goal.

If you feel you must use the FOC in mission goals here are some examples to avoid:

• A Mission Goal: Destroy enemy Heavy Support. What about armies that have crappy (easy to destroy or no) Heavy Support?
• A Mission Goal: Keep your most expensive troops unit alive. A giant Ork Mob is infinitely more durable than the maximum-size Fire Warrior squad, for example.
• A Mission Goal: Destroy enemy HQs. Why should a player be punished for not taking (or being able to take) a strong HQ unit?
• A Mission Goal: Specifying an FOC slot and giving points to that player if that FOC destroys an objective. The quality of an FOC choice varies tremendously based on codex. If the FOC is not Troops or HQ then some armies cannot achieve the mission goal at all.
• A Mission Goal: Destroy whole FOC 'slots' (e.g. all 'Elites', all 'Fast Attack', etc.). This rewards or punishes players who simply walk up to the table against an opponent who hasn't taken any choices from one or more of these 'groups'.

Stay away from the 'Buddy' System

Tournament objectives should never allow both players to score the same mission goal at the same time. At the end-of-the-day 40K tends to emphasize sportsmanship and sportsmanlike players will often (even unintentionally) throw their opponent 'a bone' and allow them to claim an objective if it won't negatively affect them in the game. Yeah, technically those points given to their opponent could come back to haunt them because their opponent could then go on to win the tournament, but the reality is that many times players have a pretty good feeling that their current round opponent isn't going to be challenging them for overall tournament ranking, so a good sense of sportsmanship kicks in and allows them to give their opponent a 'freebie' objective because it doesn't actually hurt their score to do so.

Even more problematic to the final tournament result is the possibility that players (especially friends) will simply say that both players accomplished the objective regardless of what actually happened in the game. They may not even view this as cheating or fudging.

By making your mission goals have singular results you can remove this kind of discrepancy without affecting how the missions fundamentally play. A mission goal should not be simply, “Hold your own deployment zone.” Achieving the mission goal should award all the points only if one player is holding their deployment zone, or split the total points if both players are holding their deployment zone. There just isn't any reason to have all the mission goal points scored by both players.

Always consider distance to mission goals vs. deployment

Mission goals and deployment need to be carefully reviewed as they vastly affect some armies and codices. Anytime a tournament mission utilizes an unusual deployment, consider where armies need to get in order to accomplish the goals for that mission. If a mission using Dawn of War has objectives set in spots that are hard for less mobile armies to reach you are automatically punishing a less mobile army. Mobile armies already have an advantage in objective missions because they're able to rapidly respond to changes in the game and go capture objectives that are hard to get to when needed. However, slow moving armies should never be automatically penalized by the deployment making it difficult for them to even get to the objective.

Consider how non-player controlled events affect deployment and mission goals

If all the objectives are in the center of the table and then an event is introduced like 'preliminary bombardment' you are penalizing players for starting units on the table. This is a double-whammy for slow armies. Having the objectives in the center of the table can be great, but don't also include an event that penalizes players for starting units on the table.