Map campaign input wanted

[Kramer]

Hi all,

Looking for input. How do you deal with changing attendants in a map campaign?

I'm open to all suggestions, have a couple of ideas of my own and looking at the firestorm campaign system as well. 

Just for context, we usually play a couple of days in the year with a group. But the composition of course shifts. So although I would love some kind of reward system for claiming areas on the map. But not if somebody will be so far behind on the third day that they are without chance. 

[King Taloren]

That’s a pretty tough thing to work with. Is these days the only time they come to play Warhammer or do they play other places/times? 

One thing would be to ask people how much can they commit. If enough forewarning could they manage to be there most of the days the campaign is going?

Canpaigns are hard enough to run as they are with regular attendees, 

You could try running it as a Kronor style campaign and divide the games into the four Grand Alliances instead if there are enough variations of armies. Then no single person would fall behind unless no one from like Death showed up one day.

[Kramer]

5 hours ago, King Taloren said:

That’s a pretty tough thing to work with. Is these days the only time they come to play Warhammer or do they play other places/times? 

One thing would be to ask people how much can they commit. If enough forewarning could they manage to be there most of the days the campaign is going?

Canpaigns are hard enough to run as they are with regular attendees, 

Yeah, it aint the best situation but still possible. And the because it's just a fun way to spend time as a group winning the campaign or perfect balance isn't the main objective. 

They very rarely play outside this group and moments. 

5 hours ago, King Taloren said:

You could try running it as a Kronor style campaign and divide the games into the four Grand Alliances instead if there are enough variations of armies. Then no single person would fall behind unless no one from like Death showed up one day.

Oh that is a good one! Maybe some 'throw your lot in' with one of the players if you don't make it and gain similar/same progress. Thanks, that's not something I would ever have come up with.
(No Death, only 1 destruction, rest all chaos or Order, so Grand Alliances wouldn't work)

[King Taloren]

Well could be Order vs Chaos main battle and the Destruction player can choose which side he wants to play with or play “mercenaries” for both sides depending on who needs more players to support if he wants.  (As destruction is tend to do sometimes) 

Or have people divide into teams of own version of grand alliances to mix things up. Just have a balance of players so there hopefully isn’t a chance of one group having more than another.

[Dead Scribe]

Not that I have experience but I have read someone in a facebook group talking about how he uses factions instead of individual players in a map campaign so that when people drop out or cant play the others in his faction are still contributing.

[Greyshadow]

Have you considered a narrative campaign instead? The campaign master could describe the strategic orders from high command and move the armies around a map based on that. Players then find an opponent and come up with their own reasons why they might be fighting and they feed that back to the campaign master to weave it into the story.

I have also found completely delinking game play victory with narrative victory works tremendously. (A player might achieve victory according to the battle plan but you could decide that in fact the army over extended itself and had their supply lines cut off, by the narrative they lost).  De-linking in this way allows you to give all players a sense of winning by taking part but still gives kudos for excellent generalship). I have found this approach fosters really great friendly games. 

[Kramer]

7 hours ago, Greyshadow said:

Have you considered a narrative campaign instead? The campaign master could describe the strategic orders from high command and move the armies around a map based on that. Players then find an opponent and come up with their own reasons why they might be fighting and they feed that back to the campaign master to weave it into the story.

I have also found completely delinking game play victory with narrative victory works tremendously. (A player might achieve victory according to the battle plan but you could decide that in fact the army over extended itself and had their supply lines cut off, by the narrative they lost).  De-linking in this way allows you to give all players a sense of winning by taking part but still gives kudos for excellent generalship). I have found this approach fosters really great friendly games. 

Great suggestions thanks! In essence the first point is what I will try to do between the different game days. As to keep the missing players informed and to further deepen the commintment/attachment to the campaign. I’m thinking ‘local newspaper’ as a design. 

The second point is also good. Might be worth considering. Their should be rewards of course but not necessarily one that means you also win the campaign. Would you suggest a story tree to follow to make the choices/consequences available or would you ‘wing it’ between the games? 

[Kramer]

For reference this is my current concept, shoot holes where you see them please. 

1. The map will be based on the city we all studied. I'm thinking 4 locations more than players. So 10 in this case. 

2. For every win you get a glory point, First player to X amount of points wins the campaign and maybe gains an extra artefact in the next campaign or something small in the real world. But there is also a secret win condition to discover. Later more on that.
After a draw I havent decided. Might go 2pts for the win and 1 for the draw. OR maybe lowest ranking player gets the point with a draw. 

3. Every round, starting with the lowest ranking player, a challenge is issued. This repeats until every player has a match up. If the challenger (Aka a lower ranking player) wins, he can either claim an uncontested location or steal a location owned by the opponent. 

4. Army selection: The challenger decides the amount of points (probably from 3 set options). All players get a roster to choose from, helping newer players and making it clear what is in my collection if playing with a borrowed faction. 
There is a limitation though. Every roster is broken up in regular, hero & elite options. You are only allowed 3 elites, no magic users and no heroes. Might even limit amount of champions too. Which brings us to:

5a. Some locations will lift restrictions on the army selection.
Eg. if you have the marketplace my housemates and me frequented you can negotiate X% of you list as allies form the same GA. If you have the Hotel one of the guys worked at you can bring a hero. Etc.
This is not on top of the list but within the points. That way even if you don't have any locations it's still roughly a fair fight. 

5b. For every faction there is one location that is extra beneficial to their faction. So if you play Nurgle and control the location that correlates with that dirty ass student house we used to live in, the Nurgle player gains a certain benefit. I'm thinking X amount of points extra but really not sure yet.

5c. There will be three? locations that if you control them all you can initiate a final 'endgame'. The winner of which wins the campaign. Should be multiplayer. It should be a hail mary so a bit of randomness in the scenario. If you can reasonably go for the Glory points you should want to do that, but if you are behind... go for it. Of course if I alliance myself with an opponent to trigger said end game you can force the issue if we're both behind.

TLDR: Every battle is balanced in points but locations give you more options in your army selection. Every win offers you a glory point and a location. First to X glory points wins the campaign or who wins an 'endgame' scenario that can be triggered by controlling three objectives. The lowest ranking player is allowed to challenge a player, repeated until every player has a match up in every round.

So the things i'm still uncertain about:

- Do I let players know/look up in advance what advantages the locations give? Or do I prepare a envelope for every location? The moment you use the ability of the locations it's of course known anyway. 

- I'm thinking of adding a traveling mage as location. If you claim that you can use a Wizard in your next game, but you lose the locations after that as the Wizard escapes. I really dislike mages in Skirmish, so that might just be my aversion to that. 

- Do the players know what locations you need to control for setting up the end game?

- Do I add secret objectives to help players gain extra Glory points? For example, play a higher ranking player.  Or kill a opposing general in a battle. 

- Do we set tournament style time slots for every game? Don't want to be pushy in that regard but we tend to ramble on and not finish games otherwise 😂

- also thinking  to incorporate @King Taloren‘s suggestion for missing players. But tailored to our situation as I don’t expect the balance in GAms is going to be good enough. If you’re  not there you can select another player beforehand that is attending and gain the same amount of glory points they win. 

[EccentricCircle]

I've been preparing a map campaign, which will include resources tied to specific areas. We've not playtested it yet, so don't know how well it will work, but the idea is that on a strategic level you are playing something like Settlers of Catan, where you have to secure different resource locations, and use or trade those resources to build, maintain and expand settlements.

Securing those resources involves winning battles, either against another player's army, or against an NPC faction played by whoever is available or can supply the models.

Different factions get different amounts of resources from farmining, foraging, pillaging etc depending on what grand alliance they are in, and need a different suite of resources (the undead don't eat for example). Thus different regions of the map will be more or less valuable to different armies.

Finally larger settlements let you garrison more troops in that part of the map. A players army will quickly grow to be very large, but will never all be on the table at a given time. Rather in each battle they can decide what units to field from those who are stationed near by. This should allow for a lot of flexibility in match ups, and make it less drastic is one player falls behind. They might have fewer troops than the others overall, but if they are all in the same castle they might actually outnumber someone who just attacks them with a small raiding party.

Most importantly there will be several different metrics for gauging success, rather than definitive win conditions. One player might have the most towns, others the best developed kingdom. Others might secure strategic locations like realmgates and be able to tax those using them. Others might find arcane ruins and defend those against all comers. We'll be starting the campaign fairly soon, so I fully intend to report on its progress in the narrative section, and share my player handout once we get underway.

[Kramer]

6 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:

I've been preparing a map campaign, which will include resources tied to specific areas. We've not playtested it yet, so don't know how well it will work, but the idea is that on a strategic level you are playing something like Settlers of Catan, where you have to secure different resource locations, and use or trade those resources to build, maintain and expand settlements.

Securing those resources involves winning battles, either against another player's army, or against an NPC faction played by whoever is available or can supply the models.

Different factions get different amounts of resources from farmining, foraging, pillaging etc depending on what grand alliance they are in, and need a different suite of resources (the undead don't eat for example). Thus different regions of the map will be more or less valuable to different armies.

Finally larger settlements let you garrison more troops in that part of the map. A players army will quickly grow to be very large, but will never all be on the table at a given time. Rather in each battle they can decide what units to field from those who are stationed near by. This should allow for a lot of flexibility in match ups, and make it less drastic is one player falls behind. They might have fewer troops than the others overall, but if they are all in the same castle they might actually outnumber someone who just attacks them with a small raiding party.

 

Yeah, we did so as well. Only once in AoS but before that a couple of times. If you are looking for input the old Mighty empire rules are some of the best sources to have. We build our AoS map campaign on the Lustria Campaign book. It fit our theme/made it into Pirate mercenaries. Super great fun. It also suggest a logistics game in it. The routes between locations could only be travelled by certain rolls. 

Great addition (and thats also what i've building building on) was to further limit amounts of war machines wizards and heroes and allowing armies to add more of them due to locations. Those are valuable for every army. 

Also great element was that everybody took the same general (moddeled as a pirate/raider of course) for every battle and had to have a name. 

6 hours ago, EccentricCircle said:

Most importantly there will be several different metrics for gauging success, rather than definitive win conditions. One player might have the most towns, others the best developed kingdom. Others might secure strategic locations like realmgates and be able to tax those using them. Others might find arcane ruins and defend those against all comers. We'll be starting the campaign fairly soon, so I fully intend to report on its progress in the narrative section, and share my player handout once we get underway.

Yes do because that's always fun to see! 

[Greyshadow]

On 3/17/2019 at 5:54 PM, Kramer said:

The second point is also good. Might be worth considering. Their should be rewards of course but not necessarily one that means you also win the campaign. Would you suggest a story tree to follow to make the choices/consequences available or would you ‘wing it’ between the games? 

First, sorry it took so long to reply. Your campaign has probably already started! In the campaigns our group has played the campaign master had a rough story arc for the campaign. The was no in game rewards for winning battles - none. The result of a games did have a big impact on the campaign though. One example that comes to mind was when I smashed the command elements of the opposing force but were defeated in the end. Even though I lost the game (and that result was recorded for working out our best general), it was written into the story that I had captured the enemy's leader. Our next game was now a mission to rescue the captured general from a sea fort.

At the end of the game, it was the record of the war stories from the game that was the most important. They were written down and influenced what the subsequent battles were played, who was the attacker and who was defender and such like. Of note though, is that although the players got a lot of say in what they wanted to play, the campaign master would always steer the campaign to the planned dramatic finale. This was similar to the way a DM steer the adventurers on track in an RPG. 

Not saying this is the only way to play by a long shot but it works well for us. Another advantage is that regardless of what has gone before every game was essentially a matched play game which made running the campaign very easy. This approach also avoids the snowballing problem inherent in a lot of campaign systems. Anyway, hopefully some helpful thoughts and best wishes with the campaign. 

[Kramer]

21 hours ago, Greyshadow said:

First, sorry it took so long to reply. Your campaign has probably already started! In the campaigns our group has played the campaign master had a rough story arc for the campaign. The was no in game rewards for winning battles - none. The result of a games did have a big impact on the campaign though. One example that comes to mind was when I smashed the command elements of the opposing force but were defeated in the end. Even though I lost the game (and that result was recorded for working out our best general), it was written into the story that I had captured the enemy's leader. Our next game was now a mission to rescue the captured general from a sea fort.

At the end of the game, it was the record of the war stories from the game that was the most important. They were written down and influenced what the subsequent battles were played, who was the attacker and who was defender and such like. Of note though, is that although the players got a lot of say in what they wanted to play, the campaign master would always steer the campaign to the planned dramatic finale. This was similar to the way a DM steer the adventurers on track in an RPG. 

Not saying this is the only way to play by a long shot but it works well for us. Another advantage is that regardless of what has gone before every game was essentially a matched play game which made running the campaign very easy. This approach also avoids the snowballing problem inherent in a lot of campaign systems. Anyway, hopefully some helpful thoughts and best wishes with the campaign. 

No worries, will be a month or two before we finally get a chance to play with more than three players at one time. So plenty of time to finish the rules and make some terrain  

I think your description sounds amazing and would personally really enjoy that. We did try it once though and although promising it really didn’t work for three of the guys in our group. Which is a shame but like you said, luckily it’s not the only way to play. 

I will keep it in mind though because it did inspire me to use the narrative between game days to change things up. In a crumbling city it’s narratively  sound if the leading player is hit hardest by collapsing structures and changing locations on the map.