Crusade needs to be in AoS 3.0 Needs it as a core rule

[Maddpainting]

For those that do not know, Crusade is a new way to play narrative (can also be played comp, match and you can have 1 narrative player vs a comp player even) in 40k.

The full idea is to start a small army (500 ish points) and work up to as many as you want. BUT each unit stays in your army and levels up as they play (many ways to get experience). Every X amount of experience they gain a rank and a new buff. These buffs are honestly not very strong (rr hits of 1, gain a 6+++, add +1" to move and charges, etc...) you can pick the leader in a unit to gain weapon buffs (+1D, extra Rend, etc...) characters, monsters/Vehicles (behemoths /artillery) all have their own charts as well. 
Also after each game for every unit that was killed during battle you have a damage chart so to say you need to roll on (You roll a D6 for each unit that died, on a 1 they take a lasting injurer, there are ways to remove these as well, so they are somewhat rare) this adds even more to the fun.

The core rules and the Campaign book all have missions for 500, 1000, 1500, and 2000 points. In total its about 9 missions at each point level.

What makes the game so great is, you don't always care to win, sometimes you are just trying to level up a couple units. Also you can play less strong units and given them buffs to help them and makes them more fun to play. You can have champion leaders in squads as well. 

Finally Crusade doesn't really runaway like some other games can (Necromunda for example), and the worst off player is always awarded (in 40k) more CP (Command Points, which are like Command points for Command abilities). So even if your opponent has more ranked units, the ranks are so minor it shouldn't effect the game to much, but at the same time you also get more CP to help even it out.

Over all it is a great system and I have been amazing by it, having lots of fun, it is also rewarding more than just a big win over a 4hr game.

 

[JackStreicher]

21 minutes ago, Maddpainting said:

Over all it is a great system and I have been amazing by it, having lots of fun, it is also rewarding more than just a big win over a 4hr game.

I agree by 100%!

[Popisdead]

I fully expect and really hope Crusade to take over from Paths to Glory and become the defacto "narrative/openplay" way GW gets people into the hobby.

I liked Path to Glory when I played it, even if imbalanced.  People like RPG aspect and we've seen the appeal of old 1980s roll-tables be fun when incorporated into both games lately.

 

[NinthMusketeer]

TBH, I would not say Crusade is a new system. It is clearly an evolution of Path to Glory.

The rest of what you said about it being awesome and stuff is spot on though. 

In the meantime I did make Road to Renown, a 'Second Edition' to Path to Glory that fixes balance concerns and opens up a load of new options (like forge world units and the level-up artifacts from forbidden power). You can find it in the narrative section of this very forum!

Unfortunate sidenote: the new codex already break the balance of Crusade. Fortunately since it is narrative anyway people should not be playing to min-max and the problems can be easily house ruled. But still, watching my opponent have every unit in his crusade force level up from ONE battle while I had none do so was disheartening, even though we quickly house ruled the problematic agenda that caused it.

Edited October 28, 2020 by NinthMusketeer

[RuneBrush]

Absolutely agree with this.  It's a great little system - almost a personal campaign for your army.  I'd be very surprised if we don't see this come about in AoS in some format (sorting out some of the madness of paths to glory).  What really makes it work is the missions for specific game & table sizes and not having to adapt one to work for smaller games.

[Kramer]

Is it in the same manner as warcry's campaigns that you kind of play your own story line and you mix and match from there? But with more upgrade tables?

[Beliman]

Anecdote:
Chris Metzen build a custom campaign for his own club using Crusade rules. He is the dude behind the story of Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo.
 

[Overread]

GW very much swaps stuff between AoS and 40K now since both use very similar systems of gaming. So yes I'd expect to see some kind of campaign Crusade system appear in the formal rules of AoS.

If anything its actually creating Narrative mode as opposed to just saying "narrative is games with story/connections" which is somewhat totally open-ended and informal. Crusade isn't really creating a 4th way to play its giving Narrative structure, unity, common ground and suchlike. Right now narrative and open don't get talked about as much because they are different for each player group or each game event within a player group. Giving them something like Crusade creates a common ground. 

 

That said it shouldn't be part of Matched Play. Even small upgrades are upgrades and crusade also has its limits too. It's a fun system, but non-crusade armies could be at some disadvantage compared to crusade armies. Especially since nothing forces a player to play their Crusade army faithfully. You can give your army free points, upgrades or whatever you want before the game; because unless its part of a structured campaign and monitored there's nothing to force you to obey the rules. It's just social agreements and the fact that the idea of the modes fun is to play the games.

 

Let matched be matched; let crusade be crusade (or rather narrative). 

[stickybluetoffee]

5 hours ago, Kramer said:

Is it in the same manner as warcry's campaigns that you kind of play your own story line and you mix and match from there? But with more upgrade tables?

Very much so. Lots of upgrade tables in the core rules and several pages of additional rules in each codex.

Theres also a campaign supplement out which adds yet more Crusade content.

 

My only gripe with it is that it’s done away with narrative scenarios in the sense that I find many score like a matched play game and don’t try to be different. I rarely play those missions and instead look for scenarios from older editions. With that in there, I love it!

[Maddpainting]

7 hours ago, stickybluetoffee said:

Very much so. Lots of upgrade tables in the core rules and several pages of additional rules in each codex.

Theres also a campaign supplement out which adds yet more Crusade content.

 

My only gripe with it is that it’s done away with narrative scenarios in the sense that I find many score like a matched play game and don’t try to be different. I rarely play those missions and instead look for scenarios from older editions. With that in there, I love it!

It is built like that on purpose so a Match play player can play against a narrative player and it wont effect eithers games. While the narrative player still kind of wants to win, he can still focus on scoring experience but the match play player can play like nothing has changed.

If we have a Core Crusade in AoS the main 12 missions should be like this too, but the Campaign book should NOT be like this. That way we can still show comp players that narrative can be just as fun.

@Overread this is for you too. We can have both.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Maddpainting

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

I'd definitely like to see a better system for playing narrative games than we currently have. I think there is a thing that's currently missing from AoS: A clearly communicated way to start playing at low point values. That really contributes to the barrier of entry right now. New players often feel like they can't even really start playing until they have at least 1000 points, because that's the lowest official supported matched play point value. The official battleplans are also not really designed with less than 1000 points in mind (and are often janky even at that value). Of course you can hack the battleplans to be whatever you want, but what is important on a battleplan really only becomes clear when you have a bit of experience with the game.

It would be really nice to have a few scenarios where they clearly state "Play this battleplan at 500 points".  Especially if they start making Start Collecting boxes into 500 points armies-in-a-box. I'd love to be able to tell new players to just get a starter box and play a starter scenario. Right now, it's very possible that if two people buy start collecting boxes and try to play the battleplan from the core rules, they will have a completely unbalanced (imagine Malignants vs. BCR) and unfun game that is nothing at all like regular AoS.

[NinthMusketeer]

Honestly? AoS doesn't work at 500 points. Many matchups can, but as a whole? No. There are simply too many elements of army allegiances that are designed & balanced around 2000 points and don't scale. This is crippling to Meeting Engagements too, which does nothing to resolve that problem.

For example, in a 2000 point game Tzeentch gets 9 Fate Dice. At 500? 9 Fate Dice. But with so much less dice being rolled that 9 means considerably more. Or look at the many Death allegiances that bring back models; d3 models back at 2000 points is a nice little bonus, at 500 that might be all that died in a turn. Legions of Nagash has no rule to scale down the number of gravesites either. The whole game has tons of these which work perfectly well at 2000 for which they were designed but are game breaking at 1000 or less.

To make 500 (and 1000) point battles work these things need to be dealt with. Fortunately in a casual sense it is easy; don't run those things, or houserule them. But saying 'just houserule them' is not a working solution for an official mode of play (despite how much GW may try lol).

We would still be left with a large number of 'problem items' that mean something like Meeting Engagements will never be suited for tournament play (despite how much players may try...) but it could be rendered functional. However that would require a level of army analysis and benefit breakdown that I do not feel GW wishes to invest resources into achieving. 

[RuneBrush]

On 10/30/2020 at 6:32 PM, NinthMusketeer said:

Honestly? AoS doesn't work at 500 points. Many matchups can, but as a whole? No. There are simply too many elements of army allegiances that are designed & balanced around 2000 points and don't scale. This is crippling to Meeting Engagements too, which does nothing to resolve that problem.

For example, in a 2000 point game Tzeentch gets 9 Fate Dice. At 500? 9 Fate Dice. But with so much less dice being rolled that 9 means considerably more. Or look at the many Death allegiances that bring back models; d3 models back at 2000 points is a nice little bonus, at 500 that might be all that died in a turn. Legions of Nagash has no rule to scale down the number of gravesites either. The whole game has tons of these which work perfectly well at 2000 for which they were designed but are game breaking at 1000 or less.

To make 500 (and 1000) point battles work these things need to be dealt with. Fortunately in a casual sense it is easy; don't run those things, or houserule them. But saying 'just houserule them' is not a working solution for an official mode of play (despite how much GW may try lol).

We would still be left with a large number of 'problem items' that mean something like Meeting Engagements will never be suited for tournament play (despite how much players may try...) but it could be rendered functional. However that would require a level of army analysis and benefit breakdown that I do not feel GW wishes to invest resources into achieving. 

I'm hoping that the focus on 2000 point games being the "only" or "right" way to play is something that is going to be tackled in time.  It's certainly something 40k seems to have got a lot better under control than AoS and Crusade is a testament to this because it works pretty well at smaller game sizes.

[plavski]

My playgroup's experience has been:

500 points - Unplayable, we just use Warcry at this level.

1000 points - Too few to do anything interesting and lean into anything fun

1000 points ME - Pretty decent with 2020 updates, but still gameable in ways that you need to house rule a lot

1250 points - Pretty decent as your army is allowed to do one thing well and games are pretty quick.

1500 points - Nicely fun. You can do a core strategy but with enough variation that you can properly play the objective game and you can finish at a reasonable time.

2000 points - Full strategic options, but games run on so long that it gets mentally exhausting and people start switching off.

I've found 1500 the sweet spot for my gaming group. Games are reasonable in length allowing for variation between slow/fast players, and you get to do the thing you want to do but with some extra spice and tactical options. 2000 just tends to shut our group down.

COVID put a dampener on crusade, but there was a lot of interest when it first launched. I ran a Path to Glory campaign using the excellent Road to Renown rules from @NinthMusketeer above and I highly recommend it. It adds all those lovely RPG elements and really brought a lot of competitive players into a more narrative mindset. Hopefully a crusade for aos will do something similar.

[Neil Arthur Hotep]

On 11/3/2020 at 12:02 PM, plavski said:

My playgroup's experience has been:

500 points - Unplayable, we just use Warcry at this level.

1000 points - Too few to do anything interesting and lean into anything fun

1000 points ME - Pretty decent with 2020 updates, but still gameable in ways that you need to house rule a lot

1250 points - Pretty decent as your army is allowed to do one thing well and games are pretty quick.

1500 points - Nicely fun. You can do a core strategy but with enough variation that you can properly play the objective game and you can finish at a reasonable time.

2000 points - Full strategic options, but games run on so long that it gets mentally exhausting and people start switching off.

Those are my impressions as well. I see two problems at the moment with low points games:

1.: Many of the intended and interesting builds in the battletomes that are too point intensive to run in low points games. Lots of battalions are not really playable at that level, for example, and not just because the point cost is too punishing. Often you can't squeeze in the battalion at all, or if you can you will lack a crucial support hero or enough bodies to play the objective game.

2.: Battleplans and some army abilities don't adapt to smaller (or larger) games. There are no guidelines in place to reduce table size and number of objectives, for example. Or guides for managing abilites like LoN gravesites on larger or smaller tables.

I think problem two is the more important one to tackle to make smaller games more playable, but doing something about problem one would be nice, too.

[RuneBrush]

18 hours ago, Neil Arthur Hotep said:

1.: Many of the intended and interesting builds in the battletomes that are too point intensive to run in low points games. Lots of battalions are not really playable at that level, for example, and not just because the point cost is too punishing. Often you can't squeeze in the battalion at all, or if you can you will lack a crucial support hero or enough bodies to play the objective game.

Personally battalions need reviewing as a whole.  However that's probably another topic entirely 😉

[NinthMusketeer]

After the issues of first edition GW has leaned towards pricing battalions on the high side and making them more narrative content than matched play. I personally like this approach, having super-strong battalions was all the negatives of regular cheese plus an extra layer of limitation in listbuilding on top of that, which can radiate out into the rest of the army as well. Fyreslayers are a battletome that suffers greatly from this.

It all reminds me of back in the pre-GHB days when I made point costs for all the AoS battalions for PPC (one of the community point-cost-providers). And I mean all of them, Realmgate Wars campaign books included. Think Stormcast have a lot of battalions now? You have no idea....

Edited November 5, 2020 by NinthMusketeer