Reply To: Universal Map Based Campaign System Where Manouvering Matters!

[greyhunter88 1658xp 1]

I have played many campaigns over the years, so I will try to lay down a few of my thoughts in case they are helpful.

1) The impact of long-term damage binary is critical, but a very fine balance. What I mean by this is that games where casualties have no impact (eg. Warmachine’s Frontier Campaign) don’t feel very connected. You can throw your army away without much qualm, which makes you feel very disconnected from them. Warhammer 40,000’s Crusade gives out “Battle Scars”, which are a bit narratively bizarre. My men were obliterated by a nuclear strike so now they have -1″ movement? They also don’t matter because the campaign gives you the means to just remove Battle Scars or just fire and then rehire those units anyways, so they feel pretty moot.

By that same token, if the damage is too punishing it can lead to serious feels-bad moments. BattleTech, for example, can have your ace pilot and heavy ‘Mech go up in a single ammo detonation, which can put you out of a campaign instantly. This is obviously more a problem in BattleTech Classic than Alpha Strike, but it’s definitely ended some campaign early when a single bad round puts one player way too far behind to catch up. It also sucks if your lovingly painted unit gets permakilled in the first game. Even if it’s a good narrative moment it feels like you wasted your time painting them.

I actually think 3rd Edition Age of Sigmar had a really neat way or doing casualties, where units could degrade over time and had to spend resources to try and rally back to strength, with bonuses if they sat out a game.

2) By that same token, experience is a requirement but also a dangerous tool. Everybody wants their armies to improve in experience, unlocking new abilities and what-not. That’s what makes formations and characters feel memorable. This balance is so hard, though. If upgrades are too weak (think Rangers of Shadow Deep… playing like 10 games with a sidekick only for him to go from 15 to 16 HP), then they don’t feel worthwhile. If they are too powerful, though (think Jumping Jack or Melee Master in BattleTech), they can risk ‘breaking’ the game. This isn’t a bad thing in of itself. Campaign play is where that stuff should show up. After all, if some super-pilot busts the game but runs the risk of dying every time he takes the field, that problem might naturally address itself. The issue comes from one side overwhelming the other in a win-more snowball. One side gets so strong with its better upgrades that it continues to win and get better. Many a Mordheim campaign has ended this way.

3) Fighting losing battles is just… not fun. I’ve done some historical games in Bolt Action that had asymmetrical objectives. Maybe it’s just me, but “try not to lose too bad” was just not that much fun, even if it was a historical scenario. If a battle feels like a foregone conclusion, it feels like a waste of a rare gaming night to play it out. I had this issue in a map-based campaign of The Old World, where a 500 point scouting force ran into a 1400 point Orc army. It was understandably a massacre, and felt like a waste. On the one hand, auto-resolving it feels bad for the losing player because they don’t want to just lose all their stuff when they might save a few units by playing it out. On the other hand, there just wasn’t much of a gameplay loop to just turtle and run down the clock. I’m not sure what the best way to handle this is. Whether it’s ensuring that no army can get beyond an arbitrary size, or saying that a superior force can only bring so many men to bear in an operational theater, so the game’s can be unbalanced but not completely one-sided.

4) Having a catch-up mechanic of some kind is always appreciated. When I think of a big, map-based campaign, I think of a long-term investment. Some campaigns (skirmish, especially) can benefit from having brief win conditions and fast wrap-ups. Like I think a Company on Company campaign of BattleTech could wrap up in 6 games, and I wouldn’t be against playing a best of 5 in a game like Malifaux. However, if I’m going to be making multiple armies and moving them around the map, I’m in it for the long-haul. As a result, while it might be realistic to play “Germany” and just try to lose as slow as possible, I think most players find that boring. It’s also boring to be the player who’s so far ahead you know you’re going to win. Of course a campaign with a GM can find organic ways around this, but even building in some kind of an Underdog mechanic can really help keep everyone invested until the end.

5) Army Building often needs special restrictions to make unique units feel unique. I was playing a campaign of The Old World, and despite every effort to limit rare units, lords and monsters, the armies all ended up feeling so weird. Like, an army full of Big ‘Uns with no regular Orcs at all… Modern wargaming gives you such flexible list construction options that you can basically take anything you want. To me, this was always a bit anti-climactic, because at the operational level you’ll have like… 40 Tactical Marines, but 80 Terminators, 10 Dreadnoughts, etc. Bolt Action works great for this because bog-standard infantry are the core of the game and interact very well with the mechanics. Not to mention they’re actually good… I do think that campaigns benefit from having limited elite units in some capacity, so that they feel special and their presence is really noticed when they show up for a battle.

Either way, those are kind of my stream of consciousness thoughts on the subject. Sorry I didn’t really format or edit them, but maybe there’s some useful food for thought in there!