Precinct Omega
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Infinite Dark Design Blog #7 - Campaigns
🕑 Added 2021-05-19 08:00:03 +0000 UTCCampaign play is one of those things that every wargamer says they want but only a tiny number ever actually use, and I’ve always thought that was a huge shame. But having run wargaming clubs and organized events for both tournament and narrative play in the past, I understand both where the desire for campaign play comes from and why it so often fails to live up to its hype.
We all love a good story. It’s practically part of what makes us human. And a campaign is a chance to not just read a good story but to vicariously live our way through one - just like a “campaign mode” in a digital game like Skyrim or Titanfall 2. And when we think about tabletop miniatures games, a campaign is chance for epic battles, heroic failures, last-minute victories and even-more-last-minute-defeats. Who wouldn’t want to get involved in something like that?
But campaigns also require a huge commitment of time and effort. You have to coordinate with all the participants. You may have to change your army from session to session. You’ll have inter-game administration to go, tracking losses and new recruits or upgraded equipment etc. Generally, the more detail a campaign has, the better the story it tells but the more difficult it becomes to coordinate. A campaign told between two people is tricky enough to organize. But each new person you add substantially increases the complexity of coordination.
Horizon Wars: Infinite Dark gets around this problem by linking the campaign mode explicitly to the solo game. Like a digital FPS game, there’s really no way to “lose” a campaign. You just play through missions, earn XP and see where you’re at when you stop playing. Future supplements will add much more narrative to the campaign experience, with scaling enemies and grand, decisive final boss battles. But the core of it is just you, your ships and the Red Fleet.
But you don’t have to play campaigns alone. You can absolutely play the solo game as a co-operative one, with each player controlling a number of vessels and each turn discussing and agreeing who will activate next. If a player then can’t make it to a session, you can either leave out their vessels or, if it’s convenient, allocate them among the players who do turn up. Some players may end up with more experienced pilots along the way, but because you’re playing as a co-operative group, there’s nothing really to be lost.
All that said, you can, of course, apply the rules for experience and campaign play to the Versus game as well. There is literally nothing stopping you. And in a two-player campaign, playing through the missions in the book in order, that would likely be a lot of fun. But the rulebook itself doesn’t provide you with the tools to organize a multi-player Versus campaign for all the reasons I explain above and, right now, there are no explicit plans for a supplement that will do so. If there’s enough demand, I won’t say I’d never do it. But I feel it’s something best designed by players for the people around them.
I’ve talked a lot in this blog post about the solo game, of course, but we’ve not really touched upon what that looks like, so, next week - which will be the first blog post after the rules are released*, if all goes to plan! - we’ll talk about the solo game.
*For the purposes of my public blog.
Comments
Precinct Omega
Tournament play is an entirely different beast to campaign play, imo. It's incredibly hard to sustain a narrative in a tournament setting. Not impossible, I hasten to add, but it really only works with the right game and every participant coming in with the right attitude.
Paul Holden
Also worth considering a "Swiss" format where winners play winners. Then everyone should be getting competitive games. NFL do just this when scheduling the cross division games - you play everyone in your division (twice) but you also play a number of games outside your division - and in those games you have to play better teams the better you did in the previous season. I wouldn't just go Swiss for a league but I might add an element of that along with playing round robin...
Precinct Omega
Necromunda pretty much does this. But, if anything, I'd push to the opposite. If you want to keep things so that no one side can have a runaway victory, then both sides should be equally rewards, victory or defeat. Possibly defeat might even be more advantageous in the next battle (although victory might be more advantageous in the longer run).
Andre Strauss
Well said, Robey. The typical problem with multiplayer campaign games are what I found after playing two "championships" of Blood Bowl: the early winners will most likely win more, the early losers will most likely loose more. Handicap methods are usually not enough for "balancing" the teams after a start. Thinking too much about it, I came up with an idea that never took off. Let's assume a game that have a measure of win/lose like victory points. One team won with 4VP. The other ended the match with 1VP. The team that won would receive 4 "Prestige Points" and 1 "Experience Point". The team that lost the match would receive 4 "Experience Points" and 1 "Prestige Point". Prestige points can be used to get better equipment for your team and/or new characters. Experience points can be used to get more skills for the existing characters of the team. Equipment and characters can be lost during conflicts, but if the game allows for easier character "recovery", than equipment recovery, it would make a small catch-up mechanism. Assuming the game has a good balance of skills and equipment, I think that should work out a little better than the typical: I won, I get everything, you lost you got nothing.
