Within the last few hours (as I write this at least), I finished GMing my first campaign. Now I'm going to tell you about it.
Don't worry, I don't plan on boring you with the minutia of who won what, which side beat who by how much. Well, I may drop a couple of hints. What I actually want to do is tell you some of the little things I wrote into the campaign to make it a little different from others I have seen, read about and especially participated in. I'll also tell you a few of the things I've noticed about campaigns that have failed (including things I did very wrong in this one) and how I would do them differently.
So what is the main weakness I have seen with campaigns in the past? They drag on and on. And on. And on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on...
Now, I'm not saying that all campaigns short be limited to a handful of games or played over a weekend. Far from it, especially if your gaming group can only get together once a week. You do need a clear goal to work towards, however. A lot of the in-store campaigns I have seen had to be quite long to give people a fair chance of getting in to the store to take part. The problem there being that, if each campaign turn/season/other-random-nomenclature-from-the-mind-of-the-campaign-writer lasts a month, and you are playing over half a year, people drift off. New releases, tournaments, other game systems... slowly but surely players start to lose interest, miss games, fail to place new flags. I've found that this is especially true if the campaign is open-ended and will go on until one side controls X% of the map.
So how do you fix that? Quite simply, have a fixed goal or a finish point. Now the time frame will depend on your particular gaming group. Some will be able to play for months on end, really building the stories of their forces. Most won't though. For The Gaios Incident, the campaign I have just finished, I had planned six weeks, with one turn each week. Unfortunately, due to illness that got stretched to seven weeks. A few of my players were dropping out almost immediately. One guy didn't turn up ever, and another didn't turn up until the fifth week. The vast majority did manage to make it for the first three weeks. A few missed the odd day due to illness and the like, which is fully understandable. By the end of the first month, players were just not turning up, missing games or otherwise dropping out permanently. With hindsight, logic would tell us that one month is about the right length of time for our campaigns. What else did I do to encourage players to keep going? Naturally, we had a big finale.
Apocalypse is a great way to finish a campaign. People get to play with all the toys they didn't get chance to previously. Grudges that bubbled up through out the campaign get fought out on the table top and scores settled between those character models that always seemed to be facing off in the smaller games. Now, I wouldn't just play a standard mission (and didn't!) or let players have complete free reign on bringing their entire collections. For me, I let the campaign inform the size of the forces they could bring, with a certain number of points for each territory they held at the end of the campaign and additional points for holding certain objectives at the end of each turn. I also had secret objectives for each side, but I'll get in to that later. I also fed a lot of the fluff from the campaign into the mission I wrote. To keep things interesting for the players who hadn't done so well I had a limit on the amount of Super Heavy vehicles and Gargantuan Creatures. As it turns out, I was a little too stringent which resulted in nothing bigger than Angron as a Monstrous Creature in a unit of Bloodthirsters.
My final decision to keep the finale interesting was a simple one; winning the Apocalypse game would not automatically win the campaign. The easiest way to manage that was for everyone to lose the Apocalypse game. The background for The Gaios Incident was that a rogue Inquisitor was looking to sacrifice an entire system in an attempt to ascend to Daemonhood. This gave me a perfect excuse to blow up planets, including the one the final battle was taking place on. To give the players some control, I placed an objective in the centre of the table; controlling it at the end of each player turn allowed them to potentially destroy a world based on the result of a dice roll added to the turn number. They could choose not to activate the planet killing device, if they felt that a planet with had a lot of the territories they controlled was likely to be destroyed. This simple mechanic linked the Apocalypse game back to the campaign, with the number of territories held after the game deciding the overall winner. After the first two turns, this still meant that any of the three factions could still win. In fact, the outcome of the campaign came down to the last handful of dice rolls. This kept the player interested and excited right up to the very end.
The end result was pretty horrific, as you can see in the above picture! Cocien was mostly held by the Imperial side, though it was actually held by Orks being manipulated by an Inquisitor. Nyveth was almost entirely controlled by Harlequins.
Another thing I have seen that campaigns fail because of is complexity. Most GMs seem to have grand ideas about characters that evolve, or getting different resources for every different area of the map. That can be great if you have experienced campaign players, but more often than not it means loads of rolling on tables after games and record keeping. If you have players who are really up for that and don't mind not finishing their games until 20 minutes after they finish playing games, that's fine. From what I have seen though, it can be difficult enough just to get players to remember to place flags, let alone roll to see what happened to each of their units. On top of that, you will always get at least one player at some point who needs to run off quickly after their game finishes, promising they will remember what dice rolls they needed to make. That is either going to result in them forgetting and messing up later on or, if you have particularly unscrupulous friends, they will turn up to the next session having rolled another time, luckily managing to get the rolls that were most advantageous for them.
My advice, if you want to play like that, would be to break out Necromunda. That game is an absolute blast and covers all the bases in terms of gaining experience in a nicely balanced way. For 40k, limit the options and/or units that can gain experience. Perhaps allow players to create a character to lead their armies; start off with a single HQ choice from their codex that isn't a special character, pay the points for their options as normal, and then allow just that model to gain experience. They could get USRs that can affect the whole army or just allow them to change their own stat-lines etc. With clever writing, that keeps the paper work and additional rolls to a minimum whilst retaining a flavour of the improvement and growth that a lot of GMs want to include. Don't let them become unstoppable juggernauts though. You need to have a penalty for them doing badly, just as you give them boons for doing well. I'm not saying that the second the model is removed as a casualty that they must be dead. No one would bother if that was the case. Make them lose special rules or let their stats decrease. Hell, if they roll well when the character was killed in a game, let them hate the model/unit/character that killed them, potentially making the Character better! If you do include Death as a possibility, enforce it. Don't let your players bully you into letting their characters survive the first round or two, simply ignoring the Death roll. It will only make it worse when one of the characters does eventually die. Instead, let them start again with a new character. They could even be armed exactly the same as the recently deceased started as, though that doesn't sound nearly as fun as letting an underling step up to take command.
Actually, that leads into quite a nice piece of advice for running campaigns in general; don't let your players be in control. More often than is right, I have seen campaigns fail because one or two players insisted they be allowed to use their 'fluffy' army which may well have fitted in to the background of the campaign, but was grossly unbalanced, or allowing them to attack a player they couldn't reach because they wouldn't get a game otherwise, resulting in having a second base of operations to spread out from. Now, those might be quite extreme examples, but you need to be firm and consistent with your decisions. Don't go on a power trip and start banning units you don't like or trying to steer the outcomes of games towards your own personal desired goal (especially if you are taking part as a player as well as a GM!), but equally don't bend to your players whims every time. In theory, if you have written rules for who can play who and when, you did so for a reason. Take on board comments for a future campaign (I have a word file where I have gathered mine as rough notes to implement next time round) but make sure you have last say. Part of this also comes down to writing your rules pack as clearly as possible, so get some people who understand 40k to read through it before you start to help weed out any ambiguities so they can't be wilfully misinterpreted, but the rest comes down to you. For my campaign, I held to a policy that my decision was final and continuing to argue with me would result in losing territories, which bled into me removing models in the final apocalypse game to deal with arguments caused by the issues surrounding the differences in rules between rules written for 4th ed being used in 6th ed.
Don't worry, I don't plan on boring you with the minutia of who won what, which side beat who by how much. Well, I may drop a couple of hints. What I actually want to do is tell you some of the little things I wrote into the campaign to make it a little different from others I have seen, read about and especially participated in. I'll also tell you a few of the things I've noticed about campaigns that have failed (including things I did very wrong in this one) and how I would do them differently.
So what is the main weakness I have seen with campaigns in the past? They drag on and on. And on. And on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on...
Now, I'm not saying that all campaigns short be limited to a handful of games or played over a weekend. Far from it, especially if your gaming group can only get together once a week. You do need a clear goal to work towards, however. A lot of the in-store campaigns I have seen had to be quite long to give people a fair chance of getting in to the store to take part. The problem there being that, if each campaign turn/season/other-random-nomenclature-from-the-mind-of-the-campaign-writer lasts a month, and you are playing over half a year, people drift off. New releases, tournaments, other game systems... slowly but surely players start to lose interest, miss games, fail to place new flags. I've found that this is especially true if the campaign is open-ended and will go on until one side controls X% of the map.
So how do you fix that? Quite simply, have a fixed goal or a finish point. Now the time frame will depend on your particular gaming group. Some will be able to play for months on end, really building the stories of their forces. Most won't though. For The Gaios Incident, the campaign I have just finished, I had planned six weeks, with one turn each week. Unfortunately, due to illness that got stretched to seven weeks. A few of my players were dropping out almost immediately. One guy didn't turn up ever, and another didn't turn up until the fifth week. The vast majority did manage to make it for the first three weeks. A few missed the odd day due to illness and the like, which is fully understandable. By the end of the first month, players were just not turning up, missing games or otherwise dropping out permanently. With hindsight, logic would tell us that one month is about the right length of time for our campaigns. What else did I do to encourage players to keep going? Naturally, we had a big finale.
Apocalypse is a great way to finish a campaign. People get to play with all the toys they didn't get chance to previously. Grudges that bubbled up through out the campaign get fought out on the table top and scores settled between those character models that always seemed to be facing off in the smaller games. Now, I wouldn't just play a standard mission (and didn't!) or let players have complete free reign on bringing their entire collections. For me, I let the campaign inform the size of the forces they could bring, with a certain number of points for each territory they held at the end of the campaign and additional points for holding certain objectives at the end of each turn. I also had secret objectives for each side, but I'll get in to that later. I also fed a lot of the fluff from the campaign into the mission I wrote. To keep things interesting for the players who hadn't done so well I had a limit on the amount of Super Heavy vehicles and Gargantuan Creatures. As it turns out, I was a little too stringent which resulted in nothing bigger than Angron as a Monstrous Creature in a unit of Bloodthirsters.
My final decision to keep the finale interesting was a simple one; winning the Apocalypse game would not automatically win the campaign. The easiest way to manage that was for everyone to lose the Apocalypse game. The background for The Gaios Incident was that a rogue Inquisitor was looking to sacrifice an entire system in an attempt to ascend to Daemonhood. This gave me a perfect excuse to blow up planets, including the one the final battle was taking place on. To give the players some control, I placed an objective in the centre of the table; controlling it at the end of each player turn allowed them to potentially destroy a world based on the result of a dice roll added to the turn number. They could choose not to activate the planet killing device, if they felt that a planet with had a lot of the territories they controlled was likely to be destroyed. This simple mechanic linked the Apocalypse game back to the campaign, with the number of territories held after the game deciding the overall winner. After the first two turns, this still meant that any of the three factions could still win. In fact, the outcome of the campaign came down to the last handful of dice rolls. This kept the player interested and excited right up to the very end.
The end result was pretty horrific, as you can see in the above picture! Cocien was mostly held by the Imperial side, though it was actually held by Orks being manipulated by an Inquisitor. Nyveth was almost entirely controlled by Harlequins.
Another thing I have seen that campaigns fail because of is complexity. Most GMs seem to have grand ideas about characters that evolve, or getting different resources for every different area of the map. That can be great if you have experienced campaign players, but more often than not it means loads of rolling on tables after games and record keeping. If you have players who are really up for that and don't mind not finishing their games until 20 minutes after they finish playing games, that's fine. From what I have seen though, it can be difficult enough just to get players to remember to place flags, let alone roll to see what happened to each of their units. On top of that, you will always get at least one player at some point who needs to run off quickly after their game finishes, promising they will remember what dice rolls they needed to make. That is either going to result in them forgetting and messing up later on or, if you have particularly unscrupulous friends, they will turn up to the next session having rolled another time, luckily managing to get the rolls that were most advantageous for them.
My advice, if you want to play like that, would be to break out Necromunda. That game is an absolute blast and covers all the bases in terms of gaining experience in a nicely balanced way. For 40k, limit the options and/or units that can gain experience. Perhaps allow players to create a character to lead their armies; start off with a single HQ choice from their codex that isn't a special character, pay the points for their options as normal, and then allow just that model to gain experience. They could get USRs that can affect the whole army or just allow them to change their own stat-lines etc. With clever writing, that keeps the paper work and additional rolls to a minimum whilst retaining a flavour of the improvement and growth that a lot of GMs want to include. Don't let them become unstoppable juggernauts though. You need to have a penalty for them doing badly, just as you give them boons for doing well. I'm not saying that the second the model is removed as a casualty that they must be dead. No one would bother if that was the case. Make them lose special rules or let their stats decrease. Hell, if they roll well when the character was killed in a game, let them hate the model/unit/character that killed them, potentially making the Character better! If you do include Death as a possibility, enforce it. Don't let your players bully you into letting their characters survive the first round or two, simply ignoring the Death roll. It will only make it worse when one of the characters does eventually die. Instead, let them start again with a new character. They could even be armed exactly the same as the recently deceased started as, though that doesn't sound nearly as fun as letting an underling step up to take command.
Actually, that leads into quite a nice piece of advice for running campaigns in general; don't let your players be in control. More often than is right, I have seen campaigns fail because one or two players insisted they be allowed to use their 'fluffy' army which may well have fitted in to the background of the campaign, but was grossly unbalanced, or allowing them to attack a player they couldn't reach because they wouldn't get a game otherwise, resulting in having a second base of operations to spread out from. Now, those might be quite extreme examples, but you need to be firm and consistent with your decisions. Don't go on a power trip and start banning units you don't like or trying to steer the outcomes of games towards your own personal desired goal (especially if you are taking part as a player as well as a GM!), but equally don't bend to your players whims every time. In theory, if you have written rules for who can play who and when, you did so for a reason. Take on board comments for a future campaign (I have a word file where I have gathered mine as rough notes to implement next time round) but make sure you have last say. Part of this also comes down to writing your rules pack as clearly as possible, so get some people who understand 40k to read through it before you start to help weed out any ambiguities so they can't be wilfully misinterpreted, but the rest comes down to you. For my campaign, I held to a policy that my decision was final and continuing to argue with me would result in losing territories, which bled into me removing models in the final apocalypse game to deal with arguments caused by the issues surrounding the differences in rules between rules written for 4th ed being used in 6th ed.
I will undoubtedly think of other things in the future. For now, I'll leave it there and bid you all a fond fare well. Do you have any experiences of campaigns, good or bad? Share them in the comments below. Disagree with something I have said? Let me know and I may just defend my point of view or rethink it. Either way, I hope you'll be back soon. Until then, happy campaigning,
Matt
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