Wargaming – On Campaigns – Part 1
A series on playing and designing that most elusive and entertaining of goals, the well balanced, fun and successfully completed campaign.
For me the biggest appeal of the wargaming hobby is the ability to tell a story; an armies last stand before an all destroying horde, a monster absorbing all punishment thrown its way yet refuses to die or the single hero who goes on a one man(or alien) rampage only to be stopped by the unlikeliest of things. From these stories certain models in the army will take on a character and it make the army in general feel all the more personal as you are there to witness the tales unfold. Most importantly I think its the stories in a game which make them all the more special and more likely to be recalled years down the road as old war stories to bore someone to death with.
Now while every game (the finals of a tournament to the weekly game at local club) will tell a story to some degree, for me the best stories are ones which will span a whole range of games…in other words a campaign. A string of games which pit one fraction up against another in ceaseless war. Yet wherever I go I hardly hear a mention of campaigns in the world. The internet is full of people sharing tournament tactics and boasting/hypothesising about a killer list but relatively few will mention campaign ideas.
A few months back I took part in a tournament held in my local area and after the games I asked around what campaigns people had taken part in recently. Horrifyingly the majority of responses was a Games Workshop based one which they used to run over the summer years ago. Yet many of them followed up by saying they would like to play a campaign if one was presented to them. With that I decided to embark on a crusade to encourage people into getting together and coming up with campaigns to play.
Now well designed campaigns are few and far between. Like a fine meal, each demands just the right mixture of creativity, plot, game balance, and flexibility to deal with the realities of interacting with groups of players. You can find dozens of campaigns out there that are overly complex, to small, large or inflexible to make all the way through to completion, leaving a bitter taste in their participant’s mouths. Yet all is not lost, for the well run and completed campaign will leave lasting memories that linger for years.
To undertake this crusade I plan on writing a couple of articles each highlighting a different aspects of organising a campaign which I have learnt (often the hard way) from running multiple campaigns over my years of gaming. I will look at 4 types of campaign structures that can be played and how to get the best out of them. So look around at your local club’s miniatures collections, grab a pen and paper, and start dreaming up some exciting stories that will add that little something extra to your regular games.
Next installment: campaign types.
So who here has played in a campaign? What was it and did you get more or less out of it them your everyday pickup games, or the tournament scene? Finally what is your favorite campaign size (number of players) and type (map based, linear, win-loss mission tree, etc)
