Forging the Narrative...#3

Greetings wargamers and hobbyists and welcome again to the War Room. We seem to be spending rather a lot of time in here lately...

Part three of my intermittent 'Forging the Narrative' series on Campaigns and my efforts to muddle through their planning and execution. This time around, I would like to talk about another element that needs to be clarified in order to allow your plans for war to progress. Two things I think you really need to know about are:

• The Factions that will be taking part

• The use of Alliances

Now I believe that these two points are important to get clear early on because they will impact the kind of games that will be played as part of the campaign, and the structure you will need to put in place to support them. Let's go into a little more detail about each of these areas:

Factions

A key point to work out before you can do, well, pretty much anything really as far as I am concerned, is to work out who will be taking part in your campaign, and what armies they intend to use. I find it is easier to formulate a plan and a backstory once this information is known, because otherwise you either have to come up with a very broad and generic plot idea, or you will end up having to shoe-horn armies into the plot in ways that you struggle to be convinced by yourself, let alone the players that have to play out the story.

So, question one - who is playing, and what armies are they using? If players have their own army fluff or character names worked out, this can be worked into the story, and saves you having to come up with this yourself. It also adds greatly to the players sense that their own army is developing organically and coming to life, developing it's own history based on games played rather than pure concoction.

Knowing how many players you have taking part and which armies will be represented also allows you to judge whether the armies can be allowed to operate individually, or whether you will need to group them into appropriate factions to make the narrative development and game planning more manageable.

It also gives you a chance to let the players know if the balance of armies is at all out of kilter, and let them decide if they want to rethink which army they intend to field. Heaven knows a campaign where 80% of the armies are Tau and the rest are Orks might be challenging to say the least.

I think this is one thing that caused me difficulties in the campaign I tried to run last year - for a narrative campaign there were too many individual armies roaming around and doing their own thing, and it got too complicated to organise and keep the plot straight. If it had been a straight forward map based campaign, this wouldn't have mattered so much because the plot matters less after the campaign begins, but there would have to have been a far broader supporting story, because in a map based campaign players pretty much move where they like rather than where the organiser wants them to.

 So, I advise you to try and get clear in advance how many players you have taking part and with which forces.

Alliances

So, you know who is playing, and what armies will be marching to war and causing havoc. So what happens if you have players that have smaller armies than the standard size for games in your group, perhaps because they are in the process of building up an army, or you want to play some bigger games for some scenarios? Well one option is to use 'Alliances' to even things up a bit.

Quite simply, you can allow two or more players to ally for larger games, which gives you options for playing special battles at key points in a campaign, gaming events in themselves which require a little more work to arrange perhaps due to the need for a larger table, more scenery, and of course more time to play the game out, but well worth it for the spectacle and the excitement. The back stories associated with many games systems are littered with tales of alliances, pacts, oath breaking and betrayals, and sometimes you can find inspiration for your own games in those stories.

There is also another practical benefit of using alliances which takes the use of factions a step further. It is always going to be far simpler to plan, drive and complete a campaign with two opposing alliances comprised of multiple armies and factions, than to try and run a campaign involving several autonamous armies, all with their own agendas. 

If you have many players wishing to take part, it may be a good option to consider creating two alliances and save potential headaches later on, like players inadvertantly being ganged up on, or one player running away with the campaign too early on and taking the fun out of it.

If you really want to play a campaign with lots of individual players and armies all going their own way, you might like to go with a structured map based campaign rather than one with a narrative you want to play out to the bitter end...

Next time, think I'll be getting into the part of the campaign planning that can be the most fun, but also give you the most problems to solve...the games!

Thanks for reading.

P.S. Here is a photo of the progress I have made on the Hasslefree models I was painting. I expect to have these completed within another hour or two. I think I'll try and black and white check pattern floor for the bases. 

Forging the Narrative...#2

Greetings wargamers and hobbyists, and welcome once more to the War Room for the second part of this sporadic emission, which serves as a vent for my musings on campaigning in the miniature wargaming hobby.

After considering in part one what a campaign needs to be like in order to garner and maintain interest from participating players, for part two I would like to consider some of the first practical decisions that have to be made when planning the campaign itself.

For me, a good campaign needs a strong theme or narrative (after all, 'Forging the Narrative' is the name of the game these days), and this means that there needs to be an engaging story running through the whole thing, like letters running through a stick of rock. The question is, do you want the campaign to follow a set plot path through from beginning to end, or do you create a back story that leads the participants to the threshold, and then let the story develop naturally as the armies battle it out and attempt to achieve whatever objectives they have been set?

Each of the possible routes is perfectly valid, but the decision you have to make is whether you want the story to play out as you envisaged, ensuring the climactic final confrontation you originally planned, or whether you are happy to let the participants play out the rest of the story naturally, come what may as far as the story is concerned.

The ways that each of these options could work out are numerous. For example, when letting the players dictate the outcome, in a map based campaign the story that develops will be driven by the actions of the armies on the map, and where they choose to move, expand their empires, and engage their enemies. You might be playing a campaign that, instead of a map, allows players to choose the scenario to play next, and who against, which gives them a good degree of control over match ups and how the plot develops.

If you want to take more of a hand in pushing the story in the direction you want, you might have a map campaign or a narrative campaign with a pre-determined route that the armies battle down on order to reach the destination at which they will face their final battle. An example of this might be the Storm of Chaos Campaign (ooo, my favourite!), that Games Workshop ran what seems like an age ago now, which was played in stages, each one bringing Archaon and his horde closer to their prize - Middenheim, the City of the White Wolf.

So, I guess that's the simple question: do you as the organiser want the players to play out the story you have decided on, ensuring that you can plan a suitable finale? Or do you allow the players to take a greater role in determining the direction that the story takes, and risk losing the strong theme among all the strategic moves, avoidance tactics and power play that can ensue?

The answer to this question comes with the answer to another question: What do your players want? Do they want to be told what is happening around them, where they are going and who they have to fight, or do they prefer more autonomy, and a greater feeling that their actions are having a wider impact on the campaign?

In our own Club Campaign - ably run by Nick, with just a little input from myself - the Warhammer 40,000 Campaign that we are playing through has a simple structure, with some embellishments to allow the players a sense of involvement, but ultimately is dictated by the choice of scenarios and supporting story that we have put in place, and I think that we have found a good balance. Above all, it is still relatively simple to play out, once all the planning is done and ready to rip. 

The campaign has been laid out in three stages and at each stage, each of the players (eight players divided into two teams) play a battle against an unknown opponent (players are allocated their scenarios by their ‘Supreme Commander’), with the final stage being a grand finale. In the final showdown, tactical bonuses are awarded to each side depending on which battles they won earlier in the campaign, making their lives easier or more difficult depending on how they got on.

The clarity of knowing that the campaign will be completed in just three gaming sessions is a great way to ensure participation, maintain interest, and assures players that there will be a satisfying conclusion without it dragging on for months. Petering out into nothingness is probably the biggest threat to any campaign, so I think that starting simply and clearly is best. Let more involved and complicated campaigns come with time and experience, as players and organisers get a more developed idea of what they want, what works and what doesn’t in their gaming group.

This is probably a nice place to stop, as the next thing I want to talk about is 'factions and alliances', which raises more questions about simplicity VS drama and plot.

Until next time, thanks for reading...

P.S. Still no real progress, but got the three mini's undercoated. Soon.

Forging The Narrative...#1

Greetings wargamers and hobbyists. To borrow a segment title from HeelanHammer, 'Zis is ze war room'...

Forging the narrative is a phrase we are hearing quite a bit these days, printed in magazines, frolicking online, and uttered by show hosts on various podcasts. Though this is a phrase which first saw the light of day in the Warhammer 40,000 6th Edition Rulebook, I think that the phrase has merit across any war game system. 

At the end of the day, wargames are not just a game with rules to be played and either won or lost, they are a story, and the playing of the game tells the story. By our decisions as commanders, be they sound or otherwise, we allow the story to unfold on the tabletop. Simple wins and losses become stupendous victories and crushing defeats. The game takes on a character and an aura that surpasses anything we might experience playing more light hearted games.

Recently I have been thinking more about campaigns, what they are, what they should be, what they could be, and how they can be successful. A fantastic campaign might be the holy grail of wargaming for many people, but it can also be a difficult thing to achieve. The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if you will. For myself, I think that the single most important consideration is how you can keep all the participants engaged and enthused, and if you can achieve this, it's probably because you've got enough of the other things on the money. The interest in the campaign is the measuring stick you use to determine how well you are running the campaign. That's not to say that what you're doing isn't good, just that it's not pushing the buttons of enough of the players. What one player might think is amazing, others might not.

The purpose of all this pondering and postulation is to analyse my own ability to run a successful campaign, and what ideas I can come up with to support it and make it interesting, because my favourite kind of campaign is one with a strong story to back it up (rather than one that just pushes pieces around a map and adds up area control points), a campaign that epitomises ‘Forging the Narrative’.  

Any of you who have been able to put up with me for a while may remember a couple of posts about the Eye of Morrslieb narrative campaign I started a few months ago at my local group. It's fair to say that this was not the great success I envisaged, though at the same time few events at our club remain flavour of the month for more than, well, about a month, without significant effort. I think the idea and the story were sound, I just couldn't make them work in practice, especially not with eight players.

'Bitten off more than you can chew' might be an apt phrase. I am wondering whether any future events should be based around a small but dedicated core of players, with in-built capacity to allow additional players to join and leave for one off games as they please...

This is the first of what will undoubtedly become a reoccurring topic on the Eternal Wargamer, and for now I just want to talk a little about what I have noted as potentially the most important aspects of creating and running a campaign. This is as much a journey of discovery for me as it is any kind of advice for others wishing to tread the path. Learn from my mistakes I guess. It won't just be a description of a practical system for running the campaign, because there are plenty of those out there that don't need explanation from me. I will however be referring to the foundation that I intend to use, which is one of the systems found in The General's Compendium. What I will try to talk about, the shadows I want to pin to the floor, are the additional elements that not only allow you to run a campaign, but to keep things flowing and keep people interested.

So, this post will just be my initial thoughts on what I think at this stage are the most important things to consider (to save it turning into a multi-page wall o' text):

The Focus:

To provide a setting and premise for a campaign that players actually want to be part of, because it is engaging, exciting and is challenging for all the participants.

Potential Pit Falls:

• Players getting bored and losing interest.

• A minority of players being too successful and making the campaign one sided and as a result, taking the fun out of taking part for other players and sapping their desire to continue.

• The campaign becoming too rigid or too random, so that the players feel that the impact their battles have is too small.

• The campaign becoming too complicated and difficult to track, making communicating what is happening to the participants.

• Losing the main plot driver for the campaign amongst trying to placate all participants and trying to please everybody. A strong story should engage the players without the need to keep changing the plan to accommodate their suggestions if this dilutes the focus too much.

Like I said, these are the things I will be thinking about over the next week or so, before laying the basic structure of a campaign and checking that the foundation is sound by bouncing it off a couple of the players at the club (and you guys of course - any feedback is welcome).

Let me know what your thoughts are. Are there any other key things you think I (or anyone else) should look out for when planning a campaign?

Until next time, thanks for reading...