Welcome Bad Decisioners to Campaign Corner. It is I, Ian your herald to everything bad and team captain of team Bad Decisions. This post will be involving the key decision points in making a good campaign. Just some background about my experience, I have run several campaigns, tournaments, and events. Some hugely successful and some less so. Let's talk about 40k campaigns and how to make them successful.
#1: Know your audience.
Campaigns can be great but they can easily get off track if your audience is not into the campaign. If you are in a small close knit group of gamers who play regularly with each other then a campaign will be easy and fun. If you are a regular at a game store and want to put a campaign together then it will take a lot of forethought because it will be impossible to know how many players will show up and what army they will bring. If you don't plan then you plan to fail.
#2 Which campaign to run Stage vs Map
What is a map based campaign? Normally a map based campaign is either team driven or player driven. Normally teams/players have a starting location and gain territory around them. There are normally special zones that grant small bonuses to the controlling player. They are normally long and very intricate.
Nothing is cooler than seeing a map and watching the progress of campaigns and how they affect a world/city. To witness a player swear a blood debt to another player who kicked him off an important tile/map space is funny to see and funnier to think about. That said map based campaigns will often lead to abandonment. It is normal for a losing player or team to concede when it appears all is lost or impossible to come back based on time. Every map based campaign I have ever run ended early and normally not in a good way. Once again see #1 if you have a small group of friends that are consistent you won't have any issues with a map based campaign but if you are doing this at your FLGS be prepared for people to drop or not show up for their games.
What is a stage based campaign? You have two sides good vs evil. A stage is X number of weeks at the end of the weeks add up who wins and move on to the next phase. It is easy does not require a lot of work to perform. It normally ends with a final event but it does not have to.
Stage campaigns are easy. Have everyone play track the results and declare who wins at the end of each phase. The results are not visible to players so it is harder for players to get discouraged. Bonus 5 points because you don't have to make sure players get games in because it is amazingly casual.
#3 Army/unit/model bonuses / neagtives
Whoever is winning a campaign should get some kind of bonus right? After all, if someone is meeting all their objectives you would think that it would either help or hinder their enemy in some way. Always keep in mind bonuses should be small and are meant to be minor. -1 to reserves, adding +1 to your reserves, reroll warlord trait, giving a unit the ability to deep strike or infiltrate. Relatively small sure someone could try and abuse deep strike or infiltrate just remember to not be a dick. These are little plastic sometimes metal and resin men.
What can be fun is making your own campaign mission where games played and won are tallied together and at the end of the phase a bonus is given out to the winner.
#4 Experience
Another unique thing I tried was evolving units or create your own special character. The imagery of units becoming veterans after a war or conflict feeds my fluffy bunny. What I quickly realized adding up experience at the end of each game ended up being a huge pain in the butt. Having players track it ended up being a confusing and often unfair.
I did have moderate success with a create your own special character campaign. I would make everyone model their very own special character. You give your special character wargear and his own warlord trait from his respected book. Sometimes there will be an exception of no unique wargear because you would give out unique wargear over the course of the campaign. At the end of a phase or a certain point in a map based campaign everyone gains a stat bonus to their HQ. After a certain point, the HQ could trade in his stat bonus for a random special ability which would be much better than a small stat boost. For notoriously bad HQ the bonuses would be much better in attempts to make it more even. The idea is if everyone gains a bonus at the same time then points would be relatively close enough together you would not have to worry about a great divide in points costs. There would be exceptions to bad HQ choices and how they would not see a noticable difference until they gain their first ability but tt ended up being fun and pretty fair.
#5 Ending
It is important to figure out an ending to your campaign. Informing players when a campaign is over is in the best interest of everyone so players don't get campaign fatigue. Campaign fatigue: A player who plays a lot of games in a campaign with no end in sight will eventually stop playing or quit. How to end a campaign is very important, most players will remember how good a campaign is based on the end not the beginning. I have seen a tournament run ending, mega battle, and my favorite an end game event.
Tournament style: Have a small entry fee for prize support if your gaming group has young bloods then also encourage unopened box donations from the vets to the young bloods. Have a tournament like ending with each match up being good vs evil or whatever makes sense.
Mega battle: The most exhausting but coolest picture worthy choice. Mega battles are long and by turn 3 most players want to quit and go home. This option is for dedicated players only.
End game event: This can be whatever you want, anything from a bunch of scenarios to a kind of narrative style game. One of my favorite ways to run this event has a large game 2v2 1500 per player. Then have side games 2-4 tables with objectives each playing at various point levels. The large table has a time limit of X number of hours generally you want it to be 5-6 hours enough for the rest of the players to get 2 or more games in. The side tables have special objectives that affect the main table allowing the main table to bring on units that were destroyed or adding an ordinance shot or anything else you can think of. Note I would shy away from adding units from the side tables just because you don't want the other players to get upset at the fact they are not controlling the models or making saves for their models, it's best just to allow only brief interruptions from the side tables.
At the end of any campaign, the most important thing to keep in mind is making sure everyone has fun and that the games move smoothly. Prize support should be small if there is any and make sure to have door prizes if you are doing prizes. A cheap alternative to prizes is to have special custom dice for the event and give 1 die to every participant at the end. I find small door prizes or small prizes for everyone puts your players in a good mood vs an all or nothing prize support system.
If you have any questions post them in the comments I am more than happy to reply or provide some of my older campaigns I have run.
Now go out there and make some Bad Decisions!
