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Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
dafrca
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:23 am 
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Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns

Just curious, how many have played in a large campaign? Maybe used a space combat game to invade a planet and a ground set of rules to play out the ground action. Or had a world map and played games to take areas of the map?

What extra rules did you find you needed?

Did you all start with the same levels?

Did someone ?run? the campaign other then the players?

What did you do right?

What would you do different?

Any other thoughts?

dafrca

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dafrca
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:23 am 
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By the way, this does not have to be Epic or even GW rules related. :cool:

dafrca

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The_Real_Chris
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 3:59 am 
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Yes. But it was years ago :)
(Note I'm not counting mighty empires mini campaigns plus key battles).
Twas when gothic came out. Went well for a while (ratio of battles was 3 or 4 space to 1 ground) but ended with the deaths of half a dozen world that kept resisting the attackers (of both sides). Gamers it seems without rules quickly press the big red button to ensure absolute victory or defeat (in marked contrast to space battles where people kept the ships alive meaning only a few cap ships died in over 2 dozen games).

Everyone started relatively equally on 2 sides.

Based on all that the main changes I'd make is
To chuck out most of the rules and simplify logistics massively, then use the GM to tell a player whats going on and give them a range of options.
Have a higher level of command that doesn't get involved but is a presence (to try and stop the kill the worlds event, 40k wise its the distance High Lord, for Chaos the scaring off of demons if you wipe out worlds or something).

Oh and I've played in and run 'Dune'. You are a great house, everyone has unequal starting positions and you must generate your own objectives. Very simple system of generating cash and maintaining troops, gm's fiat as to what happens in a battle. Tremendous fun.
Most important lesson is to limit orders to font 12, 1 A4 side. We recieved 3-4000 word essays ever turn from some players. I can get my co GM rob to email you all the stuff we wrote!

I bought last year vbam THe Website a dead cheap pdf book. Looks good, but after dune I have to pluck up courage to run anything again!

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Cuban Commissar
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 4:26 am 
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Back in the day I ran a massive Full Thrust campaign. ?Well that is to say I started one. ?

I made this space sector map using a hex map. ?I gave each side certain number of planets. ?Each planet gave resource that would be used to build additional forces. ?The campaign was to be combined with dirt side II to produce the ground battles. ?

The campaign movements would be blind while I kept track of all the fleet formations. ?

I made cool rules such as listening post thta would detect nearby fleet approaching in hyperspace. ?

Well anyway I give each side, abut 5 players each, a huge amount of points to build their initial fleets. ?

It was my intention that these fleets would be divided into task forces and spread over the map. ?

This was my first lesson of being a game master...The players intentionally or unitentionally will always find a way to mess with your "grand vision."

Oh no...these guys studing up on their military history took two thirds of their respective fleets and went after each other in one grand mega battle. ?

The fleets themselves were rather polar opposites. ?Each side had an overall Admiral. ?In one case the admiral took the resource points he had and split them among his sector fleets. ?It was funny to see. ?

Each Vice Admiral , and the Grand Admiral himself, custom built 5 massive Space Dreadnoughts, 100 hull. ?These shipos were like Ork warships each field with a variety of weaqpons and equipment. ?Each "Sub Fleet" was a weird collection of cruisers, destroyers, gunboats, and carriers. ?No ship or task force was the same. ?It was the greatest gypsy fleet I had ever seen or seen sense in a space combat game. ?They wopuld have made a Ork fleet look organized. ?Some Vice Admirals went with all big ships. ?Some had tons of smaller destroyers. ?Each one had their "Admiral" ship. ?Oh brother.

Now the other fleet was radically different. ?They had 5 basic designs. ?

Battleship - fight other big ships. ?Lots of A Batteries with shields. ?
Carrier - Nothing but fighter Squadrons
Cruiser - Fast with Big guns
Destoyer - Little with big guns
Escort - Nothing but C batteries to protect the other ships from fighters and missiles. ?The other ships were weak in anti-fighter defense. The Big battery ships depended on the carriers and the escorts to protect them. ?

It was a well organized fleets were the ships had to work togethor. ?

So we set all this up and the first few turns happen. ?The Gypsy fleet decideds to mass 4 of their Task forces togethor to attack the first enemy planet. ?Very agressive group this was. ?

Unfortuately they triggered the whole listening post system which was actually placed in a line ahead of this one planet. ?Each of the four Task forces set off a seperate listening post. ?When you drew all the lines out they pointed toward one planet they were attacking. ?

I couldn't contain my laughter seeing this play out as I recieved the orders. ?

The other fleet gathered 4 of his task forces and moved toward the endangered planet.

So this set the stage for the largest game of full thrust I have ever run. Considering there were over 100 ships per side I had to to something. ?

I wrote some quick rules for Task force movement. ?I printed off hundreds of transperant hex maps using overhead projector sildes. ?I stappled these to a wall in the local game club room. ?The map was Ten feet tall by 20 feet wide. ?We made little counters for each ship or squadron and glued them to push pins. ?

The next part was rear smart. ?I forced the players to sit at two opposing tables. ?They would keep track their fleets stats sheets and write out orders in a fleet order log. ?I made this huge fleet order sheet which they passed on to two helpers I had. ?The helpers would moved the counters and call out range. ?The players would roll all their dice at the table. ?I was pretty strict to keep the game moving. ?

It looked realy cool as it appeared to be a war room like the little battle room in Stars Wars or a CIC in a big ship as my hekoers moved counters to received the results of the turns movement orders.  

The battle was epic. ?But we quickly discovered that the "streamlined" fleet was superior to the hodgepodge fleet. ?They dominated the fighter battle, their Battleships while smaller than the "super dreadnoughts" were faster and able to mass against the enemy fleet. ?The Cruisers and destroyers stripped away all the escorting ships. ?The one threat the gyspy fleet did have was a swarm, and I mean swarm of of tiny missile boats. ?Little ships with one shot submunition packs. ?They did some damage but the escorts with C battereries were knocking them down in waves. ?There were just so many that it took a while before they were dealt with. ?

In the end the victory was very decisive, almost all the gypsy fleet was destroyed and the "streamlined" fleet had suffered minor damage. ?The battle was so one sided that I had to call off the whole campaign because the strategic sutuation had changed so radically. ?

We never did get to Dirt Side II... :(

Still I remember to effort foundly if with a little respect for the power of human chaos. ?:D

I think a series of linked battles is the best style of campaign. ?Where each battle is balanced and fun for both sides, but with each battle help deciding the outcome. ?

I would keep it short duration or a fixed number of battles.

I would not let players build there own forces, but assign forces to them ?

Campiagn Ideas

Here is a very good view of a campaign systems by a freind of mine. ?

Sorry for the long post. ?But I hope it helps

Made I was typing so fast I wonder if it will make any sense
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dafrca
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 6:56 am 
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Quote (Cuban Commissar @ 02 May 2006 (20:26))
Sorry for the long post. ?But I hope it helps

Made I was typing so fast I wonder if it will make any sense

Don't be sorry, it was great. It is the kind of stories and info I was thinking of when I wrote the questions.

Oh and yes, your post mades sense.  :D

dafrca

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Mojarn Piett
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 8:05 am 
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Quote (The_Real_Chris @ 03 May 2006 (03:59))
Oh and I've played in and run 'Dune'. You are a great house, everyone has unequal starting positions and you must generate your own objectives. Very simple system of generating cash and maintaining troops, gm's fiat as to what happens in a battle. Tremendous fun.

Who makes this game? Do they have a website?

EDIT: Oh, and unfortunately I have not played a campaign. Ever.  :(  I dabbled in writing campaign rules once but, as usual,  they turned out far too complex and bloated with resource management, satellite reconnaissance, production, battle effects etc. In the end my head hurt.

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wargame_insomniac
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 2:02 pm 
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Hi CC- great post- loved your idea of 2 separate tables and markers for each fleet. That took a lot of work and organisation on your part.

Not played an Epic camppaign but my local gaming group did do a Mechwarrior campaign a while back. We used the map of Risk 2210 and kept track of armies. I played Republic of the Sphere and quickly took over South America.

I was all set to attack the US from below. Then the Bansons Raiders player in southern US decided that he really wanted to play Republic of the Sphere too (and to be fair to him he stuck with them as his main faction since) and managed to persuade me into a non-agression pact.

That suited me fine as I was busy trying to take the south Paciific from the Steel Wolves and North Africa from the Swordsworn. For several campaign turns in a row we had massed battles where we wore each other done but could never progress beyoind stalemate. Then the campaign petered out as a couple of players stopped playing Mechwarrior. So my plans for world domination were foiled!!

Cheers

James

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Cuban Commissar
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 5:16 pm 
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Keeping players intrested in the long haul and avoiding camapign burn out is the hardest part.

The other brain buster for me is this...

When doing a map based campiagn how to represent recon.  Either scouts forces or scout ships.  

In "real" warfare the interaction of the recon elements may sometimes be one of the most important parts of any camapgn and or battle.  But it is one the hardest things to represent in a wargame. Space or ground comabt?

Napoleon's Victory at Ulm 1805 was proceeded by a massive coup on the recon front.  The French Cavalry Corps were sucessful in keeping the Asutrians blind to the fact that they were being surrounded.  

How to you reward good patroling?  

I best solution I have thought of is to have recon only battle where the objective is to breakthrough, or get off the board, etc.  The results of that battle would effect the main event.
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dafrca
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 6:10 pm 
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Quote (Cuban Commissar @ 03 May 2006 (09:16))
Keeping players intrested in the long haul and avoiding camapign burn out is the hardest part.

I agree 100%. Almost every campaign I have played in or been a part of, regardless of RPG or Wargames, has fallen apart because of burnout.

Our best one was a year long campaign (14 months) but even that one ended with a burn out.

dafrca

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Heresiarch
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Wed May 03, 2006 6:20 pm 
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Unfortunately the campaign game that we were going to run over winter here kind of crapped out due to everyone either moving locally or starting new jobs.

But, the basis that we were going to use for it was the Traveller 4th Edition supplement Pocket Empires.

Pocket Empires

It has a pretty granular system for generating world income, sector trade, technology, etc...

We were just going to assign point values for both BFG and Epic units so we could assign the amount of industrial output of each world to generate units for each empire.

I should also add it would have been a moderated game as well.

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MarkNorfolk
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 12:57 pm 
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Saw this thread down at the bottom but thought I'd add my bit -

Started to run a 40K/Gothic/Epic campaign using VBAM it ddn'y get passed a few turns after I kept stalling it to wait for a player to recover form an illness but there were other problems: not every one had access to all three games, some didn't want to bother with the spaceship games and representing eldar/dark eldar abilities was tricky to balance.

I may try again in the future.

Cheers
Mark
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dafrca
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Thu May 25, 2006 5:51 pm 
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Hello MarkNorfolk. Welcome to the forum. :)

Alway feel free to post your .02 to any thread that seems interesting to you. I know I love to revisit fun threads, I am sure others would agree.

dafrca

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MarkNorfolk
 Post subject: Large Multi-Game Spanning Campaigns
PostPosted: Fri May 26, 2006 10:44 am 
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Cheers dafrca.  It looks nice around here. I may stay awhile.:)

Cheers
Mark
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