Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

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Karantu
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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Karantu » Wed Aug 12, 2020 7:36 am

I'm open for TTS games too if anyone's interested or wants to learn how to play on TTS.

Mattb
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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Mattb » Sun Aug 16, 2020 1:23 pm

Karantu wrote:
Wed Aug 12, 2020 7:36 am
I'm open for TTS games too if anyone's interested or wants to learn how to play on TTS.
I just got it up and running recently so I'd love to try a game. Maybe next Saturday/Sunday night if you're free?

I'd also love to play against Tau as well - the last time I did was about 15 years ago.

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Jye Nicolson » Sun Aug 16, 2020 1:44 pm

Mattb wrote:
Sun Aug 16, 2020 1:23 pm
I just got it up and running recently so I'd love to try a game. Maybe next Saturday/Sunday night if you're free?

I'd also love to play against Tau as well - the last time I did was about 15 years ago.
We played a bunch of games today, getting @Mogus in on the fun, so there should be a bunch of us ready to go next weekend (didn't @The Other Dave say something about being tempted? :lol: )

On that note thanks for the games today @Mogus and @Karantu - I think a few people will be happy to hear Karantu handed the Wolves the drubbings they richly deserved :lol: It was good times and good to have a challenge like that Crisis team to step up to.

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Karantu
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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Karantu » Sun Aug 16, 2020 11:48 pm

Mattb wrote:
Sun Aug 16, 2020 1:23 pm
Karantu wrote:
Wed Aug 12, 2020 7:36 am
I'm open for TTS games too if anyone's interested or wants to learn how to play on TTS.
I just got it up and running recently so I'd love to try a game. Maybe next Saturday/Sunday night if you're free?

I'd also love to play against Tau as well - the last time I did was about 15 years ago.
Sure, I should be free during the weekend. My Tau army has been doing pretty well against elite infantry focused lists so I'm curious to see how it'll do against light infantry and tanks.

@Jye, @Mogus, Thanks for the games. It was nice being able have a pseudo game day while being stuck at home. I need to get all the wins I can get with my Tau army before all the codexes start coming out. I'm not looking forward to facing off against buffed Imperial/Necrons weapons for sure. I just hope that Tau codex isn't too far off.

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Jye Nicolson » Mon Mar 29, 2021 12:13 am

Arise from your grave, oh thread!

I picked up the Book of Rust this weekend and I was wondering if folks wanted to try the Charadon campaign? It wouldn't be as elaborate as Karantu's original plan but has a solid structure and should be easy to run.

It breaks down like this:


- There are three teams: Defenders (default Imperial), Invaders (default Chaos) and Raiders (default Xenos). You can join a different team (or even switch teams!) to help balance them or to reflect your lore - maybe your Aeldari are helping the defenders, maybe your Dark Angels are functionally Raiders as they hunt for the Fallen. Maybe ${alphaLegionJoke}.

- There are three phases to the campaign, each with some unique extra optional rules and a "legendary battle" you can play during that phase. Playing a game gives some points to your side plus more if you win or draw based on its size. The team with the most points for a phase wins and gets points towards the overall campaign victory. A phase would be a certain amount of time (say two or three months to have enough game days) with some limit on the number of games you could play that would count towards victory (so you can play on TTS if you want but not just rack up a million wins to trivially build up your team's score).

- The *rewards* for the campaign are all Crusade based, but I can't see any reason why you'd have to start a fresh Crusade or even play Crusade games to count. A matched play, Epic, OldHammer or Kill Team game could count just fine towards the appropriate teams, so you wouldn't be locked in to anything during the campaign. If you want to play a 2000pt Matched Play game with your Kroot army, that's probably a point for the Raiders but your Ultramarines Crusade would still be eligible for whatever team rewards were going around for the Defenders.

- There are various team and personal rewards, including some bonuses if things aren't going so well for you, so as long as you have a Crusade at all, participating in the campaign is pure upside. It also unlocks some upgrades from the campaign book, especially when playing missions from the new Plague Purge mission pack (which I also have).

- The campaign uses a Campaign Master, who has does the book-keeping and can hand out even more bonuses and rewards to keep things fair (for example if a regular Defender player is going to be out of the country for a few months, the CM can give their team some extra points). I'd be volunteering to be Campaign Master, and since I'd still like to play I'd just run a Crusade in all three teams, not give myself any rewards, and play for whoever was in third place at the time.


Does that sound interesting to everyone?

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by The Other Dave » Wed Mar 31, 2021 5:47 am

I forgot to reply to this - I'm interested, especially if someone else is going to be doing the paperwork! :lol:
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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Mattb » Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:32 am

It looks pretty interesting.

The only problem I can see is that the factions will be pretty unbalanced in favour of the Imperium.

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Jye Nicolson » Wed Mar 31, 2021 10:44 am

Mattb wrote:
Wed Mar 31, 2021 9:32 am
It looks pretty interesting.

The only problem I can see is that the factions will be pretty unbalanced in favour of the Imperium.
There's a few ways to handle that:

- Imperium folks can join Invaders or Raiders instead
- I can play my Nurgle or Drukhari Crusades more
- I can just plain give bonuses to the other teams to make it even

With the Ork codex hitting soon, Josh playing Tyranids, Necrons rattling around etc and then the enduring popularity of Chaos I don't think it'd be too hard to keep the teams vaguely even.

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Mattb » Wed Mar 31, 2021 10:58 pm

Fair enough, seems like a good idea then. No reason not to try it!

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Re: Anyone else interested in running a 40k campaign?

Post by Jye Nicolson » Mon Jan 17, 2022 9:29 am

So having done half of the Charadon campaign now, I think there are some issues with the campaign design, but that ultimately it's well suited to the extreme disruption of the Covid era and it's worth continuing into part 2.

Pros

+ The structure of the campaign is hilariously resilient. As long as people are playing 40K universe games at all and I'm loosely playing attention, the campaign can continue regardless of people coming in and out of engaging with it. There's no real way for the campaign to collapse, which given the difficulties people have keeping campaigns under normal circumstances, let alone during a global pandemic, is a real plus.

+ Crusade/KT rewards aren't for everyone but they're fun and essentially harmless to hand out (in 40K at least it boils down to a CP differential in the end)

+ The special missions are a good excuse for some big multiplayer battles and have certainly been memorable


Cons

- The story isn't really connected to the gameplay...like at all? Typhon is continually up to some nonsense but he'll be doing it regardless of who wins or even if our poor Chaos players just plain can't show up to games. The war over Metalica is ridiculously detailed and full of reverses for all sides (it takes me quite some time to parse what's supposed to be happening from the Charadon books to summarise in the thread) but nothing really changes it and it just seems to roll over into Book of Fire with Bel'akor tagging in to cause problems. The warzone rules *do* add a layer of simulating the conditions on the ground for the phase of the conflict but like a lot of 40K narrative rules they're an extra layer of mechanics over the top of everything else, and often players won't bother with them, especially if they're not playing often and have enough on their plate dealing with the core and army rules.

- Scoring is swingy with the low number of games we have during the Covid era. Me allocating my points to the faction that's behind helps but as one of the more active players it injects a lot of points into the system and muddies the result. It's still interesting to track but the team dynamic they're going for never really gets going. The only way I can see to really fixing this is playing a bunch more games on TTS, but while that makes games easier to play it's only a subset of us that are set up for that.

- The missions are hit and miss. Flood Tide on Fathom looked really cool and I was hyped but then as defender my whole goal was to shut down the mission mechanic and not let it happen :lol: The third mission did look like it would convey the chaos of the third narrative phase but would also be a game mostly decided by the roll off for first turn.


The Octarius campaign addresses some of this by going for a traditional tree structure instead, where who wins each mission matters for playing the next. That's a tried and true structure and certainly has some interest (particularly by making missions matter more), but I think it loses the resiliency of the more open Charadon pattern. Better a campaign that bumbles along come many games or few than one that is incoherent because the players participating in the tree flow can't reliably make it to game days.

As a result I think it's best for now to continue into Charadon II (The Book of Fire) while Covid is still a thing and game days are still touch and go. It doesn't take much work and means there's always *something* there if folks want to follow it. I can look at some ways to make the fiction and our results interact more (as long as I'm not doing it by layering yet more mechanics on an already complex game), but at the end of the day if it gets us a few games of the special missions and there's a few campaign rewards for those that want them, in uncertain times that's not a bad result.

When things are a bit more stable we can take another look at Octarius, Nachmund, or houseruled campaigns that are riskier but perhaps more engaging.

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