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Epic Campaign System

 Post subject: Epic Campaign System
PostPosted: Wed Jan 18, 2006 10:32 pm 
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Quote (Rastamann @ 18 Jan. 2006 (16:01))
On the other hand, many such campaigns (operational ones with several armies to move about) won't come to a successful conclusion due to the fact that the players tend to, rather naturally, attack one another with as greater concentration of force possible, therefore producing lopsided battles, where one side has no chance of winning and, thus, loses interest in the campaign.

...

2) prevents battles that are totally unwinnable from ocurring

What you have looks great so far.

I have played in a few (non-Epic) campaigns, and as you say, the biggest problem is that if the battles are too lopsided, they produce no tabletop games to play, which was the whole point of the campaign.

What we did to alleviate the problem was to determine that absolute limits of an unequal game that we would play (and also the absolute points limit we would play for any game, unbalanced or otherwise). An example might be that you won't want to play out anything where the ratio is greater than 3:2 nor anything greater than 5,000 points (these are just some examples).

So, when a conflict occurred in the campaign, we automatically resized the tabletop game to reflect those rules. Carrying forward the same example, if I came to the engagement with 2,000 points and you came with 10,000 points, he tabletop game would be resized to 2,000 pts to 3,000 pts. So, what happens to the other 7,000 pts of yours? They reinforce after the first day, forcing the smaller force to withdraw. From a campaign stand-point, you force the opposition out of the area, square, etc.

The reality is that the armies do not march around in multi-thousand point blocks, but are spread about. And much like the Escalation mission rule in 40K, forces keep piling on after the start.

Creating artificial reasons to limit group sizes is just that - artificial. Remembering the goal of the campaign, to generate battles with some context and continuity with previous battles, and abstracting out what does not fit is a good way to have your cake and eat it too!

Just an idea.

Dale
Wishing he had a weekly campaign in anything to work on... :/

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 Post subject: Epic Campaign System
PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 5:01 am 
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Yes, the problem is that in any game, some of the pieces have fun and others won't.  Who wants to play the garrison of a formation of scouts getting hammered by 700 points of imperial guard artillery?

What I always wanted in a pre-game is one that led to a checkers-like standoff everywhere, and what the players are trying to do is determine which of the stalemated battlefields is the one where the tide will turn one way or the other.  That's too vague of  system to come up with any rules, though.

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 Post subject: Epic Campaign System
PostPosted: Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:17 am 
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I'm off friday to play in an 8 day WWII campaign with 60 guys (6mil of course). The way our battles work is the gm has the map, sees where the major/interesting fights take place and use those results, plus common sense plus badgering of the two supreme commanders to decide the rest and either show you the next day or week two days or whatever. Indeed ity has become common to scoot ahead a few days in a campaign as not enough good battles were being generated and we need at least 8 to come up at the same time!

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