Can You Stop the Campaign 'Snowball' Effect?

You could build rules into your campaign like the desert war in WW2. The retreating / losing army was always retiring towards supply dumps whilst the advancing/ winning army was struggling with extended supply lines.

also in terms of the self defeatist attitude you mentioned, I remember playing shadow war and one of my guardsmen was captured by sisters of battle in a store campaign, I almost just gave the victory to the guy but another player convinced me to go for it, had the greatest saving private ryan (pretty much everyone was wounded trying to save this guy) style match ever and won and ended up being my favourite part of the campaign and one of my favourite war gaming moments period

This is why I love the idea of Kill Team. As soon as someone gets to that snowball you launch a quick kill team to try and stop that

I once ran a "Silent Death" campaign that addressed some of those issues. First, neither side used their entire force. I limited the force to X number of ships. When the players asked why they couldn't use all their ships, I told them that they were off doing other missions. Second, I made the victory conditions objective dependent. Third, the objectives were randomly assigned. My favorite scenario was this, one player had the objective to recover a stasis box from an asteroid belt. The second player's objective was, "You are on patrol, when you see a group of ships heading toward an asteroid belt. Investigate, and find out what they are doing." Sure enough, just as soon as the two groups got into range of each other, they opened fire. During the after action review, I asked the first player if he had recovered the Stasis box, and I asked the second player if he knew what the other players mission was? The collective answer was no. I further added insult to injury by telling them that they could have both been successful with out firing a shot.

can't emphasise enough the value of creating a story with mates over a couple of beers and some plastic models. My group still talks about some really entertaining 40k games from 5-10 years ago involving close character battles and how the results impacted following missions. 'Forging the narrative' is one of the most rewarding components of the hobby and I think it's something that is often overlooked.

im not even playing any "tabletop" but this is just nice to listen to while tabbed out

One thing I've liked to do is use a supply line setup for a lot of games. For example, with a mass battles game, we put together a "refresh" rule that combined with the hex map. The further you were from your home base, the more difficult it was to replenish your forces. Meaning that your forces pushing into the opposing territory would start having issues where the elite units they were getting experience to improve would be whittled down as they were used if you would play to aggressively. If you played to defensively, you would end up losing ground and not have places to push those forces to recover and a lack of the XP to improve your units. If you did poorly in a battle, you would still have fresh troops for the next, but not the units that would have been improved unless they survived and you could replenish them...which was a once per round check that happened at the beginning of your turn. The replenishment also worked to "heal" heroes and monsters...

What we do is at the end of each game have a discussion of the implications of a game, develop a story and set the stage for the next game. Then we come up with a new set of objectives, and even a scenario some time. That way, no matter who won or lost, we are actually telling the story and not really worrying about the campaign victory. We do like open ended stuff, though

Keep track of two types of "points" to gain during the campaign. Victory points are given to the person who wins battles, and you win the campaign once you get enough of those. The person who loses gets "Desperation Points" which can be used to buy boons for the coming battle. Victory Points can also be spent on boons, but they're costly and the boons are very minor. This is just a fun way of adding extra depth to a campaign. You get to think tactically in between battles too.

When I was learning to play Go, I learned it was good manners to end the game when its unwinnable rather than playing it to the bitter end. Basically, "I value your time, and this game is no longer going to be mutually enjoyable/interesting." I've applied this to my wargaming (Company of Iron and Warmachine), and the other players appreciate it. I think we'd do that for campaigns.

your intro is really satisfying. the dice roll at the end

Good advice at the end there especially regarding not playing a campaign as an introduction to a game. We are in our second mini campaign now for Kill Team, but everyone had 3 or 4 warm ups before we went at it for real. I know it's not unique to KT, but I like how your roster has depth to it, almost by default, making those early losses not sting so much. Also, in the between-game recovery round just how hard it is to actually have your team members die/get deleted. In our first campaign, winning came down to the last game - even though one person had won the lion's share of games, so everyone was still invested and that's always awesome.

I personally enjoyed the campaigns in 'Dawn of war: Dark crusade' where each faction fought over control of the planet. The planet was divided into sections, each with a unique resource or tactical advantage. I like the idea of players fighting for these areas and gaining long term benefits, like the ability to summon reinforcements at a certain point or be able to field one extra troop or something. How do you think a campaign like that can be converted from a digital format to a more traditional table top approach? It would have the potential to fuse the best parts of table top and PnP RPG I think.

Gorkamorka deal with this by some ways. Both players get toofs after fight. Weaker mob get more toofs. The bigger your ork mob the more tax toofs you have to pay them. And if your ork mob have an ork with a lot of leadership skill he must challenge your ork nob to become new nob of a mob, and one of them could die or get injury. Plus you could join forces with other weak ork mob. And there are epic ork characters who could join weak mob, but they take a lot of toofs.

As one army pushes farther into the other's territory, you could give the defender more static fortifications, let them set up part of the terrain during their deployment, or even expand their deployment zone farther across the table. It's going to be a lot harder to attack, even with superior numbers, when the defender has that much control over the table from the start.

Your videos are really informative and entertaining! Awesome to listen to while I'm painting my stormcast.

Thank you! I am planning a game linking my Star Wars RPG with my Star Wars X-Wing and Star Wars Armada minis. Great video!

Really liked the vid. From experience, people tend to not see the mechanical consequences of a campaign reward system. Which is natural, but leads to campaigns not endings Being a designer by trade, there is a small thing I wanted to do for some time, which is... Guidelines, of sorts? Like general types of campaign systems/mechanics with explanations about how they affect gameplay and how to tweak them to fit the groups expectations I've became a viewer fairly recently because of Kill Team, but if it's something you might have a use for, I could make it as a contribution to the community, as this chanel is bringing me a lot of joy :)

I'm trying to find a way to organize a 40K campaign that uses games of both Kill Team and 8th edition at different times, and this video actually pointed out something that I hadn't considered. I've played a couple of campaign-type games myself, but I've never organized one before.

I like the rubber banding effect, you get in things like Bloodbowl/Necromunda/Mordhiem etc where the player that doesn't have as good a rating get's bonuses "buffs" so to speak like extra experience for being an underdog or free players and I like that as sort of can even it up and sort of keep games level ish