It’s been far too long since I’ve made a Line Ahead post! This is a topic I’ve been wanting to tackle on the blog for a while now, but I was spurned on by Landlubber’s post on the forums about wanting to start a campaign of his own. Honestly, I’m probably not the most qualified person to be talking about campaigns; I’ve only run one myself, and participated in a couple of others. However, I have spent a lot of time looking at various campaign systems, and thinking about how their various aspects might be applied to a custom campaign of my own creation. So, here goes!

The Allure of Campaigns

After having played miniature war games for a few years, I started to feel dissatisfied with the single games I was playing. I wanted something more…some kind of connection between the game I played last week, the game I was playing at the moment, and the game that was coming next week. At its most basic level, that is what a campaign is all about. It is about stringing the events we bring to life on our gaming tables into a larger narrative, of expanding the scale of our games from a mere tactical exercise into an operational and strategic level endeavor. As it turns out, there are many ways of making this happen, but there are several themes that are commonly seen in different campaign systems. Keep in mind, this is not an exhaustive list, nor am I suggesting that all campaign systems have all of these aspects. However, they are common enough that  out there:

Damage and Repair

Your normal one-off game is not very concerned with where the ships involved are coming from, and where they go after the game is over. However, in real life, ships need to be trained, provisioned, and following a battle repaired (or even replaced if they were sunk!). Incorporating this aspect of operations into a campaign is an easy way to make the experience feel much grander in scale. However, it can also incur a lot of book-keeping; players have to track the amount of damage a ship takes, and then track whatever resources are being used to repair/replace it.Which brings us to:

Resource Management

Often, campaigns will require players to expend resources for any number of purposes; repairing damaged vessels, buying upgrades, recruiting re-enforcements to name a few. As with the damage and repair, there will be some book keeping associated with this aspect of a campaign system. Resources can be accumulated any number of ways, from holding territory on a game map to achieving victory points against an opponent.  Speaking of territory:

Map/Territory Occupation

This seems like a natural progression for a campaign, since any operational or strategic level game will have some sort of territorial goal associated with it, whether it be defensive or offensive in nature. Implementing this aspect into naval campaigns is a little trickier, since ships don’t occupy territory in the way that troops and tanks on land might. Thus, from a naval perspective a campaign map is typically more about the land masses (or planets/solar systems in the case of  a space campaign) occupied by each side than the trackless vastness between them. A naval campaign incorporating this feature is generally a “maritime” campaign, in that amphibious operations will have to be addressed and possibly even ground combat. I’m going to set aside that flavor of campaign for another time, however!

Experience/Leveling

In a real war, the skills and capabilities of the participating military units do not remain static. Fighting a warship is nothing if not a team effort, as the crew of a ship and their offices fight more battles, they become better at their individual tasks and with working together. This means that a ship will tend to become more efficient over time. Not to mention, technology often advances rapidly during wartime, meaning that the technical qualities of a ship may be upgraded as well. And so it is this feature is often incorporated into a campaign system; players may be able to improve stats on a particular ship, or give their force commander additional abilities to use during a fight.

Campaign Types

Having examined a few of the characteristics involved with campaigns, I now turn to a few broad categories that most campaign systems fall into. As before, this is not an all-inclusive list, and there are definitely examples of campaigns that are a hybrid of these categories.

Narrative Campaign

This type of campaign is entirely story-driven. Each game played as part of this campaign constitutes a chapter in a story. This type of campaign typically has minimal resource management, territory occupation, and leveling. However, the games can still be linked by giving players small bonuses in the next game based on their performance during the preceding game. The Spartan DW campaign books, as well as the short Operation Watchtower campaign I ran a while back, are both good examples of this type of campaign. From my experience, this sort of campaign works best with a Game Master that can organize the games and build the narrative for the other players. Essentially, they wind up “running” the campaign, and generating the narrative framework, not unlike a Game Master in a tabletop RPG.

Map-based Campaigns

These campaigns do the best job at creating an operational an operational and strategic level to a game. These campaigns are hallmarked by the fact that they will have some sort of map involved that will require players to occupy and defend territory over time, and will typically feature some sort of resource management tied to that aspect of the campaign.  This sort of campaign also benefits from having a Game Master, though that person tends to be less of a Game Master and more of a secretary and referee, overseeing all of the administrative tasks associated with this sort of system.

The X-Cam

Developed by Craig of the D6 Generation, the Expanded Campaign (or X-Cam, for short) system is designed to provide a framework for loosely connecting a number of games between many players. The DWVA group has run a couple of these over the last two years, so I won’t go into too much detail on them here. The system has a moderate amount of resource tracking in the form of Campaign Points, which is facilitated by having one person who can act as the coordinator and recorder and to whom the other players can report.

Pros and Cons

These campaign types all have their own strengths and weaknesses. The narrative campaign, obviously, has the strongest story elements associated with it. Likewise, there tends to be a fairly low amount of administration for the players, though the Game Master may have a lot to do depending on the detail of the system being employed. However, it is really only suited to a small, centrally located group, and not all groups will have a player who is interested in taking the role of a Game Master. Likewise, players searching for a strong operational/strategic feel may find this type of campaign lacking.

The map based campaign is going to give that feel in spades, but it is also the most cumbersome to administer and coordinate, as these systems tend to have a lot of granularity and detail. On the plus side, they can be easily adapted to a larger number of players, even multiple groups playing in different locations, than a narrative campaign can. Plus, map campaigns tend to develop their own narrative over time, as battles are fought and critical strategic points are lost and won. On the downside, this sort of campaign can take a long time to play to conclusion, and players might find themselves so far behind their competitors that they can no longer have much of an impact on the course of events, or else even be eliminated from the campaign entirely.

In this way, the X-cam is very attractive, as it only takes a moderate amount of time to play, and by far is the most flexible when it comes to incorporating many different players spread over a wide geographical area. However, in some ways the X-cam is less of a campaign and more of a league; there is very little inherent narrative built into the system, and the lack of a map and minimal resource management also rob it of the operational-level feel of other campaigns.

The Challenges of Running a Campaign

In my experience, coordinating and running a campaign can be very difficult, and campaigns often fall apart before they are played to completion. Why is this so? Well, the first issue is that a campaign requires the participants to commit to a recurring gaming event over a number of weeks. This might be too hard for a high school or university student, but at this point in my professional and personal life, that can be a pretty tall order (as it tends to be for most of my peers). Secondly, it can be difficult to maintain interest in an event over the weeks it may take to play a campaign to completion, though this can definitely be offset by a skilled game master/secretary/coordinator. Finally, any one of these campaign systems will require the participants to come to agreement on certain matters, which can be a challenge as gamers by an large tend to be fairly opinionated! Strong disagreements are always a risk, and could lead to one or more players losing interest in the campaign to the point that they stop playing.

Conclusion

So, in my usual long-winded fashion I’ve just gone over why campaigns are so appealing, some aspects common to many of them, and the difficulties facing a gaming group wishing to run one. Given those challenges, you might ask if the reward is worth the trouble. To that, I can definitely say the answer is Yes! The few campaigns I’ve been a part of have been some of the most rewarding gaming experiences I’ve ever had, and will be things that I remember and cherish for years to come. It is no exaggeration to say that I look forward to the day I run my next one!

Until next time, good luck and good hunting!