SBG: Thoughts on Campaigns

One-off battles can be a lot of fun, but they rarely give any incentive to conserve your forces. So near the end of the game, the side apparently losing throws everyone at the enemy in a “hail mary” attempt to turn the course of events.

A common solution to that problem is a campaign: a linked series of scenarios where the results of one match have some sort of affect on the next. If dead troops in your current battle are not going to show up for the next one, you’re going to be a lot more careful about preserving your forces. It may be better to cut your losses now to give you a better chance of winning the next battle farther down the line.

Games Workshop has been pretty good about providing campaigns as part of their supplements for the somewhat awkwardly-named Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game. But despite the seeming enthusiasm for them that I see in the online community, those SBG campaigns never seem to work very well for me.

The narrative scenarios themselves are sometimes part of the problem. Look at the classic Balin’s Tomb scenario from the Quest of the Ringbearer supplement. The Good player wins if at least five Fellowship members, including Frodo, are alive at the end of the game.

Now those victory conditions are the result of playtesting (one hopes), resulting in what should be a more or less evenly-balanced scenario. In which case we should expect a bell-curve of possible Good casualties, with four dying around 50% of the time, three or five less often, two or six still less often, and so on. It’s reasonable for Evil to expect to kill at least two or three Fellowship members.

So Aragorn, Gandalf, Boromir, and Gimli can all die … but Good still wins if the four hobbits and Legolas survive. In terms of the story, that doesn’t seem like much of a victory, does it? Especially since “historically” not even one of the Fellowship members was slain.

There are usually mitigating rules in a campaign such that afterward you roll a die and the character is only “mostly dead” unless you roll a 1, in which case (s)he really is out of the campaign. But surviving characters usually don’t come back with full Might/Will/Fate/Wounds.

So even if your characters survive – and we’ve all seen what happens when you need “anything but a 1” – you then face the next battle in a weakened state. If that next scenario was originally balanced, it’s now tilted toward the Evil player. (If it wasn’t balanced, there’s a good chance it’s tilted towards Evil in the first place!)

Worse, the winner of any given scenario gets a bonus for the following scenario, so when Good loses one battle they face a double whammy in the next, a weakened force facing a fresh one with a bonus.

As you play more scenarios, this problem keeps compounding.

This tension between individual narrative scenarios, which we hope are more or less balanced as one-off games, and campaigns, where the sequential play sees Good become increasingly worn down compared to the one-off situation, is why I haven’t found GW’s campaigns very interesting. There ought to at least be some chance of recreating the events of the story!

So what’s the solution?

Trying to rebalance results by giving a bonus in the next scenario to the loser rather than the winner might just encourage tanking, which would be undesirable.

I’m thinking instead along the lines of giving the Good player Plot Points, a pool which can be used like Might points, but for any character in any scenario. Picking the right amount is tricky, of course. Maybe 1-2 points per scenario to be played? That’s not going to save you from truly tragic dierolling but is probably enough to pull the Fellowship through those early scenarios where it’s easy to suffer losses.

If you’re playing competitively, it would be interesting to set the number of Plot Points via bidding. Start with maybe 30 Plot Points and the players keep lowering the bid until one decides that Evil has the advantage at the current point, in which case the winning bid takes the Good side.