Putting the Role in RPG

For a while now my store has hosted the official Dungeons & Dragons Encounters. Each week two volunteers make time to come down and do an excellent job of running two separate tables full of players. They participate in high fantasy skirmishes full of monsters, traps and grand treasures. They all seem to have a good time of it to boot.

The core concept is sound, but sometimes I feel like there's something missing. While the Encounters are an excellent way to introduce new players to a fun hobby, it's still only a stepping stone. The role of any good RPG is to act as a cooperative form of story-telling. So now on Thursday nights I make an effort to run some of the less known games on our shelves. These games are run in a much more narrative style. The rules come second, and the story and characterization comes first.

The store benefits as well. Sales for 4th edition have been down. It seems most of our encounter players have become comfortable with their play-style and the books they already own. Rotating the Thursday night game every couple of months not only keeps my players and I engaged, but it provides a built-in forum to introduce the players to new products they wouldn't have picked up on their own. Using the narrative style is an excellent way of shining a new light on old stock, or giving mechanics-heavy games a twist for more casual players. For example, allowing the players to dive right into the world of Shadowrun without over-loading them with the minutiae of it's mechanics made believers of even the most casual player.

Letting players experience different genres and modes of play are all important factors when it comes to the health of the role-playing section, and the retail space overall. This concept can be translated to other games as well. You can restrict the next 40k event to a more casual vehicles-only battle, or add  narrative benefits to a dungeon crawl game like Tomb. These are excellent examples of twisting things just enough to make them interesting for new players as well as returning veterans.

Campaign Woes

Let's talk a bit more about the Mordheim Campaign. Now I need to be honest, I had no idea how a campaign worked. All I had was a handful of good stories from fellow war-gamers about their campaigning days. Having a group of miniatures that developed and adapted sounded like a lot of fun! So off I went to conquer my store's first real campaign.

 I went ahead and used the Mordheimer as a resource for a lot of my preparation. In fact once I stumbled upon their Campaign Guide I was sold on it immediately (read: "I'm feeling lazy and this does all the hard work for me!") Now let's go over all the key components I was looking for in this campaign. First, I wanted a sweet-ass map with a lot of character. Secondly I wanted a lot of variation in the scenarios so we wouldn't get bored playing all the time. Finally, I wanted a story driven style of play, so movement across the map was deliberately restricted. Now let's talk about what I should have been looking for.

Most importantly, I should have been figuring out all the optional rules and warbands the campaign would be allowing. After that I should have been looking at how all the scenarios in each map location balanced with each warband and optional rule. Certain scenarios were outright awful, giving one or two warbands a distinct advantage over others. Finally, for a narrative campaign I should have restricted the number of players; in this way I could have given each player the time and commitment they all deserved. Thankfully the players were forgiving, and most people managed to have fun in spite of my grandiose fumbling.

This leads to the following conclusions. A narrative campaign is a poor choice for a game retailer. For a retail space to succeed it needs to maximize the number of participants in all of its events. Campaigns are excellent for casual play in small numbers; as mentioned previously the narrative campaign my store attracted got pretty out of hand. Conversely, a basic league structure will help support a larger player base. Knowing the game you're building the campaign for is also important. Like most of my players I was new to Mordheim. It was a bit naive of me to go head long into a campaign with out giving the actual game much play time. That also brings about another important thought; I let the campaign get in the way of the actual game. Because really, the campaign or league is just an excuse to play the game every weekend! Bogging it down with meta-rules from the campaign just made playing Mordheim a chore.

So, there you have it. The next campaign/league I run will be set in the 40k universe. I'll be using a set of indy rules that supports a much smaller scale. These basic rules will still help drive sales of stocked figured, but won't have the drawback of a traditional 40k format; the large price point that intimidates many new players. As the new campaign comes up I'll try to cover my second round of campaign shenanigans for the blog.

Leagues and Campaigns

So, I kicked off a Mordheim campaign a couple months back. Through word of mouth and a fist full of fliers we were able to generate a group of over twenty players. Not too shabby for a game that's technically been out of print for ten or more years. In contrast, the Magic: The Gathering league I was attempting to lift off the ground saw a lot of motion on facebook, was discussed by an already established M:TG community and only saw two people join. Not nearly enough to start a league. That's interesting.

Mordheim is one of Games Workshop's "specialist" games. Which means they don't love it anymore. They're not willing to support it's fan base by making new content. Magic: The Gathering is the leader in collectible card games, has a robust tournament circuit, and enough rules to answer almost any complex rules question during an organized event. So why the hell has Mordheim flourished where a Magic League has failed?

There's a couple potential answers gnawing at the back of my brain. Some of them are rude but quite funny; others more introspective and consequently rather dull. I feel the core problem lies in exactly WHY I chose to provide these forms of entertainment.

The Mordheim campaign was established for the war-gaming community as a whole. When I set out to start this campaign I wanted to do a number of things with it. First, I wanted to bring like-minded people together to play a game they all seemed to remember and enjoy. Second, I wanted to finish some kind of army, and a warband of fifteen models was the smallest army available to me. So fine, I'll finally paint an entire army! Third were the sales of Warhammer Fantasy models. They were always low at the store. Since Mordheim resides in the same setting as Warhammer Fantasy it would give the wargamer's an opportunity to make some purchases and paint some models they wouldn't normally get to touch. All said and done, the community was the key. It made me enthusiastic about the project, but hushed about its inner workings. I gave everyone just enough information to start building warbands, but not enough that they would know EXACTLY what to expect on the first day. I also made the mistake of trusting someone else to write a campaign for me, instead of taking it head on myself. But that's a different story.

The Magic: The Gathering league on the other hand was built out of a response from an already established community, and to be honest I was fully enveloped in Mordheim shenanigans when the idea of the league came around to me. I had chosen a newer format (Modern) that everyone was buzzing about. I figured this would be an opportunity for the Magic crowd to learn a new format and challenge each other to a new, refreshing style of play. What I got was bemoaning discontent over having to start a new format. What I didn't understand was that the Magic community already had a "league" in the Friday Night Magic events hosted at the store. The desire for something new wasn't just about another day to play. The community wanted more attention on a completely rogue format they were already playing. A month after the leagues fumble I had my Friday Night Magic Judge put together a Commander league, since most folks already had decks for that format. It's seen modest success.

At the end of the day I can only give this simple advice; stick to your guns! If the community can bare the burden on their own, let them. They'll know what they want best of all. Now I generally leave the Magic to my Friday Night Magic Judge because I have little enthusiasm for the game on a personal level (which makes me hard of hearing sometimes). I understand it from a financial stand point. I understand that it has a following, and is a staple in any good game retailers repertoire. for the life of me I don't know how a deck will play until I actually see it play a couple times; even then I get upset by  the meta-game and wonder why my awesome looking zombies on this shiny card aren't eating the flesh of all your damn knights and elves.

Another update soon on too little and too much in campaigns and scenarios (at least within the war-gaming world).