Campaign System

[Vulture]

Vulture, you say massive workload, could you expand and say what the workload consisted of?

Easymeat

To run a good campaign, the system your going to run needs to be well playtested, certainly mine did. In the CMBO campaign, I did two tests with single players, then announced the start of the campaign. Whilst I then trained up two COs, to keep the other players interested I ran what I called a Recon round. This all worked fine :) When I tried to run the second Campaign 'The Battle Of The Bulge', I used the same formula, but with four times the number of players. So what I had was 40 players per side organised into 4 Divisions. Each Division had a CO and a 2nd IC, plus there was an overall Corps CO as well. So there were 22 players who need to understand the game system. To do that, what I tried to do was run a virtual game with me randomly deciding the outcome of battles (by dice).

In addition to this I was at the same time running a Recon round for all players to participate in, so you get all the normal stuff associated with running an 80 player event:
- Players drops off the face of the earth without any warning.
- New players have to be recruited.
- Some players think it okay to only do 1 turn per week, and so need to be hassled (not something I enjoy doing)
- Players experience comms problems, so I need to act as a post office
- Web site updates are required.

The rule playtest went very badly. Not that there was anything wrong with the system, but the amount of time it took for players to process the playtest turns was ridiculous, plus one or two dropped out as well. Some of them were sooooo slow, and a couple just could not get their heads round the concepts at all, in spite of repeated E-Mails. It (sadly) became apparent that I had bitten off more that I could chew frankly.

At the heart of the system I used was the requirement for players to have (reasonably) balanced games to play, so that the outcome was not already pre-determined when they started their game. The system works, it's just that I was too ambitious with 80 players, and frankly speaking some the COs were not up to. Would I run another campaign using that system ? Yes, I would, but with no more than 15 players per side.

I hope that gives some insight. Drop me an E-Mail if you want a full copy of the rules I developed.

Cheers

Vulture