"How long do campaigns last" Topic

I have almost completed six years of my current PBEM campaign.

It has changed and developed during that period. It has been called different names, for example "1813 campaign" and "1814 campaign". But the actual campaign has run non stop. Immediately one phase ended the next started. So from the participants experience it has run non stop.

I have no idea whether this is particularly long or not. I would be interested to hear how long other campaigns last, and particularly non solo campaigns which rely on outside participation.

Impressive. In my experience most campaigns are designed around a specific historical campaign – the Shenandoah in 1862 or the 1809 Peninsular War – and end when one side wins.

It's also my experience lots of (most) campaigns "fizzle out."

The Fizzle is because some folks really don't like to lose. Too many campaigns resolve in a massive battle, often fairly early in the campaign that the losing side cannot recover from. Hard to wait for the possibility of support in 3 turns when you are at 40% of what you started with. This is also due to gamers not being ready to pull out (or it being very difficult to) when it starts to go bad.

I've become interested in the idea of cooperative campaigns (there's probably a better term for them), in which the players are nominally on the same side. For example, each of the players might be a Roman proconsul assigned to a province, with the goal being to accumulate glory points by defending (or expanding, or pacifying, or whatnot) their province. The other players can serve as opponents as needed (e.g. Fred (who has Egypt) can play the Gauls rebelling against George's rule when a battle comes up, and so on). If a player is destroyed, they respawn as a new proconsul with a new army raised in Rome. I've not tried it out yet, but it seems like a good approach.

Doug

Doug,

That's how The Sun Never Sets colonial campaign system works. Everyone has British troops in different theaters, but take turns playing opponents. The system involves allocations from Parliment and all sorts of interesting politics. It requires a dedicated group, however.

I think any campaign requires a dedicated group to survive past the initial "wow, this is cool!" stage. I was thinking that, since any other player could be the opponent for any other player, this sort might be a bit easier to manage. Might or might not, I suppose.

Doug

I try to overcome the "fizzle out" reaction by having a limited objective and time frame for each commander. My campaign is organised in five geographical areas. Each area has one allied and one French commander. There are ten objectives in each area, and each objective is similar in size and scope to the Waterloo campaign.

So each commander has a clear objective. Each campaign phase usually lasts about four months. In that time there are usually about ten campaign days and four to six battles.

When the objective is taken, and the enemy army defeated, the phase ends. At the start of the next phase both armies are again at full strength and fully supplied.

I have found that the limited objective, and short campaign duration, allows players to test the campaign and see if they like it. Many ask to continue for a second or third campaign phase.

And if one player does quite mid campaign I can take over his role until the end of the phase

Most campaigns I've been in fizzled, mostly due to player loss due to not being able to get everyone around a table when a battle needs to happen and also from losing the first battle (as mentioned above) when they do.

I've run a couple campaigns that lasted about a year, and one Sci-fi 4X one that lasted four years and four months with a distinct winner.

In the latter, I kept players artificially separated in different sectors until they learned how to conquer the adjacent systems within a sector and built up their tech level. This allowed them to get a feel for the rules, expand so they have resources, and then get on to bashing each other's empires. Unlike space, the map had a limit, everything was via wormholes, and no one was in a 'corner.'

Worked well allowing players some positive reinforcement early and some give and take in the middle and late games. It also helped NOT to have the battles on a table -- I, as umpire, fought all the battles, which is pretty handy since players were all over the country.

All the campaigns I have been in end the instant one side starts to lose.

The "fizzle" is the dominant species in campaigns. I've had maybe three or four campaigns that went on for more than a handful of battles. The most successful, lengthy, was close on ten years all told. Players came and went. There were three of us who formed the core group in the last half of that time. It was a cooperative effort, with all of us taking turns playing one side or the other. We were enjoying the unfolding of the saga, not determined to establish a winning and a losing side, i.e. players who won and players who lost. An essential part in maintaining interest was our PCs' careers. The campaign was a vehicle to enjoy watching various PCs perform, survive and occasionally die….

I have a 4-battle limit to my campaigns to combat 'fizzle', and I only model or only emphasise one aspect of the historical campaign (e.g. logistics, diplomacy, manoevure) while simplifying the rest to minimise the effort required from umpire or players.

I must be lucky.
None of the campaigns I started fizzled out.
Lets see if my luck continues with my planned Dark Africa campaign at the end of the year.
Most of my campaigns have 8+ players.

I know of one that has had 40 tabletop battles so far with no end in sight.

Aside from DBA mini-campaigns, I was in three.
An ancients campaign that included Acheamenid Persians and Vikings. I think it fizzled eventually. I was in it for a year or so.

An American revolution campaign on the bicentennial. It ran for two years before the Rebel team threw in the towel. I was on the British team.

A campaign of France 1814. We played for about a year when the French national morale (established by the OSG board game Napoleon at Bay) collapsed and I was sent to St. Helena.

Thistlebarrow2's campaign is run by email. When players drop out he recruits more via the internet and covers for them until replaced. I'm sure it's a lot of work but replacing face to face players who drop out is really hard.

Paul, your campaign longevity as:
1 Players are disconnected with the battles you play home, so there is never a no show of the one boss with half the troops…
2 Your internet players can be replaced without sabotaging the whole thing.
3 it is not so difficult to carry on for players as not to be able to do their turns even if hard pressed otherwise… Humm mostly.

From past experience I saw two main types of campaigns, which can be then divided in two: remote play ( all or part ) or in situ.

1 What I call the role play thing. Easiest the most likely to fizzle out as described in thread as one will lose interest when failure strikes or if he is on that river cordon defense that the enemy actually never will attack.
Each has " his own" corps etc.

2 Those with few players doing the operational thing, best from an existing boardgame, adapted, with strong well done rules. Multiple gamers might appear when needed and definitely for battles.
It always focuses for all on where things happen, to the cost of identifying to the troops etc.

In my experience, campaigns last three to five battles before everyone gets bored.

I did play a postal Napoleonic campaign for seven years, but it was huge and moderated so players came and went.

Depends on the nature of the campaign or game. In a large multi-national game generally of any 10 people.

2 will never send in anything, they joined for the freebies and you'll never hear from them again.

2 will send in a few initial dispositons and a few fragmentary things, but will never complete move 1.

3 will complete 1 to three moves, but when they start to lose or it doesn't go exactly to their mini-Napoleonic delusions of grandeur, will drop out.

2 will get bored or have some family emergency absent them. This can be anything from death of themselves or a relative to "My cat has a complex and I have to take him to the cat whisperer," to an excuse like "The umpire is overcontrolling the game."

1 will stick it out through thick and thin.

Depends on the nature of the campaign or game. In a large multi-national game generally of any 10 people.

2 will never send in anything, they joined for the freebies and you'll never hear from them again.

2 will send in a few initial dispositons and a few fragmentary things, but will never complete move 1.

3 will complete 1 to three moves, but when they start to lose or it doesn't go exactly to their mini-Napoleonic delusions of grandeur, will drop out.

2 will get bored or have some family emergency absent them. This can be anything from death of themselves or a relative to "My cat has a complex and I have to take him to the cat whisperer," to an excuse like "The umpire is overcontrolling the game."

1 will stick it out through thick and thin.

Thanks for your comments. I find them all very interesting.

I would agree that the greatest problem, particularly with PBEM, is "fizzle out".

The problem with the internet is that none of us really know each other, and there is often a real lack of commitment. It is all too easy to just ignore or delete emails.

I have only taken part in two campaigns as a player. Both were historical, indeed both were Napoleonic. They started really well and both lasted about four to six moves. Then came the first battle. The game masters in each case had not given sufficient thought to resolving the battles, and both campaigns just ended without a result. In both cases emails were ignored. Very frustrating.

I would be interested to hear why "fizzle out" that did not happen in those campaigns which lasted to their natural conclusion.

I would also be interested to hear any suggestions to overcome this common problem.

My three face-to-face:
the ancients campaign was open ended, with no designated end. The strategic game was done by committee as the game progressed, so rules could and did change mid-stream. The way it seemed to work was that player-nations fought three battles and then dropped out, win or lose. I suspect lack of form did it in.

The second campaign had a structure. The strategic game was the Avalon Hill Board Game 1776. Like the actual war, it could go on for quite a while. When American fortunes went south after two game years (played in two real years), the players who owned most of the American figures lost interest.

The third campaign had used OSG's Napoleon at Bay which had a shorter number of turns and a definite end point. It also had a morale track that could end the game sooner. French morale fell off the track before we reached the end of the game.

In order, I enjoyed all of the campaigns but 2 was better than 1, and 3 was better than 2.

I would be interested to hear why "fizzle out" that did not happen in those campaigns which lasted to their natural conclusion.

Hmmm.

The grass is always greener on the next turn. Or, hope springs eternal.

In the sci fi campaign, I had lots of incremental tech advances (i.e. put in the money, at set amounts, something good for you will be available), so there was a feeling of increasing capability, or, catching up capability, as the turns went by. Initially, it was quick…every turn or two or three for most players, but as the game went on, tech increases cost more money (even though the players had more money from larger empires) and took longer…but crash programs could be done (at a sacrifice of front-line units/replacements).

Differing capabilities tied to commanders. Although the system I set us was a bit convoluted for generating and promoting officers, you could send a hero to save the day (although these tended to even out in the long term).

Tooth to tail flow. Offensives often ran their course because of overall Imperial pressures -- you can get a big fleet together, and it goes well, but elsewhere…not so much a great fleet. Then you have to hold what you took. And rebuild planets to gain actual economic advantage out of what you took…and fend off attacks elsewhere in the empire. That gave those who had been whacked a chance to recover, even at decreased capabilities. One player lost his home world, took it back, lost it again, took it back, lost it a third time, and moved his seat of government to his intact sector to continue the fight…

Fog of war. Players only knew what they could see with fleets/ships, or garner from spies, drones, etc. I call this a 'closed' system (vs. an 'open' system like a boardgame where everyone knows everything). That uncertainty of the unknown tugs at players' curiosities and the surprises were indeed sometimes surprising.

The epic purple prose of the umpire. Yes, I'm a writer by trade, so every player got customized reports of battles, politics, tech advances, and whatever else I thought could be tossed in. OK, one bean-counting weanie only wanted the spreadsheet, but others went on to pen their own epic purple prose in response, which generated my response, and so on so that a story evolved. Most times, players tapped out a paragraph or two, but that's enough to generate more purple prose.

The prose NEVER changed the mechanics -- great story or no story, all players still played with the same set of rules, but it was quite interesting to create your own Imperial story.

At the end, I had all that could make it (some players were in other parts of the country) over for a post-game recap, where I presented them with a 350,000-word recap of the entire campaign (that's about 1,000 paperback pages). Hey, I edited it down from 450,000 words in the original recap. Now, most of it was routine battle reports of x ships did y damage (during the game this allowed players to see how effective their fleet of z ships was), but in between were these vignettes of story.

Late to this thread, but a little more to add:

It's also possible for the umpire to fizzle out. I have done so myself, when running the game turns out to be way more work than I anticipated. That sucks, not least because preparation for a campaign is a helluva lot of work too.

My most successful past campaigns have all been one-day DBA campaigns, such as the Second Punic War campaign I wrote called Duelling Republics and a card-based post-Roman Britain campaign I created called Age of Arthur. I believe success was helped a lot by the popularity of DBA (back then), the one-day format (no long-term commitments), and the simple rules. I think it also helped that I ran these at gaming conventions, where a table festooned with neat toys (maps, little cities and fortresses and huts, cards, coins, armies, terrain, etc.) draws miniatures gamers like moths to a light.

I'm currently part of a small, dedicated group playing through the Check Your Six campaign books with "personal pilots" who gain experience (and personal histories) through the course of multiple games. To get more experience with the rules, I started a second group to play a Korean War dogfight campaign in a different geographic location (almost no player overlap between the groups). The group playing the CY6 book campaigns is ongoing after two years (even after the original organizer dropped out!), whereas the Korean War campaign pretty much flamed out after a half a year. The main difference determining success in this case seems to be the dedication of the players. The group in the ongoing campaign are all avid dogfight gamers, collecting plane models, studying the rules, and tracking their own pilot careers. The fizzled campaign was never more than a loose confederation of gamers with disparate interests who were all sorta "meh" about dogfight games in general, about the Korean War as a setting, and about the CY6 rules in particular.

- Ix

The grass is always greener on the next turn. Or, hope springs eternal.

This is an excellent idea, and using tech advancement is beautifully thematic in a sci-fi campaign. Very cool.

Players avoid battles they think they can't possibly win, so should be provided ways to even the odds again or there won't be any battles after the first. Put another way, players who get ahead should be prevented from running away with victory. The top dog should have to fight to stay on top of the heap. Campaigns that help the rich get richer are doomed to fizzle.

Using DBA, I observed that the tactical rules themselves assisted campaigns by ending battles before a slaughter, because DBA has a clearly defined "end of game" point which limits casualties. Most tactical miniatures games lack this kind of mechanism, esp. in my other favorite periods (naval, horse & musket), so it can pay to add house rules to accomplish the same thing.

In land games I also like to add a house rule for "post battle recovery" of a portion of the troops lost during the last tactical game (never all, just some). The rationale is that some percentage of "casualties" in any battle are actually just stragglers or cowards who quietly return to their posts after the excitement is over, but the net effect on campaigns is a speed-up of post-battle recovery.

- Ix