"Campaigns: Worth the Effort?" Topic

Wargames' campaigns are often described as the supposed pinnacle of the hobby. I've only experienced two. One was a simple Seven Years' War ladder campaign—about five linked battles, neat and finite but ending predictably. The other is my current "After Waterloo" Napoleonic Wars effort, now nearly two years old and progressing glacially because our group rotates periods and Napoleonics has to wait its turn.

Which raises a question: are campaigns really the pinnacle—or just the most ambitious format of wargaming with the highest failure rate?

From what I've seen, the problems are fairly consistent:

Time vs reality – campaign turns imply momentum; real life kills it.(see my After Waterloo Campaign)
Scheduling friction – long gaps mean players forget what's going on.
Bookkeeping creep – supply, replacements, etc. become a second hobby.
Player absence – one missing person can stall everything.
Snowballing – early success compounds into inevitability.(see my SYW campaign).
Rules mismatch – translating tabletop results into campaign effects is often arbitrary.
Incentive issues – play for the campaign vs play for a good game aren't always aligned.
Vague end states – "win the war" is too distant to sustain interest.
Umpire bottleneck – one organiser = single point of failure.

Are we overrating campaigns? Or just designing them badly?

Generally, I think most of the problems you describe are caused by making the campaign system too complicated.

This is a good list. Unfortunately, I can probably expand on it.

Campaigns aren't overrated, they genuinely can be fun, but the design issues are critical, and they can't work without committed players.

The best campaigns I've played/run were very limited in scope:

• max 3-5 battles
  
• one day duration
  
• drastically constrained strategic options
  
• minimal bookkeeping, or no bookkeeping

The biggest mistake I see (and have made) is to give players too much control of the strategic and/or operational situation. In a miniatures campaign, the battles are the whole point, so the campaign should serve to generate battles with just enough flavor added to give them a sense of the consequences of winning or losing. The strategic or logistical or political decisions players make should be simple 2-3 prong forks in a short decision tree. In fact, I wouldn't rule out presenting the strategic decision tree as an actual tree structure or flowchart diagram.

The umpire bottleneck isn't just a problem for the players, it's also a problem for the umpire. I decided to stop running WWI naval campaigns because every way I tried to do it burned me out.

Snowballing is a definite problem in open-ended campaigns, and it has to be designed out. I've found a few ways to prevent it that worked in the context of the specific campaign, but the main point is to have some way to prevent losing players from getting too far behind and winning players from rocketing ahead. IRL the rich get richer, but in a game the victors have to be constantly in danger of toppling off their perch.

One of my main takeaways, learned all the way back in the 1990s: to be successful, a campaign game must be a full game: written down, playtested, with balanced and self-regulating game mechanisms, easy to learn and teach, and very fast to play. Attractive and useful components are a huge boon.

They're fun but a lot of work

An extra problem I'll add to the OP list: campaigns tend to end after one battle.

In most wargame battles, the strategic context is a vague abstraction, so wargamers are habituated to thinking only in terms of going all-out to win right here, right now. Some players can be relied on to think strategically and retreat from a loss with an intact force, but most of the time the battle rules have to force the battle to end with a lot of leftovers, because most players are happy to fight to the last miniature and leave nothing to carry on the campaign. I've had more than one naval campaign end with one battle because there's not enough left for a second battle.

There is the added problem that players can burn out after the first battle (or get demoralized by losing) and no longer care enough about what happens next to play the campaign any further.

This isn't a big deal if the "campaign" is a single operation that is supposed to culminate in a big battle, and the main focus of the campaign is arranging the forces available, dispositions on the filed, and the timing (or absence) of reinforcements. I intend to run Jutland this way one of these days, and I have ideas for plenty of historical Punic Wars and Diadochi single-season campaigns that could work the same way.