Wednesday, November 3, 2010

(Inventing) Missions in 5th Edition (poll post)

I want you to do something for me. I want you to grab your rule book. I want you to flip to page 266. What does it say at the top of the page? "Inventing New Missions"
Feel free to mess with the missions!

Why does no one do this? Why does everyone, day in and day out play the 3 same missions in the 3 same setups. And some of the setup's don't even matter for some of the missions. Whenever I get pitched battle capture and control, it pretty much goes the same as spearhead capture and control in terms of deployment and how the game plays out.

I remember a world of many missions, scaled missions and when each codex also came with a mission tailored to that army. These worlds were known as 3rd and 4th edition, and they were great and full of variety. There were breakouts and pitched battles, alpha level to omega level. Meatgrinder. VARIETY!

Now the world is stagnant and repetitive. Yes there is Battlemissions, but those aren't the best of missions in my book, and not everyone bought the book either. And there is planetstrike, but that seems like it was a flash in the pan and no one plays it anymore. As well, it wasn't balanced well and I would consider it somewhat of an unfinished product. It could have been great, but ultimately it has disappointed I feel. Cityfight goes unused as well, as either people don't have enough terrain to do it or it is considered to archaic (written in 4th edition mind you, so I can kinda see that point). Apocalypse is a breath of fresh air, but it only has one mission and is intended for really BIG games of multiple people. What you see happen a lot with APOC is instead of the one standard mission, people make their own. Which brings me back to page 266 of the rulebook.

Did you even know of that page? Did you even know of pages 267-273 which contain 4 more missions already made with 5th Edition in mind? Why does no one play these?!?!

One problem I think is people can't think of Victory Conditions for a game, like objectives and kill points. But is really not that hard. You could just use scaled KPs like the old 'ard boyz rules (3 for HQ, 2 for Elite, FA, HS, 1 for troops and DT). Or you can use the old Victory point system (margin of victory should be used with it). You can combine the two. Units under 100 pts (or something like that) are 1 KP, 101-250 are 2, 251 to 500 are 3 KPs.
You can take inspiration from your old rule books, or from other games (WHFB for instance) or just play those old missions as are or slightly modified for 5e (KPs instead of VPs).
List of suggestions
-Escape the opposite board edge
-Kill a number of enemy ICs/MCs
-Destroy all the enemies vehicles
-Your opponent starts with the objectives and you cap/destroy them
-Protect/escort "civilians" or "prisoners"- models without weapons and just basic stats
-Boarding missions with limited playing area (space hulk sets or the like)
-Sabotage type missions
-Rescue type missions

If you are one of the people out there who does mess around with missions, who does actually take the time to do something different, then tell us what you do. Oh yeah, and you deserve this:

So now please everyone, answer the poll and tell me, how do you play your missions? Poll over there --->