Campaign victory conditions

What sort of objectives/victory conditions do you use in your campaigns?

We have just started our first map based campaign using the Mordheimer's Campaign Aid, and are having a problem trying to work out how it will end.

% of the map owned doesn't look like it's going to work out very well, as it could just be never ending.
I toyed with the idea of it being warband rating related, but have no idea what sort of ratings can be deemed "end game".

The last big competitive campaign we played we based the winner on "fame" after a fixed number of games. You earned fame points by winning scenarios, but also for killing enemy heroes and a few other odds and ends.

The very idea of the Border Town Burning supplement was to provide different objectives and create a non-linear narrative campaign experience.
http://bordertownburning.de.vu/

We've used several different ways of deciding the "winner" in the past.

For the Seal of Sigmund campaign the winner was the warband that possessed the titular Seal at the pre-set end date. The Seal was found at random during exploration (we had a campaign specific exploration chart) and lost with alarming frequency. While someone had it they got a raft of advantages but each time they used one of them they risked losing it again.

For the Bell, Book and Candle campaign (and the Dark Waters campaign before that) were map-based there was 1 point for controlling a "Special" location in the city and (that also gave in-game advantages) and D6-3 (with a minimum of 1 point) for the "normal" locations. Control of a location was gained by winning a game set there. If someone controlled a location you could take it from them by challenging them for it (it was a little more complex than that as it was based on Warband ratio divided by the number of locations held, but it would take ages to explain the actual rules!). The winner was the warband with the most campaign points.

In our current Under Lock and Quay campaign we are not doing anything so competitive. There is a sub-campaign involving Pit Fights between fighters "sponsored" by the player's warbands but the winner of that does not determine the winner of the Mordheim campaign. That is just an open-ended "free play", a few people are using more than one warband and it's going at a much slower pace than our previous ones (possibly as a result of this lack of structure!).

You usually have to pick-out the end game before you start.

The other thing I have seen that worked pretty well was an winner take all senario where the last warband standing or the one to take an item off the table won.

It didn't end pretty, but the last one standing we said was the winner.

I would suggest trying the BTB Objectives but you really have to start with them.

Also the playing X games then quitting winner is the one that meets a specific criteria, for example highest Warband Rating, or most Gold and/or Wyrd Stone. Or you could create some sort of Matrix of Points in which different things give you points towards the end game, kind of like the "Fame". Like wins would be worth points, so would rare items, kills, Exp, Ending Gold and Warpstone.

Personally I would suggest the BTB Objectives because they are pretty fun and they add a whole new flavor to the games.

Thanks, some really interesting things to think about here for our next campaign.

As we have only just started our current one we will try some tweaks to it and plan the next one better.

edit cos i can't type for toffee.

I can see toffee on the keyboard as a problem, sure enough.

My group is currently playing a Border Town Burning (BTB) campaign and highly recommend it. Previous to this campaign we had similar problems for determining a winner and all of our campaigns slowly died with no winner at all. It will *not* occur this time; there will be a winner!!

Oh yeah, forgot to say: we always have a big finale game with as many players as we can muster, a scattering of special rules and a big reward for the winner (not always enough to win the campaign but normally enough to throw the result wide open so the underdog has something to try for!).

This is a revised version of our Victory Point system to track nightly winners in our campaigns (added all together for the ten weeks gives us an overall standing) We play at a store so nightly winners gets store credit and games do have a time limit.

Your warbands success in the campaign will be determined by the number of Victory Points it has acquired. These points are scored as follows:

a) For each regular scenario win, you gain 9 Victory Points. For a tie, you gain 6. For a loss, you gain 3. Games will be timed, if there is no defined winner when time is up, the game will be considered a tie.

b) In addition, if you win as an underdog, you gain your experience bonus as VP.

c) If you warband is testing to routs you lose 1 VP from your total. You could win the match after you lose 25% of your warband, thus you would still lose one point because you are testing to rout.

d) If your warband takes an enemy Leader OOA, you gain +2 VP.

e) If you warband takes an enemy Hero OOA, you gain +1 VP for each.

f) If you warband takes an enemy Hired Sword OOA, you gain +1 VP for each.

g) In some scenarios, you can fulfill Special Objectives that give you extra VPs. Other items and conditions may also give you VPs.

Victory point totals will determine the winner for the tournament. All points are added from games played. The highest total will be the winner for the tournament. Tie breakers will go in the order of:
Total of Wins
Number of enemy leaders taken OOA
Number of enemy heroes taken OOA

Or - you could go with a winner take all... if you have the models. Bank and myself decided to go out with a bang, in the campaign we did YEARS ago... Decided to get both of our warbands (2 warbands each), gear them up with a free hired sword, a few Dramatis Personae, (using a final gift of 100gc, or something like that) and pit them against Vlad Carstein and his undead army. When I say army, I mean ARMY!!! This was fight to the death, as the fate of Mordheim was at cost.

So, depending on how many players, put up an equal or higher amount of army and see if you can survive!

Crimson Udder (I won't ask), your list is similar to the "fame points" we used. We had a system where warbands decided in secret what area they were exploring, so the number of warbands clashing in any one section on a given turn could vary; accordingly, we did have some variation in points for the winner depending on the number of warbands involved (and for really big fights, second place could even mean some fame points). Also, you could lose fame points if your captain was taken out of action, if any hero died, and if you voluntarily routed.

It used to be Crimson Fist, but everyone called me Rosy Palm...

We used to have another modifier in there that stated you recieved 1 less Victory point for voulentary routing.

Those VP look interesting but I'm not sure about encouraging killing enemy characters so much - they get enough unwanted attention anyway without sticking a target on their heads!

Yeah. But our take was "fame" points, so if you offed an enemy hero, the logic went, people would talk about it.

The only problem with fame points is it encourages hero assassination in a game where some warbands are just terrible at warband assassination.

Our yearly campaign I usually have run has grown from the casual game it started with into having multiple different objectives.

Warband rating should NOT be an objective. A 'good' warband should strive to balance its power with a lean rating - if you let your rating balloon up too high or keep around sub-par individuals, you get a high rating that gives away Underdog experience. Just keeping everything is lazy, not 'good play'. And some warbands can artificially inflate their count without actually doing anything. For example, a warband with a 20 man limit could grab a halfling cookbook (or a halfling), trade out henchmen for hired swords right before the end, and maybe hire a few Dramatis Persons.

To put it another way, I wouldn't want to be competing against rating if I had a 12 (wo)man Sisters of Sigmar warband going up against a Skaven Warband with 21 members... who buys Veskit the Executioner and his meaty 70 point "penalty" after the last game.

The lore says you're trying to collect Warpstone/Wyrdstone. One of our campaign goals was 'who had the most Wyrdstone'. To be honest, a BETTER goal would be 'who has the most warpstone divided by highest warband rating achieved', to achieve an efficiency number (not JUST how much wyrdstone is coming home but who got the most home with the least rating; specifically counting your HIGHEST so you don't just fire everybody but your warband leader who trucks across the landscape with dozens of treasured warpstone rocks to his boss, trying to convince them he didn't leave anybody behind).

We dropped rating for tokens at the end, although the above calculation is better. Either way, using tokens is a good idea, since warpstone is a winning condition but it is ALSO what you use to provide more 'stuff' for your warband. So you have to make this terrible decision of how much of your winning condition to give away now to get more of it later. Do you try to save it up jealously? Or do you sell lots of it hoping to invest in a winning warband that'll bring more of it home later to make up for your investment?

We also had winners on Sportsmanship (two votes for two different people, a private vote) and painting (another pair of votes, also private). To encourage games, we had a 'map' of Mordheim and an informal system of taking locations - win a game, add a piece of land to your unowned 'territory' that is connected; if you beat somebody, you can choose to instead take one of their territories. The idea being to get people who are running away with the game to fight each other to push the other down (effectively giving them +2 locations on somebody else) and not let anybody 'farm' others.

Finally, we had one last major megabattle. If there were more players than spots available, we started with the lowest rating and worked our way up. The winner took a victory.

So there were five victory conditions: Wyrdstone, Painting, Sportsmanship, Most Locations (sort of 'most wins'), and Victor of Final Mega-Battle.

The next ones will probably focus more on winning a weekly events and maybe the wyrdstone efficiency in favor of the map, plus a "wall of champions" idea: every player starts on a line with everybody else. If you win, you go up a spot or push the loser down a spot. All players may move up and down at will. However, if there are ever more than one 'open' levels with no players on them, that spot collapses down to one. So the player in the lead is no more than two losses away from the second place, and a 'pack' forms. The idea is to keep all the games close by and always allow a person to get in the running with a few wins... it was originally a "Club" idea. One problem with keeping track of wins is that a player who gets in more games will just run ahead of the pack long before the year is done. A wall like this means you can't just rest on your laurels - if a few players start winning streaks, they can catch up with you.

This should replace the territory idea.