I’ve named every ship and squadron in my Rebel and Imperial Star Wars Armada fleets.  I keep meaning to go back and name the ship captains and squadron leaders too, but just haven’t gotten that far.

I spent quite a bit of time on the army leaders and back stories for my All Quiet on the Martian Front factions.

Coming from a heavy roleplaying background, I LOVE good fluff in my gaming.  It makes it more than just board games and rules lawyering to me.

Great questions and great topic for a forum post.

For narrative in wargames, I would agree this comes with several “levels” or “scales.”

For working narrative into a wargame,  I’ve always found it’s key to ensure it has a mechanical impact in the game.  Weaving the effects of the narrative into the actual abilities of the man or unit is what knits the narrative and wargame mechanic together into an indivisible whole.

Pages and pages of badly-written fan-fiction is one thing, but if its doesn’t lead back to the table somehow, I find people tend to drop it or lose interest.

In Darkstar, what has the players keep coming back for years on end is accumulating campaign points.  Being in a battle and surviving gets you one.  Being on the winning side gets you two.  Sometimes if there’s an extremely large, important, or just dangerous (starship battle in the clouds of a gas giant, perhaps) you get a few more.  With every six points, you choose from a list of “Battle Upgrades” or “Campaign Upgrades” that either promote your rank, promote your ship (destroyer to light cruiser, for example), accurate gunnery, accurate torpedoes, elite aerospace fighters, elite marines, there’s a whole list.  You can win medals, win star systems, win wars, lose all the same, etc.

Some people cry “augh, paperwork! ”  Yes, because you have to count to six.  The horror.  Then they try to show me their notebooks of aforementioned fan-fiction.

In Historicals, we’ve done something similar, fighting through a year of the Eastern Front with Panzergrenadier Division Grossdeutschland with Avalon Hill’s PanzerBlitz.  We each picked a battalion somewhere in the division’s OOB, became that unit’s commander, recreated that battalion’s OOB, and tried to fight through a series of historical games recreating key battles from July of 1943 to August 1944.  Win a marginal victory, get a campaign point.  Lose your command vehicle, get a German Wound Badge.  Win a tactical victory, get an German War Cross 2nd Class (2nd Tactical Win gets you a War Cross first class, 3rd Tactical Win gets you Iron Cross 2nd Class.  4th Tactical Win gets you an Iron Cross first class).  Decisive victories got you Knight’s Cross, then upgraded to KC w/ Oak Leaves, then Swords, then Swords with Diamonds (none of us got that high …)

You could also upgrade your battalion with new units, better equipment, or even switch battalion “type.”  I wound up commanding II. Battalion, Pz Rgt Grossdeutschland,  (20 PzKpfw IV-Hs, 20 PzKpfw-V Panthers), German Wound Badge, Iron Cross 1st Class, Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Oberstleutnant rank.   My friend wound up commanding the division’s StuG battalion.  😀

Another way is to have a very light, very simple campaign map.  Whoever won the last battle gets to pick where the next battle takes place, and whether they are on attack or defense.  This allows the winner to shape (in a small but measurable way) the overall shape of the campaign.  It leads back to the table by allowing the winner of the last battle to shape the battlefield, choose the victory conditions, and determine opening initiative, almost like real commanders do.

One thing it doesn’t do is give the winner some kind of extra units or points bonus.  You hear horror stories of campaigns like this, where a few early wins might give one player a lead from which there is just no recovering for the other player(s).  A pitfall to watch out for.

This was the system we used for the Flames of War 4.0 Desert Boot Camp and the Western desert Bolt Action Boot Camp.  We literally created our own narrative simply by tracking where the wins and losses are, rather than just tallying up “W”s and “L”s.   The narrative here is an almost emergent property, as the winners get to draw the “big red arrows” on the general’s map, and drive toward key sites like enemy HWs, rail lines, bridges, cities, airfields, etc.  At these boot camps, you’d hear players mutter:  “Okay, we lost the last two but we HAVE to win this one …” because suddenly the battles became important in a larger context.

Just a few short ideas, I don’t want to paste up a wall of text.

There also the narrative that builds itself if you continously field the same fixed army everytime you play (ala Nigel Stillman’s approach). Some units will forever have the memory of the time they did that heroic thing/underperformed beyond all reason.

I must admit I’ve been thinking about the ‘narrative’ aspect in games and I’d argue it’s not scale but the player who decides to go down that route.
Some will name every unit and every single person when given time and inspiration strikes them.
Others will only do the high level stuff.

You can’t force a narrative onto players, but players can create a narrative out of any game(system).
Those that lack ideas of their own can be helped by a rules light narrative campaign system. It never needs to be more than “this is the map / these are the regions / if you win you get to decide where to fight next”

There are players out there who will play games as a pure mechanical excercise.
I’d argue that these are the ones that are likely to ‘break’ any campaign system that gives advantages as they are playing the system and not the game.

@oriskany that campaign in both FoW and Bolt-Action was great. It was that tiny bit of extra that made the games a bit more fun to play.

Thanks, @limburger. Indeed, that “campaign narrative” system was extremely simple and light, the last thing I wanted was the perception of trying to “take over” the boot camps.  But just marking where the battles were taking place and where the wins and losses were unfolding within the campaign context – hopefully gave each battle a “relationship” to all the others and thus a cogent and mildly compelling narrative emerged for the event.

@crazyredcoat – “As soon as a unit staying around gives it benefits you become a little more attached to it, in that sense, though the ‘overpowered pitfall’ is deff something to keep tabs on.”

This is very true.  Darkstar addresses this issue with a two-tier narrative upgrade system: Campaign Upgrades and Battle Upgrades.  Campaign upgrades are “off the table” upgrades, they do not effect the course of the game in any way.  Faster Darkstar waves for enhanced FTL travel, promotion in rank, upgraded command rating, reduced repair times, and so on – these things do not directly impact game play on the actual table … and so do not jack up the cost of your starship (s).

Battle upgrades do effect the table play, better shielding, better EW, gunnery accuracy, gunnery impact, thrust, initiative, and so on.  Each battle upgrade jacks up the your point cost by base cost x 20%.

So you have so you have destroyers like USS Oriskany or @damon ‘s HMS Sheffield that started at roughly 40 points, and now cost 130 poinst and 90 points respectively.  Yes, the Oriskany is badass, but she always has to fight triple her weight.  She’s the USS Enterprise of Darkstar, elite and prestigious, but always gets the toughest missions as a result (why is Enterprise always “the only ship in the sector?”).  Because of her point value, she’s also the prime target for opposing players in tabletop play.  HMS Sheffield is the same way, just double instead of triple.

Conversely, you have players like @rasmus who take campaign upgrades like promotion, command rating, and upgraded ship types, trading up from light cruiser to heavy cruiser and now a battleship/battlecruiser (with the extra promotions and training a commander needs for these new billets).  True, his individual ships don’t grow more expensive, he just trades in for bigger ships which are more expensive out of the shipyard (e.g., his new “battlecruiser” costs a full 282 points out of drydock).  But he had to promote to Captain, then Commodore, while also promoting to Task Force Command – command of certain warships types is illegal at certain ranks (no Lt. Commanders with their own battleship, for example).

This is a simplified view, the actual case between campaign and battle upgrades is almost always a blend between the two.

But we definitely allow players to chart their own career for their own captains and command crews, building a narrative legacy for their warships and crews as they see fit.

The point is, we definitely want our “narrative” system to make ships, battlegroups, task forces, and fleets more powerful, but have a robust system in place to track the point cost of these improvements to ensure players don’t “run away” with the “overpowered pitfall” you describe.

@crazyredcoat I think ‘scale’ may make it easier to add detail.
It’s weird to tell stories about sergeant Joe who held the ground in a 15mm Flames of War battle, because there are no individuals (technically not true as ‘warriors’ allow for this).

And yet it isn’t impossible although the focus is more likely to shift to named vehicles.

As such I’d say : those that want to add narrative can dos so at any scale even if it appears impossible at first glance.
I can’t imagine naming all soldiers in a 15mm soviet horde … but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done.

@deamonwolf I’d argue that your lack of joy for the game is making it hard to add narrative to 40k.
I know that I will have some sort of background narrative for my 40k spacemarines (when I get to that project)
Do we really need ‘official’ rules telling us when and where to add narrative ?
It is kind of nice that GW are adding them into the next iteration of AoS and the current version of 40k, but other than time and resources there is nothing stopping us from creating our own.

I’d imagine that any club playing any game could tell you interesting stories about the battles they’ve fought.
The games become the story …