brainstorming a different approach to campaigns
I'm still looking for some kind of campaign framework for my SoG battles.
So far I've been thinking about theater-based campaigns, like To Glory we Steer or something around the Mauritius campaign. But while I'm not discarding those ideas, I'm not sure they are quite capturing the elements I'm looking for.
In particular, my age-of-sail interest stems primarily from the series like Aubrey/Maturin and Hornblower, and these derive much of their narrative momentum from the idea of following the individual commander as he rises in the ranks over a period of years. This seems hard to model in a theater-based context.
While I don't want to go down a role-playing D&D type rathole, this has prompted me to think about a looser campaign framework, in which a player has a commander (or maybe a small group of commanders) and tries to get him (or one of them) up to the rank of admiral over the course of many battles. This would be similar to how the solo rules for WoG include an element of tracking individual pilots over time as they fly missions, gain experience and get promoted, etc.
Ideally there would be:
- a way to generate missions (SoG games) for commanders, based on their rank, with perhaps not exact balance, but close enough to be playable
- templates for different kinds of missions, so it's not always just a straight-up battle
- a way to evaluate results to determine when the player gets promoted, assigned to command a different ship/squadron, etc.
Theoretically this could be played solo. Fully operational honest-to-goodness solo rules would be ideal, but actually SoG has been working ok for me as a solo game as-is. It could also be cooperative, as I've seen people play WoG missions together using the solo rules. But such a campaign could also be run competitively. For example, the mission generator might pit two players' commanders against each other some times, and other times pit one player's commanders against another player acting as anonymous spoiler.
Just some thoughts for the moment...
