I actually like Crusade. Maybe not as implemented, but at least as a concept. It sounds great to have a goal between games, and to have something to salvage from a loss – new abilities, Points you may wish to Track, etc. It’s just that it sucks, because none of it matters.
Defining “narrative gaming” is a difficult thing and not worth the effort, not least because of the often self-serving mythology around the term, but I kind of have to do it here, so bear with me. I think one working definition is that “narrative is when I get to tell you if your army is valid”, which is funny, but not super helpful (this can be, even less charitably, framed as “narrative is when I win, and competitive is when I lose”). Narration could be as simple as running a sub-optimal but heavily-themed army list, or just naming all your models. The basic-to-the-point-of-tautological definition is “using games to tell a story”, which is more useful for our purposes, so we’ll start with that one. It’s vague, but deliberately so – the story of your dudes growing as people and learning how to love, the story of who murdered who during the games, or the story of what happens between the battles/games (for Orks, this is also about murder). At any rate, the narrative is the connective tissue.
The issue with telling a story via games is that, inevitably, at some point, you are going to eat shit. Nobody wants to experience a story where their guys eat shit, but also, every game has a winner and a loser. Thus, one person’s story is always going to reduce to “I got my ass beat”, with varying degrees of “but I got some good hits in”. All narrative game design is based on resolving this tension.
In theory, Crusade is perfect for this. If you aren’t loving your odds, you can take an agenda that scores you faction-level Points for your Order of Battle, and ignore scoring primary mission points to accomplish it. Unfortunately that also doesn’t really work, because the game (the five battle rounds of Warhammer) doesn’t reward you with a W for doing this, and the Crusade itself doesn’t meaningfully do it either. If you take a dive in a game to advance your Ascension Day or Expansion of the Empire, nobody cares, because they aren’t affected by it. It doesn’t matter outside of your corner of the shared Google Doc.
When I say it doesn’t “work”, I know that the mechanics function, but they don’t mean anything. There’s no payoff. You don’t feel like you need to smoke a cigarette after you do it. I know this, because I’ve done it. In the T’au Empire crusade rules, one can decide that they only care about the Secret Ethereal Meeting agenda and earning Diplomat Points, without regard for the outcome of the battle. The army is expendable, and if you pull it off the casualties won’t matter. So I went for it. I went to my meeting, took a thorough loss in the game, updated my spreadsheet, and got a new planet or two. But because my Expanding The Empire didn’t impact my opponents’ Torchbearing, Daemonification, or Custodes Library Card, it didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. Me “capturing” a “planet” had no bearing whatsoever on anyone else’s control of anything. They were off updating their own scorecards, with their own planets, and I don’t think they even noticed what a delightful coup I was congratulating myself for pulling off. I didn’t even remember myself, a few games later. My randomized planet (that I want for the T’au Empire) isn’t the same as their randomized planet (that they want for the Tyranid Hive Fleet), so it’s a fair question to ask why we’re even fighting each other in the first place. That is not much of a narrative, in any sense.
I get what GW was going for with Crusade, it being a Personal Campaign System, and they achieved that goal, but it’s a self-defeating one: it turns out that third-party perspective is what makes story beats like the Heroic Sacrifice or Outsmarting Your Opponent Against Overwhelming Odds work. I think the core reason Crusade doesn’t do anything for my dopamine receptors is that it fits the technical definition of a narrative but has none of the spirit of one. Functionally, if not morally, there is no difference between earning the arbitrary collectible points versus just filling them in on my little tracker and saying I did it. No one will know, and they wouldn’t care if they did, because it doesn’t positively or negatively impact them in any way. The upshot of my deciding that the Empire was more important than my guys or their robot friends, as far as anyone else was concerned, was that Administratum showed me eating a 20-100 loss and gifting a Relic to one of the survivors. Everyone was campaigning, in parallel but alone, across the Onanism Sector.
What Crusade is missing then, is precisely what it’s good at: it’s trying to give players the space to tell their story without requiring them to interact with anyone else’s. The main reason this falls flat is that by not requiring it, Crusade also doesn’t allow it. Your narrative will never, can never, interact with anyone else’s. The games, yes, but the story that ties them together, no. At that point you’re just playing regular Warhammer but with a Boring Spreadsheet phase. Remember 7th Edition psychic powers? They’re back, in Excel form.
Agendas don’t matter for the outcome of the game, and while they can affect your meta-game (campaign, narrative, whatever you want to call it), it only matters for you. Every player has their own Errands to run, and can both succeed, thus “winning” (advancing that points tracker, which is what passes for a story), but it all happens in a vacuum. What I think Crusade needs, to really make it click, is a shared resource to fight over. That is commonly called a campaign, and it needs a semi-fixed roster, plus someone to manage the thing. What if you don’t have that, or don’t want to give up the flexibility?
As it happens, there is exactly one shared resource that’s already in the game: Victory Points. Since Agendas functionally replace Tactical Objectives in Crusade mode, why not attach victory points to completing them, in addition to the existing meta-rewards? That’s largely a rhetorical question, but there’s an actual answer to it. I’ll get to that, but in the meantime it is a pretty weird disconnect, that you can do your little search for bafmodads, and even if you get them it doesn’t show up on the scoreboard.
The argument against is this: allowing opponents to interact with each other’s Narrative is a two-edged sword. It’s more interactive if you can’t each pick your Agenda and both accomplish it on your own time, with an entirely incidental game of Warhammer 40,000 happening in and around you. On the other hand it incentivizes your opponent to not allow it. They can now cost you both the game and the meta-game at the same time, which is great value for money, just insane ROI. However, I would argue that they can already do that. It won’t help them, but it can sure as hell hurt you.
There already is an incentive to do this. To keep using T’au as an example, beating you at the game denies you your free Military Point. Some of us are just bad people and don’t need any incentive at all: I have definitely busted up an opponent’s agendas just for funzies if I was hungry or didn’t sleep well, and I will do it again. Aside from all that, if your narrative advancement requires your opponent to either show mercy or not pay attention – for them to let you tell the story you had in mind, effectively – I would argue that you aren’t actually participating in a collaborative storytelling experience. Maybe they are, but you aren’t. May as well tie it into the game score, at that point – you’re not losing anything.
I think the bad outcome is fine, and also pretty funny. Knowingly and deliberately losing a battle to win the war is often exactly what people claim to want, it’s just not always going to work out for them – sometimes you lose the battle and the war. You can sell out completely, position your entire army to guard the Ethereal Standup, and still get mowed down before you finish submitting Jira tickets. Good job.
No tweaks to game balance or mission design will ever entirely avoid that. This is inherently a competitive – as opposed to a co-operative – game, and trying to tell a story via PvP will always leave the door open for ego death. There are two other parties with agency (your opponent, and the dice) and they’re devoted to making the scenario play out the way they, not you, want. The “narrative” of a game – or series of games – can only come into focus after, not before: it is what actually happened, not what you went into it looking for. While I can understand not gating the storytelling and advancement content behind being successful at that part of it, it also makes all the narrative bits, happening for each player in isolation, feel somewhat tacked-on and decoupled from the act of Playing Warhammer. Why bother, at that point.
What would I do? I don’t know. This probably won’t surprise you if you’ve ever read my articles before, but I am very dumb, and bad at games also. As usual, I am not here to offer solutions, merely to complain.
I do think that organized campaigns are a great way to play Warhammer, at least for a while, before people get bored and wander off, or their lore-accurate list consequently develops an unfortunate narrative of doing lore-accurate stupid crap and getting pasted in every fight, and not quite the heroics they had in mind. I know that, as it exists in codexes, Crusade isn’t that thing. I know also that it isn’t generally trying to be, and more to the point that it cannot be.
If Nachmund Gauntlet is any indication, there seems to be a desire to get there, and maybe it even can, but I don’t think the extant Crusade system is going to be what does it. Nachmund looks fun – I haven’t tried it because I don’t get out much – but it’s solving the problem of campaigning alone together by just making it a formal campaign. That might in fact be the only solution, but I’ll leave it to actual game design folks to tell me whether this problem is tractable or not. If they do figure it out, I will sneak a back-dated edit into this article to make it look like I called it first.
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