Narrative Play

[henrywalker]

So I'm really liking the new focus on narrative play and I hope it has been really well realised. 

 

I've got this idea for it and I wonder what you guys think. Basically I want to come up with a scenario/mission against my nurgly goodness with a decent bit of fluff and some cool narrative rules that I can advertise to my local gaming group and let them have at it. They can bring any army (within a points limit or some other limit) and try to play my mission against my army and see how well they can do. I could have something of a score board on our group's Facebook page and even write battle reports. 

 

I'm thinking of a zombie uprising in a hive city. What with the addition of all the pox walkers i'm planning to buy i'll have 270 zombies who want something to do and that should be just enough to make the game quite Walking Dead-ish. 

 

I could have spawning sites for zombies to deploy like they are climbing out of the ground and i'm thinking that the main objective would be to stop the coven of Nurgle sorcerers from continuing their re-animation spell. 

 

Would you guys be interested in something like that? have any of you done anything similar? any suggestions fro ways to make it work?

 

Also, do you think it would be best to try and make it evenly matched, or perhaps would it be better for it to be very difficult for the challenger to win. 

[the jeske]

Before you start writing scenarios or even chains of them, it is probably a good idea to find 3-4 people that one to play narrative on a regular basis. Then have a chat with all people present about what everyone wants from narrative type of playstyle[if 2 dudes want to play ambush scenarios and two want to play gigantic battles, it is important to know that before investing in to the game], and then as a group write up common rules everyone should follow. After all of that you can do everything else, but the intitial steps are very important. IIf everyone does have the same way of thinking about narrative games, it may end up realy unfun for some people.

[Archaeinox]

Not to insult your gaming group, but you need to make sure you aren't playing some cheese mongers first.

[the jeske]

Good armies and good builds are not somehow exclusive from narrative play. Some of the best armies in 7th were 101% fluff based. So again the most important thing is what people want from narrative games, the rest is a secondary matter. If one dude want to pit a triple base box of plague marines in an epic stand off fight vs a horde of enemies and the other one wants to play a stealth skirmish game of 2-3 squads and no characters, it is going to be hard to find common ground. the power aspect of armies in narrative or scenario driven games is never a problem, because your constructing armies on the go with your opponent. And to a degree if someone goes very historical and very narrative, you kind of a stop having an opponent.