Alternate Approaches to Scenarios

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Multiple Scenarios

The one really great thing (in my opinion) to come out of War of the Ring is its approach to scenarios.  As with 40K, there’s a little table and you roll for the random scenario for the game.  Where it differs from 40K, though, is that you roll more than one time.  So, you could roll up a game that’s both King of the Hill and Kill Points, for example.  Each scenario comes with a set of victory points, which you total up to see who’s won.

Now, we’ve been muttering about trying to play 40K this way pretty much all year.  The only sticking point is how to make the goals of the different scenarios roughly comparable.  Because, in theory, winning at one when your opponent wins at another should result in a draw.  It’s easy to compare how objectives in Seize Ground and objectives in Capture & Control should work together, but it gets a little tricker with Kill Points in Annihilation.  If we make the assumption that the average 40K army has 12 Kill Points (which seems like a reasonable assumption to me), we can say the following:

  • Seize Ground: Each objective is worth 3 VP.  That gets us an average of 12 VP, with a minimum of  9 VP and a maximum of 15 VP.
  • Capture & Control: Each objective is worth 6 VP.
  • Annihilation: Each Kill Point is worth 1 VP.
When talking about multiple scenarios, though, what happens if you roll Seize Ground and Capture & Control?  Do you get up to seven objectives on the table?  That seems crowded.  So, I imagine that if one rolled both scenarios, that it’d be the two objectives in the deployment zone,  plus d3 additional objectives.  The two deployment objectives could then be either 6 VP apiece, with the additional objectives being 3 VP, or we could combine them so the deployment objectives are 9 VP and the additional ones remain 3.  I don’t know how I feel about that.
Capture, Not Control
Anyone will agree that Capture & Control is really sort of built for the draw.  Most of the games I’ve played end up that way: I hang onto my objective while my opponent hangs onto theirs.  What if your objective doesn’t matter as much as your opponent’s (or at all)?  (I have no doubt in my mind that everyone else on Earth has thought about this already but, hey, I’m on a roll.)  This could go two ways:
  • Only your opponent’s objective matters: If you control your opponent’s objective, and your opponent doesn’t control yours: you win.  If both of you control each others’, or if no one controls their opponent’s objective, it’s a draw.   This feels to me like it would actually produce more draws, however, and possibly reward armies that are more in your face than ones that aren’t.
  • Your opponent’s objective matters more: If we’re working with the multiple scenarios setup above, we can weight the different objectives differently.  (Well, we could weight them even if Capture & Control was the only scenario, but it wouldn’t matter.  It’d be functionally identical to only having your opponent’s objective matter, as above.)

    I imagine this would work out like making your opponent’s objective worth 9 VP and your objective worth 3 VP.  In other words, it would make your objective just like any other objective… but your opponent’s objective as important as almost all of the other objectives on the table.

Hidden Agendas
This popped into my head in response to a goofy tournament format Ben suggested on the IFL forum (which is interesting, but I suspect is fundamentally too subjective to be wholly viable) and is also likely worlds away from being an original idea.
What if you didn’t know what your opponent’s scenario was?