The Walking Dead: Map-based Campaign

[DaVinci's Cat]

Life & Death and Supplies.

The life & death part of this is fairly simple and well constructed; at the end of every game, casualties that were removed during the game and survivors that were bitten perform a variety of dice rolls to see if they return for future battles and if they do, how their starting health is affected. All done in sight of your opponent and fairly standard campaign fare. There’s even a bit where you can perform an emergency amputation on a character that has ‘died’ from been bitten should you really wish to keep them in your crew! If a character dies permanently, all equipment that they were carrying during the game is also lost.

One consideration I’ve being mulling over is when a model is removed from a battle as a casualty (not bitten), they roll one white die and the number rolled is the number of health points that ‘are deducted from the starting value in the next game’. So what happens if a) they survive the next game or b) get removed as a casualty again?

For situation a, I’d be tempted to say that that if they survive the next game, they start the following game back at full strength (they’ve had time to recover from their injuries) otherwise it wouldn’t take too much to start depleting your crew quite quickly. So this begs another question, can you ‘bench’ the character for the next game and allow them to recover fully for the following or should they have to participate with the reduced starting health before fully regaining their health? Personally I prefer the former, but keen to hear others views. Or do they recover x health points per campaign turn (up to their maximum) provided they don’t get removed as a casualty in the meantime?
For situation b, I can see this being very much a cumulative effect, and if you get removed as a casualty two games on the trot, barring some Sven-esque dice rolls, that particular character is likely to be zombie fodder/on their way out…

Experience

In the Miles Behind Us (but not the map-based campaign) expansion, there were rules for gaining experience. Basically, at the end of every game, a character that was not removed as a casualty, received an Experience Bonus of 1 Red Die and had their points value increased by 3 pts. The die could then be allocated to any of the survivor’s melee, shoot or defence characteristics, or saved to spend on other improvements later on.
After calculating any experience increases, survivors can exchange any 2 red dice (from their characteristics or saved dice pool) for a single white die, or 2 whites for a single blue. The only caveat here is that not characteristic may have a total of more than three dice. In addition, you can exchange any three dice to upgrade a survivor’s nerve by one level or to learn a special rule of your choice.
I have to say, I quite like the idea of using the experience rules as it will allow you to develop your characters in your own particular manner and you’ll be able to see them grow as the campaign progresses. Along with the joy of seeing that character butchered by bad dice rolls and hordes of walkers…

Supplies

The map-based campaign rules give you 5 points for every space on the map that you control (excluding your home location), and 10 for Washington City spaces. You also get an additional 10 points if you won the last game and 5 if you drew. These points may be spent on new survivors, equipment cards etc etc. Any left over points are recorded and kept of the next campaign turn. All well and good. Previous rulesets also gave you 10 points for each supply counter you controlled when the game ended. Personally I quite like this as it provides a degree of motivation and bonus for chasing down those tokens. Supply tokens generally yield something useful such as bandages, ammo reloads, weapons etc. Although the campaign rules don’t mention it, what are people’s thoughts about characters/crews keeping the equipment found and adding it to their crew inventory for use in later games as well? If this was the case, we’d have to have a ‘mandated’ set of supply cards per game/location to ensure a sensible spread of equipment rather than suddenly finding and Matrix-esque style gun cache in the middle of a parking lot…

Within these sections, the rules also note that no matter how many points you have to spend, you may never have more than 12 survivors in your group – so choose wisely, and also go on to describe the ‘Under-Dog’ bonus (which I’ve mentioned before) but effectively seeks to even up where possible two opposing crews that have grown at different rates. Effectively for every full 15 pts difference between the 2 groups, the one with the lower value gain 1 red die which it puts into a pool for that game. These dice may be added to any attack or defence roll but no more than one underdog die may be used on a single roll. Dice not used by the end of the game are lost.

Solo Rounds?

Given comments about using scenarios during the campaign rather than just a straight out scavenge mission, what are people’s thoughts on playing a couple of solo missions during the campaign (potentially under the watchful eye/zombie control of another player)? From a narrative perspective, and certainly in the early campaign stages when your fledgling group is just getting to grips with the new post-apocalyptic world, you are more likely to just come up against zombies rather than other survivor groups. It may also help in getting any of the less experienced TWD players settled into the mechanics of the game before going up against more more regular players – that said though, both Sven and I regularly struggle to hit the broad side of Herschel’s barn with a banjo from more 6 ft away so it probably wouldn't be that much of an issue in that respect…

As always, thoughts and comments welcome…

[DaVinci's Cat]

With a view to sorting out a campaign and getting it off of the ground, I’m about to start pulling together a set of campaign rules/guidelines. These will very much follow the published rules but with a few additions/improvements and the comments/ideas in this post are just to test the water around the main areas and get a consensus before pulling it all together.

So to start with:
a. We need 2+ players and the campaign will run for a number of turns equal to twice the number of players.
b. At the end of the designated number of campaign turns, the top 4 factions (in terms of points) will play a multiplayer game will be played to decide the overall winner.
c. Each player names their faction. If you have a faction logo, even better. Published Characters from the game will be considered faction-less allowing players to pick and choose across all available characters (although clearly some work better within their ‘current’ faction than others).
d. Each player should choose a group worth up to 125 pts. Survivors in your group cannot change (unless they die, or if some other bonus allows it). Equipment cannot be exchanged but can freely be swapped between survivors between games.

Restrictions
Starting Groups may not:
a. Include any character worth more than 50 pts.
b. Include custom survivors.
c. Purchase any equipment card costing more than 20 pts.

Additional Campaign Rules – Characters and Equipment

a. Injured characters (those that were removed as casualties during the game and have made an injury roll) gain back 1 health point per campaign round (up to their original maximum) if they were alive/in play at the end of that campaign round game. If the character was removed as a casualty again, a further injury roll is made as per the published campaign rules. You can also ‘bench’ the character for any number of games (rest and recuperation) gaining back 1 health point per campaign round sat out.

b. Characters can only be in possession of a number of supply tokens equal to their pack size. This does not affect the number of items/equipment a character can carry.

c. Factions gain an additional 5pts (in the Supplies Phase) for every supply token in their possession at the end of the game.

d. Factions get to keep the equipment found during the game if still holding it at the end. There might have to be some consideration here around dropping of supplies during a game should the character be taken out. If some-one found a particularly nice piece of kit (handgun, ammo reload, bandages etc), it could be interesting to try and get it off of them before the groups slink away back to their camps. Standard/themed supply decks are probably needed for this as mentioned previously.

e. Named equipment cards are limited to one per faction. Eg: you can’t have more than 1 of Rick’s Hatchet. You can of course have Rick’s Hatchet, Tyresse’s Hammer and Michonne’s Katana all at the same time if you’ve got cash! Like characters, if these items are lost during a game, they are gone for the duration of the campaign.

f. Veteran Skills (upgrade cards) are only available to characters that have successfully completed 2 games i.e. have not been removed as casualties. (Should this be 3?) As per the published rules, characters are limited to 1 Veteran Skill upgrade card. These upgrade cards are in addition to those you can get through the experience section.

As always, thoughts and comments welcome.


I do have a set of MDF hex’s on the way from Sarissa (about 144 tiles!) with the intention of making up a 3D map to campaign across. The intention is to have a set of starting points for factions, and pre-defined positions for rivers/interstates/forests etc. Everything else will be blank until the tile is explored and then randomly drawn from a pool. (There may have to be several smaller pools split into areas to ensure a spread of locations and preventing all of the Gun-stores appearing next to each other for example). With that in mind, how many of the following Special location tiles do you think that there should be in the overall pool? The intention is not only to help balance the map but I’d also like to try and model the special location on the tile. Somehow.

Prison
Police Station
National Guard Outpost
Hospital
Campsite
Church
Suburbs
Gun Store
Train Fuel Depot
Farm
Mini-Mart
Construction Site

[Dave]

Looks all well thought out to me.

WRT number of special locations maybe just go with No. of players x 2 or something, would mean not all locations are utilised. I’d also say no multiples but hard to judge as a layman what effect that would have (I.e someone has a gun shop but some else doesn’t would be too unfair?)