Hi all,
I am here with some bonus information from the 2023 Great Crusade survey! One of the particular bits of information I was curious about was if narrative players wanted events to use the Crusade rules. Check out what I discovered after the jump…
The Argument:
Crusade rules are great for longer campaigns where you have time to update your roster between every round. For narrative events, organizers can find themselves in a bind. If you use the rules then you either need to reduce the number of games played, or elongate the day in order to accommodate all the book keeping. On the other hand, ditching the rules gives you more time, but also might annoy players who want to use the rules. There are other pluses and minuses too. The crusade rules frees the event organizer from developing any progression rules to spice up the narrative. However, some rules cause narrative issues (oh look the Genestealer cult just overthrew the planet at the same time it joined the Tau empire….), to say nothing of the game imbalances.
Results:
As you can see, the majority of players prefer that these events use these rules. There is a caveat with this chart. We don’t know how many of these players actually went to a weekend event. It is possible the 27.8% is made up largely of players who went to weekend events, and did not have fun. I tried breaking down the campaign satisfaction question in the survey a bit more by event length.
Now he law of small numbers applies here but it looks like players who attended weekend events were not appreciably more dissatisfied then the other groups.
Recommendations:
Right now I think I would advise event organizers to use Crusade rules in their events, but there might be room for some accommodations. If you need more time to help players build their rosters, I would recommend playing one game at a smaller points value, or maybe making one game optional so payers can opt into a heavy playing burden. These rules still appear to be very popular with players, thus finding ways to incorporate them into the event would be a good idea.
And remember, Frontline Gaming sells gaming products at a discount, every day in their webcart!
