As primarily an RPG designer/GM, it’s excellent to see the principles that guide good campaign structure and player-facing design applied in this context. Excellent video, thank you for sharing!

500 like! Yippee! 🎉 So excited to voraciously consume every video on this channel like Kirby eating a multi-tier strawberry shortcake.

I have played a game where our characters were "navigating" a haunted labyrinth. We would travel down long hallways and up and down stairs until we came across intersections where the GM would stop narrating and ask us which direction we wanted to go. Not only was there no information to inform our choices, but the floorplan constantly shifted. So while the set piece was interesting, the novelty quickly wore into boredom. Playing through this scenario really taught me about the importance of information in making a choice feel meaningful.

That was great, Sam! Meaningful player choice is so important to having fun when gaming, and you explained why perfectly.

As much as I love Crusade and Path to Glory, they often feel more like narrative book keeping than narrative play to me. Let’s get some revolutionary mission design next! I want meaningful, asymmetric interactions with in-game consequences that tell a compelling story.

This has been a great triptych for game designers, thank you! I'm so glad I stumbled across your channel a few months ago.

I am really enjoying your videos. The breakdown of the different campaign trees, and how to improve them has the cogs in my brain churning, and I'm excited for the next video.

Your simple example of improving the matrix campaign got me so excited, this is like magic! Now I want to apply this to my next games!

I'm really liking your game design videos. You're taking a serious approach to analyzing flaws and solutions in existing games, very insightful and fun! I like your examples with diagrams, just hearing a guy talk can be boring otherwise :)

Great video! I love that you emphasize critique as a sound game design methodology. Also I appreciate that your video thesis is clear in the title and thumbnail.

Getting very worn out on titles like "Youre Doing THIS Wrong" or "The One Thing About the Thing"

Subbed!🎉

The early GW campaigns like Lichemaster or Hour of the Wolf used a somewhat flatter campaign structure.
Essentially, they had a bunch of independent prequel battles that could be played in any order and then everything culminating in the final battle with surviving troops and boons gained for victories.

One wargame that I think had a really neat campaign system was A Call to Arms: Babylon 5. It doesn't use any of the models presented in this video. Instead, at the start of the campaign the players randomly generate a star system with a given number of "Strategic Targets" to compete for control of. There are different kinds of targets, each of which provides a unique bonus to the player. A Drydock makes your repair actions more efficient, an Agrarian world provides you with a steady stream of new recruits, a Jump Gate reduces the cost of reinforcing your fleet with new ships, Asteroid Fields provide a source of income but can be hazardous to fight in, etc.
At the start of each campaign turn, players go in initiative order declaring what strategic targets they are attempting to capture that turn, and any other player can choose to contest them. If they do so, the two players fight a battle for that target by dispatching ships from their fleet to that location. Ships can only participate in a single battle per turn, so a player that aggressively tries to block their opponents runs the risk of not having enough forces available to achieve their own objectives for the turn. Once all players have declared their actions and all battles have been resolved, each player generates a pool of resources based on the type and number of strategic targets they control. These resources can be used to repair or upgrade existing ships, or bring new ships in as reinforcements. The campaign turns continue ticking over until either one player has captured all of the strategic targets in the system, or when all other players have conceded defeat and withdrawn their forces from the system.

I'm so excited for the next episodes in this series! Have you had a look at the narrative components of the Fallout Factions game? IIRC they've tweaked it a few times, but the core of it is pretty cool.

I had never understood how to create a meaningful choice, this video was really helpful. Thanks a lot

Very interesting. Your game knowledge explains my problems with the narrative campaigns in 40k books in a way that I didn’t understand before. So glad I found your channel

always interesting to learn the diagnostic tools of designers

Excellent videos again. Thank you for making the focus of your videos to get your viewers to take part in the design process.

Really looking forward to the next installment!

Halfway through the video (I'm at the scarcity dilemma) and I must say this is your best video so far. Your insights as a games designer are clear and powerful. Excellent job. I will definitely be applying all that you've said in my GMing and wargaming.

The wide variety of games you use in your examples is really good.

Great breakdown, would be great to see more of this philosophy showing up in narrative products.