Anderas wrote:I wonder how one can play a story-campaign just against the boardgame, without Game master.
The base game is also arranged in a story mode, but we were never doing anything but searching for a mission in "our" difficulty and then playing it. Story? forgotten.
The missions/ quests in the CRB are sort of a progressing story, though it's admittedly fairly light. This mini-campaign, on the other hand, is definitely set up to progress the campaign's story. Mainly it does this by taking cues from games like Descent 2.0 and I.A. where the outcome of a given mission determines what comes next. That said, there are really only four unique missions and one clean up mission that gets recycled if the party scrubs out.
I suppose I'd put it on par with the Game Night mini-campaigns from the Modern game. But the nice difference here, is that there are little new mechanics introduced in the missions, which mainly relate to the quest at hand (so they do not change the core game). These extra little bits and pieces of altered game play set these quests apart somewhat from the main game.
Where
Places of Interest, (the first "Campaign"), was really just a handful of "Boss Levels" that could be dropped in between other quests,
The Fire God is more like a Module--again, if primarily a short one.
But yeah, at the end of the day, it's still Zcide, so at the heart of the game is skirmish against the A.I. with theme taking center stage over story-telling while playing. Z:BP is still not a traditional crawler in that regard. I think the way to address that, would, as has been mentioned previously in the context of other games, would be to have sort of a Legacy approach, where snippets of story would be revealed based on choices made by the party, either via a choose your own adventure kind of mechanic, or a sealed deck of cards or something. Neither would be that great for replayability unless REALLY well designed. Zcide is kind of light for that sort of thing.
Alternately, of course, you can always add a GM, but that changes everything.
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