What does narrative wargaming mean to you? If your main or only experience is Warhammer, there’s a good chance you associate “narrative” gaming with a table of heavily-randomised effects sitting on top of your Matched Play experience, quite often meaning that you roll a dice at the start of each round, and on a 6 something insane happens and the game collapses in on itself.
Narrative wargaming doesn’t have to mean “Nobody cares who wins, so here’s some broken rules”. To illustrate my point: Professional sport is crammed with narratives, and pro sport is pretty much the polar opposite of “Nobody cares who wins”.
The truth is that getting stories out of our games is something that we all can enjoy, and the idea that a given person is either a competitive player or a narrative player just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. And that’s the heart of what I’ll be setting out to address in today’s article:
- How and why narrative can be part of – and enhance – every wargame experience, including competitive GTs.
- Some practical tips and ideas for putting that joie de vivre back into your wargaming – competitive wargaming included.
Reclaiming the Narrative
Fundamentally, most of us get into miniature wargaming because:
A) We like playing with toys; and
B) We appreciate the challenge of making a series of meaningful, strategic decisions with those toys
This hobby is miniature wargaming, and both of those words matter. So that’s where I think narrative gaming often gets a bad rap: ostentatiously imbalanced rules don’t add to your experience – they ruin it, by shattering the opportunity to significantly influence the outcome through your own strategic decisions. You’ve effectively been denied the wargaming experience you came for.
So today I want to reclaim what that word narrative means in a wargaming context:
Every game can have a narrative. EVERY game.
The word narrative fundamentally just means sharing a story, and who doesn’t like cool stories? We’re all nerds here, and at some point the minis – and the worlds built around them – are what drew us in.
So how can we incorporate narrative into our wargames? I’m going to separate this into two categories: the stories within games, and the story between games.
Flow: The narrative within a game
What’s the least thematic game in the history of human distraction? I’d put Tetris in that conversation. You’re not exactly naming your characters and writing a backstory for Tetris – there is no back story, there are no characters and it’s not even presented like you’re defending Moscow from a barrage of blunt, geometric missiles. It’s literally just blocks moving around on a screen.
And yet. Even within a game like Tetris, there is narrative of a kind. It starts off slow and easy, pieces floating down gently like you’re standing on the moon. Then it gets quicker. And quicker. You’re scrambling, but you’re keeping on top of it – just about – teeing up that big moment where you line up a 4-column. Bam! Thank fuck. But the screen quickly starts to fill back up again and you feel the tension escalate, keeping your mind clear and your fingers nimble as the screen fills up, and fills up, and fills up, until finally BANG it’s all over, and your heart is pounding. Like every Helsmiths batrep political career, Tetris always ends in defeat.
Contrast that to a bad game of AOS, and we’ve all had one. You spend half an hour deploying your units on the table, up pops the KO and you pack them all away again. GG. And it’s not just KO that can ice a game early: over the years it’s been Gore Gruntas or Nurgle Flies zipping up the board and pinning you in deployment, or winding the clock back a bit further, 2x 30 Hearthguard jumping onto the middle objectives in Duality of Death. The game’s over before it began, and thanks for coming.
Weeks of painting, 30 minutes of deployment and you’ve been denied the experience of anything that could usefully be described as a game. Even though that AOS matchup was superficially more narrative than Tetris – one of your minis that got blasted off the table at the end of an aethermatic shotgun was probably a named character – you’ve been denied the opportunity to make strategic decisions, as well as the opportunity to watch a game develop or experience any cool “Remember that time when?” stories.
You’ve been denied the emergent narrative inherent to a flowing wargame, and that’s why it was a negative play experience. It’s not just losing – we all lose games, but being denied the experience of even playing the game in any meaningful way feels pretty crap.
This might all seem very theoretical, but I do think the point is quite important: the emerging storylines we naturally get from games of Warhammer are narrative in the purest sense of the word. Narrative is the epic cinema of a Wurrgog Prophet staring down Archaon, not just naming your characters and it certainly doesn’t have to come from a $90 supplement with shit rules.
The narrative between games
If you’re feeling really energized, you can run a Matched Play campaign:
https://plasticcraic.blog/category/campaigns/
We ran a global campaign earlier this year where people played their normal 2000-point Matched Play armies, and all the campaign stuff was what happened in-between their games. This meant our players could take part all over the world against their own local opponents – some even took their campaign armies to RTTs and GTs – because the games themselves were Matched Play in its purest form.
In this campaign, games played (and won) with your army became a currency to conquer territories on the map between rounds – we also had points awarded for things like thematic conversions and painting units, but the fact we were taking part in a campaign did not directly intrude on the actual gameplay experience. It was layered on top, and helped us make a few memories.
On a similar note, I’ve always wanted to run an invite-only “Map Campaign in a Day” as an event. Normal tournament games and normal tournament armies, but with a map-conquest stage between rounds. Maybe one day.
Practical Ideas
Let’s look at some ways you can bring narrative into your own wargaming. There’s a spectrum here of how much “leaning in” is involved, but even if you cringe at the idea of yelling WAAAGH! out loud, there’s plenty of ways you can enjoy it.
Play for Bits: Bring a bits box with you, and the winner gets to take something as a trophy. Use a Stormcast helmet as basing material, stick an Orruk head on a flag pole, have your unit Boss swing a looted weapon around over his head. This is probably best done in local games with your mates, so it’s reciprocal, but there’s nothing stopping you taking your bits box to a GT and making a Unilateral Declaration of Joy. You can both play the most hard-edged competitive game, and when you look back at your minis years later, you’ve still got the trophy to show for it.
Reverse Trophies: Similar to using loot as above, but in reverse. For example every time your Maw Krusha gets shot off the board, stick an arrow into him with a dribble of Blood for the Blood God. Make your minis into a living memory of lessons learned the hard way.
Name your Characters: An obvious narrative flourish, but you can also tie that in to stuff that’s happened in-game and make some memories that way. Check out my converted Overtyrant on Great Maw (who uses the Frostlord warscroll):
And if you want to see how he earned that name, he did it across 8 competitive games:
Qualitative Achievements: I’ve written a full Patreon article on this one. Sometimes it can be cool to set yourself little “Achievement Unlocked” challenges, especially if you’re not taking a list with a serious shot at the podium. Things like counting how many mortal wounds your jacked-up Scuttleboss can punch out, having a competition between Kragnos and your Stonehorns for who can get the most charge mortals, tracking the scalps that your Wurrgog Prophet takes over the weekend. Any time I’ve done something like this and shared it on the socials, it seems to get a lot of buy-in: I think there’s something about it that appeals to a wargamer’s brain, so give it a go.
“How does it die?”: And finally, thanks to Kyle (Dadbod Napgod) for this suggestion1: “Something I try to do in my games is when my opponent kills one of my important pieces or one of their units spikes all of its rolls and overkills my last Varanguard, I ask them “How does it die?” when I remove the model. DnD style. I’ve gotten some awesome descriptions for the many amazing deaths my Sorc Lord has died.
Narrative as a TO
Let’s close it out with some ideas for how a TO can encourage these ideas at their event, and hopefully help their players to enjoy it even more:
- It’s pretty common to see points dished out in the pack for naming your characters.
- You can suggest bringing a bits box in the event pack, maybe even award a couple of tourney points for doing so or have a small prize for the coolest bit donated.
- You can have themed prizes: maybe a trophy for the best Monster Hunter at the event or similar.
- I’ve also seen events where the TO dishes out spot prizes to the first person who gets Box Cars on the charge, or rolls a miscast. It gets players calling out and raises the energy in the room.
So that’s my little manifesto for bringing Narrative back into your games – let me know your own ideas too. Nobody enjoys smashing their opponents more than I do – I happily played Kunnin Rukk for years – so the message is that it’s not one or the other. Forget bullshit $90 Narrative supplements, you can bring narrative into your own games tomorrow, whether you’re punching cans in your garage or writing a cutting-edge tournament list.
Narrative is an extra layer of joy that sits on top of all of that. It’s about stories. It’s about joie de vivre. At the end of the day, it’s about making memories. And why should tournament players miss out on that?
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- Thanks also to Kyle, who is a Patron, for requesting this article. ↩︎
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