Monday Night Mordheim: Scheduling

Monday Night Mordheim: Campaign Stuff

Mordheim is a Campaign Game. There's a lot in that phrase. Running a Mordheim Campaign is a bit like being the manager of a small store. You have to make schedules, keep books, and make sure that people are showing up. There's quite a bit to it, and I want to address most of the scheduling issues here. It would be impossible to address all of them at once, but for the first bit, I want to keep it simple.

A good starting place is to give you my own personal glossary of the terms that I use through out a campaign. That way, there is no question of what I mean.

Match: A single game of Mordheim between two or more opponents.

Session: All of the matches happening in a single sitting.

Round: All of the matches happening during a single part of a campaign, often made up of multiple sessions. Generally a round consists of each player playing a match against every other player, Round Robin style.

Campaign: All of the matches happening in all of the sessions and all of the rounds that are linked together.

Ok? Got it? Good. Hopefully as I go along, I will be able to provide a bit more of an insight about them, but for now the jist of the thing should be good.

Scheduling a Round:

The key to a good Campaign is scheduling. Now, I am going to let you into a secret of mine. I use this resource constantly with Mordheim. Printyourbrackets.com. This is an amazing website. All of the brackets are free, and you can choose any type of tournament for just about any size of Campaign. I took the liberty to pull up the one I personally like the best, Round Robin.

Here's what I do. I download the bracket for a Round Robin tournament with the same number of players as I have. Then I use paint, GiMP, Photoshop, or something else to change it have my players names or War Bands instead of just the numbers.

This takes care of 90% of the work for you. The hard part of the schedule, determining who faces who, is already done. However, then you have to break it down a bit further.

Each Round Robin is one campaign round. Depending on the size of your group, often one go round where everyone faces everyone else is not enough games. You might have it go multiple rounds, each time everyone faces everyone else. I highly suggest this for smaller groups of less then 10 people. Larger groups it gets more complicated.

Scheduling a Session:

While you have the overall number of matches, and who will face who, the problem then comes up to when everyone will face their opponents. Undoubtedly this will take more then one session. The number of matches you can have depends really on two things. How many tables you have available, and how much time you have available.

Generally speaking, I find that five hours is a good amount of time for a session. Under most circumstances, its enough to get in two matches with some fooling around, terrain re-arrangement, and the post battle sequence.

So if you have five hours and three tables, you should be able to get six games in one session. However, you may have to tinker the schedule a bit so that someone doesn't have to play two games at the same time

Scheduling a Campaign:

While you might have the matches set up per session, and figure out how long each round will take, the easiest part is to determine how long the Campaign should last. The minimum I would suggest is around 15 matches per person. However, if you have more tables or more time, you might want to expand or contract that a bit. All you have to do is figure out how many rounds it would take for everyone to complete the number of matches that you eventually want everyone to play with.

Example 1: My Current Campaign:

We have 4 players, one table, and an eight hour session.
Typically we can get three games in an a session.
Each round is six matches. It takes two sessions to go through one round. At the end of the round, each person has played in 3 matches.
So if we wanted to play to just 15 matches, it would take us 5 rounds, and we would be done after 10 weeks.

Example 2: My Old Campaign:

We had eight players, three tables, and a five hour session.
We would be able to get about six games in a session.
Each round was 28 matches. It would take about five sessions to go through one round. At the end of each round, each player had been in 7 matches.
So if we wanted to play 14 matches, it would take us 2 rounds, and would would be done in roughly 10 weeks.