Campaign Mastery is hosting the August 2020 Blog Carnival, and the topic that I’ve come up with is “What We Need Is/Are….”

What does your campaign need more of? What does your campaign world need more of? What do you need more of in your adventures? In you characters? In your players? What does gaming in general need more of?

Or, you can take the opposing perspective. What does your campaign have too much of? What element is over-represented in your game world? What do you need less of in your adventures? In your NPCs? In your PCs? In your players? What does gaming in general need less of?

Of course, everything that can be phrased one way can be rephrased into its opposing variant.

“What we need is less time wasted in meaningless combat” can be re-formulated as “What we need is more meaningful combat”, for example.

What does your current game not have enough of, and how can you correct that? One answer per campaign, please – unless you’re identifying a deficiency in your GMing that you notice is present across multiple campaigns! Answers can be serious, or lighthearted; literal or….. well, not.

Possible examples:

• What we need are more mice.
• What we need is more plot.
• What we need are more treasure tables.
• What we need are more Goblins.
• What we need are more elephants.
• What we need is more Magic.
• What we need are more players.
• What we need is more tapioca. And salsa. And corn chips. And Dip.
• What we need is more social interaction.
• What we need is faster combat resolution.

Covid-19 restrictions give us all the opportunity to be a little introspective. So I’d be a little disappointed by general answers such as “What I need is more prep time” or something along those lines. “What we need are more game sessions” is also of dubious value in the current social climate – but it might be valid if it was true before the Coronavirus came along.

This post will serve as the anchor post for the Carnival, so drop me a line in the comments with a link to your submissions. In an attempt to boost the participation rate (and I haven’t cleared this with Scot, the overall admin for the Carnival, so I hope he’s on-board), I will also happily accept links to any podcast in which this is a topic of conversation or anything similar. Of course, I also welcome all blogger participation, whether that be from newcomers or old hands!

Image by SeppH from Pixabay, crop by Mike

What We Need in the Zenith-3 Campaign Is: More Pace

I always like to ensure that my anchor posts contain inherent value for readers. In this case, that’s easily provided by picking one of my campaigns and putting some aspect under the microscope.

The Zenith-3 campaign was shut down in February due to Covid-19 restrictions and reopened this weekend, picking up just where it left off, in mid-adventure. I have a couple of observations about that process later in this article, but the real relevance in this title stems from before the shutdown.

In Bridging The Plot Divide: A ‘Writer’s Block’ Bonus Breakthrough, I wrote about a writer’s block situation in my plotting for this campaign. Specifically, I had established a scary situation in which Domestic Terrorists had bought a couple of Nuclear Weapons from an arms dealer who, in turn, was dealing with a Russia in serious economic distress after 6 years of war in which neither side had made great gains.

The problem was, what were they going to do with these weapons? To create time pressure on the PCs, and for the symbolic value, the plot was to transpire on the 4th of July in the current campaign year of 1986. But all the plots I was coming up with were horribly tired and cliched, and nowhere near challenging enough for the PCs. I needed more mystery, more engagement, and more complexity – in a nutshell, the plot needed to be richer.

The article linked to above deals with the process of getting through that writer’s block, and the requirements that made it more challenging. In this submission, I want to focus on the impact that it had on the campaign’s pacing.

The Pacing Problem

This problem had been existing for several months prior to the Covid-19 shutdown. Because I knew that I didn’t have anything planned, I instituted stall tactics – some conscious, and some subconscious. These padded out the plotline, slowing it down just when any rational assessment of plot dynamics suggested that it should be accelerating. But I needed to buy time to come up with a solution.

I’m normally pretty good at this sort of thing – I’ve lost count of the number of times someone on Twitter has described a plot hole and I’ve been able to immediately throw something their way. Anyone who has used that social media platform with lots of followers knows that tweets are immediate – you either respond now or lose the opportunity. Yes, you can ‘like’ a tweet to keep it, or re-tweet it so that it appears in your timeline; either will let you come back to it if there’s something on the tip of your tongue but it isn’t leaping up and down in front of your mind’s eye. But 99% of responses will be spontaneous.

So I only expected to need to stall for a short period of time.

Plot synopses became longer and more detailed – not because they had to be, but because I needed to fill time. And I began implementing stall tactics to try and delay the PCs getting to the point where my planning had run aground.

Stall Tactics

Negotiations with the alien Rheezok (and their backstory) were expanded from a (relatively) brief and decisive encounter to almost a full session, and instead of one or two PCs being involved, were expanded to include all PCs as active participants. This gained me about half a game session.

The following session, what should have been an incidental toss-off (buying a meal in a street market) was expanded into a full-blown shopping expedition, gaining another 3/4 of a game session.

You can see the trend. A (relatively) simple task – chasing down a bandit – that should have been child’s play for the PCs, over in an hour, became an entire session’s play and the exposure of corruption within the local regime and ongoing treason against that regime by a trusted relative of the leader.

Fortunately, I was able to delve more deeply into the world-building prep that I had engaged in, so none of these delays was actually wasted game time. But the more you slow the plot down, the harder it becomes to involve everyone. Variety gives more hooks on which to hang contributions by each individual.

This image combines “ability-2672659.png” by BedexpStock and “abstract beam blast” by Kevin Sanderson, both from Pixabay.

Solution

I didn’t find my way through the plot hole until June. It is possible that the breakthrough would have been stimulated into existence by the ongoing press of time had we continued playing; it was easy to turn the shutdown (and corresponding absence of time pressure) into procrastination.

With that additional spur, I would have come up with something in time for the April game session (we play once a month), which would have been the last-minute, or close to it. Whether or not it would have been as satisfying as the solution achieved, I don’t know.

The impact on pacing

In the most recent game session, the first since the solution to my plot problem was devised, there was an immediate impact that I think everyone noticed.

I actually started writing a lengthy synopsis, in part because of the long shutdown, and scrapped two pages of it, delivering a far more compressed version that mentioned a number of past events only in passing.

We then skipped over what would have otherwise been almost the entire game session in a few paragraphs of narrative. This material would not have drawn significantly on the world-building, and would have contributed nothing – it was necessary, but still filler.

When plotting it, I was mindful of trying to strike a balance between the pace that the adventure should be cracking along with at this point, and the more stately pace of the previous game sessions, factoring in the long shutdown. The speed of the introduction, which led directly into that passage of narrative-instead-of-boring-stuff was just the injection of pace needed to get the game moving again.

In fact, I underestimated the amount of material I would need to have prepped – as had several of the previous game sessions, the day’s play ended a little early, and my thoughts were already turning to what I will need for the next session.

Lingering Impacts

I actually found myself fighting my own instincts in those ruminations. The instincts that I had been developing as a result of the stall tactics were to make the next step in the campaign an emergency or a threat that would force the PCs to take action, in opposition to the in-game environment and world-building that I had been engaged in.

Since this would have taken playing time, it was the undoubted path that I would have chosen were I still needing to stall. There remains a lethargy in the plotting that I now have to actively work at avoiding. But I’m aware of the problem, and the need to confront it; at the same time, I have to be careful not to go too far in the other direction.

As always, game pacing is a delicate balancing act.

There is a passage of play coming up which has the potential to drag significantly, and which I can’t really liven up with encounters or emergencies. The need to keep up the momentum of the story means that I’m going to want to hand-wave as much of that time as the players will permit me to get away with.

There will still be a bit of a slow-down, but that’s appropriate since part of what they are intending to do in that period is to rest. The in-game situation has given them only about 4 1/2 hours rest in the last 76 or 77 hours, plus some half-dozing while mounted on riding dinosaurs.

The plan is to accelerate the preceding game-play as much as possible while maintaining verisimilitude, so that the slow-down feels like the characters are resting, enabling me to skip through that slowed passage as quickly as possible. This will be challenging simply because the players will be driving a lot of it; I can’t make decisions in advance, but have to respond to their inputs.

For example, they will want to rent a House. I know some of the criteria that will be involved; they need five or six bedrooms, to take possession immediately, they need a great deal of privacy, and they have a limited budget. Those don’t grow on trees! But I don’t even know what city or town or US state they will choose for this base of operations, which makes things trickier!

I will probably employ a magician’s force, preparing two or three options and having those same two or three options present wherever they choose to settle. That will enable me to incorporate the levels of detail and color that are appropriate to a location that will be revisited a number of times as the campaign proceeds.

What the Zenith-3 campaign needs, at this point, is greater pace. I’ve already started delivering on that need, but with the next couple of sessions, I want to double-down on that delivery.

Some takeaways

I want to call out a couple of key lessons from the situation described.

1. Stall Tactics are perfectly satisfactory when necessary – but you need sufficient depth of material that you can fill those dead spaces.
2. It’s possible to build passages of plot where you can speed things up or slow them down in order to manipulate the pacing of the campaign.
3. You should always think about what’s going to happen next, and what its pacing demands will be, when planning a passage of play.
4. Plot problems can be opportunities.
5. Plan your pacing targets before you write – and review what you’ve written to be sure that you’re meeting those targets.
6. No problem is impossible to solve – but different solutions can have different price tags and consequences. Exercise care when choosing.

So, now it’s over to the other bloggers out there. What do your games/campaigns need more of?