The other week, while hard at work on the Long Road trilogy of articles, I received an alert about a vulnerability in a plug-in and what to do about it.

Nothing unusual about that, it happens regularly. I gave the message a quick scan, and double-checked that the affected software wasn’t in use at Campaign Mastery, and normally, that would be the end of it.

Not for the first time, my thoughts brushed lightly over the way that the content management and hosting software of the core suite at the heart of the website changed so enormously depending on what extra functionality you enabled, and how what I need for Campaign Mastery could be so different to what someone else using the same core might need for their site.

Look and feel is the most superficial element – that comes from a particular type of plug-in called a theme – but it’s also the most noticeably to the casual observer. Then there are the plugins that provide some sort of front-end functionality that is visible to the visitor – the tag cloud and the print-friendly button that accompanies each post, for example. And, in back of those, there are plug-ins that provide back-end functionality – things that help in the management of the site but that the casual visitor would never see.

It’s a virtual certainty that the combination that I have here is going to be different to the combination of virtually every other website out there, even if it is built around the same core. There might be a hundred thousand that are almost exactly the same, but actually being a mirror-image? No – there are just too many options, too many plug-ins that purport to do the same job.

Anyway, as I said, this is normally just a passing reverie in response to the trigger stimulus, but this time, it fell on more fertile ground – exactly what the association was, I’m not entirely sure.

It occurred to me, on this occasion, that the structure of a WordPress website is a perfect analogy to an RPG campaign…

Core Structure

The key to this part of the analogy lies in the word “core”. The core structure of an RPG is the central rules package, often called the ‘core rules”, and this is so ubiquitous a factor that no matter how heavily you modify the rules with ‘plug-in packages’, the core rules are commonly used as a referent for the game. “I’m running D&D” or “It’s a Pathfinder game” or “It’s basically Gurps” or whatever.

From a rules engineering standpoint, you can consider plug-in rules packages as changing what part of the rules does, but the core rules still define how it does it, but that’s not entirely accurate; it assumes that your particular rules combination aims for maximum possible consistency from one part of the game to another. As any experienced player or GM knows, that’s sometimes not even the case within a set of core rules!

This is one area in which there have been vast improvements over the years, and expectation levels have risen accordingly, while tolerance for inconsistencies is correspondingly reduced. The resulting difference in mindset is one differentiating factor in “old-school gaming”; when someone describes themselves or their preferred campaign as “old school”, they are announcing that having particular parts of the rules package be ‘fit for purpose’ in the eyes of the GM is more important than having everything neat and consistent.

‘Theme’

The campaign background is the equivalent of the website theme. This is often more than just superficial look-and-feel stuff, though that can be dominant; there can be micromanaging of aspects of the functionality. One thing I’ve played with constantly on Campaign Mastery, for example, are the range of font sizes used for the tag cloud and the thresholds for display; we’ve been publishing here for so long that without regular tweaks, rarely-used tags would simply vanish into the ether.

Front-End

The equivalent of front end plug-ins are supplementary material that affects player choices and options. Third-party supplements, officially ‘optional’ rules, and deliberate rules exclusions – it used to be quite common to completely disregard part or all of the D&D rules regarding alignment for example. My impression is that the heat has largely gone out of that debate in recent years, but it once raged white-hot amongst players and GMs.

Anything that adds a PC race or class or feats that can be chosen as options or anything along those lines qualifies as a ‘front end’ change. Most of the time, these are simply ‘adding functionality’ but a few can actually turn off and replace elements of the core functionality with something more ‘refined’ or ‘customized’ or ‘tweakable’.

Back-End

Quite obviously, then, the equivalents of Back-end plug-ins are going to be ‘Supplementary Material that is used by the GM to create content’ – monster manuals and locations and cosmologies, and so on. This is more focused on the game world, which in turn provide the building blocks that are used to construct the campaign background.

There may be – heck, there are – those who don’t think that back-end changes don’t have that big an impact, but I beg to differ.

In a very real way, they are all about what resources the GM can call upon to impact the plotline that describes whatever the PCs are doing, but they are always a double-edged blade – whenever the GM comes up with a plotline or contemplates a situation (often not of his own making), these are all elements that can intersect with and potentially disrupt the straightforward scenario that would otherwise result.

Sometimes, readers have trouble seeing that point, dismissing it as relevant only if you are excessively micromanaging the campaign and delivering plot trains. So here’s a simple example:

    The PCs, for whatever reason, have to take a certain magic item to a certain place at a certain time. The journey to that place, setting up the magic item when it gets there, and dealing with whatever doing this is supposed to accomplish, are the straightforward scenario.

    In order to get it there, they have to cross over swampland that the GM has already designated as home to a society of Lizardfolk that can smell magic and worship it as a God. No problems so far, that’s just predefining some of the content of that straightforward scenario.

    But the GM has also established that a certain Thief’s Guild from a certain game supplement are heavily embedded in the city from which the PCs are to set forth, with eyes in every corner and fingers in every pie in that part of the world. They won’t simply have gone away, and it strains credibility for that group not to be aware of this item and the impending transport arrangements. They are from a completely different game supplement / canned adventure to the one which describes the magic item quest, and therefore are an X factor that the source material doesn’t envisage.

    That puts the onus on the GM to decide what the Thief’s Guild are going to do about the situation. They could be friend or foe; they could try to take advantage of the situation, for example by attempting to capture the item and hold it for ransom. They might simply covet the item for its monetary value, and attempt to steal it before the PCs even get their hands on it. They are a complication caused by the intersection of material from two different sources.

    Throw in Faye, and Drow, and dark gods, and evil sorcerers, and anyone else with both the capacity to learn of the object and its mission and a potential vested interest or benefit in sticking their own oars into the simple machinery of the mission. In some cases, these might be established forces within the campaign; in others, the GM has them in place for some later plot ideas but they haven’t actually played any noted significant role in the campaign to date. What’s more, they carry the additional complication that the GM doesn’t want to compromise his ultimate intended purpose for the group.

Always, the GM has to ask – about any plot development or event – who has the capability of knowing about the situation and what capacity and motive do they have for intervening. The more complicated the campaign, with more back-end supplements plugged into the mix, the longer the list of campaign elements who might intervene.

Every GM and playing group has some sort of limit to their capacity to manage this sort of thing. Actual lists and reminders can be useful tools in expanding that limit. One of my strategic assets as a GM has always been the number of such ‘eggs’ that I can juggle in my head over a long period of time, and integrating them into a ‘big picture’ forest. The tapestry is always composed of many threads.

This places a natural limit to the back-end supplements that the GM can fully integrate into his world (sometimes, you can pick and choose).

    As an aside, I often get asked what the big difference between a player and a GM is. A natural GM will generally have a higher threshold for translating small-picture content into a big-picture overview and vice-versa, in my experience; but all GMs ‘build up’ that ‘muscle’ by virtue of GMing over time, even if they started no more capable than the players they referee. The only people who should not GM if they can avoid it are (1) those who are unable to grow in this respect (there are some), and (2) those who find this so much of a struggle that they don’t enjoy the process. Everything else can be learned, or at least improved to the point of being tolerable, so anyone else can be a GM. Whether or not someone else is more qualified or more adept in that role is an entirely separate question.

In its own way, that’s a good thing, because it means that you can get a similar but distinct campaign simply by removing one such supplement and substituting another (staying well below your threshold, whatever it might be).

You can start a campaign with exactly the same characters (in terms of racial profile, stats, and personality) and by virtue of integrating them into a different environment with different challenges and opportunities, end up with two or more completely different campaigns simply by changing the ‘back end’.

Front-end changes may be more overt and obvious, but back-end changes can be the more significant – in the long term.

Putting it all together

Every campaign is just a little different. The only way to get two D&D campaigns that are exactly the same, to the point of complete interchangeability, or direct one-to-one comparison in any form, is to restrict the structure to core rules only. Everything that gets added to that list, no matter how canonical it might be, subtracts from that universality (unless the same material is added to both, and in the same way, of course).

The differences might not be obvious, they might not even be noticeable at all, but they are there, and domino effects will magnify any points of differentiation between two campaigns.

This can add up to generating a more significant differentiation between campaigns than having different GMs does. But, again, two different GMs working from the same ‘mix’ of supplementary plug-ins can result in markedly different campaigns conceptually and in terms of the player experience, simply through being different individuals with different abilities and skills and interests. Change the content, and you change the website, in other words (and getting back to the analogy) (nor are these completely independent variables, it should be added).

But the game system ‘plug-ins’ are every bit as significant a point of difference as having a different GM – that’s how important they are.

Extending the metaphor

I can push the metaphor just a little bit further. This whole train of thought was inspired by a security problem for a website plug-in; well, security isn’t a major issue in RPG content (outside of publishing considerations) but if you define such events as ‘processes that let individuals do things that they are not sanctioned to do’ (which is stretching the nuances of language just a little), then game balance / interface problems would seem to qualify, and those are both very real problems that are potentially just as devastating as having a hackable plug-in can be.

See, for example, The Woes Of Piety And Magic, which I described as part of the Biggest Mistakes RPG Blog Carnival, many years ago.

This is particularly apt in terms of the overall analogy; you never like to have obsolete or out-of-date plug-ins as part of your site structure simply because those are more likely to be unpatched and vulnerable to malicious intent. In fact, every site plug-in should have a definite purpose and be regularly reviewed to ensure that it is fit for purpose. And, should one not be, if the purpose is still important, the hunt then begins for a replacement.

Similarly, no RPG campaign should carry game supplements that do not contribute something specific to the campaign that the GM finds desirable. Doing so simply opens the door to any systemic flaws they contain without commensurate value to the campaign. Nor can any campaign afford to carry, unpatched, any supplement with identified flaws of the type described above; that’s simply asking for trouble.

In fact, as soon as a problem of the game balance / game interface type is detected, the GM has to pose some hard questions: can a rules ‘patch’ be used to overcome the problem (however unofficial)? Is the content / utility of the supplement valuable enough to warrant the effort required? Or would it be better to simply ‘uninstall’ the content from the campaign?

Furthermore, Campaigns always represent an evolving internal landscape; it might be that a particular supplement loses its relevance, in whole or in part, as the campaign advances. This is the equivalent of that material not being maintained – any liabilities contained within still linger, but the value that they once afforded the campaign has a limited shelf life. “Uninstalling’ such can free the campaign up for the incorporation of newer and more relevant material, or simply reducing the GM’s workload.

Working The Analogy

Any analogy or metaphor can be a useful tool, a point that I’ve made before; they offer a new perspective even on situations that are well-known, illuminating otherwise obscure points, and even suggesting courses of action or policies to be implemented.

This metaphor may be limited in that respect, but it still suggests that GMs should vet and restrict the supplementary material that they permit, if necessary making hard choices between two different supplements of equal value to the campaign. Fortunately, unlike website architecture, GMs can pick and choose and make selective incorporation – I don’t have to load my campaign down with the whole of, say, Libris Mortis; I can pick and choose.

A concluding alternative analogy

There is another analogy that is worth taking a moment to contemplate: The core rules of a campaign are not unlike the diet of an individual, while the game supplements that they incorporate are like prescription pharmaceuticals. They each have a defined purpose, and if they fail to achieve that purpose, it’s time to stop taking them; but, more importantly, each has the potential to interact with other medications in unexpected ways. No two patients and their regimens are exactly alike, and what works for someone else might not benefit you. My father, brother, and many of my friends all suffer from type-2 diabetes; but we are all on different medications and dietary restrictions.

Unwanted interactions between game supplements are always a potential concern. The benefits always need to outweigh the liabilities if the campaign is to be maintained in optimal health.

Some ideas are ubiquitous, and appear in many different game supplements in minor variations and under different names; these should always be mutually-exclusive and never permitted to stack. Game systems have a certain level of resilience, a certain capacity for enhancement which, if exceeded, pushes the internal mechanics to or beyond a breaking point.

    My favorite example of this kind of thing is the original form of “Luck” in the Hero System. This states that for every level of “Luck” that a character has, he rolls 1d6 at the start of each day’s play, and the total number of sixes rolled defines how intensely his luck can be used to modify events within the game to the players liking. All good.

    Until someone asks to buy or utilize more “Luck” than the 3d6 maximum imagined by the system. Two players with Luck each trying to create circumstances favorable to the same outcome or end, for example – do the results stack (what happens if you get more than three sixes?), or is it the initial number of dice to be tested that stack? On the face of it, the latter is the simpler choice – but when you dig into the probabilities involved, above 13d6, it becomes more probable that you will have three sixes than that you won’t. And the game mechanics fracture and break down. At the same time, though, it seems unreasonable to prevent any stacking of this particular game mechanism, because such restrictions don’t apply to anything else.

    The only solution: completely ‘uninstall’ this version of luck and replace it with something else. Which is a shame, because the existing power was convenient for simulating all sorts of other phenomena in a quick and painless way.

D&D 3.x is particularly prone to this sort of thing – I have seen a first-level character constructed with +13 to his stealth roll by taking advantage of a confluence of game mechanics from different supplements. And they always put the GM into am impossible, game-breaking, situation: Either he permits the PC to almost always succeed on stealth checks, virtually with impunity, or he makes it virtually impossible for any of the other PCs to use stealth at all by hitting the party with challenges geared to the abilities of the one character.

Neither does a campaign any favors.

The lessons contained in this section are things that I have seen and experienced first-hand, though not to the full extent described. More to the point, they are situations that caught me unawares until it was too late. It just so happens that the metaphors offered in this article would have forewarned me to look for such problems instead of being blindsided by them. And that’s the ultimate value of a metaphor – its utility as a teaching tool. So take the lessons and perspectives from these ones and be that little bit better-prepared to understand and administrate your campaigns.

Blog construction through a popular platform like WordPress is all about the plugins. I turns out that, in a way, the same can be said of RPG campaigns. Who’da thunk it?


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