Part 1: Introduction

This is the first Campaign Mastery post for 2018, and that’s rather significant.

New Years are always a strange synthesis of two things: beginnings and retrospectives. The first is fairly obvious, but the significance of the second often gets overlooked as everyone gets wrapped up in newness and new beginnings. But for me it seems especially significant that the first thing that we generally do at the start of a new year is to reflect back on what happened in the old one – in other words, how we got to “here”, to this particular new beginning.

These retrospectives are usually not all that great; the interval is too short to lend perspective, events too raw to be fully evaluated in the context created by the melange of other events that have occurred. That generally leaves the retrospective feeling superficial and rather hollow, a recitation of events with at best limited appreciation of their significance or ramifications. I have sometimes thought that some of this could be avoided simply by placing the events of the past year into a perspective obtained by looking back a second year, or further if necessary, but further reflection shows that this would contradict the primary purpose – which is the placing of the new year into context.

Nevertheless, there are some useful lessons in this duality for GMs, so it’s worth taking a closer look at the concepts of Beginnings and Legacies. I’ll get to that shortly.

Part 2: Campaign Mastery

The December that has just passed was a significant one for Campaign Mastery, and it’s a significance that will carry on throughout 2018. So that seems to be a good place to start.

You see, sometime in the course of the past month or so is when you have to draw a line and say “This is the 9th anniversary of Campaign Mastery.”

It’s not a simple number to pin down, however. In September or October of 2008 (as I recall), Johnn and I first discussed a blog; in November, he was persuaded and on-board, or was it I that had to be persuaded? Actually, I think we were both half-convinced from the outset, but each was confident that the notion would work in terms of the other’s doubts and uncertainties. In any event, mid-November, we were both on-board with the concept, at least on a trial run. Starting on November 29, and continuing over the next few weeks, we both wrote and posted a few test pieces and began to iron out the administrative protocols . Technically, the anniversary date should be the date we became publicly visible, but it wasn’t until January 2019 that we told anyone about it, having worked out most of the administrative and workflow kinks! So I tend to think of the whole month of December as the site’s “Birthday”.

Which means the buildup to the Tenth Anniversary starts NOW.

We had our first 6 visitors on January 1st. And six more on the second, and five more on the third, and 7 on the fourth. And then the number of readers started going up. As of today, according to Google Analytics, we have had almost 1.3 million page views by more than 488,000 readers. Right now, those numbers are a steady 4000+ a month, with 20% of that 4000 being new readers, 63% of whom will become regular readers. So sometime very early in January, we’ll cross the 1.3 million threshold, and about 2 years from now (at those rates) we’ll have our half-millionth individual visitor.

2017 started out with a bang, I was still getting a huge boost in readership from winning the 2016 silver Ennie for best blog. Heck, I still get a few visitors almost every day from that! As a result, in terms of legitimate readers, the site had never had it so good. Only a couple of spam events from many years earlier beat that month in raw numbers, and those were definitely not real readers. Everything was humming along nicely and I was busy making plans.

May started the big unraveling of many of those plans. First, the laptop that I had been using for just about everything died. This wasn’t a total surprise, it gave several months of increasingly-unreliable service first, so I had some time to prepare. Getting my PC up and running became an ongoing priority – initially a very high one, and slowly lower and lower on the scale as I managed to migrate most of my archived files to the PC and start organizing them.

Then, in September, my telephone line and associated internet service went dead – for 42 long, agonizing, days. To my immense gratitude, most of my readers persisted, even though for almost a month, there was nothing new to read here. After a while, I was able to get up and running using an Internet Cafe, though, and when the service was finally restored, it felt like I had dodged another bullet. By the start of December, or thereabouts, the organization was just about complete and I was preparing to back things up for the first time in months when… the PC died.

Actually, in a real deja-vu moment, the display died. I’m now pretty sure that the rest of the machine is still working perfectly. But this failure gave NO warning – I went to the Doctors for a blood test, leaving the computer to put itself to sleep, and when I came home, it would neither wake up nor boot up.

Back when the first hints of unreliability in the laptop began to surface – more than a year ago, now – I gathered every cent I could get my hands on and bought a replacement. It’s not perfect, not even as good as the machine it was intended to replace, but it works and was the best that I could afford. And it is on that machine that this article is being written. What’s more, through a USB drive-caddy, I’ve been able to recover not only all the files that were lost, but have also retrieved a lot of the lost files from my old Win XP machine – and backed everything up to a 2TB external drive!

And I have high hopes of getting the PC back into service in the near future. So January 2018 is already looking more positive than December 2017 did.

Changes Are Coming

It’s also time to start putting my plans for the tenth anniversary buildup into practice. Some of those plans have already born fruit – you may have noticed some cosmetic changes to the Tag Cloud, for example. Some are still to come – having been in preparation since the site was first launched.

The very plain and unadorned look of CM was never intended to last. I spent almost a month generating graphics for the site – all of them lost when that Windows XP PC died, nine years ago, but now recovered.

The social media plugin that the site uses is no longer supported – I’ve been looking into replacements, but when I deactivate the old plugin, posts won’t display. That’s being looked into.

I’m not even certain that I’ll keep using the same theme, which provides the basic look-and-feel for the site – it’s 9 years old, too. But I haven’t found a replacement that retains all the functionality – yet. So that’s going to be an ongoing investigation in 2018, too.

This is going to be an ongoing process, through the course of the year, a succession of small changes. The Theme, if there is to be a change, or the title graphics if not, will appear in December 2018. Everything else should hopefully be done before then.

Less Posts More Often

Over the last five years or so, there have been articles (and whole series) that I’ve had to set aside because they would not fit the realities of the publishing deadlines set for the site combined with my physical limitations.

While contemplating the tenth anniversary buildup, I finally thought up a way to deal with that problem – but it means changing the structure of the way I’ve been doing these articles. Specifically, it means introducing a new concept to these pages: the Serial Blog.

One post a week – sometimes Mondays, sometimes Thursdays – will be done the old way. But most of the rest will not. Instead, I’ll be doing as much as I can on them in an hour or so, daily, four days a week – and publishing and updating the post each time. That’s right, the incomplete articles will still be live. Some of these articles are partially written already, some are nothing more than an outline. Some of these will take weeks, some may take months, others will take only days – I can write a fair bit in an hour when the muse is playing ball and the topic has been properly organized.

To follow them, you will either have to follow me on Social Media (and pay attention to my announcements), or bookmark them and play catch-up every day or whatever, or post a comment so that you get subscribed to that post – and I will post a comment each time the post is updated so that such subscribers will be notified.

Free Time? What will I do with that?

Actually, most of it will be devoted to prepping some enormous articles to fill the month of December. These will take months to write. There may even have to be more than two of them published a week!

Some of it will be devoted to finishing some of those long-standing articles that don’t suit the Serial Blog approach. Some of it will be devoted to other aspects of the tenth anniversary buildup that I’m keeping under my hat for the moment. And, yes, some small part may be devoted to R&R.

It’s when the tenth anniversary actually starts that this changed approach will bear real fruit. Because that’s when I can turn my attention to producing low-cost high-value e-books for readers, as Campaign Mastery was originally intended to do.

Not only will that give me something else to write about in these pages, but it will permit me to resurrect competitions and other aspects of the site that have been lost over the years. And it will provide another small revenue stream to enable me to keep Campaign Mastery going, economically.

The details of this expansion are another thing to be determined in the course of the year and announced one year from now as part of the climax of the tenth anniversary itself.

Patreon? Or Sponsored Posts?

I make no secret of the fact that some of the articles here at Campaign Mastery have been sponsored. I work hard at these to ensure that not only are the sponsors satisfied, but that the readers get an article at the end of it that can stand or fall on its own merits, in other words that Campaign Mastery’s standards are not compromised. That gets harder and harder with each one; I get more offers than I can possibly accept while maintaining those standards.

But there is another possibility. One of the prospects that I have been investigating is a low-impact Patreon deal whereby only Patrons would get access to every second Serial Blog until it’s ready to be published generally, and for another 30 days or something beyond that.

There are aspects of this notion that I’m still not sure of, so I’m not committing to it – yet. But I would prefer to use this as a way to raise the same level of funding that I receive from these occasional sponsored posts so that the integrity of the site is never compromised. $2 a quarter from 30 patrons would do that.

That will also help keep Campaign Mastery going, while keeping advertising at its current unobtrusive levels – less if you count that sponsorship as advertising!

Campaign Mastery: The Tenth Year

Or, The more things change, the more they stay the same
This isn’t the totality of what I’m planning, and what I’m contemplating. But it should be enough to show that there are many things in the wind to get excited about!

And yet, look at what they actually mean: Bigger articles, with even more in-depth analysis – the very things that have become hallmarks of Campaign Mastery over the last 9 years. If anything, Campaign Mastery will become even more Campaign Mastery-ish as a result.

Which is why these plans are, and should be, a part of the tenth anniversary buildup.

Part 3: Campaigns

The notion of Beginnings and Legacies applies to several aspects of what we all do as GMs.

Consider: You are sitting down to run your first session of a new campaign. One of the first things that you have to supply is a retrospective “how did we get to this point?” from an in-game point of view.

I’ve looked at a lot of different methods for projecting as much of the delivery of campaign background into actual play as possible over the years, from the “big document before play” model all the way through to the “tell them nothing until you have to” approach. But “Beginnings and Legacies” is a great way to sum up one of the simplest.

Simply write 3/4 of a page telling the players how the world got to the point at which their characters are starting play. Leave out explanations, ignore context, touch on only the most important points, tease and hint – and if including an incident takes you over the limit, you have to choose: either that incident is omitted (for now), or – if it is too important – something else has to be left out to make room for it. Then read that page as the prologue to the first adventure of the campaign.

Everything else can be expounded when and where it becomes relevant, and choose your encounters so that each day’s play includes at least one “history lesson” in which it does become relevant. Have your villains monologue, explaining the historical context that has made them a villain.

The more significant you make your backstory, the greater the variety of associations you create to it, the more memorable it will be, and the more it will shape the player’s thought processes while roleplaying their characters.

This technique declares that campaign background should be like an iceberg – nine-tenths of it don’t show, and the only reason you know that they exist is because they hold together the one-tenth that is visible.

Part 4: Adventures

Every campaign develops a ritual of sorts that defines the end of one adventure and the start of another. A common pattern is “last words”, “hand out XP”, “level up/spend XP”, “introduce next adventure”. Some campaigns add things like “sell booty” and “replenish supplies” instead of repeatedly performing those acts in-game.

You can simplify and abbreviate the process down to three simple element categories: “After”, “Transition”, “Before”.

• After deals with the logical consequences of the last adventure, such as healing characters, handing out XP for deeds done, and so on.
• Transition deals with those things that are either a little of both the other categories, or are clearly neither. “Level up” or “Spend XP” (depending on your game system) can clearly be thought of as either an “After” or a “Before”, for example.
• Before permits predefined preparations for play to be hand-waved. They include any changes to a PCs appearance that the other PCs would notice, often symbolic of a changing role within the party.

Things get more interesting when you give individual PCs quick solo games in between group game sessions, rather than playing these scenes and incidents as part of a main adventure, which inherently excludes most of the group and gives the spotlight to the individual for an extended period. Doing so – perhaps using some form of online gaming or play-by-email technique between game sessions – means that the game, and the game background, progress and evolve in between game sessions; there’s always something new to capture and hold the players’ attentions whenever they ‘get the band back together’. The question is, do you consider these as part of the “after” of the previous adventure, the “before” of the next, or the “transition” in between the two? Or sometimes one, sometimes another?

In Fumanor (D&D) I treated them as “after,” because they were often about characters gaining levels and such. My first in-print RPG-related article was Shadow Levels: A way to roleplay the acquisition of Prestige Classes in D&D 3.x, which clearly designates those activities to an “after” phase of the adventure.

I’ve often deferred roleplaying minor solo incidents within an adventure to a brief solo session handled after the fact, simply telling the player what the outcome was at the time insofar as it affects the game going forward. “I’ll explain later,” in other words.

Part 5: (Role-played) Encounters

Not a lot of GMs think of encounters as having a definable beginning and end, but they do. The beginning places the encounter into context, and deals with what players can perceive before the encounter itself starts. It will include physical descriptions, perhaps a description of tone of voice, perhaps a mention of past history with the character. The encounter itself follows, concluding with some obvious verbal conclusion or an action that draws a line under the role-played encounter. That is then followed by the “after” section that deals with any aftermath or actions in response to the conversation.

Quite often, one such encounter will be followed by a passage of exposition by the GM, or by a combat encounter, but it is also not uncommon for one role-played encounter to segue directly into another, and that is why, in my opinion, most GMs don’t think of encounters as a discrete building block within an adventure, but as a component of something larger.

How much of a difference does it really make?Well, the only substantive impact is in the way a GM thinks about his encounters – so that could mean nothing or everything, something in-between, or both at the same time (depending on the encounter). Thinking of encounters as a discrete phase of game-play enables them to be analyzed and characterized and that permits improvement in discrete types of encounter.

But, in practical terms, there isn’t likely to be much impact, if any – any impact will come along when designing subsequent encounters.

Part 6: Combat

Combat is sometimes described as a game-within-a-game. Many rules come into effect that apply at no other time, and the entire focus of the rules changes from simulating a character within an environment to simulating action within an environment, and opposed action at that.

It was in my second or third RPG session as a player that I first encountered a GM who had completely excised the combat system from (then) AD&D and replaced it with another (I forget what, but it was something in between Rolemaster and D&D in it’s subtleties and complexities). I didn’t understand the practice at the time – why? Why not simply play that other game system and be done with it? Or play straight AD&D? It was only when I began to appreciate the change of attitude in terms of what the rules were trying to accomplish during combat that it started making sense to me, at least in an abstract sense.

Like an adventure, entering and exiting combat is usually achieved through a set of almost ritualistic practices. There are things that you always do before combat starts, things that you always do before combat starts if using a particular method of depicting combat (e.g. using minis), and things that you always do at the end of combat, and of course, combat itself tends to follow strongly game-mechanized processes.

Dividing play into two phases – “combat” and “non-combat” – is usually the first refinement that a GM makes in his game-play. It’s certainly the most obvious.

Which only makes it more ironic that some of the best advice I’ve ever received regarding combat was to selectively erase that distinction, and to incorporate more narrative and roleplaying elements into my combat – something I still struggle with at times, I have to admit!

Nevertheless, there are times when it is helpful to think of each combat encounter as a discrete game element. The trick is always to know when to look one way, and when to look the other.

Part 7: The End Of An Article

I started this article by talking about Campaign Mastery, and that’s also where I’m going to end it – by talking about the End of Campaign Mastery, or the lack thereof.

Some readers may feel that the changes that I have announced here represent the end of Campaign Mastery as they know it. But here’s the thing: the number of articles and series that I’ve had to defer because they fell outside the practical scope of what was deliverable within the deadlines of publication has grown longer and longer, and articles that would fit within that publication schedule have become more and more difficult to find. That combination would ultimately signal the end of Campaign Mastery, when there was nothing left that I could say within the time available to me.

Making the changes opens up the site in scope to tackle those lengthier subjects while keeping the articles themselves coherent.

Similarly, it’s getting harder and harder to write sponsored articles that are up to the standards that have been set for the site. So the mooted income streams that become possible under the altered schedule become critically important to the longevity of the site.

Ultimately, that’s what these changes are all about: Ensuring that Campaign Mastery continues beyond it’s tenth year, into an eleventh, and then a twelfth, and… Nevertheless, I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation, here. I’m messing with a formula that’s been proven successful over the last nine years!

Beginnings and Legacies. That’s what this article, and this year, are all about.