Running a campaign is a lot easier if there’s a clear process that maximizes opportunities for success and avoids the worst traps and pitfalls.

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Inspiration

Today’s article was inspired by an article at EnWorld by Charles Dunwoody – a shout-out to him – entitled “Joyful GMing: RPG Success Strategies”. I adapted it into a flowchart to which I made a number of modifications, which you can read about in part 1of this two-part article.

The first part looked at the creation of a campaign, steps 1 through 5. Today, the focus is on running an ongoing campaign, and steps 6 through 10. To the side, I have repeated my modified flowchart, and – as you can see – step 6 has actually been subdivided into 5 sub-steps.

6. Adventure Creation

The central concept surrounding the sub-division of the original Step 6 is “Sandboxing In Time”. As the term itself makes clear, this is related to Sandboxing a campaign, but applies the concept to adventure creation and prep by breaking the process up into smaller steps. You’ll see what the advantages of this approach are in just a little while.

In traditional approaches, steps 6a through 6e are done in between sessions for the specific next adventure. Because the GM doesn’t know (or care) where the PCs will go and what they will get involved with in the course of that adventure and especially in its aftermath, he focuses all his attention on the immediate consequences of those decisions, only investing prep time in the very next adventure.

It assumes that the GM entrenches within each adventure several adventure seeds, far more than the PCs will actually have time to fully resolve in the next adventure; instead, they can either pick one or two, or even pick up on one or two that were left lingering in previous adventures.

It’s often a good idea simply to replace any plot threads seen through to a conclusion in the last adventure, so that the ‘pool’ of potential areas of focus remains constant in size, once the maximum desired pool-size is achieved – the pool doesn’t have to start fully-stocked.

For example:

Adventure #1 – four plot threads, two of which get resolved (player’s choice).
Adventure #2 – 4-2=2; + four plot threads = pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
Adventure #3 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
Adventure #4 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
Adventure #5 – 6-2=4, +2 new plot threads= pool of 6, two of which get resolved.
…And so on.

It can make life a lot easier for the GM if the ending of each adventure includes a mandatory statement of intent by the players on what they intend to focus on next time, but that rules out their choosing one of the new plot threads, which in turn permits them to be seeded somewhere other than the beginning of the day’s play.

That in turn gives the GM more flexibility in how he or she weaves them into the ongoing plotline and gives a less ritualized and more organic feeling to the whole campaign.

The biggest flaw to this approach is that no two adventures are alike in the scale of the prep required to bring them into a playable state. Some will be quick and easy, while others will by slow and convoluted; the process makes no allowance for this variation.

Getting around this problem isn’t all that difficult – you simply specify a fixed amount of time to be invested in prep on a regular basis that is sufficient to complete one of those slow-and-complicated development jobs, and – if the next adventure requires less – investing the remaining prep time in developing elements for future adventures, in effect investing that extra time in ‘getting ahead of the curve’, permitting the next ‘slow and complex’ prep to extend over multiple prep-sessions.

But this has an assumption (a big one) and carries a new flaw. The assumption is that you have correctly determined how much prep will be needed for the slowest / most difficult adventures and allowed enough time, OR have employed some corner-cutting within the process to cope with incomplete prep on game day.

You can assist that corner-cutting by a process of prioritizing what prep is needed most urgently to get the adventure under construction as close to ‘ready to play’ as you can get it within the available prep time. I like to also factor in how long the prep will take, and to differentiate between multiple standards of prep-and-polish – from ‘quick-and-dirty’ through to ‘extensive and polished’.

Links:

Prep Prioritization as a concept was first discussed in depth in Game Prep and the +N to Game Longevity, and was the core subject of Fire Fighting, Systems Analysis, and RPG Problem Solving Part 2 of 3: Prioritization and To Every Creator, An Optimum Budget?.

It would be remiss of me not to prominantly point to Creating Partial NPCs To Speed Game Prep before going any further.

The benefits of deliberately not doing certain kinds of prep get discussed thoroughly in Leaving Things Out: Negative Space in RPGs, while the impact of trying to do too much prep is the focus of Overcoming The GM Crash.

Two parts of the Basics For Beginners series, Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 7: Adventures and Basics For Beginners (and the over-experienced) Pt 3: Preparations take a lot of advice from my other articles and expand on it, including on this subject.

Finally, Dominoes and Daisy Chains: Writing Adventures has a lot of useful advice on all aspects of writing adventures, with links to relevant articles for further reading.

The flaw that this introduces is that you are actually violating the principle of sandboxing the campaign by working on material that may never be utilized, simply because if it is needed, it will take longer to prep than the time available.

Overcoming that flaw requires a more sophisticated approach to game prep than the ‘do everything for next session in between sessions’ approach, and organizing it demands a breakdown of the type that the flowchart proposes.

I’ll deal with those bigger-picture approaches in a set of sidebars at the end of step 6, but let’s start by looking at each step of the subdivided process and what it entails.

6a. Adventure Outline

An adventure outline is a summary of the central idea. It’s your answer to the question, “what’s the adventure about?”

It has to be short and succinct. A single line is preferable, or 2-3 sentences at most. Sometimes, that isn’t quite enough, but it’s a good standard to aim for. You can facilitate the avoidance of railroading within adventures by focusing your adventure outlines on what one or more NPCs are doing, rather than working from the point-of-view of the PCs.

As such, it shouldn’t have anything about how the PCs get involved, and should have little or nothing about how the adventure is to be resolved. That’s often harder than it seems, because the PCs should always be the focus and heart of the campaign. You achieve it by ensuring that whatever the NPCs are doing, it will have an impact on the lives of one or more PCs – in other words, the job of these outlines is to summarize how you are going to get the PCs into trouble and not how they are going to get back out of it.

6b. Adventure Draft

An adventure draft takes your one-or-two line summary of the adventure and breaks it down into major plot sequences, each of which is then summarized in one or two lines. In other words, they turn the idea into the outline of a story.

In theory, that’s all they contain. In practice, it’s never quite so simple – who the NPCs are, motivations for actions, ideas for locations and snatches of key dialogue and narrative always seem to get attached, and if you aren’t careful, you find yourself writing the whole adventure without having done the summary of the whole story first.

Now, some writers love that – the challenge of it, the discovery as you write of who the (NPC) characters are and what will happen next. Again, there is a very organic feeling to the result. But it’s also really easy to write yourself into a corner or a blind alley, and it’s then twice as hard to backtrack and choose a different path. The most sensible and logical path forward is the easiest and most natural to write, and that’s what got you into that mess to start with.

As a general principle, leave that sort of thing to the novelists; you need a more pragmatic, disciplined, and workmanlike approach. The best answer that I’ve found is a simple rule: Don’t connect ANY dots except in the draft outline, where you have that general breakdown of the action.

This, in turn, is best achieved through document structure, believe it or not.

Adventure outline.

Act 1 summary
Act 2 summary

     (space for more acts to be summarized)

Act 1 snippets / content

     (space for more details to be added)

Act 2 snippets / content

     (space for more details to be added)

Act X snippets / content

     (space for more details to be added)

The above is a generic and general demonstration, stripped of specifics. So far, 2 acts have been summarized, but there’s more to do before what you have is a story. In the course of summarizing them, some bits and pieces of these two acts have come to mind, and rather than trying to remember what they are, you’ve done the equivalent of jotting them down, with lots of white space in between. There has also been an idea recorded for content that hasn’t yet been tied to a specific act – this is usually something like the personality of the antagonist; you need to summarize it early so that it can be consistent with their actions in acts 1 and 2, but it hasn’t actually been revealed to the PCs yet. In fact, it might never be overtly spelt out except in the GM’s notes – letting the players form their own opinions (right or wrong) about the NPC’s persona.

Critically, no attempt to actually join the dots and spell out the full sequence of events in the acts is permitted until as many Acts as you need to resolve the story are outlined.

Once all the acts are summarized, you can then proceed to the next stage, breaking each down into specific plot sequences. You can then drop those snippets into place and connect those dots because you have a summary of the big picture to guide you and keep you out of those blind alleyways and corners.

There will be – well, there should be – lots of empty space in the document, even after you’ve broken the story down into plot sequences. Remember, at this point you don’t know what the outcome of those plot sequences is going to be; unless you’ve noted a specific description (or part of one), you have no specifics of locations, and so on. Instead you have a list of things that need to be created before the scenes can be completed.

The ultimate goal of this stage of the creation process is to have an end result that lets you completely improv the adventure while remaining consistent with the big picture. The level of detail needed to achieve this will vary from one GM to another, so each individual will need to set their own standards through a bit of trial and error.

There is also a significant difference between being able to completely improv around the general shape and being comfortable doing so. The first is the minimum standard to aim for, the second is the desired standard, but you don’t need to get there – yet.

6c. Supplemental Creation

From top to bottom, start to finish, fill the descriptive and narrative gaps, write up the NPCs to the extent that you need to (but no more), and so on. For example:

Location: Martian Domes

These are constructed of dozens of layers of gossamer silk exuded by martian worker-units, to which a stiffening agent has been added. In the primitive past, hundreds of layers were needed for strength, but the discovery of the stiffening agent permitted a construction boom. When the martians were forced into stasis because of the thinning atmosphere, dust and sand began to accumulate in the lee of the prevailing winds, so the domes appear more tear-drop shaped on planetary ordinance surveys. A relatively thin crust has slowly formed over the more exposed parts. The domes are variable in size according to function – worker-units and soldier-units are accommodated in the largest domes, 100-150 meters across, science, medical, engineering and colony management in intermediate domes 60-100 meters in size, and leader-units resided in the smallest domes, 30-60 meters in diameter. Several of the domes have collapsed over the centuries and filled with dust that has slowly fused into solid rock, but many remain intact. Archaeological testing will show that the domes were constructed at least 8,000 years ago, around the same time that humans started building pyramids.

Implications: organic feel to the technology, arachnoids, machines with multiple legs suitable for crossing difficult and dry terrain. Flat pads on the feet to cross sand. Hive-mind? Hierarchical society.

This description is generic enough that it can be the springboard for any specific dome’s description while supplying enough detail that other specifics can be detailed as needed.

What’s missing are numbers – how many of each dome? And, just possibly, an intermediate group that are more advanced than just workers – scientists and engineers and medical personnel.

Note in particular the ‘implications’ section, which plants the seeds for other things that might need to be described, producing a more even consistency of concept.

Next point: Quite often, one description will imply another, saving you the trouble of at least some of the detailed work.

Example:

Site Manager’s Office

The site manager’s office is spartan and pristine, at least on the surface. A bookshelf against one wall holds volumes on the design and construction of the site and its facilities, but these are organized in what appears a haphazard and unstructured manner. In reality, whenever one is consulted, it is returned to the top shelf, with others moving down to make room; over time, the references most frequently needed will congregate to that top shelf, while those needed less frequently get pushed down onto the lower shelves. Despite their having no purpose in a near-airless environment, rose-colored silk curtains hang in front of the windows, which (of course) cannot be opened. An artist’s depiction of the completed facility as it was originally envisaged hangs on the wall, capturing the design ethos of the facility in graphic form; it is far more structured and even than the reality visible beyond the curtains. The desk is large and constructed of a white plastic or ceramic material created with a combination of native martian materials and some admixtures brought from Earth. The chair is large, soft, and luxurious, with built-in leg and back massaging, designed for long periods of sitting. The only concession to individual flair is a perspex cube on the desk which contains an autographed baseball, it’s stitching slightly torn. Although the writing is faded and hard to read, it appears to have been signed by “Bub Ruth”.

Implications: Hard-nosed, pragmatic, organized to an extent beyond the obvious. Spartan but with dramatic touches and flourishes where they will be most noticeable by visitors.

After the description of his or her office, the site manager themselves needs very little description – it’s all spelt out or implied, already. Size, weight, race, gender, name – there’s no real hint about any of them, implying that these are secondary to the personality and the professional occupation.

The more two-birds-with-one-stone that you can incorporate like this, the less work you actually have to do in prep, and the more easily you can be consistent. Note that this description has two thrusts – practicality and the way the person is perceived by others. The latter could simply be vanity, but the first argues that it’s more deliberate and related to job function. There are further hints in the description of the office that the office-holder is organized and competent at their job, and a take-charge type who could be trusted to get the job done.

And yet, this isn’t quite enough to improv everything about the NPC – some things require further thought. Anything and everything related to their personality and their work performance are well-covered, but there isn’t enough there to tell us much about how their personal quarters are arranged or decorated. They could be along similarly spartan lines, or that might be a space in which the character can metaphorically let their hair down and relax. Which approach to take should be derived from their function in the story – are they to be hard-nosed and no-nonsense, or do they need a little softening to make them more rounded individuals?

6d. Revise / Polish Adventure

A lot of people skimp on this step, and there’s rarely a good justification for doing so. The technique and structures that I have described already are designed to keep the need for this step to a minimum, but that only makes failure to perform it all the more inexcusable.

What’s involved is fairly straightforward: Now that the supplemental creations are done, go back over the descriptions of events to transpire in the settings and the dialogue to be delivered and make sure that they are consistent with the descriptions of locations and NPC personalities.

Because the creation is holistic, with plot sequences inspiring content creation, most of the narratives will be fairly consistent with what’s already in place, but a quick once-over to be sure will usually reveal some areas that would benefit from the greater clarity of concept that you now have.

6e. Adventure Prep

If you feel the need to generate maps and diagrams and illustrations and photographic reference and anything else, this is when that happens. But that additional gloss is more often unnecessary than those of us who practice producing it regularly would like to think; it’s usually a secondary activity to the reality of Adventure Prep.

This stage is really about double-checking that the I’s have been dotted, the T’s crossed, and no unreasonable assumptions made; it’s a reminder of the content of the adventure (skim it only) and how it all fits into the bigger picture, and it’s about making sure that you are as ready to run the adventure as you possibly can be.

It’s also about making sure that all necessary resources are in the one spot so that nothing essential can be left behind (if you have to go somewhere else to game). The number of times I’ve seen someone forget to bring something they had spent hours preparing…. Okay, for any given GM running a game every weekend, it might only happen once a year, and often it’s not the end of the world (depending on what has been left behind), but still…!

6 Sidebar: Just-In-Time Adventure Creation

It’s a little more work in the campaign setting up process, but every time you start a new campaign, this bears thinking about.

Let’s say you have the breakdown of process that I have described above. And, when setting up the campaign, you generate 5 adventure outlines for adventures #1 to #5; and then you do rough drafts for adventures #1 to #4; and then you do all the supplemental creation for adventures #1 to #3; and then you do you final polish for adventures #1 and #2.

The results can be labeled ‘just in time adventure creation’, but it’s not necessarily obvious what’s happening unless you see it in a diagram – so I’ve done one.

What you end up with is a situation in which adventure #1, after some final prep, is ready to run.

Adventure #2 needs only that final prep to be ready to run.

Adventure #3 needs only to have final polish and prep to be ready to run.

Adventure #4 needs NPCs and Locations and narrative to be fleshed out, as well as final polish and prep, and

Adventure #5 needs everything except the generation of the final idea.

After running adventure #1, look at the breakdown of what happens if the GM carries out the same tasks listed above for the next adventure that needs that work to be done:
 
 
 
 
 
 

• He generates one adventure outline (for adventure #6);
• He turns one adventure outline into a rough draft (adventure #5);
• He does descriptions, NPCs, etc for one adventure that’s already in rough draft form (adventure #4);
• He polishes one adventure whose NPCs etc have already been done (adventure #3);
• He then does final prep and revision of the next adventure to be played (adventure #2),
• Leaving it ready to run, and everything else further up the pipeline one step closer to being ready to run.

In other words, he does no more between-sessions prep than usual once the campaign is underway, but has multiple adventures in progress.

Why is this such a big advantage? The answer is, flexibility.

If the GM has underestimated how long it will take to create NPCs etc for an adventure, he can spend the extra time by cutting out adventure first draft and maybe adventure outline, and has four game sessions to get caught back up.

Every adventure is still ready to run just in time; every adventure can be given final tweaks to accommodate decisions made by player agency; he has sacrificed a little extra time getting the campaign ready, buying himself insurance for a future occasion when he gets caught short of sufficient prep time for whatever reason. Real life gets in the way? No problem. Something takes longer than expected? No problem. An idea simply doesn’t work and needs to be scrapped or heavily revised? No problem.

Flexibility. When the time comes that you need it – and it happens to all of us – it’s priceless.

If you don’t have it, your only solution is to improv something with little guidance for how it will fit in and no regard for the bigger picture. With this arrangement, you always have some work done on the next adventure, so you always have the big picture perspective and something that’s at least semi-playable up your sleeve.

The key is in that final polish stage, now incorporating anything that you didn’t foresee in the way of player priorities or decisions, and making sure that the adventure as run always builds out from whatever the players have decided they want to do next session.

But there’s a secondary advantage as well: it makes foreshadowing a breeze. Hints and background events can be seeded into adventures with the deliberate intention of having them pay off in a specified adventure “not long from now”. This is something that the basic flowchart does really poorly, so that’s definitely something to contemplate.

6 Sidebar: A grander Vision

There are two other variations that are worth considering. The first is to develop adventure outlines for the whole campaign, or for the next six months of it at least. This essentially employs the same “general summary” technique used to turn adventure outlines into broad stories for the whole campaign or a significant slice of it.

If you have a look at the posts that I made here about planning what was at the time my next Dr Who campaign (it’s now ongoing) – links below – you can see an example of this process. I also used a similar approach to the Zener Gate campaign.

My superhero campaign goes a bit further – it has a long list of plot threads that are fully outlined, essentially mini-campaigns of 5 or 6 (or less, or more) adventures and employs a concordance to schedule “the next part” of each of these plot threads into specific adventures.

You still have complete flexibility to modify things, bring them forward, delay them, even abandon them altogether. Your adventures are still completely responsive to player input. But you get the sense of a much bigger campaign because there are multiple things happening all the time – and sometimes these can interact in interesting ways.

6 Sidebar: More epic adventures

Under this heading, i want to actually talk a little bit about the current adventure in the Doctor Who campaign because it shows flexibility being applied within the process described, and not just because of it.

I outlined the adventure in several acts, each representing a day’s play. The first act integrated the basic plotline with the character’s stated intentions and priorities so that events emerged naturally from his attempting to achieve those goals. A crashed spaceship on Skaro, the Dalek home-world, needed rescuing.

Act II was all about getting what the ship needed in order for that rescue to take place. It delivered the broader, more campaign-level developments that justified the story’s inclusion in the campaign.

Act III dealt with the actual rescue / escape and introduced a new villain, one who was ultimately responsible for the ship needing to be rescued in the first place.

This villain then blackmails the doctor into doing his dirty work in Act IV, which was mostly deep background material, but which included a first attempt at said dirty work.

Had the player not flubbed a major roll, damaging his lungs in a toxic atmosphere, breaking an arm and smashing his spacesuit, Act V would have completed the adventure, taking down an established villain and completing most of said villain’s backstory. This was the game session played this weekend just past.

Instead, he landed himself in hospital for a period of time while various parts of his anatomy were repaired and the session was about campaign backstory and planning how to complete the mission more successfully on a second attempt, which will comprise Act VI.

The function of the story within the campaign is to push the Daleks and Time Lords into the Time War. In fact, once the new villain showed his hand, it became clear that every possible choice by the PC led, eventually, to such a war; only the interval between cause and effect would vary.

But the heart of the campaign’s overall story isn’t about how the Time War began, it’s about the 8th Doctor becoming the 9th, a version of himself dedicated to fighting the Time War. Almost every adventure has seen a small step in that direction result from the titular PC being himself in the situations the adventures orchestrated. Its central tenet is that putting the character into the situations that comprised the campaign made this transition inevitable, whether the character recognized the slippery slope that he was on or not.

The new Act V was another step in that direction, as the character employs painfully-acquired skills in tactics and military planning to solve the immediate problem of completing the mission without stuffing it up a second time. But here’s the key point of relevance so far as this article is concerned: until the character blew what should have been a reasonably easy roll in Act IV, the Act V just played did not exist. It was completely written and researched in the two weeks between the Act IV and Act V game sessions and inserted into the adventure as a consequence of that failure.

It broadened the campaign canon in several areas, most notably in the history of the robotic dog companion of earlier Doctor Who and the history of an organization from those earlier days, a history that explained the situations depicted in later seasons of the TV show when both that robotic companion and the organization would reappear within the canon, integrating the campaign even more solidly with the established series canon from both before and after the supposed events of the campaign, and continued the overall story of the campaign – and none of it could have been planned in advance, because the character should have been able to make that roll – but didn’t.

In terms of the process outlined above, the entire adventure was developed to fit into the overall plotline of the campaign; it was ready to run without the inclusion of the new Act V. The only activity between game sessions that was anticipated was the final polish / prep, which is all about revising the adventure to incorporate the latest in-game developments surrounding the PC. Because of the failed roll, the new Act V became logically necessary, but it wasn’t simply shoehorned in – it was used to further the overall story contained within the campaign, as explained above, making both the adventure and the campaign better for its inclusion.

There are GMs who only run adventures-as-written, without adapting and evolving those adventures as play proceeds, just as there are those who insist on Rules-As-Written. They tend to be inexperienced, but that’s not a defining trait. The better you are at the art of GMing, the more you can integrate in-play events with the unplayed-as-yet parts of the adventure.

This anecdote shows, by example, how extensive the revision phase of the process described in the flowchart can be.

Admittedly, it’s a relatively extreme example – the only thing that would have been more extreme would have been the complete junking and replacement of the planned Act V (which became Act VI); that wasn’t necessary in this case. I wasn’t originally going to even mention it – this entire section wasn’t in my outline of the article – but, as I wrote the preceding sections, an impression seemed to be conveyed that the final stage was little more than a quick skim through the adventure to fix significant elements in the mind of the GM.

Most of the time, there’s not a lot more than that involved; but the system has the capacity to permit more substantial revisions when they are warranted, and this section is intended to highlight that.

7. Run Adventure

How long is an adventure? I’ve run D&D sessions in which the entire day’s play was consumed by a single room in a 5-room dungeon. The relationship between adventure breakup into acts and playing time is loose and slippery. As a general rule, I’ll try end end each act on a cliffhanger or a moment of decision or commitment, and I’ll try to drop a lesser cliffhanger part way through the adventure.

Because I have it to hand, let’s look at text length vs playing time from the current Dr Who adventure:

• Adventure Outline: 260 words
• Additional Background reference: 731 words
• Act I: 4524 words
• Act II: 4025 words
• Act III: 3179 words, 1 critical diagram
• Act IV: 4566 words (a lot of prepared dialogue)
• Act V: (newly inserted) 3615 words, and ran a half-hour short
• Act VI (was act V): 90 words (outline only) plus 1613 words that can be re-used from Act IV.

If I posit that the critical diagram showing the tactical progression of the escape from Skaro is worth the metaphoric ‘thousand words’, Act III contains 4179 words. If I extrapolate a full session’s play for Act V (3.5 hrs vs 3 hrs), that rises to 4217.5 words.

The average over the acts that have actually been played is therefore 4302.3 words. As a general rule, 4200-4500 words gets a solid day’s play.

As soon as you introduce a combat situation, the planning gets messier. As a general rule, most combat sequences get allocated 10 minutes plus 5 minutes per protagonist (PC or NPC ally) or significant antagonist. This gives one ‘qauntized unit’ of combat.

• Simple battles = 1 unit.
• Moderately-complicated battles = 2 units.
• Complicated battles = 3-4 units.
• Extremely complicated battles = 5+ units.

If the battle needs to be spread over multiple sessions, add one unit per extra game session to each session’s play to represent setting up and documenting positions and statuses.

Let’s take an example most readers won’t know: the Grand Finale of the first Zenith-3 campaign involved 5 acts, three of them battles of increasing complexity and difficulty, plus an aftermath of about 1/4 of a game session. There were 5 protagonist characters, +3 in the first, and +1 in the second; and each battle was with a single enemy. There was also about 2000 words worth of roleplay in between each battle. Acts I and II were set-up and totaled about 4700 words from memory (and ran slightly overlong).

Let’s work the math:

Act I + Act II: 4700 words
Act III: 2000 words + Battle #1:

One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x (5+3) + 5 = 15 + 40 = 55 minutes
Complexity Level: Complicated = 3-4 units
     = 55 minutes x 3-4 = 165 – 220 minutes
At the lower end of this scale, so use 165 minutes.

Act IV: 2000 words + Battle #2:

One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x (5+1) + 5 = 15+ 30 = 45 minutes
Complexity level: Complicated = 3-4 unites
     = 45 x 3-4 = 135 – 180 minutes
At the upper end of the scale, so use 180 minutes

Act V: 2000 words + Battle #3:

One Battle Unit = 10 + 5 x 5 + 5 = 15 + 25 = 40 minutes
Complexity Level Extreme = 5+ units
     = 5 x 40 = 200 minutes or more

Aftermath (also part of Act V, effectively): 25% of the game session.

If I arbitrarily set the average length of a game session to 4250 words, except for Act V which I knew would run a little long, so 4750 words, I can calculate backwards to determine how many words each battle unit represented:

Act III Battle #1: 4250-2000=2250; 3 units, so each = 750 words; 750 / 55 = 13.6364 words per combat minute in a unit.

Act IV Battle #2: 4250-2000=2250; 4 units, so each = 562.5 words; 562.5 / 45 = 12.5 words per combat minute in a unit.

Act V Battle #3: 4750 – 25% x 4250 = 4750 – 1062.5 = 3687.5; -2000 words = 1687.5 words; 5 units, so each is 337.5 words; 337.5 / 40 = 8.4375 words per combat minute in a unit, less if more than 5 units.

I wasn’t expecting a consistent value across all three battles; they were intended to be bigger stakes and increasingly frenetic. And Battle #3 was deliberately simplified to fit the available time – without that, the words per combat minute would have been closer to 10. It was the stakes that were bigger, not the combat complexity per se.

If I put those numbers onto a chart, I get the above. The red line is a straight line between the high value at 3 and the low at 5 simplified and shows just how consistent this is as a method of guesstimating how many words equivalent a combat is going to represent in a day’s play.

Extrapolating back, I get 2 = 16 words per combat minute and 1 = 17.5 words per combat minute. In other words, the less climactic / complicated the combat, the more room there is for the insertion of roleplay into the battle narrative. As things become insanely complicated, the need to clarify the tactical situation becomes all-consuming.

The other piece of wisdom that can be gleaned from the chart is some idea of the margin of error. The straight red line fits 3 of the 4 points almost perfectly, but it cuts the 4 mark at about 12 words per combat minute, while the actual value was closer to 12.5 – so 100 x 0.5 / 12 = ±4.17%. Call it ±5%, because there’s no indication that this is an extreme case.

It’s only a rule of thumb, but it’s a good one to have around.

8. End Campaign?

How do you decide that a campaign has reached it’s end? Well, if there’s an overarching story that connects the whole campaign together, that’s fairly obvious. If the campaign is more open-ended, it can be a more difficult question.

I can see 6 – no, 7 – reasons for a campaign to end in addition to Plot Completion (which I will include in the list for the sake of being complete):

• Plot Completion – the story is over. You might tell another story with the same characters in a sequel campaign.
• TPK – everybody dies. This doesn’t have to spell the end of a campaign if the GM/players don’t want it to; there are ways around it. New characters taking up where the old ones left off, some form of resurrection, some combination of the two, a sliding doors moment that rewrites history, whatever. Another option is to pivot to a new-character sequel campaign in which the world is living with the consequences of the previous PCs failure. So sometimes this ends a campaign and sometimes it doesn’t.
• Player Interest – the GM should always be on the lookout for the subtle signs of waning player interest, bearing in mind that everyone will experience this to a different degree and will express it to a different degree. If the signs are clear, though, maybe it’s time to wrap up the campaign and do something fresh.
• Player Departure – when a player leaves the campaign, that can be the end of things – it doesn’t matter why they have gone. If you know that the situation is only temporary, putting the campaign on hold for a while and doing something else might be a viable alternative. Several of my campaigns did not survive the death of one of the key players. Some of them did. One was put on hold for more than a decade. It happens.
• Character Limits – Some game systems limit how far the characters can advance. Those limits may or may not be sufficient to fully encompass the planned plotline of the campaign. Personally, I never let such limits constrain my campaigns – if they have to go into “epic levels” to get the story told, so be it. Other GMs feel very differently about the question.
• GM Interest – when prep becomes a millstone around your neck and you keep finding reasons to not do the things that you know you should, when the campaign becomes a grind, the GM has lost enough interest in running it that he is better off either putting it on hold while he recharges his batteries or shutting it down altogether. It can be said that you should always leave the audience – the players, in this case – wanting more. I disagree, I think you should always leave them satisfied.
• Internal baggage – sometimes campaigns grow so convoluted and complicated that internal baggage starts making plots harder to come up with. Again, when it becomes a grind, putting it on hold or shutting it down are viable options that have to be considered.
• Repetitiveness – when you’ve run out of original plot ideas and things start to feel repetitive, the campaign has run its course. Note that this can occur if PCs develop faster than the GM intended – when there are no credible threats left to challenge the PCs, and they win every fight without breaking a sweat, something has to change – and retiring the campaign is one option under the heading of ‘something’.

If the campaign is ending, you can let it quietly retire, or you can activate a planned ‘big finish’ of some sort. My co-GM and I already know how the Adventurer’s Club campaign will end, even if we don’t know when we will pull that trigger – and even if one of the other campaign-ending reasons forces our hand.

If the campaign is ending, then it’s back to ‘square one’ and the development of a new campaign. If not, it’s move on to step 9.

9. Revise Campaign

Too many GMs don’t do this, but after every adventure, the GM should revise his campaign plans, first to incorporate the direction in which the players want the campaign to travel in (and to avoid the directions in which they don’t want to go), and second because the characters will have evolved in the course of the last adventure and the GM should take that evolution into account, going forward.

This can take quite a bit of time and effort; the earlier it happens that the characters diverge from their anticipated path through the campaign, and the larger the campaign, the more significant the effort that is required.

Most of the time, it’s a lot more straightforward – so much so that GMs don’t see how critical it is. NEVER skimp on this step unless performing it would require shutting down the campaign for a period of time because the job is SO large.

When that is the case – for example, in my Zenith-3 (superhero) campaign – campaign revisions have to happen at the adventure outline stage. This complicates the adventures, but they tend to run for multiple game sessions – the current adventure has been running for a year of actual play (and been shut down for a year following my move).

That means that the overall campaign plan has to be robust enough to survive changes in direction and PC plans / goals / ambitions unscathed, while still letting those plans / goals be significant within the scope of individual adventures – and that’s a lot harder to pull off than it sounds. Plot Trains are inevitable in this situation unless you actively work to derail them – one of the limitations of the big sprawling campaign plan.

But either way, the campaign plan needs to be revisited and revised to accommodate the consequences of player agency. Whether it happens as a standalone step in the campaigning process (Step 9 as show) or gets folded into a more localized set of events / developments, it still has to happen.

10. Evolve Characters

The GM often doesn’t get to see how the key characters of the campaign – the PCs – are evolving until after it has happened, and there’s at least one game session lag between that evolution and the GM’s capacity to incorporate the evolution into the campaign; the evolved characters simply show up ready for play in an adventure that was written and prepped without knowing what they had become.

Inevitably, this makes the characters more capable and competent than the GM had anticipated, sometimes markedly so. The adventure as written will almost always seem easier than expected.

There are a number of potential solutions to this problem.

• Ignore it / live with it – my preferred option most of the time.
• Require player foreshadowing of evolution – I’ll discuss this below, it’s too complicated to put in a bullet-point.
• Anticipate character evolution and make the adventures harder to compensate for it – this is hard to get right, but very satisfying when you do. Beware of over-estimating how far the characters will evolve.
• Tweaking adventures on-the-fly to incorporate the evolution in the characters – sometimes, you have no choice but to do this, because the character evolution is adventure-wrecking; sometimes, you can get away with paying lip service to the changes at times and mostly going with the first answer offered in this list. If character evolution makes the planned adventure a walk in the park, it’s not always a good idea to prevent that. That’s answer #1 in its purest form.

Require foreshadowing of character evolution

In my Fumanor campaigns, whenever a character gained a level, I always required them to tell me what they intended their next character level to be.

Players were free to change their minds as the campaign played out – sometimes, a planned diversification down a character evolution side-path would be delayed or brought forward because the player felt that the change would better prepare the character for what they foresaw happening in the campaign.

This let me add little scenes here and there into an adventure showing the character trying to master certain skills or abilities that would lead to the planned evolution.

It gets a little more complicated when you don’t have the limitations of condensing evolution into a simple headline using character classes, but the general principle still works – foreshadowing what skills or abilities the player intends for the character to improve next is still possible.

When you are writing adventures, it can sometimes become obvious that characters are going to be pushed out of their comfort zone, and players may elect to evolve their characters in response to that eventuality – or they can decide that staying true to the character concept / personality requires them to accept that such situations will remain outside of their comfort zone. This also lets you anticipate and foreshadow such evolution.

So long as the decision is not binding until the character actually gets to evolve – i.e. gains a level or gets a certain amount of banked experience to spend – this can add greatly to the verisimilitude of the campaign.

My personal preference, when possible within the overall campaign plan, is to both foreshadow the next step in a character’s evolution AND let their last evolutionary development play some significant role in the next adventure, even if it’s only one small scene or a difference in the narrative that takes it into account without making a huge difference to the story.

These let the players sense that their character’s in-game experiences are being shaped by their evolutionary choices and implies that the campaign is evolving in response to their actions – in other words, they are a public demonstration of player agency, implying that other player choices are also having an impact, even if it’s not always obvious.

The rewards for making this little bit of extra effort are far in excess of the costs incurred in terms of GM time and prep.

Again, this all plays into the business of revising and polishing adventures; it’s another element within step 6e. Quite often, the only significant changes or additions to an adventure are a direct consequence or expression of character evolution.

The other thing that needs to be highlighted under this heading is that NPCs should evolve, too – either to further their goals / plans, or in response to in-game events that show a weakness or vulnerability or even an opportunity. Where PC evolution gets publicly displayed (a character exhibits a new ability), when an enemy gets to hear about this, they should revise both their own plans and their own future evolution to take it into account.

Back To 6a

I consider these post-adventure steps to be a permanent attachment to the act of running an adventure. When they are complete, the GM has them to employ as context within the campaign for their game prep – so it’s back to step 6a and the development of the next adventure.

Final advice

Prep requirements always expand to fill the available time plus 20% – or more. That’s just a reality that GMs have to get used to.

Ideally, prep can be spread out so that some of it gets done in advance. A number of scenes / adventures in the Zenith-3 campaign exist for no other reason than to introduce an NPC who will be a building-block for future adventures, or who will trigger the development of such building blocks.

The metagame benefit of doing so is that the character creation gets separated out from that NPCs campaign-significant appearance, making both that bit less work-intensive. On top of that, the GM gets to see what works and what doesn’t, and can fine-tune the character to make them more effective when it matters.

Campaign Activities: A sidebar

I have a little time up my sleeve, so I’m going to invest some of it in a sidebar at this point. Campaign events, from a meta-perspective, can be categorized as:

• Introducing new campaign elements – people, places, things
• Developing existing campaign elements and contexts
• Introducing new narrative threads / subplots
• Advancing existing narrative threads / subplots
• Interactions between existing and/or new narrative threads / subplots
• Concluding existing narrative threads / subplots

Six categories, in all. If a chart is drawn up showing the life of a complex campaign over time, the % of game content that each of these represents provides an interesting set of patterns over the lifetime of the campaign:

The image is a little hard to read, you can click on it to see a larger version in a new tab (so that you can switch back and forth between it and the text).

This chart breaks a campaign into 4 divisions – Early, Mid-campaign, Late, and End. Each of the first three is subdivided into three smaller periods the same size as End, to get 10 equal spacings and End is subdivided into two. In reality, there is virtually no chance that a campaign’s phases would be of the same duration, but the regularity helps with interpretation.

• At the start of the campaign, it’s divided 50-50 between introducing characters and introducing plotlines.
• 1/3 of the way through the early campaign, and these have shrunk to make room for advancing some of those existing plot threads and 5% in resolving early plot threads. This is necessary to give players a sense of accomplishment, of making progress.
• 2/3 of the way through the early campaign and 5% of the total is now devoted to developing existing campaign elements, while resolving plot threads is up to a little more than 10%. These take equal chunks out of the new campaign elements introductions and new plot threads – advancing existing plot threads remains consistent at about 15%.
• At the end of the early campaign, as it transitions to mid-campaign, plot resolutions remains about the same, developing existing characters and related campaign elements is up to about 10%, advancing existing plot threads is up to about 20%, and introducing new elements and plotlines continues to fall steadily to make room.
• 1/3 of the way through the mid-campaign, and a key characteristic of the mid-campaign is now a noteworthy component: interactions between plot threads. Advancing existing plot threads has again grown in significance, and plot resolutions have also grown. Steady falls in both new campaign elements and new plotlines continue in order to make room for these changes.
• 2/3 of the way through the mid-campaign is actually the half-way mark of the whole. Plotline resolutions and advancing existing plotlines have both grown as a share of the content while interactions and developing existing characters have remained about the same. The same steady reduction in new plots and campaign elements continues, now down to 20% each.
• As the campaign transitions from mid-campaign to late campaign, there are dramatic changes. Advancing plotlines grows again, and interactions between plot threads triple; there is actually a reduction in resolutions as a result, in addition to the steady drop in new content introduction. For the first time, advancing existing plotlines is SUBSTANTIALLY higher than new campaign content. This is a key feature of the late campaign.
• 1/3 of the way through the late campaign, and only 10% of the campaign is new character elements, and the same for new plotlines; advancing existing plotlines is now more than both of these combined. Developing existing campaign elements grows, and so does resolution of plotlines. In fact, more plotlines get resolved than get introduced.
• 2/3 of the way through the late campaign, and everything starts to come together in terms of narrative, resulting in a massive spike in plotline interactions. Character evolution becomes extremely important because that’s the trigger for subsequent plot developments. The big picture is starting to resolve itself into something definite. There’s neither an increase nor decrease in the emphasis placed on advancing plot threads outside of these interactions, and there’s another big drop in plot resolutions. Things begin to stack up on the PCs, in other words.
• The conclusion of the late campaign is the beginning of the End. Plot interactions collapse, because things have come together. Character evolution both results from the previous interactions and drives the next phase of the campaign. New campaign elements are almost non-existent, but there are a few new plotlines still being introduced – mostly in the form of short adventures of no campaign significance in between the more campaign-oriented material.
• Half-way through the End, there’s one final burst of thread interactions and the development of existing campaign elements. Advancing plotlines all but collapses because there are so few plotlines left outside of the main campaign plotline. Almost everything else has been resolved at this point, there’s only the Big Finish to come (and anything leading up to it).
• The End of the End is the end of the Campaign. There’s a little bit of interaction as all the existing plot threads coalesce into one plotline, there’s one or two isolated adventures to give that a little time in which to happen, there’s a tiny bit of plot advancement, and it all leads into the Big Finish. There’s also allowance made in the “New Plot threads” for an epilogue or even a prologue to a sequel campaign, building on anything not resolved. And, if you add up all the “New Narrative Threads”, 50 + 40 + 35 + 30 + 25 + 20 + 15 + 10 + 5 + 5 + 5 = 240; and the Resolutions add up to 5 + 12 + 12 + 18 + 22 + 20 + 25 + 10 + 20 + 45 + 85 = 394, it becomes apparent that the two aren’t to scale; there’s a significance factor in play. if resolutions are twice as important as new plotlines at the moment the latter are introduced to the campaign, 240 – (394 / 2) = 240 – 197 = 43, or roughly 18% of the campaign. If resolutions are even more important, this percentage only goes up. And those numbers assume that plot resolution is in the PCs’ favor – which might not be the case. Sometimes, a victory is simply stopping an explosion for long enough that it becomes somebody else’s problem.

Okay, where was I? Oh, yes.

The ideal of introducing everything before it becomes plot-significant can’t always be met. There will always need to be some measure of compromise and corner-cutting when it comes to prep. The goal is never for prep to be complete and comprehensive – fine detail takes a lot of time for often minimal gains – its to have the next adventure be ready to run effectively. If there’s time up your sleeve once that’s accomplished, you can spend it on incorporating fine details and nice-to-have adventure elements.

I try always to be aware of the best places to cut corners – juggling maximum gain in prep time for minimal impact on the adventure. This comes back to planning and scheduling campaign prep and the art of knowing what’s possible in the available time and what’s not – while keeping things loose enough that you can occasionally indulge yourself.

The campaign flowchart, and the process that it depicts, is an ideal, a guideline, something to be varied at need. This is especially true when it comes to adventure creation.

The closer to game play that you can leave the creation of an adventure, the better that adventure will be in terms of fitting into the existing and established continuity and context of the campaign – but the further from that point it takes place, the better an adventure will be in fitting into the overall campaign plotline and context. Both are necessary and desirable – and mutually contradictory.

There’s a saying in Computer Programming: “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it functional. Pick two.” Of course, that’s an oversimplification; these points define a three-dimensional solution space in which any point is a valid one to aim for. But it gets non-IT people thinking along the right lines, deciding what needs to get compromised and what can’t be – and identifying the costs associated with those specifications. If one function requested is going to be 70% of the development effort and associated expense, you have to at least think about whether or not that’s an essential, or just a ‘nice to have’ – is there some practical workaround that lets you do without it, slashing the development time and expense in the process?

This is a similar situation, the right answer is to compromise both just a little. But breaking the adventure development process up into discrete steps means that the compromise point can be adjusted within different phases of that process, maximizing bang-for-buck in terms of the development time invested by the GM.

There is no one right answer, there are innumerable wrong answers and even more poor ones. A campaign process that flows activities lets you ask the right questions and make the most effective plans for the utilization of your prep time. That reality is the best that you can realistically hope for, and its not to be sneezed at.