This entry is part 10 in the series New Beginnings
new beginnings 10

The campaign is on the verge of blooming as growth sprouts in every direction.

It’s not easy making a completely fresh start. This series examines the process of creating a new campaign in detail, a process that is approaching its conclusion.

Campaign Structure

There isn’t much of a structural nature left undone, or so it must seem – and, truthfully, the bulk of the work is done. But there is a small remainder that demands a little intensive thought.

How is everything going to tie together? You have intrusive game mechanics, practical necessities, the need to interrupt play for what might be a day, a week, a fortnight, a month – or some unpredictable combination and/or multiple of those. There is the necessary interface between experience point awards, other rewards, character progression, and plot to take into account – there’s very little worse than an adventure that over- or under-estimates the capabilities of the PCs at that point in time, but that has to happen for the overall plotline of the campaign to make sense.

These are all global decisions, individually small in nature, but combining to wrap the adventure up in an overall look-and-feel envelope that will encapsulate each adventure. Everything from the degree of continuity from session-to-session through to the style in which play will be synopsized (or even if it will be synopsized) fall into this category.

It’s easy to make these decisions. It’s not easy to ensure that they harmonize with each other, and still harder to ensure that they compliment the adventure content. In fact, it’s all most people can do to try and minimize the level of interference that they impose on the campaign content.

What might surprise those who haven’t thought about it before is that this approach is actually just one step removed from successfully completing that much harder task.

  • Make a list of the decisions that need to be made.
  • Order them in sequence of the amount of in-game content.
  • Make your decisions in that sequence.
  • The criteria are to choose the alternative that:
    • reflects the theme,
    • or, if not, compliments the theme,
    • or, if not, reflects the way the players are expected to react to the theme,
    • or, if not, balances the theme,
    • or, if not, that interfere the least with the theme’s expression.

This could be as simple as ensuring that every negative or downside is paired with a positive or upside, regardless of the relative strength of the elements of an individual pair, or as complicated as ensuring that at certain points in the campaign the balance shifts this way or that. It can be as plot-oriented as ensuring that each synopsis contains dark hints at the relevance to the larger picture, or as metagame-based as giving the players the option of “buying” a treasure/reward preference or substitute with XP that would otherwise go to enhancing their character’s capabilities. There are a multitude of options, but the process listed above will enable you to navigate your way through not to the compromise that interferes the least, but to the compromise that enhances the most.

There is one term in the list above that needs a little further discussion. That word is “balance” and it occurs in the second last basis of judgment. “Balance” doesn’t mean contradicting the theme or playing up the opposite; it means (in this context) grounding the game element so that the players aren’t necessarily feeling the same things as their characters, putting some distance between passionate positions and an impartial position that enables the players to enjoy the theme vicariously.

Adventure Format

One of those global elements needs to be singled out for special attention. Over time, your campaign will develop an individual adventure format whether you create one deliberately or not – but there can be a lot of pain, frustration, and lost opportunity in the meantime. A far better alternative is to create something that is close to what will arise anyway and just tweak and refine it, thereafter.

Each of the campaigns that I run has a different mixture of plot and in-character life. In some cases, only a few minutes (per multi-game-session adventure) for each character brings their lives up to date, with the occasional exception where the personal life of a PC provides the lead-in for a particular adventure. In others, I might spend an hour or more on “social in-character activities” for every hour spent actually advancing the plot agenda. Most fall somewhere between these extremes.

In some cases, these occur in deliberately-inserted “quiet moments” inside the plot, in other cases they precede the adventure. In one of my Fumanor campaigns, I target the mid-adventure session breaks with cliff-hanger endings, while bookending each adventure with “social life” – and again target these with a “personal life” cliffhanger. However, that campaign also had “soft boundaries” – which means that i was content for one adventure to end, and another to begin, mid-game session. (“Hard boundaries”, in contrast, mandate that each adventure ending also ends the day’s game session, demanding “padding” mid-adventure to get the timing more or less right – another of those “global choices” that I mentioned earlier.)

I have run campaigns in which experience was handed out after each conflict, campaigns in which experience was handed out after each game session, campaigns in which experience was handed out after each adventure, and at least one campaign where experience was handed out by note (modern equivalent: email) in between game sessions. Where does this metagame element fit into your adventure format?

I have run campaigns that preceded each social interaction session with a political subplot, and others which preceded it with a James-Bond style Teaser action sequence that did not involve the PCs – these targeted the players, but mandated that I provide a channel by which that information ultimately found its way to the PCs. I used a variety of such channels – everything from security footage to speculation to a mystic’s visions (eventually the players figured out that someone was pulling their strings by “showing” them the things the someone wanted them to see, leading them into the final phase of the campaign). This is a perfect example of how the adventure format and these global decisions can operate to enhance a campaign and even form a central element of the plot.

House Rules

In earlier parts of this series, we have made (and extended, and trimmed) a list of House Rules that would be required for the campaign; but with the exception of a few that were retained from earlier campaigns, these haven’t actually been written yet. One of these days I’ll do a more substantial article on the subject of creating House Rules*, but for now I’ll simply hit the high points:

  • Model your house rules on an existing example from within the game system as a first preference, and on an existing sample from a different game system that you know well as a second preference. Something completely original should be a distant third choice, made only when the first two don’t yield a model for you to follow.
  • Each and every House Rule needs to be justified, and that justification needs to be clear on what the rule is intended to achieve.
  • Every House Rule should have notes on a simpler, more abstract alternative in case it doesn’t work as envisaged. (NB: This is a case of “do as I say and not as I do” – failure in this area is one of weaknesses as a GM.
  • Rigorously apply the principles enunciated in one of my earlier articles, The Application Of Time and Motion to RPG Game Mechanics. In particular, if it is going to slow play, the justification for the rule had better be pretty darned good – and possibly even compensated by a simplification to another rules element that is at least as ubiquitous as the rule that slows play.
  • Test the rule to make sure it achieves the objective you’ve set for it.
  • Write a summary that explains the principles behind the rule as though you were explaining them to someone in an email. Maximum of three sentences permitted. This then becomes the introductory/explanatory text to the House Rule.
  • Look for hidden assumptions that might come back to bite you. Look HARD.
  • Go through your campaign plan. Make sure that there is at least one adventure relatively early in that plan in which you expect this House Rule to be showcased. Add to the prep requirements list for the adventure that follows, it a review of the House Rule.
  • Push the House rule to see what happens. So many rules are fine at low stat or character levels but fall apart under heightened stress.
  • Find an online list of feats, abilities, powers, whatever, for your game system. Search it for key terms from your House Rule, looking for unexpected confluences and interactions. Modify the House Rule accordingly.
  • This is an optional step, but one that I strongly recommend: give the House Rule to someone who knows the game system (who might not be a player in your game) and get them to review it for clarity and unexpected applications/flaws. Offer to return the favor if they ever want to call in the debt – and mean it. And accept their comments without a chip on your shoulder!

* One of the major reasons I haven’t done so is the degree of systems dependence that such an article would have and the difficulty of abstracting general solutions as a result. My fear is that it would either be so generic as to be useless or so system-specific that it would be useless to anyone else. As a result, it’s been on my back-burner for years, waiting for an approach to be uncovered that holds some hope of avoiding both these problems.

PCs

Your notes should contain everything that a player needs to generate a PC, including making intelligent choices for their prospective character. And they should be organized in logical fashion so that you (and they) can find whatever they are looking for. Creating an index is painstaking and tedious but often worth it.

Right now, neither of these is completely true. Before your campaign is ready to play, you need to change that.

Structural Organization

The organizational structure that I have been using as my guide throughout has been one that’s applicable to D&D (any flavor) simply because it covers all the bases; other game systems may not require everything on the list.

When a player indicates a desire to join the campaign, especially if the campaign is not already ongoing, here’s what they should receive:

  • A summary of the races available for PCs, as they are to be depicted within the campaign. This contains only what “everyone knows” and as such will be incomplete, abbreviated, and possibly even inaccurate.
  • An introduction to the game world and its history, society, geography, etc.
  • A summary – one paragraph at most – of each of the nations from which PCs may derive.
  • A summary of the archetypes or character classes available for PCs, as they are to be depicted within the campaign. This contains only what “everyone knows” and as such will be incomplete, abbreviated, and possibly even inaccurate.
  • The House Rules.

Once the prospective player has shortlisted one, two, or at most, three combinations of race, homeland, and archetype, they should receive the “full” (detailed) files on the chosen races, homelands, and archetypes that contains everything they need to know. In some campaigns and circumstances, they may instead receive an intermediate file that doesn’t reveal a race’s secrets, only getting “the whole story” once they have committed to a particular combination.

Even then, these files should not contain information that the race or archetype doesn’t know, though it may indicate areas of mystery that remain unresolved.

Internal Organization

I can’t speak for everyone, but I find it a lot easier to organize the contents of each document when everything is still in note form, simply because I can see more of the content at the same time. I use a lot of cut and paste to rearrange these notes into a coherent form.

Another trick is to use standardized headings for each file on a particular subject. This helps ensure that nothing has been left out, and generally imposes a level of rationality to the contents’ structure.

Expounding on the notes

Fortunately, even though this is a lot of work, much of it is complete already; you simply need to turn your notes into prose (one file for each nation, race, and archetype) and then edit and prune to get the versions for more general dissemination. Only a few of them should take a full hour to complete, and a reasonable average to aim at is 20 minutes or less.

Now, I know from experience that it takes a lot longer than that to properly create a balanced character class with descriptions of the class abilities. It follows that any such will be outside the boundaries of these estimates, which assume that you are simply modifying an existing class.

Cross-linking to House Rules

As I go, I am careful to cross-link to any House Rules of relevance. If there’s a house rule about extremely high Dexterity, for example, or if the GM has chosen to subdivide the stat into Nimbleness and Manual Dexterity (as I did for my first AD&D campaign), and a race gets a bonus to one or the other but not both, link to the relevant rule rather than repeating it redundantly.

Read-through, spell-check, edit, revise, polish

This should be fairly obvious! This is your final chance to make sure that your prose makes sense – take advantage of it!

Briefings & Backgrounds

Once characters have been generated, the clock to campaign start is definitely ticking. Without play, interest can only be sustained for a limited period of time. It is therefore important to make sure that you have all your ducks in a row before pulling that trigger.

I frequently buy additional time by getting players to generate a character background (which I then vet for compatibility within the game world). As much as possible, I like to make this an interactive process between the player and myself, enabling me to build connections to key plots into the characters, with the player’s approval, in advance. At the same time, I modify the campaign plan to integrate the actual characters – and the personal goals set for them by their creators – into what I have planned.

This frequently involves the preparation of additional briefing material for the player to read and integrate into their background. While it isn’t necessary to complete this material in advance, I do as much as I can find time for, because it eases time pressures later, freeing me up to focus on the individual adventures.

Exit Strategies

A player can choose to leave a campaign at any time. A character can die in any battle. The only certainty is that someone will want to do so at some point. Plan for it in advance!

Such planning consists of two parts: one, if the character doesn’t die, explaining where the character goes when he leaves, and why. Depending on the circumstances, this can be quite tricky – if an Elven character pulls out of the campaign in the middle of a life-or-death quest to save the Elvish Nation, for example. It might be that you need to keep the character around as an NPC until a certain point is reached – but this only defers the problem. Solve it now, and it’s out of the way.

The other aspect involved is to examine future plots for impact as a result of the character being missing. These may need modification.

This is one of the penalties involved in customizing the campaign to integrate the PCs. It’s a price well worth paying, but a little prep – like having a series of exit strategies for each PC that you can pull out of your back pocket whenever you need them – a lot of the angst which normally result can be expiated in advance.

These exit strategies all need to be generated in the context of what’s supposed to be going on in the campaign at the time. That’s why you may need several different ones for each character. Strategy #1 might apply until the fourth adventure, Strategy #2 might apply from adventure number 5 through 12, and so on.

Note that this isn’t the same as a temporary absence, no matter how prolonged it might be. However, it is the same as a player deciding that he isn’t enjoying his current character and wants to trade it in for a new PC.

Initial Adventure

There are also a couple of final decisions to be made in conjunction with the initial adventure. One of the necessities, for example, is to get all the PCs into the same physical location and give them a reason to bond into a group. Only when the characters have been generated do I know where they will be coming from, and therefore where the most sensible place for them to come together is going to be.

I then need to get the group from that point of assembly to wherever the first adventure is supposed to take place. Along the way, I like to incorporate mini-encounters that will introduce each PC to the group in a more substantial manner than a verbal “I’m Alderac, a Wizard from the Western Divide” does.

Infrastructure

Finally, I make sure that any necessary infrastructure is in place. This could be anything from photos that give a sense of the world, its architecture, etc, to forms, paperwork, props, and tools. I include the selection of an appropriate miniatures figure for in-game use in this category, but it can also involve making sure that you have enough chairs for everyone who is going to be involved!

There often isn’t much in this category, but that just makes it a quick and easy box to tick – just what you want, approaching the end of a major task!

Oh, and one more thing: I make sure that I have contact information for everyone, and that everyone knows when and where play is expected to commence! This is taken for granted too frequently.

It’s been a long road, but the conclusion is in sight. We’ve taken a bunch of isolated ideas and legacies and forged them into a plan for a campaign, we’ve created everything that we need for PCs, and we’ve signed up a number of prospective players, who are busy reading briefing and background material and creating PCs. It’s time to put that plan into operation…



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