A brief recap:

This is the final part in a detailed reexamination of singe-player campaigns. If you want to see the full Table Of Contents, it was included in Part One (though it has definitely been updated since that was published). So far, we’ve looked at the effects on combat, characters, roleplay, and how those all contribute to plots and adventures for one-player games. To wrap it all up, it’s time to study the biggest picture of all, campaigns. As always, there may be some recapitulation of past points because of the way they impact campaign-level play, and that’s where we begin…

The Fragility Of Memory

I mentioned in part 3 how fragile eyewitness testimony has been proven to be. Memory is inherently fallible, and the one-player campaign is reliant on one person’s memory. While this avoids some of the contaminant problems that plague group attempts at recollection, the simple fact that you have just one memory instead of a group collaborating on remembering what’s happened makes this a very important campaign-level factor.

Perhaps even more than in a group campaign, the GM needs to help out, taking action to assist the player in overcoming the one-player handicap. It is, after all, no fun for the player to be distracted from play because he’s trying to remember what happened six months earlier and why what he’s involved in now actually matters.

There are two aspects in which the GM’s campaign planning can help prevent this problem interfering in the campaign.

Mnemonic Reminders

The easier of the two is to build in Mnemonic Reminders. These are recaps of the essential action that the player needs to remember. You can either deliver these “voice-over style” – “Previously in campaign X” – or you can put the reminder into the mouth of an NPC – “Remember, Vasili, that the Deviant Orc tricked you once before, when he.,..”

It also helps when you can build into character encounters something distinctive that can serve as a reminder of that character. This can be a verbal trademark or some visual cue – remembering that visuals are muted in a roleplaying campaign, provided through narrative rather than actually being seen.

This goes beyond a mere catch-phrase; it can be a shorthand way of propelling yourself into character. I’ve remarked many times on Peter Jurasic’s use of this technique for getting into character as Londo Mollari in Babylon-5, simply reciting mentally “Mr Garabaldi” in the faux-Hungarian accent that he used to characterize Londo – it didn’t matter whether Garabaldi was in the scene or not. Since you have more NPCs than usual to handle, you should take every advantage that you can get.

The Carry-forward

Something that takes a lot more design effort, and that has a notable effect on the adventures that comprise the campaign, is to limit the information that has to be carried forward. This involves making adventures more self-contained while also keeping continuity very strict. I used the one-sentence summary as a structural testing device for adventure components; well, it works equally well at a campaign level, and it also means that everything that has to be carried forward can be summed up in that single statement.

Of the two techniques, this is by far the most profound. It requires a tying up of loose ends within each adventure, and tight control over the theme of each adventure, and a – I almost wrote “simpler” adventure structure, but as was pointed out in the previous part of this series, Clarity is what’s needed, not Simplicity.

Fortunately, adventures were already heading in that direction – and for exactly the same reason, just on a smaller scale.

What We Have Here Is A Failure To Communicate

Another impact of the “Due North” phenomenon (discussed in part 3) within solo play is that there is no safety net when there is a breakdown of communications between player and GM. The player misunderstands the GM or vice-versa, there are no other players to clarify the situation, and the adventure takes a violent left turn into la-la land as a result.

This happens at the campaign scale as well. In fact, it’s arguable that these are not adventure-scale problems at all; they are campaign-scale problems, because the effects can linger (even post-correction) and affect more than just the adventure in which they appear. That’s because the subject most prone to severe impact is the relevance of the isolated adventure to the collective campaign.

For that reason, campaign structural control mandates the incorporation of a couple of sub-structures into each adventure that permit recovery from the problem before it has time to be cemented into the player’s thinking. Your next play session is too far away; even a post-adventure debrief is too late, because of the impact on human information retention of excitement/adrenalin.

In a nutshell, information received (or self-constructed) during a period of high excitement or an adrenalin rush is given higher associative value within the memory than information delivered in a moment of relative calm, and this difference is magnified when an individual is coming down from such a moment of high excitement. Furthermore, information and situational interpretation that occur during such periods of excitement are prioritized by the mind according to the symbolic threat that they contain and the capacity for successful reaction or response; not only will the player remember an interpretation that poses a greater threat, they will remember interpretations that give them an opportunity to deal with the problem, both in preference to the real situation being described by the GM. Clarity has to be achieved before the climax, or (at worst) during the climax, of an adventure, or any misinterpretations will linger beyond that one adventure, and contaminate the player’s understanding of future confrontations and situations. After the adventure is too late.

In a group game, GMs can use this to his advantage, because players are affected by the phenomenon to varying extents. Some will retain the correct interpretation of events, while others will retain the misinterpretation. This produces the sort of natural confusion that is entirely more likely to occur than a clear understanding of what is going on.

One of the reasons for the emphasis on added verisimilitude in the first two articles is because I know that some of that gain has to now be sacrificed to compensate for another problem that is more severe in single-player games, for obvious reasons – reasons that funnel directly into the “Due North” phenomenon, to bring the discussion full-circle.

In addition to the Clarification Scenes, Plot Shortcuts, and Milestones recommended in the discussion of adventures, there are three types of structural element that I recommend incorporating into you solo-game adventures for campaign reasons: Resets, Logic Breakers, and Rationality Bombs. Because these are all about correctly connecting individual adventures together to form the campaign. I tend to think of these as “superstructure elements” instead of “internal elements”.

Resets

“Resets” are catch-your-breath “reality check” moments that give the player clues that a misunderstanding has occurred. Optional scenes that get included just to paraphrase and rephrase past information or question chains of logic without supplying an answer, or any more information that could be used to obtain an answer.

This is something different to a Clarification Scene, which does aim to bring the player closer to a solution to whatever problem or situation he is facing in-game by clarifying facts that may have been misunderstood within the adventure. The purpose of a Clarification Scene is to enable a successful end to the adventure (from a roleplaying satisfaction point of view). A Reset is a pause to enable the player to get his understanding of the significance of the adventure into correct perspective.

I’ll discuss placement and implementation of Resets together with the other types of adventure superstructure.

Logic Breakers

Logic Breakers are Optional Scenes where an NPC guides the player’s thinking back in the right direction to overcome a misunderstanding. These go a step beyond a Clarification Scene, and should only be used when the player’s mistaken interpretation threatens to damage the entire campaign irreparably. Nevertheless, even though they might never be required, it’s important to build them into the adventures so that they are as natural as possible in terms of plot.

A plot breaker requires two things: an NPC who has a very different thought process to that of the PC, and a way for that character to become fully informed of the past events that require interpretation, possibly by overhearing a Clarification Scene, though I would prefer to find more natural ways of achieving this requirement.

Data, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, with his ability to download and investigate the totality of log entries made by another vessel of individuals, and to rule certain interpretations out just for the sake of argument and then completely ignore them is the perfect plot device for delivering a Logic Bomb. Q is another, albeit one that would be more annoying and whose findings would be more likely to be disregarded until there was no alternative.

In the Pulp Campaign, my co-GM and I have Colin Blackstone, an NPC illusionist and master magician, who assumes until proven otherwise that anything he learns in the course of an adventure is because the opposition wants him to know it, in order to mislead him. This enables him to penetrate deceptions and misinterpretations that are otherwise almost impenetrable – in other words, to deliver Logic Bombs when they are needed – although when Blair created the character, he didn’t realize that this was the plot function that I would utilize the character for!

In the Dr Who campaign, more to the point, I have deliberately made Jangshen, the Doctor’s companion, an individual who filters his understanding of all phenomena through his own philosophic perspective. While this means that he usually misunderstands the nuances of how technology works (often in a humorous fashion), it also enables him quite frequently to cut through the technical details to the heart of the situation. Explaining things to him also forces the PC to simplify his own perception of events, which can itself provide clarity. Thus, when the NPC requests an explanation, it is a Clarification Scene, but when he is interpreting and explaining events, it is either a roleplayed scene for comedic relief, or a Logic Bomb – or, occasionally, a Red Herring, as I don’t want the NPC to make the PC Lazy!

Rationality Bombs

A Rationality Bomb is an optional scene that provides a way for the 13th hour to become the 11th hour, effectively buying time for the PC.

These are very difficult to pull off without a Deus-Ex-Machina, which is an undesirable solution for all sorts of reasons that I’m not going to go into here. Nevertheless, I work hard at trying to create a back door through which I can send the PC as a last resort. Despite the fact that they are manipulations of the plot, I want these to seem naturally occurring, and better yet, not to hand everything to the PC on a silver platter; they open onto an opportunity, not a solution. That also helps keep them manageable in scope, and – ironically – makes them easier to create.

My usual technique is identify a solution path that is so unlikely that it would never occur to anyone to even contemplate it, then use the Rationality Bomb to lower the improbability of success to a level that exactly matches the character’s level of desperation. I’ve used the same technique for more than a decade in the Zenith-3 campaign – and in all that time, I think I’ve had to pull the pin on exactly two Rationality Bombs. All right, maybe three.

To make a Rationality Bomb a seamless part of the plot, it’s often necessary to lay the groundwork in advance to justify it. This runs the risk of the player seizing on it as part of his solution to the problem; I don’t have a problem with that.

For example, let’s say that the plotline features an out-of-control reactor that is facing a China Syndrome. I might make mention early on of some upgrade work being done, and not all the manuals being completely up-to-date. If pressed for details, I might mention upgrading pumps and other such infrastructure. Some time later, I might further suggest that it takes quite a lot of power to run the monitoring equipment of the reactors, and that the internal electrical grid is designed to automatically reconfigure to draw that power from wherever it is available.

As the plot approaches it’s climax, the supervillain locks himself in the number 1 reactor chamber, having deliberately caused a Loss-of-coolant accident and jammed the SCRAM sequence (i.e. the normal safety procedure for shutting down the reactor when this happens), so that his energy-absorbing capacity is soaking up massive amounts of radiation, supercharging his powers. Confronting the villain means a lethal radiation exposure that will probably kill before the villain can be defeated – at least, it would if he weren’t absorbing most of the radiation in the reactor chamber – the expected solution is to keep him between the hero and the reactor at all times, or at least enough to make the encounter survivable. However, the other reactors are approaching super-critical, because they are all affected by the conditions he created, but he is not soaking up the power in them.

But, in the event that the players don’t spot this solution until the villain has reached his maximum capacity and torn through the reactor casing, leaving an imminent meltdown with nothing to contain it, I can deploy the Rationality Bomb that I have carefully buried in the first paragraph. Did you spot it? No? You weren’t supposed to, because it’s only partially spelt out – I’ve supplied just enough information to justify it, not enough to make it available to the PCs (unless they ask the right questions).

Because the reactors haven’t all been upgraded to the new spec, some of the SCRAM systems can be manually triggered, shutting down reactors 2, 3, and 4. Second, cut off the connection between the power plant and the outside electrical grid. Third, by then activating every monitoring system on those three reactors, you can trigger the internal power configuration to draw power from number one reactor, which bypasses the computer control systems of reactor one that the bad guy sabotaged; the computer will then read the imminent catastrophe, and shut down reactor number 1 at the last possible second. Some meltdown will still have occurred, but total disaster will be averted. A makeshift cap on the hole in the containment vessel, some fire-hoses to cool the whole mess down (and settle any radioactive particles in the air), and the PCs can get on with the job of corralling the menace they permitted to be born. (Note that simply flooding the chamber through the hole punched by the villain will only produce steam explosions, worsening the crisis).

This Rationality Bomb defuses the immediate emergency if the PCs make the right moves, without completely solving their headaches. That’s all that I would reasonably offer. Nor would I make the solution as obviously effective as I have described above – this would be a chance at success, not an ironclad guarantee of solution, or at least I would make it seem so to the players, no matter what I – as GM – intended to be the outcome!!

Placement

Sprinkle your adventure with Resets. Include a Logic Breaker anyplace where the player might commit irrevocably to flawed logic, or where it will be too late to get back on track if you wait any longer. Install a Rationality Bomb at the climax, while ensuring that the groundwork to justify it gets inserted at appropriate places earlier in the adventure. Remember, these aren’t present to solve or salvage the adventure, they are present to ensure that failure to solve the problems posed within the adventure don’t catastrophically impact the overall campaign – if the consequences of failure are not going to be so severe, forgo the Rationality Bomb and force the players to live with the consequences of failure.

Concealment

Arguably, the bigger trick is disguising these to let the player find his own way out of the problem without solving it for him. Design encounters to Ask Questions, not supply answers. Drop hints without making it obvious what they mean by inserting them into casual conversation. Have another PC react to the significance without seeing the whole answer. Point out every second tree but leave the conclusion that he’s in a forest to the player.

Assembling The Big Picture

What this entails depends on the structure that you have in place for your campaign. There’s a whole spectrum of possibilities along the episodic-continuous spectrum:

• Totally Episodic – Everything resets at the end of the adventure, Nothing is carried forward, not even XP. PC capabilities are always the same. NPCs can change personality, name, or title; relationships never advance, but stay the same forever. No adventure will EVER have anything to do with a previous adventure. It’s like restarting a computer game. Or The Simpsons – how long can Bart stay eight years old? Another example is The Twilight Zone, where the stories were all completely separate entities. You could even say that each adventure is an entire campaign unto itself.
• Extremely Episodic – This is what most people think of when they speak of an “episodic” campaign. The PCs and a small core of NPCs develop and advance, though their relationships remain the same. No adventure ever refers back to a previous adventure, they are all completely isolated. Changes to the core characters are Big News and don’t happen often – and are permanent. Many TV shows start off this way and become less episodic over time; for example, in the first seasons of M*A*S*H or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the episodes stand pretty strongly apart. Ditto Star Trek (The original series), and most police procedurals.
• Incorporated Trends – The first real hint of continuity comes when the individual episodes are isolated but there is an incorporated trend towards something – it doesn’t matter what it is. It feels like time in the background is advancing only very slowly, and hence all the adventures seem very tightly bunched together. It’s rare that there’s a lot of change in a five or ten-year period, and this was even more uncommon back in the middle ages upon which Fantasy games are based; it was not uncommon for change to occur on a generational scale. There is an evolving context within the background, and even overtly similar plotlines will be slightly different as a result of this evolving context, but it still remains rare for one adventure to refer to another.
• Compartmentalization – With the next step toward continuity, individual adventures are still discrete and isolated, but each frames and evolves the wider context within which the next takes place. Adventures refer to prior adventures having happened, and form part of the collective experience of all participants, but do not directly influence the events of the next save through this collective experience. One good way to view these is as self-contained adventures with an evolving outer “wrapper” provided by the past adventures. Another is to view every past adventure as part of the game background; as soon as an adventure is complete, it adds to that aggregated past, and the next adventure will take place in this updated reality.
• Serialization – At about the same level of continuity comes this approach, from the olden days of Pulp Magazines, Movie Serials, and early Sci-Fi. The notion is that each “campaign” is broken into a small number of individual chapters – no more than 10-15 – which have some level continuity within them (ranging from not a lot where as soon as the cliffhanger from the previous chapter is dispensed with, a new “adventure” within the greater story begins, to quite strong levels of continuity) but which are then isolated from the next such group. Think of these as a series of however-many-parts stories within an otherwise strongly episodic campaign.
• Season Arc – Advancing the continuity meter still higher, we come to the season arc concept. While individual episodes may be isolated, or may have broader continuity with reference to other episodes, there is an overall storyline to each season or year of play, or a limited number of such within the year. When one finishes, a new one begins. You can even foreshadow the next season arc within the current one as a trend that is going to become significant. While there is strong continuity between linked episodes, there is much looser continuity from one set of linked episodes to the next. This is what series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer evolve into.
• Campaign Arcs – Higher again up the scale, and you get the sort of thing that I do in most of my campaigns, where every adventure is, first and foremost, part of a greater whole. Almost every adventure has something to do with prior adventures, or with the collective whole, and are more like a series of books that tell one larger story between them. The primary difference between this and less continuity-conscious approaches is that there is a deliberate story going on behind the scenes, whether the PCs are involved in it or not, and they will rub shoulders with it from time to time. The bigger the campaign, the harder these are to do. This is Babylon-5 territory.
• Extreme Continuity – Adventures are a seamless stream of events, and nothing is really isolated. A strange shadow in one day’s play may become relevant six months later. This is soap opera territory, where no plotline ever really ends, it just continues to evolve, until eventually it lapses into absurdity.
• Total Continuity – This turns the entire campaign into a single adventure of many parts. Ironically, this is the other end of the scale writ large, because at the end of the campaign there is a total reboot.

Each of these approaches have their merits and their drawbacks. There is no right way; though choices near the higher end of the continuity scale are often perceived as being “more advanced” than those lower down the scale, first because they entail much more effort and creativity on the part of the GM, and secondly, because the presence of a bigger storyline aids verisimilitude and enables the PCs to make a difference within the world. My campaigns dangle one toe over the line of going too far, and I’m the first to admit that. It’s my belief that the presence of the bigger plotline helps make the smaller plotlines within more interesting.

And, of course, you can mix-and-match with a number of these options. The Dr Who campaign has individual adventures at the Compartmentalization level, but the evolving outer “wrapper” of overall plot forms a Season Arc that will play out over time and several adventures – if all goes according to plan.

Continuity And The Single Player

With only one mind to retain the details of what has happened in the past, there is the need to reduce the amount of baggage that has to be retained from one adventure to the next. I chose “Compartmentalization”-level for the individual adventures so that they would form self-contained plot “bricks”, enabling the player to take each adventure on its’ own terms. Whatever your usual level of continuity, I recommend taking it down a step or two when dealing with a single-player campaign.

This is assisted, and made more important still, by the greater pace of single-player games, which enable you to pack more into each single adventure. As I think I remarked earlier, each adventure in the Dr Who campaign would be a 3-5 part adventure in a group campaign such as Zenith-3.

The “wrapper” provides a need that all higher-end campaigns require – some sort of continuity to give those plot bricks a context. If a campaign is a jigsaw puzzle, the individual adventures are the shape of the pieces, while the continuity is the piece of image printed on the faces of each piece.

Clarity & Confusion

Another way to look at the contradictory needs of continuity vs accessibility is in terms of the creation of clarity and the manipulation of confusion. At the end of each adventure, you need there to be as little residual confusion or mystery as possible, and as much clarity about the significance of what has just taken place as possible. Internally, within each adventure, you can have as much mystery and confusion as you want, but at the end, everything that is not specifically intended to carry over should be wrapped up in a neat little bow (or a series of them).

Flexibility

Getting the right level of flexibility is important. Too much leaves loose ends and plot holes that could be accommodated in a group campaign, but that cause problems due to memory fragility. Too little and you sacrifice one of the primary assets that a solo campaign has, the ability to go anywhere without notice.

The best approach that I have found is to channel the flexibility by blocking certain directions that the plot can unfold in while giving the player free reign within the boundaries you establish.

Solo campaigns are more sensitive than group campaigns in this respect. Group players expect things to be a little fuzzy from time to time because the GM is splitting the plot over all of them and none of them is necessarily getting the whole story and all of the context. This isn’t the case with Solo campaigns; there’s only one player, obviously, so if he doesn’t get a piece of info, no-one does.

You need more a episodic campaign structure than in a group game simply to achieve clarity.

Recuperation

Another important factor that needs to be taken into consideration is Recuperation. You have only one PC; the recuperation of that character is therefore a lot more important than in a group campaign. This is an ongoing need that must be addressed within each adventure.

Even more important, there is only one player and one GM, and the solo game experience is so intense that additional recuperation time between game sessions can be essential. I have GMd a small group game for 30 hrs (with a six hour sleep break after the first 20 hours or so; and I am quite comfortable GMing three different games on three successive days; but I would not attempt to GM a solo campaign for more than 7 or 8 hours (with a break in the middle), or on successive days. In fact, ideally, I’d like at least a week between solo campaign sessions. The greater pace and intensity makes them a lot more mentally wearing than the equivalent group game.

Campaign Emphasis

In a solo game, roleplay is up and combat should be down. There will be a greater emphasis on ideas and concepts, and less on the mechanics of existence. I know from experience that these things will happen anyway; you’re better off not fighting them. Instead, you should be aware of these effects and plan accordingly, and that means making appropriate structural changes to your Adventures, your NPC generation techniques, and so on all the way down the line. Heck, I’ve run entire solo campaigns without ever generating an NPC’s stats, just using characterization and a general indicator of capabilities.

The GMing Challenge

GMing solo campaigns is much more difficult than a typical group campaign. There are more constraints, while the player typically has more freedom and inclination to explore options and pathways. Throw in the greater intensity and all the other elements discussed and you have a serious GMing challenge on your hands.

The Value Of Success

So, why do it? At worst, a single-player game is no more or less rewarding than a group campaign, but at best, it hits a peak – and drives you to a peak of ability – that you simply can’t hit in a group game. There are no delays save those you take into the room with you.

The best action movies are non-stop roller-coaster rides. In comparison to a single-player game at its best, a group game is an action movie with more acting and less action.

Single-player games are Gaming turned up to 11.

And you hit that mark, or close to it, far more often; it’s easier to get interaction with one player up to 10 out of 10 than it is to get everyone in a group up to that mark. Or to 8 out of 10, for that matter. There is a lowest-common denominator factor at play that results from needing to spread your attention.

Single-player gaming isn’t for everyone; the demands are greater, as is the stress. The prep required is at times greater, and at times, less – but it takes time to learn where you can cut corners, because it’s not the same as a group game.

But it’s something that everyone should at least think about trying. You will be a better GM – in any situation – when you come out the far side of the experience.