Have you ever watched a repeat of a show that you once enjoyed and thought, “this hasn’t aged well?”

Have you ever re-read a book that you enjoyed in your youth, only to discover that the magic just wasn’t there any more?

When you listen to old favorites on the radio, do they ever sound passe, because they just can’t conjure up the excitement and enthusiasm that they once did?

Do old movies take you back to a simpler time – or are they just slower and duller than today’s blockbusters?

Why do we think RPGs don’t suffer from the same fate?

Today, I want to talk about campaign aging – first, because I have campaigns that are old enough to experience the symptoms; second, because I routinely future-proof my campaigns to permit longevity if everyone wants them to continue; and third, because this preparation actually improves a campaign in the short- to-medium-term, making these useful techniques to implement, even if your campaigns never last more than a few months.

And the place to start, obviously, is with human biology.

Human Aging

From a biochemical standpoint, life consists of a myriad of chemical processes, all of which come and go with lightning speed. Of these, one of the most significant is the creation of new cells to replace worn-out ones according to the DNA blueprint. This happens constantly, and more quickly than most people imagine.

There are 50-75 Trillion cells in the human body, and over a 7-10 year span, every last one of them (with one or two exceptions) will be replaced. Some cells don’t even last that long – Red blood cells live for about four months, tops, while white blood cells live on average a little more than a year. Skin cells live about two or three weeks. Colon cells have it rough: they die off after about four days. Sperm cells have a life span of only about three days, according to LiveScience.com.

The exceptions I mentioned: brain cells aren’t replaced when they wear out, and it’s possible that the same is true of damaged nerve cells, especially those in the spinal chord. There are clearly limits to the process, too – if an organ, digit, or limb are removed, they don’t grow back.

Human aging is die to a number of complex processes. One of these is believed to be the accumulation of errors during DNA replication, a necessary stage in the creation of replacement cells. This is certainly one of the primary causes of cancer. In addition to direct damage to the function of the organ that has a cell replaced with a defective copy, there may also be secondary effects that compound with that damage.

For the last 200 years or so, medical science has concentrated on one principle aim: avoiding the onset of death. Diseased limbs and organs are removed and replaced if possible, and if not, a replacement part is manufactured. We have learned how to transplant organs from one body to another. We’ve learned about blood interactions and diet and toxicity and the way poisons work, and a whole host of other notable achievements. Every time we’ve advanced the point of onset of death, new conditions have been exposed, and treatments devised.

I have been prescribed medications not because there was anything dangerously wrong, medically, but because my blood pressure was just a little bit high and my heart rate a little too fast. These are preventative measures aimed at avoiding a cardiac event, not at actually treating one. I also take a number of medications because there are some conditions that increase the risk of serious problems – so I lower my cholesterol and my blood sugar, and infuse my body with specific nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, that I seem to find it difficult to absorb as part of my regular diet.

In one episode of The West Wing, it was stated that overwhelmingly, the first symptom of cardiac failure is death. Well, that’s no longer true – not completely, anyway. But most people don’t get tested, because the tests are time-consuming and expensive, and the expertise needed to interpret them is rare and even more expensive.

Such care is designed to help me live to a ripe old age by avoiding death, and controlling conditions that can (and have, in past eras) led to death. Very few of the medications that I consume daily are aimed at improving quality of life, but there are a few of those, too, designed to mitigate the symptoms of aging.

That’s what medical science aims to do: to prevent death and crippling conditions, and to prevent symptoms and injuries from impacting quality of life more than they have to.

RPG Geriatrics

With that as a framework, a guiding metaphor, lets consider an RPG campaign.

Ongoing gaming processes are the equivalent of ‘life’ – so long as players turn up, make decisions in response to the situations described by the GM, and inject random numbers through dice when necessary to measure the effectiveness of an action resulting from such a decision, the campaign can be said to have a pulse – to be alive. More important are the equivalent of higher brain functions – those ongoing routine functions might be the equivalent of a pulse, but it’s the stories and adventures that they facilitate that constitute a meaningful life.

Extending the ‘life’ of a campaign simply means avoiding premature campaign death and sustaining the quality of the ‘life’ experienced by the participants. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Let’s set aside the questions of ‘quality of life’ for a moment and focus on the needs of sheer survival. Exactly what kills campaigns, and what can be done about it?

Avoiding Campaign Death

So, what kills campaigns? Aside from a number of traumatic events that can put an end to a campaign overnight – the equivalent of a massive stroke or coronary or accident – what we’re talking about, more than anything else, is simply age.

Campaigns age the way people do – through the accumulation of plot and personal errors, compounded with the side effects of these errors. These rarely disrupt the ongoing ‘heartbeat’ (though badly mismanaged house rules and relationships can do so); no, they make it harder and harder to produce coherent plots that aren’t cookie-cutter repeats of something you’ve already done.

There comes a time when the GM has run every interesting plot, employed every plot twist, plumbed the depths of all the significant characters, and is just going through the motions. When that happens, the campaign is doomed – it’s only a question of how quickly the axe will fall. While it more frequently occurs gradually, the well can run dry very suddenly, so let’s add ‘the loss of GM interest’ to the list of traumatic events.

Quite often, the players will reach the point of giving up before the GM even gets that far, simply because there’s a narcissistic thread in all of us that encourages us to love our own creations that little bit longer and harder. If you run an RPG and no-one shows up, repeatedly, that campaign is (usually) dead, some extraordinary coincidence notwithstanding. While it’s not universally true, it is generally too close to truth for comfort that any given player is only really interested in his character. He will tolerate the plumbing of the depths within another character, but only if he gets his fair share of the spotlight along the way. Or maybe the plots or the GMing style are just a little too familiar to the player, or simply focus on things that the player isn’t interested in.

It doesn’t have to be as extreme enough that the player gets bored, either – you just need enough disinterest that other activities and opportunities take priority in the players’ mind. If offered a choice, they don’t choose your game.

Real life can kill campaigns, too – losing key players or key characters with minimal or no warning due to circumstances. Have you ever had a player announce, totally out of the blue, “I’m moving to [country X, thousands of miles away] next week to become a stand-up comedian?” I have!

How about “I’m getting married and my wife doesn’t like me playing RPGs?” That’s yes again, in my case. Or “I’m moving to another city because it will be a healthier environment for my unborn child?” Or “I’ve gotten a job in another city and have to leave next weekend?” Or “[Player Name] has passed away from a sudden heart attack?” I’ve had all those, too.

Without players, there is no campaign. These are definitely traumas that can kill campaigns, too.

But it’s not enough to simply avoid campaign traumas. Old age gets us all in the end, if nothing beats it to the punch.

There are all sorts of metaphors that could be employed at this point. ‘Campaign Errors are like cholesterol, blocking the campaign’s arteries’ is one. ‘Campaign errors are like DNA replication errors; some are benign, but others are malignant, breeding still more complications and errors, until the Campaign is overwhelmed,’ is another.

But make no mistake; errors in an adventure can kill a campaign quickly or slowly, or they can simply linger until something else commits the deed.

Traumatic Events

Before looking at slow deaths, let’s deal with the more traumatic sudden-death syndromes that can occur and how to treat these problems.

The loss of a key player

Most of the campaigns in which Stephen Tunnicliff was a player have continued, one way or another. There are three that have not. One is simply on hiatus, waiting to resume when everyone has the time available. The other two were terminal cases.

In the Rings Of Time campaign, Stephen was one of only two players, and the entire campaign was geared toward the ultimate objective shared by those two. Take him away and the campaign would be like a chair with one leg missing – you could stay upright on it for a while, with an effort, but the collapse is inevitable.

The other victim was the Shards Of Divinity campaign. Stephen was not the only player, and not even the focal player of the campaign; so it was thought that it could continue. But Stephen was the “life of the party” within the campaign; enthusiasm (both mine as GM and that of the players, equally) simply waned until it died.

Death is not the only reason a campaign can lose a key player. All those other traumatic player losses that I described earlier didn’t kill the campaigns in question. In some cases, the character simply wasn’t essential enough; in others, a solution was found in which another player took over running the PC; or one PC was killed off while another took their place. In still other cases, a scheduling solution permitted play to continue more intermittently, or even regularly.

Ultimately, to survive the death of a key player, the GM has to do two things: (1) Identify what made the player so essential to the campaign; and (2) find a replacement who will bring those same qualities to the game. Both easier said than done, but no-one ever promised it would be easy.

Of course, if you make some preparations in advance, it can make the whole job a lot easier. I’ll get to those measures as they come up.



Photo by Niels Kolb from FreeImages

The loss of a key character

This happens one of two ways: (1) You lose the player as well as the character, but it’s the latter loss that is campaign-critical; or (2) The player gives up the character, but is willing or even eager to stay in the game. What makes the losses critical in both cases is that the character in question was the focal point of too many of the GM’s plans.

Here, you have a few more options to consider. You can replace the character as the focal point of those plans; you can keep the character as an NPC; you can arrange for a new player to take over the character (with the former owner’s permission); or you can replace those plans, effectively throwing away most of the old campaign plan and creating a new one that stretches forward from this point of in-game time. Or even some combination of the above.

It’s important to distinguish between a character’s mindset and the capabilities that he or she brings to the team. The first is very hard to replace, the second is trivially easy.

Something that I learned from Babylon-5: for every character, no matter how central, have an exit plan, a way for them to leave the spotlight, either permanently or for a very long time.

If one of the players in my Superhero campaign, Zenith-3, were to decide to call it quits, or got tired of the character that they are running. I would be able to cope. I have an exit plan in place for each of them. To pick one at random, let’s say that Nick left; he runs a mage, Runeweaver. Now, Runeweaver is too complex a character for anyone to simply take over, so that would also remove a character who is central to a lot of my plans. Some of those central roles would be taken over by another character, sometimes a PC, sometimes an NPC. Some would simply retreat into the campaign background, in-game events like any other. Some might be simply dropped completely. But the campaign would survive.

The loss of a key foundation

This only happens when playing in a contemporary time and place, or a contemporaneous one.

Scenario 1: Let’s say that you were playing a cold-war spy campaign in the 1980s. Suddenly, the Berlin Wall comes down and the Soviet Union breaks apart. A key piece of your campaign foundation has just disappeared from under you. This leaves you with only a couple of solutions: Continue on as though nothing had changed, putting your campaign into (effectively) a parallel world from that point on; or incorporate the new events into your campaign, even though you don’t know the whole story and who the real players behind-the-scenes are, and possibly never will.

The first puts your campaign’s narrative above that of the real world, the second means that you are left without an antagonist – a role that you will have to fill.

You only have until your next game session to decide. Your choice will have repercussions for the campaign that will persist until its ultimate conclusion, so we aren’t talking trivialities, here.

Wouldn’t thing go smoothly if you had realized, back when you were first thinking about the campaign, that this might happen in some way, and had devoted a little thought along the way to the decision? You need not have actually made a decision yet – but at least you’ve thought through the alternative choices and have some idea of how the campaign will evolve as a result.

Scenario 2: One of the features of the TORG system was that all games were (supposedly) being played in a shared reality, with a newsletter keeping GMs abreast of developments elsewhere. While this might work for isolated adventures, with very limited continuity, it really is catastrophically lethal for a campaign. For example, you might build your entire campaign around the character known as The Gaunt Man, one of the primary villains of the game world that comes with the system. What do you do when some other group somewhere snuffs him?

I saw this potential problem coming right away, and since I intended to run a campaign, and not a string of unrelated adventures, I ditched the association. I made my decision in advance, and built the campaign around the consequences of that decision. Game supplements published afterwards and new material from the game company could either bend to my will, or be disregarded within my campaign.

Official TORG brings in the Incan space gods? Sorry, not happening. TORG officially kills off the Gaunt Man? My version is alive and well and sends you his regards. TORG officially rewrites the Cyberpapacy by having it invaded by the Pulp Realm? Mine remains as it was, thank you kindly. If you give me an idea or resource I can actually use, I’ll gleefully incorporate it; but if it doesn’t fit, it’s gone.

The same decisions have to be made: reflect the changing reality in your game or put your game above the source material.

I can be reliably expected to adopt the latter approach, every time. The same hard line also applies to third party supplements for game systems – I’ll incorporate them on my terms, or not at all.

As shown in Pieces Of Creation: The Hidden Truth Of Doppelgangers, to make “The Complete Guide To Doppelgangers” (a game supplement from Goodman Games), work in my world, I had to write a sequel that was even longer than the original. They make a great 1-2 punch, though, and you need to buy the Goodman Games supplement to use my add-ons.



Photo by praise139 from FreeImages, cropped by Mike

The loss of player interest

This is completely lethal to a campaign, but it usually results from campaign toxicity that has built up over time.

That means that there have usually been warning signs that have either been ignored or that went unnoticed. If you detect and act on those warning signs, this trauma never results; if you wait until things reach the ultimate conclusion, it’s usually too late.

But it’s usually the case that these toxic problems completely blindside the GM, who is under the impression that everything is right on track; that’s because he is looking at the big picture through rose-colored glasses. Some GMs become prickly and precious when their hard work is criticized; again, a natural reaction.

Therefore, a GM needs some means of diagnosing the health of their campaign from an objective perspective, but that’s easier said than done. The best indicators of health that I have noticed are when the players say or show that they had fun, or very interesting, or unexpected, or that they enjoyed the session, or keep coming up with ideas and thoughts about their experiences even after the session has wrapped, or engage in extra activity outside of the game like sending emails with questions. If none of those things are happening, it’s time for the GM to look more closely at the campaign because it may be ill.

If there’s a problem, it could come in a great many forms. Perceived or actual favoritism, a Players vs GM mentality, a lack of sufficient rewards, perceived or actual railroading, personality conflicts, a toxic playing atmosphere, rules problems, plot problems, and ideological conflicts are just some of the many possible issues.

Whatever the problem is, you have to identify it and take immediate action to expunge it from your game. That can be trivially simple or it can be tremendously difficult, such as asking a player to leave. Every circumstance will be different, so I can’t offer much in the way of meaningful advice.

The loss of GM interest

When you eat the same food, day after day, you eventually get sick of it. When that happens, you might try some variation on the same food, or you might look for something completely different with which to replace the boring old meal, whatever it was. Sometimes, you will eventually go back to the old choice, when you tire of the replacement, and possibly of the replacements’ replacement.

Other times, you can simply discover that you don’t enjoy eating something anymore that you used to love. I get that way with chocolate, especially white chocolate, for example. I went through a phase of hating pumpkin – it lasted about 14 years.

The psychology of why we like what we like and why those preferences change is poorly understood and incredibly complicated. Fortunately, for my needs within this article, it suffices to say that it happens.

So it is with campaigns. Sometimes, you just need to take a break from the same old thing before you can resume it; most of the campaigns I run take most of December and most of January off, 6-8 weeks a year in total. Given that they occur monthly, some will miss one session, some two.

Even so, it’s possible for the GM to simply run out of breath in a campaign without warning. At other times, it can be exhaustion caused by bingeing.

I’ve learned the hard way that if you run a campaign one day a weekend, write that campaign on the days immediately before and after, and work on the rules of that campaign throughout the rest of the week in between, by the time six months is up, you will be tired of that campaign and everything associated with it. Every day per week off that you can take adds 6 months to the time before that exhaustion point is reached. At best – write the day before you run, and do no work on the campaign in between – that gets you two-and-a-half years of constant weekly play before fatigue sets in. Your mileage may vary, of course.

Running that campaign every second weekend and replacing it with something completely different in tone doesn’t just double the number of years before fatigue sets in, it quadruples it to ten years.

Once-a-month play can get it as high as twenty or thirty years, or more, because you are no longer binge-consuming the same thing, day after day after day.

But inevitably, sometimes the GM just loses interest one weekend. He simply can’t be bothered any more. That often occurs when the campaign that has resulted is not what the GM pictured when he started it; I’ve seen campaigns grind to a complete halt because the players took over and dictated that they were going to be doing something else within the game than what the GM expected.

When this happens to you, it’s time for drastic action. There are several solutions of increasing severity:

1. Take a break for a weekend and play something completely different.
2. Introduce an “Elsewhen” alternative campaign thread that you can explore whenever you need some more substantial relief.
3. Shut down the campaign for a fixed period of time and run something completely different in the interim. Make sure that you players know that you’re feeling burned out and need a break, and that the campaign will resume on such-and-such a date.
4. Inflict catastrophic change upon the campaign such that it is suddenly something completely different to what it was. Caution: there is usually no going back.
5. Shut the campaign down for a LONG period of time, usually indefinitely. I’m talking about a decade or more. If you don’t scratch it for long enough, the old itch will eventually return. You will probably then need to revamp it into a sequel campaign, most of your players will have other commitments or have dropped out of gaming entirely.

I’ve never tried the “catastrophic change” option, but I’ve employed all the others when the need arose.

The final tale of a GM losing interest happens when it all starts to feel more like work and less like play. Preventing this requires drastic action – you need to find a way to take the prep needs down several notches, even if that means surgery on the campaign – because it’s generally solo activities that feel more like indentured servitude and not the actual playing time.

Again, sometimes a break can be all you need to recharge those batteries, and sometimes you may need to take even more drastic action to rekindle your enthusiasm; the recommended treatment is very much an intermediate solution.

The Roads To Recovery

Catastrophic campaign death is not inevitable; it can be avoided. If you leave it to the last minute to do so (and sometimes there’s no helping that), it can merely result in the campaign getting very sick for a while. Uncover a problem quickly enough, and it may not even be noticed.

Quite often, though, what doesn’t kill you still leaves the campaign convalescent, limping along for a while. Make no bones about that, and be prepared to consider putting the campaign on “light duties” or even “bed-rest” for a while. The roads to recovery can be long ones, full of unexpected bumps, twists, and bruises.

Lifetimes

Whenever the subject of campaign longevity comes up, someone always raises the question of what a campaign’s typical lifetime is, anyway. My stock reply is that no-one’s ever done the statistics so no-one knows.

Well, that’s not good enough for Campaign Mastery. So, here are my thoughts: Some campaigns are quick – no longer than a single adventure or a single session’s play. Sometimes, that’s even by design. Others are long-lived, experiencing multiple generations in comparison.

It’s my belief that the product of a campaign’s lifespan in adventures, multiplied by the number of campaigns with that lifespan, equals the division of one dumbbell curve by another, as a measurement of the probability of any given campaign having that lifetime.

Sounds complicated, doesn’t it? So, let’s say 6d6 divided by d6 (it’s not, but it’s a good start). The lowest result on the 6d6 is 6, and the highest result on 1d6 is 6, so the lowest result of the resulting probability curve is 1. The average of 6d6 is 21, and the average of 1d6 is 3.5, so the average result will be 6. The maximum result of 6d6 is 36, the minimum result of 1d6 is one, so the maximum of the divided die roll is 36.

This is a curve that peaks early, and then has a long rightward tail of low-probability outcomes. Mapping out the resulting curve can also show a secondary (much smaller) peak of probability or even more – this example actually has three, indicated by arrows on the graph below. Note that I’m not saying that this is the exact probability curve of campaign longevity, only that I think it probably looks something like it.

This actually makes more sense if you think of it as a series of scaled dumbbell curves compounding together. You see similar results when you cross-reference age against mortality rates in olden times, though perhaps not this exaggerated. And that’s the key – it indicates that there are a series of thresholds that a campaign has to cross to gain access to the next phase of longevity.

What exactly these thresholds are remains open to debate. Clearly, one of the first is design intent – if you only intend a campaign to last one adventure, it’s not very likely to extend very far beyond it (there are exceptions). What the other challenges are, and precisely when they occur in the course of a campaign’s lifetime, is uncertain.

As a campaign ages, two forces compete for superiority within the campaign, and it seems likely that balancing these will be one of the last thresholds that has to crossed. These are Degeneration and Rejuvenation.

Degeneration

Degeneration is how I describe the atrophy that occurs as plot and character options are taken off the table because they’ve been done already. This not only makes the GM’s job more tedious, it makes it harder to create adventures that engage the players, and puts increasing stress and strain on verisimilitude. It has all sorts of toxic effects on the campaign as it is experienced at the game table, in other words.

The distinction is important; the GM might have all sorts of original ideas, but if the road to them lies in a channel of boring, the campaign could easily shoal out before it ever gets to those interesting ideas. Or the GM might have all sorts of interesting short-range ideas but none of them seem to go anywhere substantial. Any campaign that lasts long enough will almost certainly experience one, if not both, of these problems in phases.

Rejuvenation

Rejuvenation combats degeneration by introducing new situations, new ideas, new contexts, new cast members, and new relationships. They not only make the players look at what you are currently offering in a new light, but can force reevaluation of the old, and even make it new again. If carried out in such a way that the past remains consistent, it builds incredible depth into the campaign; if it forces an inconsistency into the past that has to be resolved, it causes it throw out offshoots of plot that create breadth. Both are good, and both directly counter the trend towards degeneration.

The Slow Death

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or so it is said. Sometimes, that might be true – if you learn from the experience and adapt to the changing reality. Traumatic events that don’t kill you right away can return to finish the job if you don’t modify your circumstances – or don’t modify them enough.

Each of us has a line that we will not cross, in terms of modifying our behavior, because crossing that line would sacrifice too much quality of life. Mere existence is not enough. It may be selfish, when viewed from the perspective of family and friends, but there are times when it’s right to be selfish – or right not to be. Every wrong answer in this area is someone else’s right one.

So it is with campaigns. There’s only so far you can go in preserving the life of a campaign before it is no longer recognizable – and so many of these life-extending acts involve ad-hoc surgery, that never fully heals, that the patient can easily die on the operating table from the induced stress of the surgery, anyway. Like doctors, we’re bound to try, up to the point at which the effort becomes futile – but that point is different for every GM.

Proactive Anagathics

It’s not enough to simply avoid these problems, but it’s a start. Preventative maintenance is intended to keep a car from breaking down, just as preventative medicine is intended to keep the body from breaking down.

In the latter quarter of the 20th century, it became popularly recognized that activity was necessary for the maintenance of biological longevity potential and realization of that potential. The phrase “use it or lose it” has been in common circulation ever since. Even more recent revelations that some of the exercise forms that were most popular at different times could be counterproductive in health terms for certain individuals and certain conditions has not mitigated this common advice.

Management of my diabetes would be a lot simpler if my back injury did not restrict the activity levels of which I am capable so severely, for example. When I was younger, I used to walk the 12 km (about 7.5 mile) route shown below from gaming every Saturday, with a 125kg (approx 275 lb) pack on my back. Google’s estimate of 2 hrs 37 minutes is a little optimistic, it used to take me 3-4 hours (I did once manage it in 2 hrs 45m, though) – because I could only afford to use public transport one way and eat on the day. These days, I struggle to walk more than 150-200 meters (about 500-650 feet).

Map produced using Google Maps, data ® 2019 Google. Click on the image to open a larger, more legible version. I’ve highlighted a number of iconic Sydney locations that were close by, just because.

As a result, I’m keenly aware of the impact of minimal exercise, and of doing what I can to at least maintain my current fitness levels.

Campaigns are a little different, in that the routine activities don’t do anything in particular to increase the “health” of the campaign; they do nothing but keep the “heartbeat” ticking over. That’s because a campaign is a collection of stories, (or possibly one larger story) and those activities are just means to the end of generating that story through interactions – characters & rules, players and GM, players and Characters, PCs and NPCs, PCs & environment – the list of interaction types goes on and on.

Variety of interaction is the campaign equivalent of keeping active, of exercising to maintain or improve health and fitness. Every piece of advice that you can think of regarding exercising for health applies – sometimes only as a metaphor – to variety of interaction in this context.

But, just as I take vitamin supplements and the like to enhance my quality of life, so there are other measures that can be taken at a campaign level. On their own, they aren’t to ensure good health, but in conjunction with Variety of Interaction, they can ward off or assist in the management of various health crises along the way.

Continuity Resets

I think of these as “checkpoints”, moments of stability in the story of the campaign. When you reach a checkpoint, you declare what has been to be as canonical as anything in the campaign background, fixed and relatively immutable. If something goes catastrophically wrong, you can simply fall back to the state of play as it was at the last continuity reset and proceed from there.

How canonical should a campaign background be? is an obvious followup question. Without going into it too deeply – this is already a long article (5800 words and counting) – I treat a campaign background as past issues of a comic book. Anything within can be altered or rewritten as necessary provided that such changes in continuity would not have been obvious to the participants of the past events at the time – but that this should not be done whimsically, but always to achieve a definite and deliberate purpose within the context of the campaign’s future from the point of continuity alteration decision onwards. In other words, consistency matters, too.

A continuity reset point doesn’t mean that the past is untouchable – it simply represents a decision on the part of the GM that events prior to that point will only be changed with good reason, and therefore constitute an anchor to which the players can attach the campaign.

Prep

Last week’s article noted that good prep was essential to good improv. Good prep is essential to just about every campaign activity, to be honest; but this incorporates activities that a lot of GMs don’t think of as prep. Things like thinking about the campaign, about how different characters perceive campaign events and the world around them, about what can be done to permit PCs to experience parts of the campaign’s potential that they haven’t yet tapped, about what stories you can tell using the building blocks already in place, and so on.

Good prep is like detox for your campaign, cleaning the gunk out of clogged arteries, finding new facets of the established campaign elements to explore, and creating an inventory of unused ideas in the back of your mind to call on when you need them – whether that’s to add sparkle to a planned adventure that you are writing or to feature when drafted in at the last minute as in improvised sequence.

Plot

Players, like readers of books or audiences for visual entertainments of all sorts, will forgive an awful lot if the plot is good. My players would agree that most of the time I don’t shine when it comes to portraying an NPC in-game. I can’t do much to change my voice, for example, and am moderately awful at accents. Because my plots receive a lot of care and attention, though, these flaws are overlooked.

Having a solid plotline that you understand completely means that when things threaten to go off the rails, you know where the overall story has to go, and can start looking for high roads instead of the now-blocked low road. So long as the roads all lead to a sensible and entertaining resolution of the plot, who cares? Do you really care how the PCs get from A to B, so long as they do so? Sure, if they follow the trajectory that you’ve anticipated, you can use some of the extra polish that you’ve prepped, but that is just icing on the cake.

No plot is complete until you know how it is going to end. I don’t start exposing one to the players unless I have already visualized a likely outcome and how that will impact the bigger picture. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about an encounter, with the ‘adventure’ being the bigger picture in question, or an adventure or significant plot development, with the plot arc being the bigger picture, or a plot arc with the overall campaign being the bigger picture – the principle scales.

Structure

At a superficial glance, you might think that my Zenith-3 campaign is very similar in structure to the Adventurer’s Club campaign. The differences are subtle, and easily overlooked – but they have a cumulative impact that makes the two campaigns quite different.

The Zenith-3 campaign entwines the lives of the characters within, through, and around multiple plotlines. Each player character has his own plotline, connected by virtue of his sequential experiences and interactions with characters. In addition, there are group plotlines, and a game world plotline, all arranged in a Master Plan that connects everything that happens, and everything that happens does so for a reason – even if that reason is simply because it sounds like fun.

I’ve described the structure of the campaign before, as best I could – but when I thought of this article, I conceived a new way of expressing it, almost as an infographic or a flowchart.



It starts with an overall story. I then create a long list of plot threads that can run through that overall story, either shaping it or being shaped by it, or both, in the form of campaign notes. Using the overall story as a guide, I can determine when each of these plot threads should start and when they should finish. The overall story only takes place within these plot threads, so it’s important that there be relevant plotlines for each part of the overall story.

I then break each of those plot threads into discrete series of events, shown on the graphic above as the “plot breakdown”. The effect is to break the plot thread into smaller pieces that fit together perfectly to create the totality of the plot thread.

When the time comes to write an adventure, I extract all the contemporaneous pieces until a clear adventure theme takes shape. The campaign plan tells me which pieces to select, acting as an index, and looking up those individual pieces within the plot breakdown for that plot thread gives me the content of the adventure. But, as isolated pieces, there is no narrative flow; only when assembled into such a narrative structure does the adventure take shape.

The resulting structure designs the required level of longevity required to complete all the plot threads into the campaign.

I actively tinker with the structure and plot threads throughout – if an event doesn’t make sense in terms of the narrative flow, it may be delayed, if a future event does make sense it may be brought forward. The internal sequence of events can be manipulated. Both of these manipulations are represented in the diagram above.

All these effects take place in the planning stage, a rough synopsis of what will be in the final adventure. The operational principles are, (1), that no event occurs in isolation – NPCs (and PCs) have to react to it, and that reaction is an intrinsic part of the event for all that it follows the event or revelation in question, and may in turn trigger other events or create the conditions for those events to have the desired impact; and (2), that no Primary Character should be doing something without the other Primary Characters also doing something at the same time. Which means that if Blackwing gets on the communicator to the team leader, St Barbara, the conversation always has a context, always connects through into the personal lives of the characters concerned.

I also want to draw special attention to the columns in the “Campaign” plan (blue background) labeled “Implied Plot Threads” and “World Plot Threads”. Implied Plot Threads integrate anything that the player has said that he wants his character to do with external events that exist only to add to that character’s personal plotline. World plot lines exist to advance time within the campaign world and include everything from political developments to public holidays to sporting milestones. These keep the game world from being static, and make the environment feel more alive.

I see that there’s one term used above that I haven’t fully explained – a “Primary Character” is any PC, or an NPC that is being treated as a PC by the GM. Some GMs don’t like such characters, I find that they have too many advantages to be ignored. The only thing these NPCs lack is a player; and that only if you define the GM as a “non-player”.



Image by stokpic from Pixabay

Planning

The relationship between plot and planning is akin to the relationship between strategy and tactics – one is big-picture, the other is smaller-picture. Strategy can be defined and described by the tactics that are arranged in a deliberate structure to achieve the goal of the strategy, which includes anticipating the enemy and what they will attempt to do.

I do most of my planning during the process of transforming an adventure outline into a playable written adventure. That’s when I (and my co-GM in the case of the Adventurer’s Club campaign) determine that I need an NPC to do X or a description / visual image to do Y (sometimes, these visuals are only essential in some permutations of what a PC might do, and may appear to the players as superficial fluff if that permutation doesn’t eventuate, but there’s nothing wrong with the occasional fluff that helps the players visualize their world!)

The process of creating an adventure for the Adventurer’s Club campaign demonstrates how profoundly planning can impact a straightforward plotline, just by taking into effect character capabilities and personalities.

The differences start at the structural level – adventures for the AC campaign are self-contained story ideas, sometimes with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end; they aren’t part of a cohesive narrative, though they do remain part of a continuity.

When the time comes to write an adventure, we break the adventure down into logical steps or stages. These aren’t quite Acts and they aren’t quite scenes (because they may include multiple scenes in multiple locations), though we call them scenes for lack of a better nomenclature. In the example below, there are 19 such scenes, which are assumed to feature all PCs (and usually do – but we aren’t afraid to divide the party if that makes more sense).

We also touch on the personal lives of the PCs so that they are always doing something when the main plot comes calling. Those are illustrated by the smaller color-coded blocks at the top of the diagram below. You can see that most of the PCs have three-scene personal plotlines, but “FO” has four, simply because that’s how many it took to resolve the little mini-plot that is taking place in that PC’s personal life this time around.

These personal plotlines usually precede the main action – though there have been times when we’ve put them in the middle, or omitted them entirely. While they don’t often add to the main plot, they are never permitted to detract from it.

It’s important to note that this is not an example invented for this article, it’s the actual adventure that we have almost finished writing, and which we expect to start in early October. It should take two or three sessions of play to complete, bringing us to the December break in play.

A real-world example from the Adventurer’s Club campaign. Click on the image to load a larger, more legible, version.

The lower part of the illustration depicts how the adventure pieces have been arranged to create the finished adventure.

At first, everything looks sensible – the opening chapters of each character’s mini-plots occur in a sequence that makes narrative sense, running across the page. It should be noted that when actually written, “DH1” was longer and larger than the other first scenes, as reflected in the diagram. That’s followed by the second row, where SZ2 is larger than the other second pieces of the preliminaries.

The third row is where we begin to segue into the main plot of the adventure. We decided that a different sequence of characters getting their scenes made more narrative sense, but otherwise there are no surprises. To express this, the row has been split into two sub-rows. This double-sub-row ends with the All-PCs start of the main adventure.

The fourth row is where things start to go crazy. SZ4? FO4 and 5? CF4? DH4a and 4b? EB4? DH5, 5a, and 5b? Where did they come from? When we wrote the second scene of the main plot, we realized that only one PC was involved – and so we extended or subdivided the other PCs personal plotlines accordingly. That’s what happens when the pieces of the plot get sequenced into a narrative. This row is effectively split into five sub-rows, and they all lead into main plot scene 2.

You can interpret the rest for yourself. Following the principle that each PC should have some story happening to them or around them at all times, the focus wander from one PC to another as they experience their individual plot sequences. You might also note that main plot scenes 5 to 12 and 14-15 have been subsumed completely into individual characters’ plot sequences. Among other things, this shows that each of them has a role to play in resolving the overall adventure. There’s also an “all PCs scene 20” and “all PCs scene 21” thrown into the plotline simply to tie up loose ends in a player-satisfying way.

It might seem that there’s no room for player input, that the script has been written in advance, but that’s not actually the case; in some cases, we could state that one character’s capabilities or personality made them a near-certain choice for certain activities, but in others, we were less certain. The structure of the adventure is completely accommodating of any decision short of non-participation that the players choose to make; the plot developments are derivations of the logical steps required to resolve the plot. In fact, some of the scenes are marked optional because we weren’t sure if they would take place at all!

It’s entirely possible that players may force us to skip certain scenes because of their choices, or to play some scenes out of this planned sequence; that quite often happens. This narrative is structured to accommodate our best guesses; we’ll go off-script if the players make other choices.

It’s important to realize that both arrangements are telling the same story. The only difference is that the second adventure has been customized for the PCs in the campaign and for the logical progression of time.

Detailed planning like this isn’t everyone’s boat; I don’t do it for the Zener Gate campaign, and I get even more convoluted in plotting the Zenith-3 campaign. These choices are not capricious; they are a combination of deliberate choice and responding to the desires of the players.

It should be noted that each style of adventure yields a definite “normal adventure format” – in the Adventurer’s Club, that’s individual plotlines leading to an all-PCs main plot; in the Zenith-3 campaign, it’s individual plot threads combining to tell a broader narrative, with personal events and world events forming connective ’tissue’ in-between. Every campaign develops such a “format” (in the Television series sense). It might be teaser, title sequence, plot development, complication/reversal, victory, aftermath – a classic dramatic structure – or it might be something else, but one emerges in every campaign (there are times when that can be turned to advantage, and times when you can gain an advantage by deliberately violating it – useful if advanced plot techniques you should always be aware of).

If campaigns age because plots become increasingly complicated by the past, especially the accumulated weight of plotting mistakes, such planning structures and techniques greatly diminish the chances of “playing yourself into a corner” by letting you discover the problem in time to do something about it. Never complain about writing yourself into a corner – because you got there in time to avoid the problem. Things are far worse when you “improv” yourself into a corner.

It follows that careful planning and plotting is just as useful in avoiding Geriatric Disease of the campaign as they are for successful improv.

Exit Plans

I’ve already touched on this, so I’ll just briefly mention it again. For every campaign, you should have an exit plan for every PC, every player, and every major NPC (because you never know when one will get accidentally killed).

In fact, you can define a “major” NPC as an NPC whose death would adversely impact on the campaign, or would have done so in the past.

So, you now have all the tools that you need to prolong the life of your campaign and keep it fit and healthy even when it gets a little long in the tooth. That means that it’s time to take a look at the consequences and implications!

The Social Consequences of Lifestyles

When we’re young, medical advice is (generally) all about treating traumatic and unusual events. As we age, visits to the doctor become a regular occurrence for most of us, and the emphasis slowly shifts to chronic conditions and their management. Similarly, lifestyle advice shifts from creating advantages or opportunities for the participant to minimizing the constraints that restrict life.

Another way of phrasing it is that when we’re young, medical advice concerning lifestyle changes are aimed at prolonging life, but when we age, the goal shifts to prolonging quality of life. In general, lifestyle alterations change when we can be expected to die, and what will kill us (absent traumatic events).

There is a certain degree of delaying the inevitable when discussing such measures, giving rise to complex medical issues – for example, When do the measures we undertake to extend life begin to cost us more in quality of life than we gain?

Of course, it will vary from individual to individual and from measure to measure. Giving up Pizza is a lot easier for most people than giving up sugar. Some people will find it easier to give up sugar than caffeine, for others the relative difficulty might be the other way around. But the general rule remains: if you accept the premise that mere continuation of existence is not enough, and that quality of life matters, a decision that you will probably have to make repeatedly as you age is whether or not the gains are worth the price. And, when the price is unacceptable, is there are satisfactory compromise that will yield a significant amount of the benefit?

So it is for campaigns. Beyond a point, the costs can outweigh the gains. A sensible campaign plan will have a number of natural end-points. If your campaign plan doesn’t have such potential end-points already, you might like to consider inserting ‘natural’ endings into your master plan.

Endings imply the natural question of what comes next? What happens after? In essence, you have four choices.

• Same campaign & characters, different players.
• Same campaign, different players, new characters. Implies some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Similar campaign, different characters, probably a mixture of old and new players. This hits the ‘reset’ button, kills off plotlines that had become tedious, but still draws on background and other material from the old campaign, in effect making it a sequel campaign. An in-game explanation for the transition is required, which is often some sort of in-game catastrophe.
• Different campaign, different characters, may or may not be the same players. In other words, start a new campaign and lose the old one.

Sometimes, it’s better to let a campaign die a natural death and move on to something else.

Campaigns are a story

I’ve stated a couple of times already in this article that Campaigns are a Story, or a series of stories. But I want to briefly look at the consequences and implications, especially in terms of campaigns aging.

Every story has an optimum length. You can only make that optimum shorter by cutting plot threads out, or longer by adding more. You can think of this as a campaign’s natural “lifetime”; if it ends before reaching that optimum, it has died prematurely (and usually traumatically); if it ends after reaching that point, it’s been on life support for a while and lingered more out of force of habit than substance. I’ve experienced both outcomes.

But, just as we are medically concerned with quality of life, so we have to be concerned at the campaign level with “Quality of story”. When a campaign lives beyond it’s natural limits, it’s quality of story that suffers. Individually, the adventures may be fine, even excellent or inspired on occasion; but the sense of purpose that held the plotlines together is missing, and that begins to show. Death is inevitable.

Your goal, when designing a campaign, should be to match the optimum lifespan as closely as possible to the optimum duration of reliable quality of story. This lets the campaign go out on a high.

Of course, that’s a really difficult thing to determine in advance. Personalities and creativity and skill and interest levels and Character investment and all sorts of other things come into it. None of these are fixed quantities, they change over time, most of them for the better. So quality of story will not only go up over the course of a campaign’s lifetime, the duration during which you can sustain an acceptable quality will extend. How much better will you get? Unknown – and, in part, it depends on how good you already are.

How much of what you do well is the result of experience, how much is expertise and training, and how much is inherent instinct? The first increases automatically with practice, the second increases only with an effort to improve that is sustained over time, and the third can only be better understood and accessed.

I grasped these points fairly dimly when I was planning the first Zenith-3 campaign (the current one is a sequel with mostly the same characters). Since I couldn’t predict how much more experienced or skilled I would be at the end of it, just that I would be both, I built some slack into the plan, some padding – adventures and plot threads that could be incorporated into the campaign to extend its lifetime or ignored if they would extend its life too far. I knew what the last three adventures in the campaign would be, because these tied up all the plot threads established at the start of the campaign in a huge climax; but how far removed those would be from the preceding “scheduled” adventure was unknown. As things turned out, it was about two years, real time, maybe three. That’s a lot of padding, even in a 13-year campaign.

That was also the time that I was planning the current Zenith-3 campaign – not a coincidence; I had been stockpiling ideas throughout the preceding decade. Some of those ideas were appropriated for Earth-halo padding; most of the rest became the source material for the new campaign.

Not all padding is evil; this is padding for good effect.

Campaigns on Life Support

So your campaign is treading water, barely holding it’s head above the waves and about to go under for the third time? It’s a campaign on life support. That means that you are artificially pumping up the excitement with tales that grow more outrageous and exaggerated with every outing. You don’t know what’s coming next, only that it has to equal or better the last day’s play in grandiosity. The PCs are too capable, able to solve anything less with trivial effort.

And yet, for some reason, you don’t want to end the campaign – not yet, anyway. Maybe because you haven’t yet created a replacement to your satisfaction, or because you’re waiting for a particular rule-book to be published, or because your players haven’t yet seen the writing on the wall and insist on continuing.

You have two choices to try giving your campaign a new lease on life: Heroic Measures and Radical Surgery.

Heroic measures means throwing away everything that the players think they know about the campaign and replacing it with something that only presents a superficial resemblance of the old background. Then hitting the players between the eyes with the difference, without warning. In effect, it’s shoving the old players into a new campaign that you haven’t fully worked out yet. It usually starts in cataclysm and only gets more violent from there.

“The gods are fakes under the control of a demonic presence from outside reality and the afterlife is the gaping maw of that presence. It has consumed and perverted so much positive energy that the barriers between reality have begun to break down. The PCs awaken one morning to great cracks in the sky through which different planes of existence are leaking…”

Think Epic, then double it.

Radical Surgery forces all the existing PCs to retire, a new batch of villains to emerge from the woodwork, and the players to start over in the same game world with novices – first level characters, in D&D parlance. This keeps more of the current game intact, but provides fresh avenues for exploration.

Use radical surgery if you still have unknowns in the campaign, things you haven’t played around with – whether those be draconic social structures or the recipes of lava giants, the truth about fey or the hidden secrets of beholders. Or whatever. If there’s still unused source material, in other words. Use Heroic Measures if you need to throw the old out to make room for new source material.

There’s no guarantee that either approach will save the campaign. And there’s no going back from either. Both are very much voyages into the unknown.

All things must end

Inevitably, one way or another, every campaign will end. If you follow my advice in other articles, you’ll finish it in a blaze of glory, an exclamation point that will transform the campaign into a monument to your creativity and skill as a GM, a Norse Ragnarok or Biblical Armageddon.

Implicit in both is the question of what comes next? What happens on the day after Infinity?

Every ending implies a new beginning. The trick is to manifest the transition in a graceful manner. That never happens by accident; it’s a happy chance that the actions and processes that enable it also enhance the campaign along the way.