Campaign-Level Play Part 4: Setting Up The Campaign

I spent a lot of time trying to define two separate styles of gameplay, for the purpose of elucidating one of them to you. But I want to stress that I like to mix the two styles. I have created many tools for campaign-level play, but there are locations on my world map that are big plot-heavy adventures. I warn the players ahead of time. They see “Castle Ravenloft” on the map and they know that if they choose to go there, they’re initiating an adventure module that they’ll be kind of locked into for a decent number of sessions. That’s okay. A lot of players really like being taken on the rollercoaster ride of an awesome story you've prepared, so don't be afraid to trade places for who's driving the campaign at different times. The extent to which you do player-driven action versus DM-driven action is up to you, and it's important to figure out your preference because it determines the prep workload you create for yourself as the DM. All those tools I talked about last time are probably things you'd need to make before the campaign, and it'll be a waste of your time if you don't then tell the players "take advantage of this stuff and base your decisions off of it."

Let's say you decide you want to include all the moving pieces, but you might not be sure how to start. So the question is, if you want to use these structures of campaign-level play, then how and when do you incorporate them?

Campaign-Level Play Part 3: Tools for Campaign Systems

So I've described a level of gameplay where the PCs are in a position to do all kinds of ambitious activities that can be resolved without needing to spend time walking through each step, moment-by-moment on a small scale. That you can safely assume the player can accomplish these tasks without needing to throw them into a dungeoncrawl first. There can definitely be obstacles, for sure. You don't have to just say, "yes, that works exactly as you wanted it to" for everything they ask to do. But recognizing a level of decision-making that tends to happen on the scale of days, weeks, or months is something that players can greatly enjoy taking advantage of.

Many groups dabble with this in some forms. For example, here are some subjects of gameplay that lend themselves well to this: economics, politics, war, and maybe espionage. Notice that these are the types of things you do in board games a lot. But you could totally have something like construction, conservation projects, running a business but focusing on the non-financial parts (e.g. running an opera house and managing the actors, the playwright, the stage production, etc.), going through religious rituals and sacraments, forming relationships, and so on.

While plenty of people have made downtime mechanics, and plenty of others recognize the fun of this sort of thing, it’s very rare that I find games that actually equip the DM to run this. There have been resources and websites like Obsidian Portal or World Anvil that cover a lot of what I'm about to describe, but most groups don't realize how to take advantage of the potential. All too often, these are treated as resources for the DM rather than the party. So I'm sorry 5th Edition, it's not enough to create an inflexible minigame for every specific "downtime activity" that occurs to you. The only way you'll ever achieve a true player-driven sandbox campaign is by letting their imaginations drive the car and merely providing the fuel and tools to guide that. 

So lets talk about the fuel and tools.

Campaign-Level Play Part 2: Model United Nations (and Other Competitive Simulations)

The story behind this painting is hysterical, btw

Last time, I introduced the idea of "campaign-level play," where activity is conducted on a larger scale than the moment-to-moment action of high-intensity scenes, but also as a space for players to drive the story themselves rather than respond to a story offered by the DM. I began explaining some of the ways that RPG products and DMs will toy with this playstyle, but concluded by introducing (through Matt Colville) a pretty unintuitive approach that I think has a lot of potential. To build on that, I'm dedicated an entire article to an adjacent form of play that I think we have a lot to learn from.

Campaign-Level Play Part 1: Maybe the Best Thing that D&D Has to Offer

How often does your character
choose to write a letter?

This is one of the trickier-to-describe qualities of running the game I know of, because it has to do (once again) with presentation and flow. I hope it makes sense.

I perceive a distinction between a common and, seemingly, modern way of running the game and an older way of running the game that has to do with the structure of the activity itself. And it seems obscure enough to me that I don't believe that even most OSR gamers play in this "old style" because they don't know about it. Like, adventures and RPGs from OSR designers that are clearly built with old-school sensibilities in mind are often nonetheless ignorant to this quality. I'm gunna call this old structure "campaign-level play" because of the following reasoning:

"Campaign" is a residual term brought over from the wargaming hobby. But it wasn't just a meaningless word used for its familiarity, like some other terminology relics. See, something like "Armor Class" is called that because the AC rules were borrowed from an old naval wargame, where every ship had an "Armor Class" rating like "first-class armor" (the best quality) or "fourth-class armor" or whatever. That's why we use a weird name for something that refers to a character's ability to not get hit or damaged. But "campaign?" As in, "me and the bois are gunna start up a new campaign of 5th Edition"? That comes from a time when the hobby was about a series of grand Napoleonic battles strung together by the same strategic and political forces that define a real military campaign. While, yes, a single session does just look like some homies getting together to have an isolated battle on a pre-crafted terrain map with their respective armies... they were playing what modern gamers would call a "legacy game." Today's battle is determined by the outcome of our last session, where the army general has a macro-scale plan for the direction of the army's campaign to conquer the enemy. You suffer losses in one battle and it carries over to the next. You write a treaty forming an alliance today and that matters tomorrow. You make a crucial victory and you take advantage of the opportunity by carving up the map of the countryside into chunks that will be allotted to each of your allies and yourself, which then shapes the next campaign when another war inevitably breaks out. These could be thought of as "meta elements" that shape the campaign itself, rather than elements you play out during the session (the battle).

Changes I'd like to see in new RPG Products

If you are making RPG products and want my two cents, read on for the changes I'd like to see:

Decent Rules to Make Languages Fun

First, here's some supplemental reading you may find insightful. All of it is from other RPG bloggers tackling the same subject as me:

1. https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2020/04/dungeoncrawling-languages.html 
2. https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2016/03/on-language.html
3. https://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2008/11/languages-or-why-we-shouldnt-be-able-to.html
4. https://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2020/05/soft-ass-d.html (he covers language as a specific part of the post and I think his take is neat)
5. https://thelastdaydawned.blogspot.com/2016/11/making-languages-make-sense.html
6. http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38698/roleplaying-games/untested-fantasy-lorem-ipsum
7. https://www.paperspencils.com/making-languages-relevant/

The RPG Mausritter, about playing as tiny mice in a fantasy world, has some really cool language rules that I don't think can easily work for most other settings:

As a general rule of thumb, the more closely related two creatures are, the more likely they are able to be able to understand each other. Use the creature’s taxonomy to make a ruling. Magical or highly intelligent creatures may break these rules. • Same species (mouse): Can easily communicate. • Same family (rodent): Can speak and communicate, with some difficulty and difference of custom. • Same class (mammal): Make a WIL save to see if communication is possible. • Otherwise: Can’t directly communicate.

So yeah, all those thoughts are very neat. I'll throw in my two cents.

A Revised Dungeoncrawl Procedure

I recently drafted this page on dungeoncrawl procedure I may add to Brave. It needs playtesting. Some of it's weird, so I felt like it would be worth explaining the design choices I made. My intention is that this page would comprise 100% of the dungeon-related advice and rules in the game. But for context, earlier in the rules I've established a timescale called the "active turn" that lasts 10 minutes, which should be familiar. The main reason I even felt this was worth making and putting into the game was because, the more I thought about it, the more I believed that 1) having a committed dungeoncrawling procedure has great value, especially baking one into the system itself, and 2) I have issues with the standard options.

For those who want context on the old-school tradition of dungeon procedure, I'd point you to threads like this one, this one, and this one. But of course, the main point of contrast is going to be the codified procedure from B/X D&D, as re-packaged by Old School Essentials (courtesy of Necrotic Gnome), which is far and away the most popular option these days. Here is the 2-page spread included in OSE:

Let's talk about what they have in common before talking about the differences. 1) There is a play sequence up front, which is there for both the referee and the player to see and understand. 2) They both cover movement, traps, random encounters, and at least a little bit about miscellaneous common activities. So what's my problem with the original?