Tips on running a long-running campaign

[Vraille Darkfang]

OK. Sorry.

But that 'Epic' is also 'Epic' in that I've been running it for over 2 years now once a week almost every week. So yeah I know something about epic.

Do you want to run Epic or epic?

By Epic I mean Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance everything that is done is bulding up the the ONE GREAT THING.

or do you want to run epic, like Star Trek, Buffy or most TV series. A core group of charcters journey togehter and have adventures, sometimes long running plot lines & enemies, but there is no ONE GREAT THING the party is constantly striving for.

In the case of 'Epic' I've played in several & ending up detesting many of them. You see Epic denotes that certain things must work out in a certain way. The easiest way to accomplish this is the DM Railroad Express. Refrain from doing this. If an enemy MUST survive a battle & the PC's get lucky with 3 crits, don't have him miraculously survive.

Avoid Railroading, be prepared for the villains to have set-bcaks & contingency plans. There is nothing more annoying than the realization that things will only happen 'when they are supposed to happen'. I mean why play even.

Think of it as the difference between an Open Ended role-playing game on the computer & a plot driven Role-playing game (like Final Fantasy).

 

[Jdvn1]

Big battles against little peons.

Give the party the impression that they're supremely powerful even at level 4 or 5.

 

[GuardianLurker]

MacGuffin Hunt

I'm coming up on finishing my first such successful campaign, with players running from 1 to 16+ level.

Having an overarcing plot helps a lot. I'd suggest picking one (or two) secrets that will be revealed as part of the climax. Don't try to plot out all the intervening steps, you'll bog yourself down in detail, and your players will blow any pre-plot out of the water anyway.

With that in mind, think in terms of discrete steps neccessary to advance the plot. Don't get much more specific about pacing besides early/low, mid, late/high, and try to keep the adventures independent. MacGuffin hunts lend themselves to this.

Organizations work much better than solitary BBEGs. I used an evil cult, but opposing monarchies, conspiracies, etc. all work too. This also lets you use a common/reinforcing motif.

Don't get experimental with your GMing style. If you tend to run combat games, don't try to run a political/intrigue epic. You've already committed to one experiment (the long game), and that's going to be a big enough difference.

Avoid showing your big gun/point-of-weakness early, and make sure the plot will take time/is complicated. If the BBEG's plot is "Go to X location, enact Y ritual, gain awesome power" have the ritual require multiple components, and make X a mystery. Again, MacGuffin hunts are good.

Plan to interrupt the on-arc adventures with off-arc. As a smoke-screen, you may want to detail a parallel plot, giving you On-A, On-B, off-arc.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

Contrary to what some others have said, I would absolutely advise you to have a grand overarching plotline. Making it up as you go is disjointed and becomes obvious very quickly. Your grand plot should also not be dependent on any specific PC, but should have ample opportunities for all of the PCs to be involved. If you base it on one specific PC and that PC dies or, worse, the player leaves, then you've got a big problem.

The campaign I run has been going for 3-4 years now and I had the grand plot outlined in my head from the very beginning. I fleshed out all the major events in a "tree", and then added new branches whenever the PCs did something cool or came up with a new plotline to add to the campaign. The key is that the campaign grows with the PCs. But always keep in mind the grand vision b/c otherwise you'll get off track and the campaign will drift aimlessly from adventure to adventure. The PCs should always know where they're going, even if the way they're going to get there or when they'll arrive remains unknown.

My campaign has changed tremendously over the years and has gone in a bunch of unexpected directions (including spending 15+ sessions on an adventure that I had planned would only take 2-3!), but the key is that the overriding storyline has always remained constant. And that's what gives the campaign longevity and continuity.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Seed the campaign world with lots of adventure possibilities. Don't focus on one big, end-all story, since what you want is the ability to tell lots of stories. Set up lots of majors enemy possibilities, but don't ock yourself into one path too soon. That way you can vary the campaign within the context of the world, rather than needing to change worlds when you change campaigns.

This has worked well for me - I ran three long term campaigns in my old campaign world (4 years, 10 years, and 4 years in length) from 1989-2004. I've now built a new homebrewed world, and have two campaigns going on in it, one coming up on roughly 18 months or so, and another coming up on 6 months. I fully intend to take each campaign to 20th level, though I may take a short break from one or the other if I feel the need to recharge.

 

[DonTadow]

I can give you advice on mistakes I've made

I would suggest making sure that you find the right players up for it. Some players just are not in to long term campaigns, as I found out my first campaign and initially running my current campaign. I ran into problems as I tried to start them off small, having them learn about the world, but the players wanted... essentially to make a difference every game. It was my fault because I didn't pick the right players for the campaign. Your players also have to have chemistry with each other, and don't be afraid to tell someoen that your campaign won't fit for them. As I found out in a recent thread different people play for different reasons.

The dungeon and Dragon subscriptions are great suggestions. I've never used a Dungeon adventure straight out, but its so well written that I can take parts, creatures and descriptions from it without having to worry about coming up with it myself. It lets me see the larger picture.

Also don't get set with your story. I have a few pages of detailed story arc and how i would like the overall picture to look, but I know this can change and I end up rewriting elements every three adventures. This is good because I know my players are making a mark on the world. , I know how I want the campaing to begin, to climax and to end, but I do not want to steer my party towards it, rather you want them to seek it out. Plus I want to take each adventure for what it was. I was so excited when i began this campaign i set the pacing super high and didn't let the party bathe in the new world that was created. Pacing is really important as you have to let your players gain an appreciating for the game. When I started this campaign I assumed that the players would easily see that being with the church is a good thing, but i was wrong and it changed the complete outlook of the campaign.

Create the important NPCs first. NOt neccearily stats, these change over time, but their purpses and personalites. I"m a big fan of moral dilemmas. I didn't create a villian persay but three seperate npc factions that have a goal that puts them against each other. ONe of these happens to be evil. Instead of telling the pcs, who do you want to side with, I slowly began to pit the pcs against a couple of the factions (the last they have yet to encounter and probably won't for some time). This let me know what hte pcs wanted to do wit hteh campaign as I observed how they related to one faction over the other.

Make sure your players have short and long term goals. Not only do you have to keep your interest but you have to keep your players interest and parto f that is making them super interested in your campaign. Make sure that their backgrounds, stories, and ideas are weaved into your overall story. the weaving is the hard part, because you dont want to make it seem like you're forcing ap layer into a story, but you want it to appear natural, like they belonged their all along and iddnt know it. There's no better feeling than when one of my players emails me and tells me how excited they were that their father was behind a recent event. I have fun when my players have fun. Even if their character dies, if they have fun they will let you know and be excited to build another character.

Keeping player interest can be hard. A little something I do, before each adventure, is think about the overall arc and think about the characters. I try to think who was most active the last few adventures and brainstorm ways to make someone who wasn't that active participate. I recently had to add an element to my story to more involve my monk, as I could tell that she had not been important to the story in a bit and her character was way too qiet.

HOpe some of these suggestions help.

 

[MetalBard]

Antagonist NPC motivations are key. These are the back-bone of an over-arching plot. Make sure you have some starting adventures and hooks that introduce the PCs to the NPC villains (or maybe just their machinations) and then let the PCs run from there. They'll know which baddies they'll want to go after and all you have to do is throw together (from the NPCs' point of view) the means to achieving the villains' ambitions as well as the means to keep the PCs from messing up those ambitions. Once those are determined, the PCs are bound to want to mess things up... and that's what makes D&D fun!

 

[DrNilesCrane]

I'd agree with most of the advice presented so far. Having an "uber plot" can give you a direction, but a lot can happen between now and a year or two down the road: I'd strongly suggest keeping your overall ideas more general and flexible the farther out you plan. It will also help to stop you from railroading as the players may want to take things in a whole different direction than you anticipate.

Don't over do the initial set-up or what you expect the players to read / memorize to step in to the world - develop it over time as much as possible. Definitely try to involve the players as much as you can: the more they have invested in the creation process (perhaps even contributing directly), the better chance they'll be involved over the long term.

One thing I didn't see mentioned was putting your own "easter eggs" (for lack of a better term) in the campaign. That is, throw stuff in - unique magic items, someone's name, a brief description of an interesting place - as you go and don't worry as much about what it means yet. If you use it later, it will help make the campaign feel consistent when the player remember they heard mention of [fill in the blank] 10 adventures ago, even if they (or the DM) did not know the significance of it then. (And 99% of the time, if something you toss in never comes up, no one will really remember anyway).

Hope that helps!

 

[S'mon]

take small bites.

make small goals. and have the party achieve them.

don't go leaps and bounds. it means certain doom or a quick end.

I agree with this. I also agree that starting at 1st level on a small scale is the best way to begin a long running campaign. Have some scenarios that you can run for the first few levels. Have some long running themes in mind, like the rise of a particular evil power, but DON'T plot the whole campaign out in advance. Be very attentive to what the players want. Give the PCs great freedom in what they do, where they go. Have plenty of hooks sketched out, let the PCs decide what direction they go in. Encourage the players to develop backgrounds for their PCs, use those to develop adventures. Campaign building should be an interactive process with the players, not something you spoon-feed them. Don't be afraid to radically shift direction - eg in one campaign I ran the PCs were early on employed by a LG noble, they decided they didn't like that and ended up as evil outlaws - the last session I ran, the evil PCs were leading a hobgoblin horde attacking the LG castle, and having a great time.

 

[S'mon]

Long-term enemies are good. The most successful approach I find is to have a hierarchy of BBEGs, from the local orc warlord through hi lord, the evil high priest, to the priest's evil god. If you look at LoTR, it pits 1st level hobbits against Sauron, the Dark Lord of Middle-Earth. My 1e campaign pitted 3rd level adventurers against Demon Prince Graz'zt. This kind of disprity, with on-stage minions of an awesome power off-stage, makes for a stable long-term high-fantasy campaign - the hobits can't just waltz into Sauron's throneroom and lay the smackdown, while Sauron isn't going to personally hunt them down. The Star Wars trilogy takes a similar approach - you have beatable bad-guys on-stage like Grand Moff Tarkin & Vader, but the true villain is Palpatine, kept offstage until the GM/Director decides to wrap up the saga.