Challenger RPG
First Post
When I’m walking down the street, the question people most often ask me is, “Are you married?” but that’s completely beside the point of this article. One question I see popping up over forum boards again and again is, ‘How do I set up/keep going/not kill off my new campaign? I’ve seen whole sections in RPG books to address this concern, and I know of a few gamers who simply plug away at campaign after campaign without asking for help at all. I respect those guys—asking for help is unmanly. Better to read a how-to article on the net and appear as if you spontaneously learned how to do it.
There are many, many ways to kill off an otherwise kick-ass campaign. Instead of listing the near infinite number of ways you can trash your campaign—which I’ve pretty well covered in earlier articles—I’ll try to outline some of the ways you can ‘not’ kill off your campaign.
1. Schedule: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: set a time and a date for your game! One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal is the force of habit. Habit is what gets us up in the morning at 7:01 AM sharp without an alarm, allows us to not kill ourselves tripping our way to the bed in the dark, show up at the same coffee shop over and over again, and make it to work at the same place each day. Harness this awesome power, and use it. Remember, it only works if you actually do the same thing at the same time. Setting 1 game-day every week is great, preferably at 7:01 PM sharp.
2. Prepare: Improvisation is one of the best tools a GM has, but if your campaign is in troubled waters, preparation is a great ally, too. It makes your game: richer, more detailed, better thought out, keeps it in your mind between sessions, makes you talk about it all week like a lunatic (further reinforcing it in everyone’s minds), and actually ‘improves’ improvisation because you were thinking about ‘what’ could occur.
3. Leave a Question: The lack of a question can be what causes your campaign to die off. Every adventure, encounter, and storyline has a story question. Will Voldemort kill Harry? Will Frodo make it to Mount Doom? Will Pooh Bear get the honey? The point is, once this story question is resolved, your game will lose momentum unless there’s a new story question. This works on both a macro and a micro scale. The primary question in a successful campaign I once ran was ‘would the PCs defeat the villain?’ What kept the game going was the continuing effort of the PCs to take down their foe. Once he was finished, the campaign quickly died despite my best efforts. It’s as if Voldemort suddenly died in book three, it’s really hard to take the story anywhere from there.
On a micro scale, this applies to encounter building. If the players don’t have a clear scene goal or if that scene goal is completed with no new scene goal in sight, it can lead to confusion, lack of focus, and—ultimately—the end of the adventure and campaign. Cliff-hangers at the end of an adventure are a classic way of leaving your question open. You make it seem like the question will be answered, and instead throw up such a great twist the players demand you answer immediately…but you don’t. If used correctly, this kind of thing can keep the adventure in the player’s minds all week (or all year) and make it ridiculously easy for you to continue your campaign next week.
4. Keep Regular Players: This is one point that can’t be stressed enough. If you have regular players who show up to all your games, keep them. Work hard to fit their schedule with yours. People who show up once every three weeks—if they feel like—it can make it really hard for you to keep a campaign alive. Someone who shows up every time can be extremely valuable to you. Try to make a point of training new players effectively, and maintaining your regulars.
5. Make Fun Characters: This is something that GMs often overlook in their quest to build the ultimate campaign. The funny thing is you could have the most detailed and cool campaign in the universe, but if Bob doesn’t like how his Fighter turned out your campaign could end up as Dog Mush. From a player’s perspective, the most important thing in the game is their character, then the story of their character, then the cool things their character owns, then maybe what the story is. Thus, a key component to making your campaign work is to let the players play characters they truly want to—right from the start. Forcing someone to play a character they hate, can ruin your campaign faster than saying Power Word: Kill. It’s often the small stuff which will make someone enjoy their character: a unique power or ability, a certain NPC contact, a special magic item of great power, an incredible deed to their name, etc. Stock characters don’t tend to have a lot of value attached, but once a player makes a character ‘theirs’ it’s usually for keeps. If they like their characters’ enough, it’ll definitely help keep your campaign alive. Everyone has a favorite character, try to let them make their new favorite.
6. Have a Heart to Heart with the Players: While this may sound like relationship advice, it’s actually a great tool for keeping your players interested in the game. Nothing is quite as contagious as passion for something. If you’re passionate about your game, it’s bound to get other people interested, too. Asking players what they like, what they want to be doing, and how they rate the last adventure are all great methods of improving your game. Simple questions like: “How can I improve?” can get you great feedback. You don’t have to incorporate everything, but often two (or five) heads are better than one. It also involves the players in your story. Try it and see.
7. Organize for Speed: When the dice hit the table, the only thing that matters is speed, efficiency, and clarity. Okay, that’s a lie: fun counts, too. However, if you organize well, keep clear notes, think things out, and move with the speed of lightning; your game can only benefit. GMs searching for notes has become a cliché. Don’t be that GM. You can also over-plan. Don’t do that either. Create just enough notes to let you do everything as effectively as possible. No more, no less. Players only have to worry about their character, and maybe a henchman or pet. You have to operate the entire cast of the fictional world all in roughly the same amount of time it takes 1.5 players to get their turns done. If you take longer on your turn than any two players combined, you’re probably taking too long. Become a speed demon. Practice multi-tasking, rolling loads of dice at the same time, and coordinating your players like a conductor—without getting in their way.
8. Improvise: I know I’ve just been saying: plan, coordinate, use notes, and all that. However, sometimes it’s actually much better for your game to ‘wing it’. Sometimes the players go off on a tangent, sometimes they ignore your adventure, sometimes you forget something, sometimes you have to run a game last minute with no time to prepare, sometimes you just didn’t plan out something fully. No matter what the cause, all good GMs will have to improvise at some point. Being able to successfully improvise can make or break your game. Improvising is simply planning, but immediately using that planning instead of writing it down. If you can plan an adventure, you can run one on the fly. Train yourself to come up with situations and adventures quickly…very quickly. In fact, if you can think up a whole adventure complete with all necessary details in under 30 seconds, you probably don’t even need this article.
The key to improvisation is authenticity. Since you’re likely running a game filled with magic, structurally impossible dungeons, and monsters; it shouldn’t be terribly hard to justify random stuff you come up with. Try to be fair, interesting, and unique. If the players dispute your odd ruling, explain your reasons. If they still find it odd, be willing to tweak what you made up.
If you can’t make up adventures in 30 seconds flat, try to buy time by having something happen. Monsters can show up, an NPC can arrive, and so forth—anything to keep the players busy while you think up what you’re going to do next, or prepare quick notes. At high levels of experience, you’ll cease to worry about such things. You may even show up to games totally unprepared just to see what happens.
9. Bring Essentials: It almost goes without saying that you should have all the rulebooks required to play, dice, pencils, paper, and more dice. If you know you’ll need miniatures, maps, or whatever; it makes sense to bring those, too. Having extras of anything the players might be missing is a good idea.
10. Be Dogged: Determination is one of your strongest tools. Practice makes perfect, and dedication is often the best way to bring about results. If you try over and over again until you succeed, it’s almost impossible for you to fail. If you give up, don’t care, or don’t put in the effort; your chances of success are minimized. Because you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those rare few. Keep at it doggedly, and your game has far less of a chance to end up as Dog Mush.
There are many, many ways to kill off an otherwise kick-ass campaign. Instead of listing the near infinite number of ways you can trash your campaign—which I’ve pretty well covered in earlier articles—I’ll try to outline some of the ways you can ‘not’ kill off your campaign.
1. Schedule: I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: set a time and a date for your game! One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal is the force of habit. Habit is what gets us up in the morning at 7:01 AM sharp without an alarm, allows us to not kill ourselves tripping our way to the bed in the dark, show up at the same coffee shop over and over again, and make it to work at the same place each day. Harness this awesome power, and use it. Remember, it only works if you actually do the same thing at the same time. Setting 1 game-day every week is great, preferably at 7:01 PM sharp.
2. Prepare: Improvisation is one of the best tools a GM has, but if your campaign is in troubled waters, preparation is a great ally, too. It makes your game: richer, more detailed, better thought out, keeps it in your mind between sessions, makes you talk about it all week like a lunatic (further reinforcing it in everyone’s minds), and actually ‘improves’ improvisation because you were thinking about ‘what’ could occur.
3. Leave a Question: The lack of a question can be what causes your campaign to die off. Every adventure, encounter, and storyline has a story question. Will Voldemort kill Harry? Will Frodo make it to Mount Doom? Will Pooh Bear get the honey? The point is, once this story question is resolved, your game will lose momentum unless there’s a new story question. This works on both a macro and a micro scale. The primary question in a successful campaign I once ran was ‘would the PCs defeat the villain?’ What kept the game going was the continuing effort of the PCs to take down their foe. Once he was finished, the campaign quickly died despite my best efforts. It’s as if Voldemort suddenly died in book three, it’s really hard to take the story anywhere from there.
On a micro scale, this applies to encounter building. If the players don’t have a clear scene goal or if that scene goal is completed with no new scene goal in sight, it can lead to confusion, lack of focus, and—ultimately—the end of the adventure and campaign. Cliff-hangers at the end of an adventure are a classic way of leaving your question open. You make it seem like the question will be answered, and instead throw up such a great twist the players demand you answer immediately…but you don’t. If used correctly, this kind of thing can keep the adventure in the player’s minds all week (or all year) and make it ridiculously easy for you to continue your campaign next week.
4. Keep Regular Players: This is one point that can’t be stressed enough. If you have regular players who show up to all your games, keep them. Work hard to fit their schedule with yours. People who show up once every three weeks—if they feel like—it can make it really hard for you to keep a campaign alive. Someone who shows up every time can be extremely valuable to you. Try to make a point of training new players effectively, and maintaining your regulars.
5. Make Fun Characters: This is something that GMs often overlook in their quest to build the ultimate campaign. The funny thing is you could have the most detailed and cool campaign in the universe, but if Bob doesn’t like how his Fighter turned out your campaign could end up as Dog Mush. From a player’s perspective, the most important thing in the game is their character, then the story of their character, then the cool things their character owns, then maybe what the story is. Thus, a key component to making your campaign work is to let the players play characters they truly want to—right from the start. Forcing someone to play a character they hate, can ruin your campaign faster than saying Power Word: Kill. It’s often the small stuff which will make someone enjoy their character: a unique power or ability, a certain NPC contact, a special magic item of great power, an incredible deed to their name, etc. Stock characters don’t tend to have a lot of value attached, but once a player makes a character ‘theirs’ it’s usually for keeps. If they like their characters’ enough, it’ll definitely help keep your campaign alive. Everyone has a favorite character, try to let them make their new favorite.
6. Have a Heart to Heart with the Players: While this may sound like relationship advice, it’s actually a great tool for keeping your players interested in the game. Nothing is quite as contagious as passion for something. If you’re passionate about your game, it’s bound to get other people interested, too. Asking players what they like, what they want to be doing, and how they rate the last adventure are all great methods of improving your game. Simple questions like: “How can I improve?” can get you great feedback. You don’t have to incorporate everything, but often two (or five) heads are better than one. It also involves the players in your story. Try it and see.
7. Organize for Speed: When the dice hit the table, the only thing that matters is speed, efficiency, and clarity. Okay, that’s a lie: fun counts, too. However, if you organize well, keep clear notes, think things out, and move with the speed of lightning; your game can only benefit. GMs searching for notes has become a cliché. Don’t be that GM. You can also over-plan. Don’t do that either. Create just enough notes to let you do everything as effectively as possible. No more, no less. Players only have to worry about their character, and maybe a henchman or pet. You have to operate the entire cast of the fictional world all in roughly the same amount of time it takes 1.5 players to get their turns done. If you take longer on your turn than any two players combined, you’re probably taking too long. Become a speed demon. Practice multi-tasking, rolling loads of dice at the same time, and coordinating your players like a conductor—without getting in their way.
8. Improvise: I know I’ve just been saying: plan, coordinate, use notes, and all that. However, sometimes it’s actually much better for your game to ‘wing it’. Sometimes the players go off on a tangent, sometimes they ignore your adventure, sometimes you forget something, sometimes you have to run a game last minute with no time to prepare, sometimes you just didn’t plan out something fully. No matter what the cause, all good GMs will have to improvise at some point. Being able to successfully improvise can make or break your game. Improvising is simply planning, but immediately using that planning instead of writing it down. If you can plan an adventure, you can run one on the fly. Train yourself to come up with situations and adventures quickly…very quickly. In fact, if you can think up a whole adventure complete with all necessary details in under 30 seconds, you probably don’t even need this article.
The key to improvisation is authenticity. Since you’re likely running a game filled with magic, structurally impossible dungeons, and monsters; it shouldn’t be terribly hard to justify random stuff you come up with. Try to be fair, interesting, and unique. If the players dispute your odd ruling, explain your reasons. If they still find it odd, be willing to tweak what you made up.
If you can’t make up adventures in 30 seconds flat, try to buy time by having something happen. Monsters can show up, an NPC can arrive, and so forth—anything to keep the players busy while you think up what you’re going to do next, or prepare quick notes. At high levels of experience, you’ll cease to worry about such things. You may even show up to games totally unprepared just to see what happens.
9. Bring Essentials: It almost goes without saying that you should have all the rulebooks required to play, dice, pencils, paper, and more dice. If you know you’ll need miniatures, maps, or whatever; it makes sense to bring those, too. Having extras of anything the players might be missing is a good idea.
10. Be Dogged: Determination is one of your strongest tools. Practice makes perfect, and dedication is often the best way to bring about results. If you try over and over again until you succeed, it’s almost impossible for you to fail. If you give up, don’t care, or don’t put in the effort; your chances of success are minimized. Because you’re reading this, you’re probably one of those rare few. Keep at it doggedly, and your game has far less of a chance to end up as Dog Mush.
