Blades in the Dark, which I have run since the start of the pandemic, is an ensemble serialized series that alternates between missions (Scores) and personal character development (Downtime). The mechanics and the campaign structure are pretty closely tied together.
Exploration-driven sandbox. We’ve tried this over a few iterations the last few years. This is the first one to really click, and it’s pretty fun.
My creative agenda is the Right to Dream. I have a hex map and a setting. The party defines a goal it is working towards at the end of the session, which helps direct my prep (where I need to make sure things are detailed). Otherwise, they can go and do pretty much whatever they want. The party’s aspiration for this campaign is to loot the fallen capital, though their current distraction is some property that came into their possession recently.
To help keep me honest and prevent the campaign from drifting too much into other agendas, I’ve taken stuff from various sources (Apocalypse World, Principia Apocrypha, etc) and cobbled together a set of principles and best practices. The system is a homebrew hybrid of Old-School Essentials and Worlds Without Number.
Agenda
■ Make the world seem real.
■ Use the campaign as an experiment to answer stakes questions.
■ Play to find out what happens.
Always Say
■ What the principles demand.
■ What the rules and your rulings demand.
■ What your prep demands.
■ What honesty demands.
Principles
■ Barf forth fantasia.
■ Portray a living world.
■ Address yourself to the characters, not the players.
■ Reveal the situation, don’t bury the lead.
■ Divest yourself of the characters’ fates.
■ Name everyone, make them real.
■ Don’t prep plots, prep situations.
■ Maintain the integrity of the experiment.
■ Use the dice to decide, but make sense of the outcome.
Best Practices
■ Rulings over rules.
■ Ask the characters how they do it.
■ Let the players’ characters off the rails.
■ Let the characters manipulate the world.
■ Let the dice kill characters, but telegraph lethality.
■ Give the players’ characters layers to peel.
■ Don’t make the characters seem incompetent at their role in life.
■ Make combat deadly but avoidable.
■ Allow clever solutions to work as long as they are plausible.
Exploration-driven sandbox. We’ve tried this over a few iterations the last few years. This is the first one to really click, and it’s pretty fun.
My creative agenda is the Right to Dream. I have a hex map and a setting. The party defines a goal it is working towards at the end of the session, which helps direct my prep (where I need to make sure things are detailed). Otherwise, they can go and do pretty much whatever they want. The party’s aspiration for this campaign is to loot the fallen capital, though their current distraction is some property that came into their possession recently.
To help keep me honest and prevent the campaign from drifting too much into other agendas, I’ve taken stuff from various sources (Apocalypse World, Principia Apocrypha, etc) and cobbled together a set of principles and best practices. The system is a homebrew hybrid of Old-School Essentials and Worlds Without Number.
Agenda
■ Make the world seem real.
■ Use the campaign as an experiment to answer stakes questions.
■ Play to find out what happens.
Always Say
■ What the principles demand.
■ What the rules and your rulings demand.
■ What your prep demands.
■ What honesty demands.
Principles
■ Barf forth fantasia.
■ Portray a living world.
■ Address yourself to the characters, not the players.
■ Reveal the situation, don’t bury the lead.
■ Divest yourself of the characters’ fates.
■ Name everyone, make them real.
■ Don’t prep plots, prep situations.
■ Maintain the integrity of the experiment.
■ Use the dice to decide, but make sense of the outcome.
Best Practices
■ Rulings over rules.
■ Ask the characters how they do it.
■ Let the players’ characters off the rails.
■ Let the characters manipulate the world.
■ Let the dice kill characters, but telegraph lethality.
■ Give the players’ characters layers to peel.
■ Don’t make the characters seem incompetent at their role in life.
■ Make combat deadly but avoidable.
■ Allow clever solutions to work as long as they are plausible.
I should mention that it does depend on the game as well as the purpose. I run "convention campaigns" that are 4 to 6 4-hour sessions long over the course of a 3 or 4 day con that are a single ongoing story very much in the short premium TV paradigm -- a single "story" with built in pacing beats. But I just got my The One Ring 2E stuff and gears are already turning for a much more "novel paradigm" campaign involving the Black Arrow that killed Smaug.
Depends on the genre, system, and whatever the group is into.
I enjoy episodic games for pulpier games, and for ultralite systems. When I run, though, I usually aim for a self-contained "serialized novella" or a "miniseries." That is to say, campaigns are short (ie, under 10 sessions), and generally coalesce into a fairly well-defined story-arc with a resolution. I also try to end each session on a strong beat (an important choice, a big reveal, a cliff-hanger) like episodes in a "tune in next week" -style serial.
Depend on the system, been playing Zweihander in the Witcher world.
Have a couple of plots that are impacting the world but those are background. For the players, I have moved to every action has a re-action game. Basically, the players do something, and I ask what can happen from that action. I then may do it or just note it down. Games mostly center around monster hunting and exploring ruins that the players pick from job posting boards.
I am looking forward to the day when Artificial Intelligence gets good enough it can run a game for other other AIs, and then, after realizing how the game runs best after trillions upon trillions of iterations, the AIs will band together and take over the world so that they can (1) kill off us pesky humans, and (2) institute a workable spell-less Ranger.
I am looking forward to the day when Artificial Intelligence gets good enough it can run a game for other other AIs, and then, after realizing how the game runs best after trillions upon trillions of iterations, the AIs will band together and take over the world so that they can (1) kill off us pesky humans, and (2) institute a workable spell-less Ranger.
