D&D campaign structures, in the modern day?

[Dannyalcatraz]

Wait...

When we’re talking about fluid membership, are we talking PEOPLE, PCs or BOTH? (Because I’ve only seen the second.)

 

[Lanefan]

Wait...

When we’re talking about fluid membership, are we talking PEOPLE, PCs or BOTH? (Because I’ve only seen the second.)

For my part, a bit of both.

Sam plays in Sally's game, and also DMs his own. Mary plays in both, while John plays in Sally's game having recently come out of Kyla's game; Kyla's the one who taught them all how to play. Two of Kyla's current players also play in Sally's game but one is thinking about jumping to Sam's. Eric just put his game on hold to give Sam a night to run on; Sam took over most of Eric's players except Bill and Jenny decided to try and start yet another game even though Jenny's in Kyla's game as well. Each game has at least one player unique to itself.

Each of these players has a number of PCs and tracking the movements of these between games (and between parties within those games) would lead to a chart resembling a plate of spaghetti.

And in six months all of that will have changed again.

 

[hawkeyefan]

My experience in the early days was similar. We were young kids, so there wasn't one DM who ran a persistent campaign. We all took turns, and ran shorter adventures or modules, and we carried our PCs with us from adventure to adventure, session to session.

Then we got a little older, and 2nd edition came along, and we starting creating a more persistent world. We still rotated DMs a bit, but most would remain DM for longer stretches, and I started DMing more often than others. As that happened, we started treating everything far less episodic, and longer storyarcs started coming up. Characters started to have more detailed backgrounds, and goals in play beyond acquiring treasure and leveling up.

Then things got kind of crazy because it seemed like overnight, there were a bunch of new settings on offer, and everyone wanted to try new things. So for some of the worlds (Ravenloft and Planescape), we used our longstanding PCs, but for others (Dark Sun , we made new PCs. So we started several campaigns during this period, but most were never finished as the novelty of the settings wore off. We'd always wind up going back to the original campaign.

Then 3E came out, and the player group had changed a bit at that point. We were adults (sort of) and some folks moved, and other friends joined. I ran a long standing, persistent campaign for 3E, which we actually ended. However, we ended it by connecting it back to the original campaign from when we were kids. Unfortunately, we weren't able to continue with it at the time.

With 4E not really taking off with our group, we switched to Pathfinder and started playing campagns in Golarion. We did a few of the Adventure Paths and some assorted on shots or home brewed adventures set there, but always with a new cast for each Path. We never finished what I thought was the best of the bunch, Kingmaker, and that always bothered me.

So with the launch of 5E, we started a new campaign. A few of the players are the originals from when we were kids, others are newer, from the 3E days. We started a new campaign with Mines of Phandelver, and set it in the Realms. But what I did was I decided to wrap up as many of the old campaigns as I could, by tying them to this one, and making it very planar in scope.

So we now have multiple characters from multiple campaigns across multiple settings, and we've pulled it all together into one campaign where they're all working together (mostly). My goal is to wrap this up finally, tying up as many loose ends as possible.....and then I'll be taking a long break from DMing D&D!

 

[aramis erak]

I've never experienced such a campaign structure, nor would I particularly want to. The closest I've gotten was 5E's AL system.

Like Umbran, I also started in the 80's, never saw that mode ever used by my friends, never had a stable gaming club that did RPGs (the ones I knew did mostly boardgames).

in the 80's, most campaigns I played were several months only. In the 90's much the same, tho' I finally had a few run over a year. I don't like long campaigns (over 2 years).

I also don't see it in the rules of OE nor AD&D, but I do see it in the descriptions of former members of Gygax and Arneson's groups. There are a few hints in the DMG, but they're buried in other toxicity, so, ignored them I did.

 

[pemerton]

I also don't see it in the rules of OE nor AD&D, but I do see it in the descriptions of former members of Gygax and Arneson's groups. There are a few hints in the DMG, but they're buried in other toxicity, so, ignored them I did.

I've never tried to read the OE rules cover-to-cover. They're too brain-fragging. So I can't comment on those.

In Gygax's AD&D the stuff on time in the campaign seems to rest on some assumptions, in the sense that it only makes sense relative to those assumptions:

(1) A standard expedition to a dungeon is no more than 1 day;

(2) The play group consists of various participants who may or may not be present, and who pick from a stable of PCs (this is reinforced by the discussion of Successful Adventures in his PHB);

(3) The campaign is being GMed frequently enough that a rule of ! day in game for each real life day for those not on wilderness treks makes sense.​

Then there is the discussion (spread over multiople sections of the DMG) of nerfing the magic items of PCs ported in from other GM's worlds.

None of this made any sense to me as a relatively new player who was running a single campaign in a non-club context. So I mostly ignored it. I can make sense of it in retrospect because of my improved knowledge of how Gygax and others played the game in those early days. But I think that approach to campaigns is probably now a minority approach and I wouldn't expect any modern DMG to say much about it.

 

[aramis erak]

I've never tried to read the OE rules cover-to-cover. They're too brain-fragging. So I can't comment on those.

In Gygax's AD&D the stuff on time in the campaign seems to rest on some assumptions, in the sense that it only makes sense relative to those assumptions:

(1) A standard expedition to a dungeon is no more than 1 day;​

​

(2) The play group consists of various participants who may or may not be present, and who pick from a stable of PCs (this is reinforced by the discussion of Successful Adventures in his PHB);​

​

(3) The campaign is being GMed frequently enough that a rule of ! day in game for each real life day for those not on wilderness treks makes sense.​

Then there is the discussion (spread over multiople sections of the DMG) of nerfing the magic items of PCs ported in from other GM's worlds.

None of this made any sense to me as a relatively new player who was running a single campaign in a non-club context. So I mostly ignored it. I can make sense of it in retrospect because of my improved knowledge of how Gygax and others played the game in those early days. But I think that approach to campaigns is probably now a minority approach and I wouldn't expect any modern DMG to say much about it.

You're making the assumption that Gygax's rules had to made mathematical &/or psychological sense at all. I don't think his corpus of works supports that, especially not post-TSR.

I get that he ran large parties, and let players have a stable... but the way most everyone i ever met played, that was totally abnormal praxis.

Portability of characters from one campaign to another? Far better to just say no, rather than be the passive-aggressive that Gygax advocated. It was exceptionally rare in my experience, and the few who tried, generally were min-maxer rules-lawyers, and I don't know any who'd let them bring in their obviously cheating Ubermenshen...

 

[John Dallman]

Trying to sum up, it seems that campaign structure usually emerges from group structure.

If you have a group that's too large to all play together (and that size limit is a separate question) then multiple DMs are a necessity, and there's the potential for open campaigns, stables of characters, and character portability.

For a smaller group, if you have only one DM, then a single party is the natural form. Other structures can happen (I've seen separate parties formed to play separate plot-lines, or explore other parts of a setting) but are rare.

Does that make sense?

 

[Umbran]

When we’re talking about fluid membership, are we talking PEOPLE, PCs or BOTH? (Because I’ve only seen the second.)

This cued me to remember:

There is the notion of "Troupe Style play". This isn't swapping between campaigns, but within the same campaign folks swapping around roles.

There is also West Marches style, which is a way to manage a large group of players who may not all be able to attend any given session, and use multiple game masters. If, in West Marches play, the GMs have very siloed domains, this could look a lot like what the OP is discussing. It takes a lot of work, though.

 

[aramis erak]

Multi-GM campaigns, as long as all the GMs are relatively close in setting design, and are regular participants, works rather well. It's totally abnormal, tho'.

Troupe Style, as defined in Ars Magica, 1 campaign, every player owns 2 characters, and the rest are shared minor recurring characters; no one but the current GM runs more than one character per adventure. No siloing, either. GMing rotates, as does the array of eligible PCs (you're not supposed to use your PCs when you're running your adventure). That it had to spell this out so very carefully is a good indicator that it was not normal praxis overall.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Multi-DM campaigns, IME at least, were rare at best and the last one I personally was involved in was back in the 80's. One of the few advantages of being the DM is the ability to impart YOUR vision of a game setting to the participating players and I have always found it problematic to ever cede authority and creative control of that to another DM. It is too easy for another DM to take "YOUR" setting in directions you don't want it to go. It was also a matter of tension that one DM could hand out too much or too little reward in comparison to another resulting in one of the DM's being dissatisfied with the speed of progress or power level of the PC's, such as giving out money and magic like candy when the other DM wants to keep such things under control. Or one DM could simply end up having better adventures that made them a clear favorite over another DM - even though they are supposed to be running the same game world. Unless the adventures were very self-contained and different PC's of various levels were played according to the appropriate levels for a given adventure I never saw it work well. On the few occasions when I tried it myself I didn't care for it at all; sharing my "precious" game world with another DM, or feeling justifiably restricted in what I could do with theirs.

If a DM genuinely wants to run a game they can and should run THEIR version of whatever setting they like with individual PC's dedicated to THAT game and setting, whether it be a one-shot or intended to run on a weekly basis forever. If they want it to look and feel like mine with the same places and NPC's and history and whatall, that's fine (and flattering), but it won't then be MY game world.