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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grendel_Khan" data-source="post: 8315859" data-attributes="member: 7028554">I know it’s a weaselly thing to say but I think it really depends on the particulars. In my current campaign, which is all about faction conflict, the PCs did a deeply unwise thing that wound up killing off the main big bad group in their area, totally cutting lots of long-term plot threads I was laying. An interesting only-in-RPGs twist, but also genuinely really not great for the campaign’s full arc, since they’ll probably never know what and how much awful stuff they averted, and some major NPCs are just deleted before they could really develop.I’m reconfiguring things, and I hope it all still plays out in an interesting way, but I have to accept that the campaign might have lost its momentum. I don’t want to do the annoying “let me tell you about my campaign lore!” so let’s just say it’s a bit like if the main big bad in Highlander got murdered with a lucky swing in act 2 of the movie.But I also think it’s a matter of zoom level. When you step back and look at the campaign once it’s done, were there themes or big character arcs. Even if a campaign doesn’t have a general (though still malleable, of course) endpoint, and is more about episodic encounters, will you think about it years later in a sort of retroactively knitted-together narrative, or is it more about how that second of your three PCs got that sweet critical that one time? Did the protagonists change, the way they do in most narratives, or just get more powerful? And when it did end, did it feel like the climax pulled threads from throughout the whole campaign, or was it mostly about the final challenge level?Im not saying it’s bad to have a campaign be fully episodic and almost procedural, in the video game sense. Just that I think there’s a way to nudge and plant seeds that make a campaign feel like a story—however chaotic and un-novel-like—when it’s all done, without scripting or railroading.That’s really what I was curious about, whether that sort of approach is not the default for folks, and most are running campaigns where PCs can come and go, get replaced as needed, and you either go till a book like RotFM is over or until the campaign sort of peters out due to scheduling, setting burnout, etc.Asking in part because this is a very D&D-centric community. A lot of indie gamers seem to have moved toward super-short campaigns (too short for my trad tastes!) but the way 5e is presented I can’t tell if things are tilting more toward sweeping Critical Role-style narratives, where any character death is monumental, or largely sticking to more traditional die-and-replace play, which necessarily makes it harder to wind up with big character-centric stories.</blockquote>

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