The classic ‘white whale’ of any RPG gamer’s experience is the long-form campaign.
Imagine it with me: a year-long campaign in which you tell an extended story with a group of friends. The characters are rich, deep and developed. The story evolves naturally and gathers meaning and stakes and it continues for an age, eventually culminating in a final storyline that makes you all feel like the world is right again. You’ve shared something together that took a mass of investment. Hundreds of playing hours, years of work and a cast of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of NPCs. I think most people who play RPGs want that experience at least once in their lives. To say they’ve done the ‘big campaign’.
It’s not just a personal thing; we are often sold this as the perfect state, right?
When we think of campaigns in our head we often think of the long-form adventures we see published. Things that would take years to play through. Tomb Of Annihilation, The Shackled City, The Enemy Within, Rise Of The Runelords, Masks Of Nyarlathotep, The Great Pendragon Campaign. These are held as impressive standards of our hobby, something to aspire to.
I know for me they’ve been the gold standard of achievement. I’ve wanted to run games that take years and years to play. I’ve done it too, played and run maybe 10 campaigns that have taken 4 years+ of play time to resolve.
The Issue Here
Having run many of these campaign styles, I get the allure. A massive game is rewarding.
But is it something to be aiming at?
We often try to teach newer GMs to start small: One encounter, just the local area, build as you go. But then we dream of a long-form campaign: we start working things out in the long term. We put cool stuff back, thinking about how it will fit into a later arc. And then someone drops out and we never get to tell that story, maybe we should have pulled the trigger earlier. Scheduling comes up and lives change and before we know it the game is limping along or no longer looks like the story we thought we were going to tell.
This is ok. Lives get in the way, RPG’s are hard to plan. It takes a lot to run and keep a game on track for years. My last long D&D campaign had 46 distinct dungeons and 65 separate cities each with different cultures and NPCs. I’ll be honest, the reason I’m able to produce this output is because I’ve set up my life in a way that services them – GMing and RPGs are my job, the structure of my life is set around making it work. But my life isn’t representative of what most people’s games look like. People reading this do this as a hobby. And I’m sure you haven’t got the time to restructure your entire work and home life in order to tell a story – this is supposed to be fun.
If you run a game that lasts six months and it is tight and focused and tells an impressive story full of twists and great character moments and has an ending, people will love that too. That is just as worthy. Maybe that should be our standard. So let’s talk about being kind to yourself when we think about that ‘long game’ dream.
Make It Work For You
If I’m to believe meme culture or internet discourse, a lot of people’s experience with RPG’s is to play a campaign for a small amount of time and then watch as the game starts to fall apart due to scheduling conflicts.
So the first step we would take here is to look back over our last four campaigns and see roughly how long each game lasted. Then we’re going to aim to run a story that takes exactly that time. Let your players know – the plan is to run a game where you are going to maybe eventually make sequels to it but the original plan is to actually tell something with a beginning, middle and end in a reasonable amount of time.
This means that when players give you backstories, you need to take a different tack. You’re not looking to build a long arc around each storyline: you’re looking for the parts where the backstories connect and to lean into that as a point of focus. If one of them has a missing brother and another one has nightmares about faceless things that maraud the night, you know that brother has been taken by the faceless ones.
You don’t need to separate them out into different arcs, you haven’t got the time if you want to tell a story. Be kind to yourself and let those connections happen and don’t feel ‘guilty’ or ‘lazy’. Just enjoy the weaving that will produce the best moment at the table, knowing you aren’t going to have to wait a year to let these players get spotlight – it’s all colliding early on.
Once the game is underway, you have to be a bit cruel to yourself. In a longer game, you can have an idea and just go off and explore it for three sessions and come back. But if you’re aware that the deadline of players being unavailable might loom, play every game like it is your last. Enjoy it, be in the moment and keep it tight – not on rails, but at least keep it inside the story you are telling. When something interesting and maybe side-questy comes up, then note it down: this is material for a sequel.
An when you’ve finished, you’ll have a full story. Not something that petered out because you were trying for a tale that is too big to fit into most people’s lives. You can pick up the sequel to the game you ran if you’d like. Or you can go on to something else. Either way, you can take that satisfaction of having told a complete story and use it to run the next thing rather than having to battle the feeling that you never quite got to finish the story you were telling.
Seriously, this works. In the time it’s taken me to run one long-form D&D game with one long D&D group, I’ve also taken a different group through six shorter campaigns with five different systems. And both groups enjoyment has been real and deep.
So stop questing after the crown. Go for just one year, or five months, or four weeks. And play the hell out of the time you have. I hope you love it.
Creative commons art: “Adventurer – Fantasy character” by Niolam, “Viking Warband 2” by ZoLariusZombie and “Things We Saw In The Dark” by TrentAnthonyFrancis.
