Talking Long Campaigns

0:00Hello, my name is Lowell, pronouns he, him and I am the community manager for the open hearth gaming community. And this is another one of our series of group talks, seminars about particular topics. We've done a number of these. This time we're talking about long campaigns. Often on open hearth the default has been here's a month and we do a series that's four or five sessions, but we've had people now do longer series, quarterly 11, 12, 13 sessions or groups of sessions that are then linked together to form a longer series. And that's been been something we've been talking about. We also, you know, we support people playing outside the community who are running longer campaigns for their home groups or for other online groups. So we're going to be talking about that. Now what I'm going to do is talk about a few topics and some setup things.

1:04I want to mention that there are some great resources out there for talking about long campaigns and managing those. There's a really interesting cobalt guide to plots and campaigns, Robin Laws guide to good game mastering. Those are interesting things. If you are interested in longer campaign management, and I use that word very particularly, there is one resource I want to point people to kind of right off the top, a book called Odyssey. And this is by Walt Chennanowski and Phil Vekioni. This is literally just a book about campaign management from very much a project manager approach to things. I really like it. And you know, it's often we get these RPG books that are kind of topical and maybe they're kind of fun to read through. I think this one has a lot of good solid advice to it. So I want to start with the question of what we get from a long campaign, just to kind

2:07of set some some baselines. So when we're going to do a long campaign, they're attractive to us as GM's for a number of reasons. What is the longer campaign allows us to show change over time? It allows us to have characters evolve, have the world evolve. It allows us to explore all of a world. If we've got a cool world, a cool setting, it gives us more of an opportunity to go and tour and try different places of it. It also gives us more of a chance to explore the system. If we've got a system that has a long evolutionary process, advancement things like that, a longer campaign gives us a chance to try out all the cool corner abilities, get the, you know, level 10 powers, all of that kind of thing. Another thing it does is it allows for over time, maybe that something that a short campaign doesn't, everyone gets to do those combinations of interactions and scenes and developed arcs

3:08with the other players, with the other player characters. We had this just recently in the Raps Gowing Game, we're at about session 1314 and this last session, Patrick's character and Sherry's character, they had had some interactions, but they got really tightly thrown together in a way they hadn't before and it completely changed the dynamic. We hadn't had a chance to explore that before and it really, really played out in a different way than maybe we expected. During the longer time to play gives you a chance to mix those up, come back to those and change those things up. What are though some of the challenges for longer campaigns? Longer campaigns, we've certainly got higher risk involved. We can lose consensus, people can start to have different expectations, there are changes that occur in our life or in the game and so on that we have to deal with, that could

4:10be the general loss of energy. Certainly scheduling issues are the bane of gamers and longer campaigns can be really vulnerable to that. There's also, and I know I've experienced this and I assume that all of you had as well. It's when you're playing a beautiful, long game, but then you see that there's this other beautiful, shining, long game over there and you're not getting to play it because you're running this long game and you have FOMO from this. This is a common thing for me. One thing I want to start with is the idea that we have to choose a system that is going to be sustainable for a long campaign. In doing that, we need to know what the system can sustain, can manage. Many PBTA games have kind of a statute of limitations. They have a minimal length that you really need to play to get them up to speed, to explore

5:11and see what's going on in them, but there's also a point at which you've been playing long enough that your characters have really run through all their options. They've taken all their advancements, they've moved to the end, they feel bloated in some ways. It's one of the things that has not been copied, I think, in other games, but Apocalypse World originally had to take a second character. Not a lot of PBTA games have copied that approach as a release fell for that. That's one of the considerations is how long can this game play for? I know Richard Rogers has been running a mass campaign for years, and he wanted to stop it several times because the characters had gotten too big, and the players have wanted to keep playing, so they've had to reset the playbooks, start from zero again with those same characters, which I think is a really interesting approach to that kind of thing.

6:15Some games have obviously a built-in set of structures and limitations. For example, Grow by Moonlight. Grow by Moonlight builds into itself. This is how long the campaign is. These are the events that are going to occur. This is what's going to build up to answer Jim's question in the chat, so I would say that the players feel that it is one campaign for that mass game, but I think Rich would say it's several campaigns linked together. I think there's a very different vision of that between the players and the GM. Other games that have structural things, blades in the dark, certainly it is built in that this campaign where our goal is to get our group bigger. It's not a set goal that we get to X thing, but it definitely has a sense that we were aiming for something that we're going to get to. Certainly, being to blades takes that in its logical conclusion by having a very set

7:19of structures and steps and points and things like that. But outside of PBTA, there are other games that do this. There are a number of OSR games and D20 games that have 10 levels. You will get to 10 levels. But specifically, I've run a lot of 13-dage and it has those 10 levels broken up into three acts. We've got essentially our venture tier for the first few levels that our heroic tier with is going to jump up in power and then our epic tier. I have run a full 10 level campaign with that. One of the things I think you need to know when you're going into choosing that game is what that limitation is, but also having a sense of how many sessions it takes to get from A to B to C. How many sessions does it take for advancement? How many sessions does it take to go up a level?

8:19If that's a consideration, is there a difference between how the game expects advancement to happen and how you as a GM run it? I would go back to 13-dage in this. 13-dage. Again, I love this. In the D20, it's the closest to Trad I get, I think, in a lot of ways. But it has this assumption that you have to have four fights before you have a complete rest and you have to have a couple of complete rests before you go up a level. That's a lot of fights. I do not do that because I don't have a fight every session. I don't have two fights every session. Like that is not the way I run. So it is much more a milestone approach to me. Part of that is I know how long the combat in 13-dage is going to take when I'm running it. I'm not going to stop and do a combat that we're going to do three incidental combat sessions. That is not what I want to get at.

9:20So curious about this, we've seen some people run different games that have had some structural things to them that have affected it. We have thoughts, questions, things like that. Jim mentioned in the chat, the const pyramid. Can you talk about how that works in NBA? Jim, would you know about that? Yeah, it's the structure that they have for anybody that's not familiar with Knights Black agents. Ken Height, who's one of the principal authors of it, pitches it as Jason Bourne versus vampires, your burned spies that are fighting this vampire conspiracy. And they have a structure that they call the conspiramed, which is the conspiracy that you're fighting. And there's like you fight the low level vampires and kind of work your way up to the main vampire. And because there's that structure, the number of layers you put into the conspiramed there can, you know, is a timer for the campaign so that, you know, because you're working your way up through to get to the main vampire, whether that's, you know, Dracula himself or

10:24whomever, you know that you're going to fight your way up to this level. And then once you take out the vampire at that level, that's the end of the game. And so it's, it's like a little similar to kind of the way that the, um, a lot of those car for Brindlewood games work where you're kind of building your way up to, to that fight with the mastermind. And then that's the end of the game. But I really like it because you can, you know, if you want a short campaign, you do a short conspiramed where there's only three layers of it or something like that that you have to fight your way through. But if you want some that lasts a little longer, you make it seven or whatever. And I'll mention this, this is a thing to think about that much like the sort of the, the Brindlewood Bay effect, that is a clock that the players can see. When we're playing online, players have an expectation. We're doing 10, 11, 12 sessions. They can see that is the link that we are going for. But if you're playing free play, if you're playing in a game where you're just playing

11:26or so on, maybe the players don't have a sense of that. One of these things that these do is provide a framework that players can see and measure. And as Garrett says, it's about a kind of transparency that helps align those expectations. Alan said something interesting in the chat. Some of like length and things like that in terms of like how long it takes to do things to stuff will depend on do your players know the rules. This is a thing to consider. It's part of the kind of the choice of system and how it's going to impact are your players people who are going to buy the books. Are they going to buy the books and have a copy of it or are they just going to look at the spreadsheet or are they just going to work off of the cheat sheet? Because I think that makes a big difference, especially if you're playing a longer game where you're expecting the players are going to engage with the system.

12:27You may have players that don't. That is not their thing. They just want to play. And so the choice of system begins to really impact that. As a side tangent, I will say, and some of you may agree, not agree with me. One of the biggest red flags warning signs for players in a long campaign is if you see a player not spend their points. They don't take their advancements. They don't bother to level up. They're not spending points to buy new advantages. That is the biggest single red flag that you need to figure out what is going on with that player in a longer campaign because that is not going to get better unless you deal with it, especially because they're already disengaged and then they're going to get to a situation where they are underpowered and they're going to feel more frustrated and it's going to be a loop, a cycle that is going on.

13:29Alan, you had said something about the definition of campaign and how we define that. Can you speak to that? Yeah, only as much as if I think of the first campaigns I ever ran, then they were endless. They were there as long as the players would turn up and get at me the point about there's this implied big bad on the horizon. And then once you knock that one over, beyond that is another peak decline. But I think there's also that definition of campaigns that says, is it the same group of players playing every week for 20 years? Is it a rotating cast of players who come in and out of that setting? But the general thrust to the campaign is the same. They have the same campaign history that they build on and they go forward from that. Is a set of series, you know, like Night Witches, I think Jim Rannick, you know, start finish every week, you know, pausing for bank old days and illness?

14:30What can you run it as we're going to chunk, chunk this down, we're going to do a couple of months and then I'll offer you the chance to come back to this in another month's time. So I think campaign means different things to different people. I think is what I'm suggesting. Yeah, yeah. What works for different models? Maybe different. Absolutely. And I think that that is a thing that the GM should be thinking about at the start. I think that you want to at least have an idea of what you would like and communicate that to the players. Garrett summed this up in the notes. So we have some transparency things, fixed length, in-game goals, character progression and these are all timers things that players can see, but having a discussion about what is the goal for the campaign, what distance that we're going to be moving through. If I just build on that point, as part of my ongoing process of bigging up GrimWild,

15:31GrimWild has a model whereby you get one XP procession that you turn up to and you are limited to eight levels and then done. Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a really interesting one. It is one that you can tweak a little bit in terms of how much you're going to do and how fast you're going to get through that. GM asks about how I'm structuring Star Trek Adventures and I want to talk, I'm going to kind of jump forward. I have some notes here about approaches to campaign length and what a campaign might meet. So for me, I'm running a lot of Star Trek Adventures and particularly for one series Star Trek Kansuki, I have structured that as seasons. There is a discrete season that's a quarterly and we have a set of characters for that and when we get to the next quarterly, we have some of those same characters returning. We definitely know that we've got the continuity. We've got the secondary characters and NPCs between that.

16:35Now mind you, that's also broken up in that. I very much structure those games as two sessions is an episode. So there are blocks that are being built up that we can do. We're carrying on, it is a length campaign thematically, but we might have a very different crew between these things. When I say quarterly, because we tend to break things up into months on the open hearth, quarterly just means probably like a three month series here is what I'm talking about. I have done that breaking up of a campaign into arc several times. I did fearful symmetries with Alan and some others. We did a 12 session arc and then a year later, we did another 12 session arc with those same characters where literally in the game world a year had passed. We used the timing of the real world and matched that up. I've also done Godbound. I love Godbound and I broke that up into three 12 sessions and I did not intend that at

17:42the start. We hit the end of that first 12 sessions and I was like, this is really good. I would like to come back to this and so we took some time off and we came back. It was also one of those games where we actually added a new person. Ethan came in and joined us at that point, which was a fun and interesting and mixed things up. It also provided a new perspective because Ethan's character could come in and go, wow, you're all really weird and bring in a kind of a grounded reaction to what was going on in the game. That was a really fun way to do that. I have broken up campaigns even smaller. I've done quarterlies where each month is a book. Basically my focus has been in this first month. We're going to do a three or four session story. Then we're going to have a little bit of a break time and then another three four session story.

18:43We have another little break time with the idea that it's a trilogy or it's a series of comics. That's another way to structure that. Another thing is I ran for a very long time, a school campaign, a fantasy school campaign and that was very much broken up into years and here's the opening of the school year, midpoint, big bad at the end of the school year. Then we have a break and we come to the next year and that formed a very conscious structure for the players and a very conscious structure for the GM. One of the nice things is that if we have those kinds of longer structures for longer plays, we can also maybe dive out and have our characters play NPCs in the setting to get other perspectives on things. That length and those campaign structures, especially when we get them linked up and such, we can do interim episodes between campaign arcs.

19:45We can dive down and see what the NPCs are doing. Jim, can you talk about Alan asks this? Can you talk about how Knight Witches function for you with the cast rotation and things like that? I ran a Knight Witches game on open hearth when it was called something else back in the gauntlet days and because at the time we were pretty explicit about wanting stuff to be open table, I ran that as an open table game, modified so that I put each month worth of sessions up as its own thing and people could sign up and because of the nature of Knight Witches where you're playing pilots in World War II, it was really conducive to having people drop in and out as they wanted to and we had a few players that kind of stuck with it through most of the entire series. But we also had people that just came in for literally like, you know, across the like

20:50that year plus game, just one or two sessions where they could make it for one session, they're like, you know, after we'd been running it for a few months, they're like, hey, I heard this is really cool. I just want to check it out. They drop in for one or two and their pilot is there. We bring them in and if they, you know, if they like it, they can come back, but, you know, you can get transferred and whatever you're not flying, you're working on the plane, you're a mechanic instead or something like that. And we would explicitly and people would explicitly say whether they left, if they didn't stay with us, do you want your character to become an NPC that we can mess with or do you want to go off somewhere else so that conceivably you could return and come back and, you know, when it was probably about 50, 50 people deciding whether they, you know, wanted to maintain the option to come back with that same character or whether they, or whether they were happy to like read three months from now that they had, you know, gotten shot down over, you know, Warsaw or something like that later in the game, but it worked really,

21:51really well. And I think by the time it was over, we had had like, you know, close to like 18 or 20 different players through the whole thing, but like I said, with a core like maybe half a dozen six to eight that played really regularly, you know, throughout the campaign. The timing on that is World War II. And so kind of everybody has a pretty good idea of what that means. And so, so, you know, we knew it was going to end with the end of the war. I'll say this. And then when I threw the gar at a really interesting point when I did my mass campaign that was quarterly, I could look because I had put all the months out, but they kind of broken into months, I could see who was in each one, who was carrying over and who wasn't. And that gave me a way to when I was thinking about things, knowing what what we need to do, where we need to get to, how we need to have people exit or come back in. Gary, could you talk about the concept of the magic circle in gaming and how that relates

22:52to campaigns? Yeah, I happily will do so I recently wrote a block article about it. Unfortunately, in German though, translation tools can be offered there because I have a block specifically for my last campaign, which was running for seven years. It was a traditional campaign of fantasy module, which was big in the 90s in the German dark eye, but I translated it to Indie mechanics and tried to do it as modern as possible, like taking the best from the 90s and ping it into our times. And for that, I also thought like very actively about the magic circle, that is a concept from game theory. Vertica is I think the the theorist behind it, which says that they play begins much earlier. It's not just the play time when we come together, but it's also like when you announce a campaign, when you talk about the campaign in between, when you prepare the session, the GM is already playing in a certain sense, when you at home think about like your next advance, you want to pick for your character, that is a way to play.

23:53And like categorizing all these different elements, which make the campaign, I've found very useful and in the campaign, especially important because a campaign for me is such so much more collaborative exercise than a single session, where it's more kind of a mastermind sits down and has an idea on what they want to do in that session. And then the players join you and just celebrate what you developed. And in a campaign, I want to see that differently, the way I want to see campaigns and how we play them in the community is that we think about like how what is coming next, like what worked, what didn't work, how do we want to progress, how do we define the ending and so on, like we do this together, and I like this very much. And so expectation management is something we take time for, we look at how does the group develop, not only single characters, but also the group dynamics you can look at. You can think about like doing a workshop about a certain element, you can think about rules, like how to discuss rules. And if you categorize these like the elements, which are important to you and to think

24:54together about like how you want to spend time on them beside play, I think this can deliver it your play experience a lot. Yeah, that is something where I say the magic circle needs to be seen and appreciate it. It is something which is our play, not just the three hours we just play, so to say. I think that's so important knowing what your players know about the game that you're playing, what their expectations are, one of the things that has happened that's been a little bit different between the different Star Trek games that I've run is that Star Trek game has benefited from people knowing the TV show, from people having watched the TV show, they know the dramatic stuff, but they also know what Starfleet is, they know what Star Trek is. It was an interesting and learning experience to me when I ran an original series, series, TOS series, which doesn't know original series.

25:56Like he knows Star Trek, but he doesn't know original series, and he was fine, but he was super, super uncertain about his own knowledge, and that is a thing to be aware of what are people know. How do we invite them in to the thematics of this kind of thing? So there's a really interesting, the officials have done a couple of books, one of them they've done is this book of proactive roleplaying, this theory about having with the start of the game, your characters define goals for themselves, short term, medium term, long term goals, and then you build the campaign around that. This is, I think this is a great idea, I think this is a wonderful idea, but the players need to know what the game is going to be. Even if you're collaboratively building the game or the game world, if they don't have a strong sense of what you're going to be running of what the game is, they're going to have trouble with that. I did a Mutants of Masterminds game, we did some collaborative building, and then I went

27:00to try and use that sort of proactive approach, but people got stuck because the players had very different expectations about what a supers game was, and some of them had never played a supers game, and some of them had never read comic books. The dramatic level of difference created a really intense approach there, and I thought, okay, it's a collaborative building, certainly it'll be fine, but yeah, that setting knowledge is really important there. Let's talk about some tools here. One of the things that is appealing about a long term campaign is that when you do a session zero and do some building and stuff like that's going to pay off potentially, that effort, that investment is going to be cool, so we can do collaborative building, we can use tools like microscope to build histories, we can use microscope to build cities,

28:02we can do map building to start out, we can really focus in on entanglement building, all of those kinds of things, and I love that. I think it's really fun. I'm curious about what folks have found as successful tools for doing that building, that preparation for long campaigns, either specific to a particular game or in general. Alan? Maybe there's something to be said here about how are you collecting information about the campaign so that when other, either new people drop in or there's a break and you pick it up again, that campaign history remains accessible and can be built on rather than a feeling of, oh gosh, yeah, we're starting with scratch again, and I suppose Will H and I have used Miro to map our vampire games across, gosh, dozens of sessions now.

29:04And I think probably we're up to about 15, 16 different players across time. Oh wow. Conspiracy, Bullard, that's the job of, you know, here's the history of the game. Don't know if that's hell. Yeah, no, I think it is, it is a challenge though, like that's a massive information. And players should know what their expectations about, how much do I need to know, how much can I grok in play, like what can I get from that, Jim? Yeah, I mean, I am just in the habit now of any time I do a game that's going to be more than four or five sessions, I just make a discord for it. I'm very text oriented, I like just thinking about a Miro board makes my head spin because it's graphic design, which is not a thing I can do. But like in terms of information organization for our Band of Blades game, we've got a discord that has a whole lot of stuff in there, you know, like recaps of every mission. And then before the mission, we list out all the, you know, here's the potential missions

30:06and you guys, you can yack about it and stuff like that and what you might take in everything. And so it's all there for anybody that wants to pursue it. Like we have one player who really can kind of only engage in the game for the three hours that we're playing. But I know that like he'll like take 15, 20 minutes before, just kind of do, do, do, do, catch up on everything. And then he can jump into the game and, you know, and be privy to that conversation that's going on. And that's the thing I like about discord is it's got that kind of sort of wiki function where we can record all of that. But it also facilitates conversation between sessions. I just think discord's really, really great for that. Garrett, you mentioned about a tool that you're using to kind of keep that continuity. Yeah. Tool might be a big word for what I'm doing, but similar to end of session questions, I always ask every after the every session, every player to write down one sentence, how their character has changed in the session in relation to the main theme of the game

31:11of the of the campaign. And that makes such a difference because at the end of the campaign, after let's say 17 sessions, as we played in this large campaign I mentioned before, you can now read through the whole story character arc by going back to the table where we put per session per player. The stories and then that you can lead from you can read from left to right and see like what happened in a specific session, but you can also retop down and see like how were the characters have developed and that was such a nice tool and we use this at the end of the campaign to see like what we made through what our characters had to go through and that was pretty, pretty amazing. And I like to have this is all this kind of graveyard engravings you could make out of this. I love it. I want to talk about another sort of approach to informational organization before I come and talk about a microscope in my experiences and ask about other people say, here's what I learned from Ray. For me, I don't do morrow, I don't do text. For me, campaigns are organized by NPCs very much and I do this both online.

32:16Those NPCs broken up into their sections are are how I visualize it, but I do this for my face to face game. I will print out character pictures and we have a like a baseball card binder and will organize them there. That for me is the way that I approach that Ray Ray kind of taught me that. How does is that kind of coincide with your experience, Ray? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm also the kind of jam where you can nudge me slightly and an NPC will come out like fully, fully grown, but I feel like NPCs are such a good tool to mirror PCs, but they're also a good tool to store information about setting and factions and relationships and cataloging changes across a campaign. It's really great, especially like a long campaign, one of my favorites when we were play testing Twilight Throne was there was an NPC a bad guy called the pawn and she was

33:24at best in nuisance, but she kept surviving, she kept coming back to life and wretched awful body horror ways. But after like about, I want to say like there's like 20 something sessions, I got to have her deliver a killer line of, you know, if a pawn lives long enough, it becomes a queen. And that's when she like evolved into this really bad ass horrible version of herself and became the big bad that no one expected. And so I got to store a lot of information in that particular NPC and I find it's just easier for players to remember, I mean, this depends for player, but for a lot of my players, it's easier to remember imported information if it's connected to another characters connected to an emotional or relationship thing, rather than just pure lore, setting information that can be harder to keep track of. Absolutely. It definitely is the way that I approach that I want to talk then about point that like

34:29I've used microscope a lot when microscope first came out, I was like, this is it. This is absolutely it is is my bag 100% and I remember using it and I remember bringing it to my players and some of my players were like, fuck this. And it wasn't until we sat down and did it that they were like, Oh, okay, because they were worried that other people would screw up the world. Like that was that was literally they said this multiple times and it was one of the things about getting comfortable with with building consensus and things like that, which I think is probably where we're less in that year and now, but this is right when microscope came out. I've used microscope to build worlds, we did 13th age, 13th age has a lot of setting assumptions that are built into it, but we build a history and we modified some of those setting assumptions based on what was done there, but I've also done it where I said, we're going to build

35:31a fantasy world and they built a fantasy world or we're going to build a fantasy world where it's fantasy battle star galactica and that's all I gave them and then we built the world from there and those have been really fun and successful and things like that. The question is, how much people engage with those things? One of the things I found and Dominic mentions this in the chat is when you get a lot of information, how much people engage with those, how much we get to use them. One of the things I found with the 13th age game is in the microscope thing, they created the icons, essentially the big powers of the world. Those came back quite a bit, but a lot of the specific details of the history got dropped out. I would bring them in, I would reference them, but they weren't important to the players. They liked the vibe when they saw something that they created and some players would build on the things that were in the history, but I realized that that was less important

36:33to the players, so I drifted that back. I deemphasized that. I think where I've had players more engages, where it's not history, where it goes backwards in time away from where they're at, is when I've done games where they built the city that they're living in. Where that is a thing that is temporally present in their engagement. If a player goes and looks at history, how am I going to bring that into play? If I go and look at the city and the neighborhoods and the people that are in it, that's something I can engage with. Yeah, and this is just by hanging up with it, but I feel like microscope emphasizes in some ways. There's consensus building at the start when you create the palette and all of that, but in play, it encourages you to don't pull the table, don't ask the other players, just decide what you want to see there. I think that both creates a sort of hesitancy for actually going for the cool, big things

37:39because you don't know what the other players will think about it. Which makes the players hesitant about what the other players will do. For me, but I don't know how much this is a playstyle thing or a personality thing, but for me, that works against the good of the game. I think that's right, because while some people are really comfortable with re-incorporation, where you've set a standard that you're not supposed to kill it, you're not supposed to do that. It makes people hesitant to take something that somebody else has done and modify a play with it and so on. And I think that is a disadvantage to it. And so I think there are ways to modify that. There are some other tools that are out there that are kind of interesting. There's the deck of worlds and the Oracle Story Generator. These are interesting ones. These are very physical, object kind of ones.

38:39There's a ton of world building, which sounded pretty, but is just a lot of tables for building stuff that I don't think you can actually use at the table a very much a solitary thing. Alan, what's our item? Yeah, our item, actually, I don't know if he still is, but he was a community member for a while. People are always community members, whether they're with us or not, they are community members in spirit. Thank you. Thank you, chicken community members. William Mann, pick started this little while ago, oh gosh, several years ago. And it has Ariam create, which is the idea of creating a game. And I think it walks a decent line between the consensus where everyone is happy or everyone just takes what I is the GM put in front of them and everyone feeling they've got some ownership of the final creation, because I think trying to get consensus in any kind of table of players is probably a, you know, it would be perfection, but I set up for the

39:43practical. So yeah, no, Ariam, you can get you look it up on on drive through. It's available there. Oh, Jim, talk about StarForge, Don't Iron Sworn, as a campaign prep. Yeah. I mean, they're designed to be played as solo games. If you want to, I mean, for the most part, people end up playing them as kind of more traditional role playing games, but they're, they're explicitly meant to be played as solo if you want to play them. So there's a lot of tables and world generation stuff, good questions that help you build a campaign world that you can then drop your solo character into without having to get consensus from a whole bunch of different people on building that. If that's something that you're interested in, it's, it's kind of the same. Iron Sworn is Iron Age fantasy stuff. StarForge is based opera SF and Sunderdiles is sort of like pirate, rough scallion flavored time stuff. So, and they're all, they're all pretty neat to take a flip through if you get the, just

40:44get the PDFs. I want to mention here with those an interesting thing to consider that those tools are really solid online where it's very easy for everyone to look at the tables to have them as reference. It is a different beast in person because usually you have what, either you're passing the book around or you have one person who is reading from it and I think that changes the dynamic significantly between because there is that interruption, there is that break a flow. People, if, if one person is the book, you're sitting there waiting for your turn. You don't have a chance to look at the tables or whatnot. I think that is a significant consideration. I'm going to come back to tools that we have for when we're actually running, once we actually get our bike peddled and rolling, but Garrett asks about group collapse about playing with a fixed group, long campaigns mean commitment to a standard, how to handle group collapse.

41:51Why do groups collapse? And this is one of those ones where I want to ask for people's experience with this. I have been doing this long enough and I have traditionally run long campaigns such that I have seen some amazing bullshit in my life, things coming crashing down. I've had a couple of times where players have blown up at the table where they had a very different expectation of the game and everyone else at the table were on the same page and one player wasn't and that created a problem. I had a game where a player had a kind of a what I'm going to describe as a persecution complex such that any negative thing that happened to their character they perceived as personal attack and that caused a problem. But I've also seen personal dynamics, divorces. I had a great campaign that was going wonderfully. We were moving up towards the conclusion and one of the sort of key players who had been there since the beginning was a small table.

42:53Smaller tables are more risky, three players lose one player. That's one leg of a tripod and they had an argument with their partner and they decided that in order to show their partner they were going to quit all their games and they didn't tell me and they didn't give me a chance to like do a wrap-up session and suddenly that game just crashed and burned. Can people talk about their experiences, Dominic you mentioned in the chat, the Apocalypse Keys, how you've managed that? Yeah, I've been running a game since we're in session 17 now so do the math it's like five months and we started as a wish fulfillment thing for our community member Shane and Shane stayed with us for the entire run of the quarterly and then just you know daylight savings caused them to drop out. Another player dropped out for like personal commitment reasons and then other players

43:54cycled in with every new mystery I put in a post in the request players as long as I have session. I keep on the calendar for that reason as well so people see that they're still a seat open but I do realize that the time slot is not great for many people but I think it really helps to have a big community like we do and also that Apocalypse Keys has these very distinct mysteries and you always also play them in a new city so that's really easy to integrate new players and cycle through them. It would be more different in a like more let's say personalized game but I feel Apocalypse Keys is still very personalized it is just that you have these built in that's called them change points where it's a new city so it's a great moment to say hey we have a new player and that player has been the local agent for for division all along and now they get to to join the gang and somebody else goes for ruin a shame did or just quietly disappears.

44:59I think that's a really interesting thing you're mentioning to about how easy is it to integrate to bring characters in that mission based structure of Apocalypse Keys invite that there are games like I think masks in some cases, hearts of wool in and others where there's a strong building of those relationships between characters at the start that can be a real challenge when somebody new comes in and having to restructure those to build into this to find their place in that. Dominic I noticed that Apocalypse Keys has this as well like these relationship building questions in the beginning our problem was so what do we do with that and we just ended up always asking the same question again so it's always like you love me but I can't return that and you would think that have only worked for one character but it doesn't like we have the same question question answered towards like several players by now and several

46:02characters there's always somebody whose love you can't return you know absolutely you can just reuse the questions one of the things I want to mention in this is you have someone depart as a GM what are the things you what are you going to do now you can bring somebody else in if you're going to bring somebody else in especially if there's been a change over where somebody's played for a long time and maybe the departure is acrimonious this is a time to really talk to the table it is a time to talk to the table but I stress I cannot stress this hard enough do not denigrate the player who left do not talk them down do not talk down their character don't do shit to their character there is an instinct I mean I play for a long time and I've been I've played in the ears of adversarial GM's if you do that that is corroding to the trust at the

47:03table if you swac somebody's character what I typically do when that happens is we quietly move them aside they move out we don't reference them we take them out of the picture or we give them a happy ending but make it clear the players that that is kind of off the table I think that's really important sometimes that it involves retconning sometimes you go because this has happened you know these players were involved with this we're going to play in a different way not doing this to spite this character or spite this player we're doing this to manage expectations going further forward that's super super important and there is and I think Dominic points at this there's a real difference between playing this online and how easy it is to bring someone in or slide someone in and out as opposed to having to play face to face people know this but last year

48:09I had I had a game I had a player I played with for 20 30 years and he died and at that point I didn't want to run that campaign anymore we'd been playing it long enough I just couldn't do it and his spouse was playing with us and she played with us for a while but I knew that there was a clock on that I knew that she would feel eventually this would be too much for her and and it was and I think that those kinds of dynamics we cannot cannot like neglect that that social component Jim really long enough is me so I know you have some more stories really briefly I guess one of one of the things that that that you should establish at the beginning if it's going to be like a tight game with people you know is so it's the five of us if somebody has to drop out what do you guys want to do you know and that's a pull the table thing that's not a thing that you can decide

49:10as the person running the game are we going to bring in somebody new or we're going to bring in is it going to be somebody completely new is it going to be somebody we know who we've been talking to the game about like whatever our our friend who you know hasn't been able to make it on Wednesday nights and then suddenly they can and that feels like a conversation that should kind of happen at the very beginning and then sort of be open as you're going what what do we do if someone gets and I've had to drop out of a couple of games because a job crap which is super frustrating for me and I hate to do it to the people that you know that I'm in the game with but it's you got to eat so that can be really frustrating but but but it just like at the beginning you should figure out you know how you think you're going to handle that and go from there and people may have been polite when they thought a person wasn't going to be in the game and then you're like I'm going to invite Rob and suddenly I'm like I don't want to play with Rob Rob and I do not get along we do not like each other I don't want to drop but I also don't want to say to the GM no

50:14please don't invite Rob or eight months ago when you started you were fine with Rob and since then like something has happened so yeah that's that's the long campaign thing yeah Alan yeah I you know I put in the in the chat I've never been blessed with living for extended period of time in a decent sized city and so too often I have run campaigns with whoever I could get and that is not a good place to be either at the start or eight months in I will say I have played in the same city all my life and this group that I have it has been pretty continuous since since 1996 in some form which is good and bad there have been change outs because in that long amount of time there's some people who have changed their political views have changed their personality in a way that I'm like I do not want you in my house anymore and I think that's

51:15that's a real real consideration and it's tough because I have some of my friends who really believe in the social contract and hate conflict they they are conflicted verse so they are not willing to call people on bullshit and I am too old to not call people on their bullshit so it's tough Garrett and then I want to come back to something that Ray said in the chat yeah indeed and I wanted to come back to something Jim said in the chat which is that if it happens that your game collapses and then next week again you don't play and three weeks later you still don't play don't worry too much and I say this to myself as strongly as I can and still I struggled with it it's so difficult to see something where you're excited to play to continue and then it just doesn't happen because people are not fully aware of their schedule sometimes or just bad things happening and so on somebody somebody's fault even and still you shall not blame

52:21them you shall not put like too much pressure on anybody relax take a deep breath in and wait for next week life will continue humans are always more important than a campaign you cannot and yet it is difficult and obviously sometimes you need to talk about like reliability and the schedule and so on and yet it is one of the most challenging parts for me if things are not happening time wise as I expected that's that's for me like it but but the worst is if you try to punish the group by also not offering new sessions anyway it even longer for continuing that's the worst and I in the chat I also put like what I once collected in terms of how to avoid a group contract and a couple of things which you're not mentioned yet is one is like celebrate that you are playing together like really like show your appreciation to the others like that it is fun to play together that it is wonderful to be together and to develop a complete new cosmos together that that is such an achievement don't forget to celebrate and also to say like

53:27it is in our times and with our life circumstances not easy to come together and so appreciate that people make the time and are therefore the game no matter in which role but also like divide the burden maybe it doesn't have to be the facilitator organizing the next session data or so like maybe that can also be done by somebody else and not always the same person and then also rethink the schedule maybe the campaign was expected to go for too long but make it shorter if that makes it easier for people to commit and find a difference or so I think talking obviously is the summary of all of this like talking to each other and being there for each other you know but also when the time comes except that it is over and maybe go out of it without a blow let me point to just a last bit a sort of a button on this array setting the chat and I think this is the very true statement that the ideal number of players is 3.5 that is the ideal number because you want to have enough people that if one person doesn't show up it is cool you want to have that three players

54:33is super risky that one player is gone as I said tripod four players one person is gone as a GM you can go okay I can call it or we can play there's enough room there five players even more of that but then you're also dealing with five players and my dudes I ran too many years of six and seven player tables I I never wanted to do that again that was too much and but I ran years and years of that but we also played don't want or two in the morning which I do not do that anymore that is not my not my thing I want to talk a little bit I think there's some tools for managing long terms of things we talk about maraud boards I think that things like I've done a bunch of decks for events for different kinds of campaigns that are really useful to inspire you when you get stuck on what to do I have a set of worksheets that I've made that if we're playing in a long campaign

55:36it's like when I'm like okay where are we going now I have a set of questions that I ask myself that I write three things in answer to each of these and then I like here are three things for each character and I'll do that that takes an hour and I work off that for for weeks there are some tools that are out there that you don't use at the table that you can get done in an hour which for me my prep time I try to keep that tight as I've said before we pump the pedals on the bike and then we coast for a while that is my strategy for doing things another thing this advanced to long term games long term games allow you to do one off special bullshit it allows you to do a special event like okay and now it's an arena fight or now everybody's going to a ball or now you have to plan a party think about that the one thing I want to say about that before I kind of maybe open it up and maybe we talk a little bit about endings is this change up the energy

56:39what are things we learned in improv is about if we're at this level we're going this direction we switch off and we go another direction that change that frision between that change ups that's as important if we've done I mean it's as simple as if we've done a bunch of fight sessions we've got to do a session where the players have a chance to decompress to talk it's built into some games like the downtime from fortunate dark but Jim mentioned the surely of episode the one shot episode we've done a space battle now we want to be on a planet I very consciously do this in a Star Trek game so that we're not getting back to back of the same energy the same tone I think that's a really important thing let's talk about what other people want to have a questions on thoughts ideas you know I haven't talked about when to wrap up when endings are but anything

57:40anybody wants to ask question wise Ray yeah I just wanted to bring up one of my personal favorite tricks is to be in the same campaign with the same players but switching to a different game a different system with different characters so for example we were playing brinkwood blood of tyrants and so because I love brinkwood so much I designed two fan games for brinkwood and so one is a belonging game which is about the refuge which is really about the community building as the weights you remember who are you fighting for you're fighting the vampires you're building community but who are these normal people who are waiting back home and then there's also the other game which is based on trophy dark which plays out the fey who lost to the vampires and what they exactly lost and all that colonial violence and so switching between those three games mainly

58:43focusing on brinkwood and the forge and the dark one but then once in a while we'll have like oh this is what happened in the distant past this is what the fey lost this artifact and then it'll show up again in a future game or my favorite thing to do is to I will quotation mark confront the players with their own PCs from the other games sherry is always really funny about that when when she has to deal with her other character from another game but it helps creep like all these different NPCs and it helps like deep in the game and I'm doing it along with the players and it feels like a really fun break of like tone or looking at different parts of the campaign before you switch back to the main game is one of my favorite things to do one of the things that I'm I did with the game that I'm probably most proud of that I keep faking back on how I can do it with other games is at the end of that big night which is game that we

59:46ran I invited every player who had ever played in it during the course of the entire run to come back for a final session that was like the history channel documentary story of that unit and so we got to so everybody got to say like even if their character had died or whatever you know we would give them the opportunity to be like somebody commented like one of their relatives commenting on it or something like that and some of them actually played their characters in there whatever 80s or 90s and stuff like this you know reminiscing back and we had we don't like black and white photos and the montages and stuff like that but it was a really neat way to include everybody in on that and not just whatever the five players that happened to be there for the last session when you know V.E. Day happened and it was it was a really neat way to do that so some kind of like if you've had more than just a core group some kind of way to include everybody that's been in been in on it so that the you know the last session isn't just we beat

1:00:51the bad guy we all go yay and then that's the end of it but to have some some kind of final session that is you know kind of purely narrative but that gives everybody a chance to reflect on on what has gone on before so let me hard frame a little because I think that's the great jumping off point let's hear in this last 10 minutes let's talk about endings let's talk about how you wrap up games one of the things that I've seen people do that I really like is the idea especially as we're getting towards the end of a game is saying to players is there anything new that you want to do or explore with your character getting their head cannon out on the table when you're coming towards the end it helps where you kind of know that is going on we just recently had to talk about what kinds of activities what kinds of games things like with gyms is said that you can use to finish off a campaign in a satisfying way in particular we got referenced a world ending game which is a

1:01:55collection of mini games of different approaches for for ending campaigns anyone have thoughts about things that you've seen that you've liked that have been good ways to end campaigns or to have have not worked like I'll just say this when I when I learned about epilogues that changed me because I had had a couple of big campaigns that I didn't do epilogues for and I it was a huge mistake other people want to talk about endings that have worked or tools that you've used mainly share the ending of my last big campaign which was playing physically again after many years of playing online so a special occasion for the very end of the campaign anyway and I asked every player to bring one object representing their character with them and I prepared a little box and we made a funeral for our characters at the end and digging that box a hole for that box

1:03:00and put it into the garden with candles and everything and singing the campaign song and that was quite touching I have to say and so they just had to mention this here and honoring the time we had together and still when I visited this friend in whose garden I know we have this graveyard it's a very touching moment and these objects of the yeah representing the character so feel pretty real yeah so and the time we spend together so that was something I will not forget because well it's an actual physical place yeah and that is maybe a general izable lesson out of that having something representing the campaign like leaving like an artifact from the campaign behind this can be virtual obviously like a virtual background for your screen or something that is something I allow myself to have as a as a memory as a world memory and yeah and keep that warm feeling as long as you can together and as a social bonding after such a

1:04:02long time spent together I'll mention one technique I saw I wish I had done it I really do like when I saw it I was like oh shit we had a big long fancy campaign and a friend ran and we got to the last session and there was the fight against the big bad and one of the players one of the player characters got essentially detached from time in that fight and so what we then saw were epilogues that were done where this character was bouncing through time in that moment and seeing the future and players got to narrate the GM had some framework for it had some things and it was epilogues that were kind of in the play of the game it was really interesting it was it was really fun and I dug that a lot other people endings Ethan Ethan who is apparently cruel wants to do a game

1:05:05where you run a game using the os setting book and then destroy everything and then run dark designs and vertegrary so I kind of love that anything else people want to say about endings I think they're hard I think it's hard to decide when you want to end I think that is one of the big challenges you do need to get feedback you do need to tell the players ahead of time I have never when I've gone to players and said I think we're going to wrap it up I have never had players go yes please I always go I've got so much I left I want to do but you know there are signs there are signs like when you're getting burned out there are signs when you're losing interest when you feel like maybe you've jumped the shark in the game when you've done the big thing you're not sure how to top it I think you have to be really conscious of that there's a real real difficulty to

1:06:08doing that rap and getting a button on it I'm just speculating on the best way to end the campaign is not to end it in the sense that if you and I've only managed this one once as described in the chat which was to take a long-term faith campaign in the low fantasy world and then we killed a bit back we dealt with a big bad everyone had a good time and next time you take off the VR headsets and go back to your everyday life as an edge runner in night city and that that worked very well we then played cyberpunk fate for a while it was like start from scratch but everyone was still bound together by events that happened previously and we kept getting references back to it oh I love that I have done this where I ran a long sort of three arc superhero campaign and we finished that up and then we were done and we did a microscope session to decide what happened over the next 20

1:07:13years what happened and then we ran a near future cyberpunk game in that world based on the history that we've made I think that there are some interesting tools for building connections and things between those that allow that to really really develop Ethan I do have one question here before I want to wrap because I have referenced you a couple of times in this talk would you be willing to talk about the challenges you felt when you've been brought in a couple of times into existing campaigns and what that was like yeah sure I I was mostly worried about stepping on anyone's toes especially in the like the beginning setup where like you establish relationships with other characters and things like that and I didn't want to like it's fun to mess with other people's storylines and to like challenge them and complicate them when you know what they are

1:08:14I don't want to do that accidentally so that was that was a thing I was had to be really careful of and the other was that I just frequently didn't know the setting I didn't understand what was and wasn't possible so I tend the reason my character was so grounded in that Godbound thing is I didn't know what was possible so I aired on the side of lower powers so I was like I don't know what I can do I don't know what okay I'm gonna play a complete new book who has not like they have powers they have no idea how to use them because I don't know what I can get away with and I don't want to have to stop every five minutes and be like can I do this so like I yeah I eased into it and like started out super low power just partly because I didn't want to break anything I didn't want to interfere with any ongoing stories that I didn't know about and I didn't know what the world would allow it worked out fine it ended up being very fun but there is there is some stress

1:09:16there jumping into an established campaign which is like not knowing what what's allowed both by the game and by the established setting and by what the players have going on that's a really really good point like to for GM to be aware of I think you're hitting it something that I think is so important is GM's giving a players the sense of what the permissions are what do you permission to do how do you want to do modeling that early I thought you did a brilliant job with that especially in that Godbound game so that was great I'm glad it worked out like I was it ended up being great for me too but yeah but definitely was some because I think Godbound is a little bit like the game itself is a little bit confusing as to what you can and can't do yeah there are other things to talk about but we are here at the last five minutes so this is where where I breathe the campaign to an end where we would do epilogue now and stars and wishes and all of that roses and thorns but I

1:10:18want to thank you all for joining me here today to to talk about this to talk about long campaigns there's lots of stuff to discuss I'm glad to see people are are doing more long campaigns on the calendar I'm just now gearing up to to start a new long campaign I'm in that process of thinking about okay well how do I want to structure it what do I want to do and and it's a challenge so thank you all for coming along with me today and I am going to stop the recording