The same dungeon master I quoted in my prior article (RPGs and Psychological Needs) when he played in my campaign said he was really enjoying his character. Why? He had never played a character in a campaign that lasted more than 2 sessions!
Many factors contribute to short-lived campaigns: flaky players, demanding life events, general lack of dedication. And while most groups of players can enjoy each others company for at least a few sessions without any rules or table culture, this eventually gets old. The symptoms of this fatigue: everchanging groups, a focus on one shots, and fishing for excitement with minigame sequences rather than the game itself. But there are elements of systems and of table culture that can promise longevity, and without resorting to gimmicks or the next fad.
System Needs
To begin with, I must admit that this list is filtered primarily through the lens of “things I feel are lacking in Mind Weave as currently written,” though they are also things I’ve found lacking in other systems. I’m sure there are many things needed in a system for it to have the promise of longevity that I have not included because they are ubiquitous in my experience, like perhaps advancement or limited resources.
- Permanent Character Death
- High Level Retirement Play (Domaining)
- Value of Information
- Integration of NPCs (henchmen, hirelings, sages, etc.)
Permanent Character Death
I added the word “permanent” here because in many ways it is a question of table culture whether a GM will allow players to meet challenges beyond their ability and to fail when it makes sense for them to. Yes, I could argue that many systems promote highly balanced play in order to prevent death at all, but this is more of a default culture than a system limitation.
What does tend to be a system limitation is how permanent that death is. In Mind Weave, for instance, RAW access to resurrection is as common as characters with a couple levels of spell casting and a focus in healing, and the cost of resurrection (at least of low level characters and those who have been dead a short time) is a few hours of spell points.
I’m not saying the system has to be a life-is-cheap, death-is-inevitable system, but for longevity it is important that characters can die, remain dead, and call in new characters to replace them. From a cultural standpoint, campaigns shouldn’t be designed so that a character or a party dying is the end of the campaign.
High Level Retirement Play (Domaining)
Mechanics for creating strongholds and running domains at high level are vital for giving players something to aspire to and for having a change in kind as players advance within the world. Even more importantly, these mechanics allow long-lived characters to exit regular play while still being a part of the campaign.
There are two major benefits to having high level character cycle our of regular play and play at a higher level. First, this allows low level characters to continually cycle into play and have a continuous, rotating cast of characters without a major discontinuity when everyone decides they want a new character because their current character is over-leveled. Second, these high level characters can have a high-level impact on the campaign world, contributing texture to the world that continues to benefit ongoing play.
In Mind Weave, we introduced a lot of mechanics from Strongholds and Followers to bring this element to the Haven campaign, but for real longevity, we soon learned we needed to change it a lot to really have the semi-retirement effect we were looking for.
Value of Information
Again, there are things GMs can do to control how valuable information is in the campaign regardless of system, but default, mechanical information that needs to be acquired (such as command words for magic items and spell knowledge, for example) and means of acquiring that information (such as identify spells and sages) can have a huge impact on how valuable information is.
When information is valuable, players are inclined to engage in the campaign to find answers and there will always be more questions to answer. The NPCs who have this information become more important and the world feels more immersive. (I haven’t really figured out how to fix this in Mind Weave.)
Integration of NPCs
For the sake of longevity, a system should have mechanics for players to integrate NPCs into their party as henchmen, as hirelings, and as hired experts. The presence of NPCs that grow with the players, mercenaries that can give the party more weight, and world establishing blacksmiths and sages and gem cutters give the world more meat that the campaign can continue to build on without exhausting the novelty of the campaign. Henchmen were pretty easy to add to Mind Weave, and I have worked up some notes on adding them to 5e as well.
Cultural Needs
In this section, I’m going to refer to what Rick Stump calls Psychotronic Gaming as things that a GM can do in any system to promote longevity in a campaign:
- Strict Time Keeping
- Verisimilitude
- Status Quo is the Enemy
- Multiple Characters per Player
- Characters can Win or Lose
- Players Drive Action
- Genre is Descriptive, not Proscriptive
Strict Time Keeping
Campaigns that live long lives have many things going on around the players, with and without their involvement. It is vital that all events in the campaign share a consistent and reliable world clock. When time marches inexorably forward, players are forced to accept that there are certain events they can do nothing about as they are otherwise occupied during the vital moments during which those events transpire. They are forced to face the ongoing costs of living and taxes that turn time into a resource they are not eager to squander.
Verisimitude
Yes, it’s a fantasy game. Yes, we’re accepting genies and wizards and dragons and teleportation as existing in the game world. None of this means that the world doesn’t have to make sense! The otherworldly facts of the game world are still facts and they inform player decisions and they should inform how the world works. The world should still function in a logical and consistent way in the face of these mad influences.
I once had an NPC say to a PC “this isn’t a fantasy world” in regards to the amount of time needed for her master to gather armies. The player was surprised. Not a fantasy world? Magic and dragons and undead! But none of that changed the logistics of gathering support and arming soldiers. The idea that armies could be raised at a drop of a hat was fantasy, even in this world that is fantasy to us. It is vital that the GM (and the players) think hard about the logical consequences of the things in the world so that a verisimilitudinous experience can be had by all.
Status Quo is the Enemy
Change should be constant. Will the same king reign for decades in game? Perhaps. But things will change. Many of these changes will be the result of player activity, whether direct or indirect. But players are not the only agents acting in the world. The various plots of the NPCs of the world will advance and things will change. If players choose to travel south and deal with slavers on the coast, they may return to learn that the gnolls they left encamped in the north have burned a village and disappeared into the wilderness. Conversely, after a couple weeks dealing with the gnolls and the mess they left behind, they might arrive in the south to find that the slavers have moved on, leaving only a small garrison in place and signs of their next destination, or perhaps an important member of their band has arrived with reinforcements, but what they find weeks later should not be the same as what they would have encountered had they gone right away.
When the world is changing all the time, the players will never run out of threats to confront. The frontier continues to grow and the forces of chaos continue to spring up within the bounds of civilization.
Multiple Characters per Player
Each player having multiple characters gives them lots of options, not only for mixing up the team when they need a special expertise for an objective, but also for being able to pursue many objectives in parallel in keeping with the one game clock and the ever-changing world.
This also allows what I consider one of the most important things for campaign longevity to work smoothly: flexible party composition. When each player has multiple characters, you can play with whatever players you get at a given session. If certain players come infrequently enough that their characters start to fall behind in level, no worries! With multiple characters per player, those dedicated players who are getting ahead will soon be making new characters that can overtake them and keep them in play. This frequent introduction of new characters by the diehards in your group also means that there will constantly be opportunities to induct new players because there will always be a low level party at play in the world.
In this way, your campaign becomes resistant to the busy schedules that prevent players from committing to something as demanding as a weekly game. It protects you from players who stop being able to play due to their life events. We can’t expect to find players who will be infinitely uninterrupted by the rest of their lives (people like that get stuck as GMs), but we can organize our campaigns so that players can participate at whatever level works for them and so that new players are easy to introduce and the loss of a player doesn’t destroy the campaign.
Characters Can Win or Lose
This goes back to the players’ psychological need for competence, but it also contributes to longevity. If things always go the players’ way, their victories become unsatisfying and eventually, they lose their desire to play. If the players suffer no set backs, then the campaign moves ever and dependably toward… what? Can any destination be anything other than an end? For longevity, we want no ends, just the continuing story (as my Stormguard campaign planning document was aptly named).
Consider long-running TV series. For example, Stargate: season after season after season of one step forward, two steps back. Some of it is “Status Quo is the Enemy,” but some of it is just that the heroes can’t always win, or the story would inevitably come to an end. With a small audience that is also the cast, we can conceivably keep that end off forever, if we allow the players’ actions to play out for good or for ill.
Players Drive Action
This is vital. For a campaign to persist for long periods, the players must be the ones deciding what they engage with. The GM shouldn’t have a plan for where the story is going to go. First of all, these plans are never as engaging as what the players end up deciding to do. And second, the players driving the action means they will never run out of things to do. No matter how farsighted a player is, they will inevitably have to deal with immediate concerns and while they may even eventually achieve a goal for one of their characters, they will continue to drive action with other characters.
Genre is Descriptive, Not Proscriptive
This is where Rick’s term “psychotronic gaming” comes from. The fact that it’s fantasy doesn’t mean you can’t have space ships or aliens or robots operating on physical principles. Of course, we know this. Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is a popular module. So we know that calling our game a fantasy game doesn’t tell us that our world has to be exactly Lord of the Rings or Greyhawk. It can include whatever elements we want.
I’ll take things a step further and say that eventually, any long lived campaign will want to move beyond the surface of the world, whether into space or into other dimensions or into the hollow earth or all three! Knowing this, I would encourage GMs to include out-of-genre elements early in their players’ experience.
My dad informed us we had no bellybuttons and eventually we started to understand when we found a TARDIS allowing us to adventure in various worlds.
My Haven players rescued a giant snail with a galaxy in its shell that the moment it got into the open was beamed up into space. It was years before giants from the moon landed and started encroaching on their lands, but it came as no surprise. The snail had been on their mind from the beginning.
The example funnel dungeon at the back of the DCC RPG book ends with (spoilers) a hidden room with a crystal ball that allows the characters to speak to an alien that it is heavily implied will appear again.
So, are you tired of short-lived campaigns and one-shots. Tired of not being able to keep a group together? Take the plunge. Start playing differently, and you can have fun that lasts forever.
Mind Weave Role-Playing Platform 