Pacing a campaign
A word of warning before I begin.
When writing roleplaying articles for the Big Bad Blog, I normally try to keep the articles grounded in my own experience. When I describe potential origins for magical items or how to create a villain, I am drawing on twenty-five years of time spent playing roleplaying games and letting you in on what, why and how things work for me.
Today, we leave that comfort zone. I have been putting off this article, the follow up to Combat Pace and Pacing a Session — it’s about setting the pace for an entire campagin.
The reason why is because this is something that I have never been good at. In order to set a good pace for a campaign, you need to know two things ahead of time:
1. The desired “goal” of the campaign.
2. The desired length of the campaign.
I very rarely go into a game knowing either of these two things. I have never gone in knowing both. So instead of laying out a recipe for success, I will be laying out what I think might be a successful recipe, which I am going to try.
Foreknowledge
Before you can pace your campaign, you need to know a few things. Most important is how much time is available. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to assume an infinite amount of time is available. This is not just blatantly false, but it is a detriment to the game: Constraints provide focus, and allow for greater creative expression.
The game I am running is already four sessions old, but I am putting a lid on it already. This is the first time I have ever done this — all my previous lids have been of the “it’s time to wrap the game up” variety. Not this one, and not this time. The game is not open-ended.
Goals
The second thing that is needed in order to pace your campaign is goals. What is it that you want to achieve?
Here we run into another problem, which is my motivation for running games. I run games for a limited number of reasons: either I want to try a system, or I simply want to roleplay and nobody I know is running a game. And so it was this time — I tend to GM by default, rather than design. I never have a great idea for a game, work on the concept, and then find players. I want to play, I find players, and then throw together a game.
To be honest, it’s a wonder that I have never had a group up and quit on me.
But now that I’m four sessions in, there’s another aspect to it: I want to run a classic-feeling D&D game for my players, whatever that means. There have to be some classic monsters and situations. I need to throw in traps and dungeons. I need to do a few things that I rarely tend to do in my game, which tend to focus on the more humanlike races, monsters, and relationships.
These will still be in more limited supply than tradition dictates, of course — I need to play to my strengths — but it must be done nonetheless.
The Plan
My players read the Big Bad Blog, so I cannot really get into it, but the plan is simple.
I have X number of sessions.
I am creating a list of experiences and plot points for the storyline.
With these in mind, I create my disassociated game plan, mingling the experiences with the plot points into discoveries which play to the overall plot of the game — which is still pretty open-ended at this point.
These will provide goals for each session, and hopefully allow me to run a game that has a finish line, rather than one that needs to be wrapped up after it has gone on too long or jumped the shark.
Wish me luck or give me some advice. I’m going in.
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