Welcome back, kids…
That True Game Master course sure made a long, fun, long semester, didn’t it? But it’s all over and done with now. Unless, of course, I go back and fill out the lesson plan with that Stealth and Infiltration thing even though I’d just be saying the same, exact shit for the eighteenth frigging time.
Put your damned hands downs and, you there, stop dancing. If I decide it’s worth doing, I’ll do it. I ain’t asking for input.
The point is, you’re all True Game Masters know. You know to sit behind a screen and do more than beep and boop your through Mere Game Executery. You know how the Masters do it.
In theory, anyway. In practice, y’all probably still suck. Get used to that. It takes a long time sucking at things before you’re good at them. Just enjoy your ride through Sucksville.
Meanwhile, though, there’s more to running a game than Running a Game. And that’s what this semester’s course is all about. That’s right… this here is the start of the follow-up to True Game Mastery: True Campaign Managery.
At least, today’s the lame-ass and uninformative introduction to my True Campaign Managery course.
Welcome to True Campaign Managery
Sit down and shut up, dumbasses. Class is in session.
I’m Professor The Angry GM. Most you of know me already thanks to my nine frigging months of telling you how to run a game real like like True Game Masters. Well, settle in for another three months of abuse because I’m about to tell you how to keep a campaign going like a True Campaign Manager.
True Campaign Managery is all about how True Game Masters manage tabletop roleplaying game Campaigns. And I kinda hope that’s obvious from the course name and the context. But what is a campaign? And what does it mean to manage one?
Let me tackle those headings — I mean questions — let me tackle those questions one at a time.
What is a Campaign?
I know lots of you know what a campaign is. Or you think you do. At the very least, I know lots of you have had lots of arguments about what campaigns really are and how to decide whether a thing counts as a campaign or not. Some of you have had them on this very site.
True Campaign Managers don’t give a single, tiny little crap about what a Campaign actually is. To a True Campaign Manager, any game they mean to run for more than about three sessions counts as a Campaign. About three sessions, by the way, not precisely three sessions. That’s it.
Basically, a True Campaign Manager defines any ongoing tabletop roleplaying game as a Campaign. And they manage it as such. Such a game might comprise a single, long-ass published adventure that takes six months to play. Or one of those multi-part adventure paths with a bunch of softback modules that represent chapters in a longer story. Or the game might be a bunch of disconnected pay-what-you-will adventure modules snatched from DriveThruRPG.com or from a dozen different content creators’ Patreons or Discords or whatever. The game might take one of those games with no plan or structure where everyone just keeps showing up every week and the Game Master just keeps making up more stuff to happen. Or it might have been an accident. Maybe the Game Master ran a bunch of newbies through a Starter Set or teaching adventure and they begged the Game Master to keep that shit going with the same characters and now the Game Master’s just stitching whatever they can into an ongoing game.
It doesn’t matter.
A Campaign’s just an ongoing game. One wherein mostly the same people — or maybe different people — show up semi-regularly — or whatever — and play something they all agree is part of the same, ongoing game. Or rather, play something the True Campaign Manager tells them is all the same game.
Because what really makes an ongoing game a Campaign is the True Campaign Manager treating it like a Campaign.
What is Campaign Management?
Yes, I’m Old…
I get it, okay? The word Campaign is kinda obsolete. People still use it, but there’s not much reason to.
These days, everyone who sits to play a tabletop roleplaying game knows they’re in it for the long haul. Unless they’re gaming at a Con, of course, or the Game Master specifies the game’s a one-shot adventure. That wasn’t always so. When I was an Angry kid, I ran lots of short-term and one-shot games. I’d say, “Hey, I just made this dungeon! Come on over goes; you can make some third-level characters and give it a shot.” And that’d be it. And because lots of games ran like that, we needed a word for a game that required more of a commitment. For a game that didn’t end when the adventurers got back to town.
I know shit has changed and I even know why it’s changed. But I still like the word Campaign. And I think it’s a valuable word. It’s good for discussing game structure, which is something that modern Game Masters just don’t get thanks to this being the age of the bingeworthy show and the cinematic universe franchise. And it’s good for reminding people there’s more to keeping a game going than just running a game.
If a Campaign is just any game that stretches beyond a month of sessions, then what does it mean to manage one? Well, I could just take the bullshit copout and say, “Campaign Management all the shit that’s not running the game. Or making game content.” But considering the point of a course introduction is to lay out what plan I teach — and what I don’t — I can’t get away with that. The problem is, that answer really is the best. Managing a Campaign is doing whatever needs doing to keep the game going.
Really, it’s about your mindset. And the best way to explain it is to highlight the difference between a True Campaign Manager and a Mere Campaign Runner.
The Mere Campaign Runner shows up every week — or every other week or whatever — ready to run yet another game session. After they’re done, they take whatever notes they need to take to keep track of shit. And before the next session, they find — or create — the content they plan to run. They read the next chapter in the book, they buy or download the next module, they build the next adventure, or they just make a conscious choice to wing it. On the day of the game, they pack up all the resources they need — maps and miniatures and whatnot — and schlep them to the game table. Then, they run yet another game session. Sometimes, they bounce e-mails off their players when it’s time to level up.
And that’s it.
A True Campaign Manager, however, knows there’s more to keeping the game going than running the game. They know that even if they run a great session today and another next week and another and another and so on, there are still a thousand things that can just fucking end that campaign. Burnout, boredom, frustration, fights between players, fights with players, friction with the rules, players cycling out, players cycling in, schedules collapsing, and a million other things that have nothing to do with Narrating and Adjudicating can kill a campaign before it’s done.
See, when you’re a True Campaign Manager, your Campaign doesn’t end until you say it does. Campaigns don’t die until you give them permission to die. And if it tries to die, you will shoot yourself, follow it into Campaign Hell, and drag it screaming back to the mortal world. When a Campaign does end, it ends because you told the story you meant to tell or else you feel it’s run its course.
Investment and Ownership
A long, long time ago, I introduced Aspiring True Game Masters to the concepts of Investment and Ownership. I explained True Game Masters make every decision they make so as to build the players’ long-term emotional Investment in the game. They ain’t after momentary fun or satisfaction or contentment, they want the players’ Investment. And to get it, True Game Masters take total Ownership of their games. They — and they alone — are responsible for everything that happens in their games.
True Campaign Managers take that shit to the next level. They look beyond the game itself. True Campaign Managers know if they want to keep everyone Invested in a game for three months or six or a year or five or indefinitely, it ain’t enough to run good game sessions. If they want everyone to keep showing up for however long, they’ll have to work at that shit beyond the game itself. And they’ll have to work harder than anyone else at the table. Hell, True Campaign Managers know they’re the only ones working to keep the game going.
But True Campaign Managers can’t deny reality either. They must accept that, despite all their best efforts, the Campaign might die for good before they’re ready to bury it. Conflicts might rip the game apart. Insoluble scheduling issues might stop sessions from happening. Players might not be able to get over a TPK even though everyone agreed on what happens when the whole party dies. Or some crazy surprise issue might blindside the True Campaign Manager and prove too much to handle.
That’s life. In life, you can do everything right and still fail. What matters, first, is that you can say, honestly, that you really did everything you could. And second — and more importantly — is how you deal with the failure after. Because you’re gonna fail eventually. That’s life.
The True Campaign Managery Triangle
True Campaign Managery is doing everything and anything you must to keep your Campaign from dying until you put it in the ground yourself. And I mean everything and anything.
Sort of…
See, I assume I’m talking to a bunch of adults here and so, I don’t have to tell y’all to balance the rewards you get from running the Campaign — whatever the hell those might be — against the effort it demands. And I don’t have to tell you that if running your Campaign stops being worth it, you need to shut that shit down. That, technically, is you deciding the time’s right for the Campaign to die. But True Campaign Managery is also about not getting to the point where you’re miserable running the game.
But I digress. My point is that, because True Campaign Managery is about doing everything in your power to keep your Campaign going — even when it’s got nothing to do with running the game — there’s a lot to cover. Too much. Everything is beyond the scope of the course. So, to keep things manageable, I’m breaking Campaign Managery into three broad tasks: Planning the Game, Managing the Rules, and Herding the Kittens.
Planning the Game
Extreme Ownership
True Campaign Managers know that it doesn’t matter how or why a problem happens. And it absolutely doesn’t matter one fucking iota whose fault anything is. The only thing that matters is that there’s a problem and someone’s got to deal with it. And that someone is the True Campaign Manager. In short, True Game Masters take responsibility for everything that happens at — or around — their table. And while taking responsibility isn’t the same as accepting blame, it usually feels the same. Which is something not everyone can handle. Often, True Game Masters end up taking the blame for — and apologizing for — shit that wasn’t, technically, their fault. And they do so with grace and dignity. Why? Because, sometimes the only way to get people past a conflict is for someone to take the blame and apologize.
What’s more important to you? Is it more important to keep your Campaign going or is it more important that you never take responsibility, admit fault, or take blame?
This is called Extreme Ownership: taking responsibility for everything that happens in your world, even the shit you can’t control. It’s difficult and it’s painful, but it’s powerful. And it’s really just down to getting your priorities in order. And being secure enough in your self-worth to take the blame just to get someone past an issue.
Planning the Game means just what it sounds like. But it also doesn’t mean that at all. I’m not talking here about plotting the campaign and structuring the sessions. This ain’t about running games or building content. Nope. Planning the Game is about setting your Campaign up for long-term success. It’s making deliberate choices before your Campaign starts to maximize the odds it won’t end until you end it.
Some planning is purely about working out the practicalities of the game itself. Like figuring out where and when to play the game and what rule system to use. But a lot of it’s about readying yourself to deal with problems you know — or should know — are going to come up someday.
Now, this ain’t the same as avoiding problems. Planning can help you avoid some problems, but it’s more about equipping yourself to deal with the problems that are most likely to come up so that, when they do come up, they’re only speed bumps and not disasters. See, certain things come up often in tabletop roleplaying games and always cause disruption. Like death. If you’re running a game in which characters can die, you should know what to do when one or several or all the characters die. That won’t stop death from being a problem, it just means you’re equipped to handle it.
And if you’re running a game for actual, human beings, you’re eventually going to have a scheduling or attendance problem. So you’d better arm yourself against it.
Managing the Rules
Every game system’s got problems. Sometimes they’re big problems, often they’re small. If a system’s got too many problems, you don’t play it. But if it’s got a manageable number of annoying niggles, you ignore them and enjoy the game.
In theory.
The thing is, tiny little niggles can wear you down after a few months or years. And lots of systems don’t even show their niggles until you’ve played them for a while. Even a single, tiny, imperceptible grain of sand can grind an engine to shit if you run it long enough. And every system has sand in the gears.
Thus, a big part of Campaign Managery is about not letting your game system’s problems wreck your game. It’s about treating your rules as an evolving, dynamic system, and making tweaks and changes and adjustments to keep the game running smoothly. And part of that’s keeping the True Game Master from throwing more sand in the gears.
See, True Game Masters often make calls in the heat of the game-running moment to keep the game running in the moment. But every call is another potential bit of grit in the Campaign’s pistons. So in addition to smoothing over the game system’s in-built burrs, the True Campaign Manager’s got to keep an eye on what the True Game Master’s doing and tweak, adjust, or override that too.
And, yes, I realize how bonkers that sounds given they’re both the same person. Compartmentalizing is vital.
Herding the Kittens
Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others
You can Plan your Game with your players’ input or without it. In fact, part of Planning your Game is deciding how much input your players get. Where on the spectrum between democracy and dictatorship does your table fall? I’ll talk about that decision later — but prepared to be told there’s nothing wrong with a dictatorship — but understand now that no amount of input and democracy changes anything I said about Ownership.
It doesn’t matter when you write the rules of your table and impose them with an iron fist or if you and your players sit down as a committee and draft a gaming constitution. In the end, you’re still the executive branch. Judge, jury, and executioner. You are the one who must enforce those rules — and veto or amend or repeal them — if that’s what it takes to keep the game going.
Even if you let the players help you every step of the way, it’s still your Campaign and they are there at your invitation.
Gamers are people. And so, they’re prone to all the same social bullshit as everyone else. But, because it’s your game table, that social bullshit can break your game.
Every gaming group — even the basement-dwelling group of four bestest buddies — is, in essence, a social club. And someone’s got to take responsibility for the club. Otherwise, any disagreement between any two buddies has the potential to shake the club apart.
Guess who that someone is.
As a True Game Manager, you’re President of the Only Chapter of Own Personal Gaming Club, LLC. And that means — among other things — that every social buck stops with you. It’s your job to mediate every dispute. Even the ones that involve you. And ultimately, whoever stays and whoever goes, it’s on your say-so. Even if the group votes on every issue, you’re still the one signing the order.
This fucking sucks.
Most of us Game Masters run games for our friends. And even if we run games for strangers, we usually end up befriending those strangers if we run for them long enough. But Managing a Campaign means adopting a position of authority over the players. No sane person wants authority over their friends. Mainly because every time you’re forced to exert that authority, it might cost you a friendship.
I can’t sugarcoat this: as a True Campaign Manager, your friendships with your players are at risk. And if you run games long enough, eventually you’ll have either lost a friend to save a game or you’ll have killed a game to save a friendship or you’ll have lost a game and a friendship despite your best efforts to save one or the other.
And long before you hit that point, you’ll have faced at least one nasty decision about punishing someone you consider a friend for a breach of your attendance policy or excluding a friend from your group because the other players don’t like them.
It’s this sucky-ass facet of Campaign Managery that’s why it’s so vitally important for you to master basic group management and conflict resolution skills. And why you absolutely must be willing and able to do whatever it takes — including taking the blame for and apologizing for shit you didn’t do — to maintain the peace.
Fortunately, you’ve got me here to teach you. Unfortunately, you can do everything right and still fail. Even if you learn every lesson and handle every issue with grace, humility, and aplomb — whatever the hell aplomb means — there’s still even odds you’ll end up with a damaged friendship thanks to this gaming shit eventually.
And on that happy note…
The Course Outline: Such As It Is
The Myth of Setting Expectations
Whenever the topic of social conflict arises in online gaming circles, there’s always a bunch of dumbasses tripping over each other to insist that if the Game Master had just set expectations properly at the start of the game, this never would have happened. Said dumbasses will insist that they always properly set expectations with a well-written document or a well-run Session Zero and thus they never have problems like this.
Guess what? Those dumbasses are dumbasses. It is simply not possible to set expectations to forestall any conflict that might ever arise. To do so, you’d have to perfectly predict every possible future event at your table, even the ones beyond your control, devise a perfect solution to every such possible future problem to the satisfaction of every possible participant, and perfectly communicate every such problem and solution. No human has the power to do those things.
You can’t prevent conflicts from arising at your game table. And there’s no tips, tricks, or tools that’ll breeze you through them when they arise. Vetoes, X-cards, surveys, and content warnings? They don’t avoid or fix conflict, they cover them up and declare them off limits to resolution.
The best thing you can do as a Game Master is to master basic social conflict resolution strategies so you can deal with the inevitable conflict or offense that you or someone else eventually causes at your table in a way that’s best for the game and respects all parties, yourself included.
Especially if you run games for strangers.
As with my True Game Mastery introduction, I’m going to end this with my course outline. Basically, it’s just a list of the lessons I plan to teach in roughly the order I plan to teach them.
But publishing True Game Mastery’s taught me a few things. One thing I’ve learned is to leave myself some wiggle room. So, despite having outlined True Campaign Managery pretty well and knowing what topics I mean to cover where and when, I reserve the right to adjust things as I see fit. I ain’t apologizing if I need to stretch a lesson into two, add a lesson, or skip a lesson that ain’t as relevant as I thought.
Right now, this outline’s really just my best guess.
- Planning Your Campaign
- The Rules of the Clubhouse
- Managing Your Ruleset
- Death, Advancement, and Other Problems
- How to Session Zero… Or Not
- How to Session CG… Or Not
- Fixing Broken Rules
- Managing Your Kittens
- Conflict Resolution for Game Masters
And that’s it. Expect the first lesson in a couple of weeks. And, as a final note, I don’t need any of you dumbasses telling me what aplomb means. Even if I didn’t know — I do — I have the Internet and I know how to look shit up.
Now, get lost.
Forget the meaning of aplomb, is managery pronounced as “manager-y” or like menagerie?
manage-REE
When you master a game, it is mastery.
When you manage a campaign, it is managery.
That’s how language works.
Assigning blame for a conflict takes up a lot of time, gets a group no closer to a resolution, and will often leave one or more people feeling wronged. It’s counterproductive, and if fairly irrelevant when you think about it.
On the other hand, if you as come out and say something like “sorry guys, I took a risk doing x and it backfired. This one’s on me” a number of things will often happen.
* One or more people may identify something they did to contribute to the conflict and apologise, forget defusing the situation
* Blame being assigned without any butthurt scapegoats, the group can move on to resolving the issue
Taking responsibility like that can help keep the group together. The only cost is that you have to risk a dent in your ego, but grownups should be able to deal with that easily.
Replace “responsibility” with “blame” then.
Group dynamics are complex and often there won’t be a single person or action that caused a conflict. Fact is you’re the one running the table and there will have been a point where you had the chance to steer things in a different direction.
If a player is causing issues then you’re the one who invited them and you’re the one who can resolve it, either by talking to the player or removing them from the game.
If the plot you put in front of the players doesn’t work for whatever reason, you’re the only one who can fix that situation.
You can instead point at a player and say “you angered the king and now there’s no way forward” but that leads nowhere except arguing. You need to move beyond the blaming stage to reach a solution and the best way to do that is by taking it on yourself.
If you have a player that keeps causing issues you say “Sorry I let this continue for so long, I’ll resolve the situation by removing the player”. Boom, done.
Taking the blame doesn’t mean letting a shitty situation continue, it means acknowledging you had the means and responsibility to make things run smoothly and didn’t manage in that instance.
There are rare occasions where things go wrong beyond your control. They’re the exception though, not the rule. The sooner you recognise that the better.
You’re missing the point, this isn’t about fault-finding. Of course the gm is not at fault is a player turns out to be a knob, but by saying “that’s on me” you can move past the finger pointing and start dealing with the problem.
It’s advice, take it or don’t.
There is a limit on the number of nested comments my site allows to avoid these “back and forth” sort of debates that aren’t going anywhere. And the above thread hit it.
This:
“It is indeed more important to be right than to “get past a conflict”.”
Is why you have to ask this:
“How is there grace and dignity in taking the blame where no blame is?”
The thing is, most people just aren’t mature enough to get past the idea that when someone feels bad, someone has done a wrong, and someone must apologize. In many situations, it is simply impossible to get people to move past an issue without saying, “you know what, you were right and I was wrong; I’m sorry.”
Once you learn that, in the end, apologizing for something that isn’t your fault because another human being NEEDS to hear an apology to stop feeling angry or upset or whatever doesn’t hurt you in the least, you can be the bigger the person and resolve a lot of conflicts.
Your question has been answered. You are welcome to disagree with the answer and you do not have to like the answer, but the answer is the answer.
It is not a bad rule to follow. You are wrong.
I’ve said all I intend to say. I feel my point stands on it’s own. I’m sorry you find it unconvincing. That is your right.
But not everyone is a bad actor. If the specific situation has people who will abuse attempts to defuse, you handle that problem, possibly by first warning that you won’t tolerate that behavior, and including tossing them out of your game. You have that authority, and at a table without bad actors, if both sides feel the other is to blame for something, accepting that blame isn’t really lying, and provides a foundation for moving forward, instead of playing the blame game.
I am of the opinion that this thread has run it’s course. Thank you.
I thought this course would include content-building advice. Where do I go for TTRPG content-building advice with attitude? E.g. session preparation, thread weaving, building adventures out of encounters, managing pacing and story beats, etc.
My years of content that have come before this. Or you wait until the next course, True Scenario Designery.
Fair enough, but just like the true game mastery series still provides a lot of value even if a lot of the ideas had already been discussed on the site or in your book, there would definitely be a lot of value in a True Scenario Designery series.
I thought this series would include that, but I’ll have to wait for the next 🙂 our styles are very different when it comes to campaign managery, but all your advice on running the game and building content resonates with me strongly.
1800 words to get to something useful. I think your “Angry” gimmick is getting in the way of teaching anyone anything, which is a shame, because what you do teach is brilliant. But it’s %*£#ing ruined because of your angry shtick. It’s gotten out of hand. 1800 words wasted!
this is just a course introduction…
“And if you run games long enough, eventually you’ll have either lost a friend to save a game or you’ll have killed a game to save a friendship or you’ll have lost a game and a friendship despite your best efforts to save one or the other.”
I killed a game to save a friendship, but neither of us realized it played out that way until time had passed. These things can be subtle!
I really liked how you busted the myth of setting expectations (in a TTRPG) in such a concise way. If I were the type of person to use this column for life advice by analogy and through the lens of my own personal experience, that is the kind of thing I might think about for some time.
Except that a good session zero, x-cards and all the other tools listed are not tools to prevent conflicts, they are tools to make sure everyone feels included and listened to. That’s not the same thing, although an inclusive environment with aligned expectations will probably reduce the amount of conflicts the GM has to deal with.
Just because they are not a complete silver bullet it doesn’t mean they don’t have their place.
Session Zeroes are fine. They involve communication. But X-Cards, Forbidden Lists, Content Warnings, replace communication and prevent people from developing conflict resolution skills or discussing compromises like adults. They tell people it is okay to be uncompromising. The problem is often, people mistake “listening” and “including” for “obeying”. I can include someone and listen to them without having to accede to their demands. I recommend that Game Masters dump that shit in the trash. And any player who can’t communicate without a card with an X written on it and accept sometimes a group will choose the group’s fun over the individual’s personal needs can be dumped in the same place.
X-cards, by definition, say ‘there are some things that we won’t listen to at this table’. Same with most Session Zero frameworks I’ve read. To my mind, when used properly they can make sure everyone feels included and listened to *to some extent and when following the rules*, help align expectations to some extent and formalise the social contract to some extent.
If they’re not facilitated and later supported by strong social and conflict management skills, however, they’re irrelevant. If I hold up an X card, it’s social skills and conflict management techniques that will ensure that it gets honoured. If the GM doesn’t have those social skills and conflict management techniques and I realise that, I may not even feel safe raising that card.
Tools don’t get work done, the skills and intention of the person holding the tool gets work done.
The problem is not the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem.
Aplomb is what you need to make aproon. 🙂
Thanks for continuing to speak with a voice of uncompromising adulthood about our often-childish hobby.
Looking forward to this series.
I’ve tried to explain this sort of stuff a few times to friends who approach me about wanting to run their own campaigns, or about why their games die in a few months every time they try to run one, but often find it hard to really articulate what I am doing to keep multi-year campaigns alive and running through all the stuff that comes up in groups of 4-8 people during that amount of time, in a way that is actually helpful to them.