Enough already about social skills you should have learned when you were five frigging years old and enough utterly useless moral philosophy. You’re here because you want to run a tabletop roleplaying game campaign and I’m here to show you how to maximize the odds that your campaign won’t die until you decide to axe it.

As with the True Game Mastery course, I assume y’all already know the basics. I assume you’ve run — or tried to run — a tabletop roleplaying game campaign before. Thus, I assume y’all know how to string three or more games into a going concern. And I assume some of you have even managed to drag a campaign kicking and screaming across something like a finish line.

As such, I won’t be wasting time teaching you obvious crap like, “After your players finish an adventure, run another.” Which, by the way, is how you run a campaign. And if you want to run a homebrew campaign, replace the word run with the word build.

And now y’all know how to run a campaign.

The goal here’s to Set Your Campaign Up for Success. That’s our little course catchphrase. Just as the last course was all about Build Investment; Take Ownership. Got it?

Of course, you can’t guarantee success. You can’t guarantee any damned thing. Especially when you’ve got five dumbass players involved. But you can nudge the odds in your favor. And that’s what everything I teach you in this course is all about.

Are we now clear on how we’ll spend the next six months? Good. Let’s start by talking about the Second Choice you’ll make when you start your campaign. Because the Second Choice is the big one. It’s the one that 99 Mere Campaign Supervisors out of 10 will tell you is not only wrong but morally wrong. But before we talk about that choice, let’s talk about…

Starting a Campaign in Ten Thousand Easy Steps

So you’ve chosen to run a TTRPG campaign. Good luck and Godspeed because that’s a stupid choice to make. It’s also, by the way, the First Choice you make when you start a campaign. And that ain’t just pedantical, semantical nonsense. As I noted in the long-ass advert for social selfishness that preceded this lesson, that First Choice ain’t a minor thing. Remember, making that First Choice actually translates to something like, “I hereby choose to make myself the president and dictator for life of a social gaming club and I hereby take full and total responsibility for the ongoing social fun of myself and all of the members dumb enough to entrust their precious leisure time to my care.”

But that First Choice doesn’t prepare you to actually run a campaign. Before you can run the damned thing, you have to first start your campaign. For obvious reasons. But before you can start your campaign, you have to decide how to start your campaign. Because Setting Your Campaign Up for Success is all about starting right.

So, what sorts of choices do you have to make? Let’s take a look.

What Are You Even Running?

First, you’ve got to figure out what game you actually plan to run. And I’m going to lump all this shit together under the term Campaign Vision. Because, there’s more to this question than, “What rule system are you using?” It’s really more about describing the campaign you plan to run.

Obviously, choosing a game system or a game engine is a big choice. And that choice will make a bunch of other choices for you. When you pick a system, you’re usually also picking a genre and often picking a setting. At least, in the broad strokes you are. And often, without realizing it, when you pick a system, you’re also making some choices about the game’s theme and tone and other narrative horseshit.

Not that you should sweat the narrative horseshit. Few True Campaign Managers lose sleep over things like theme and tone. But we’ll talk about that in a later lesson.

Your Campaign Vision also includes a general sense of your campaign’s structure. Do you plan to run an Adventure of the Week setup or do the Overarching Plot thing? Or do you plan to totally abdicate responsibility for running your campaign by dropping your players in a Wide-Open Sandbox and sending them digging for the cat turds you buried out there?

Your Vision also describes where your actual game content is coming from. Are you running a published campaign-length adventure like Rime of Ravenloft or an adventure path like Seven Ghosts of the Sky Kingmaker? Do you plan to buy some random modules from some online content creator and stitch them together? Are you homebrewing your own shit? And are you homebrewing a plotted campaign or an adventure path or just shitting out a new, random adventure every time you need one?

See why I call this your Campaign Vision? You’re imagining what you’ll be doing as you run your campaign over the next umpteen dozen weeks you can keep it going. You’re describing the game you want to run. That description can be as short as the title of a published adventure path or several pages of prose description long.

Where There’s Game, There’s Rules

You might think you’re set once you’ve got a Campaign Vision. And you are. Kind of. But True Campaign Managers rarely stop there. They know, for example, that just choosing a game system — and a setting and a module or whatever — doesn’t, by itself, set all the rules of the game.

Tabletop roleplaying games are complex things. They have way more rules than they need. And lots of those rules are optional. And your average roleplaying game includes roughly sixteen million sidebars containing optional rules, alternative systems, and variant options. And because most roleplaying game designers like food and shelter, they rarely stop at selling just one rulebook. Thus there’s usually somewhere between ten and ten thousand supplemental splatbooks you can cram — wholly or partly — into your campaign.

Do you really have to worry about all that shit? No. Definitely not. Most True Campaign Managers start with the default rules as they’re written and add a few choice options and variants and house rules and maybe a splatbook or two. The difference then, between True Campaign Managers and Mere Campaign Supervisors is that Mere Campaign Supervisors don’t think about this stuff deliberately or in advance. They just don’t know or care to review the variant options and so stick to, “Whatever the book says except not the optional stuff.” And they either assume every published book they own is on the table by default or just say, “Core only because I can’t be assed.”

Choices about the Rules of the Game — that’s the term I’m lumping all this crap under — should be deliberate, conscious choices. But even if the deliberate, conscious choice is, “Core only because that’s all I need,” True Campaign Managers recognize there are a couple Rules of the Game that always need some deliberation and tweaking. That the default rules in most game systems — even if the tiny, indie ones — are incomplete or inadequate or just don’t fit every game.

I’m speaking here specifically about Character Death and Character Advancement. Most tabletop roleplaying game systems have rules for when characters die and most tell you how to dole out experience or advancements or skill points or whatever. But there’s shit that the rules never tell you and your handling of these things can destabilize your game in the long run. Or rip it apart.

And this is definitely something I’ll be covering later.

There’s also a big subset of every game’s rules that need special attention to the point where I need to give them a heading of their own.

Mommy, Where Do Baby Characters Come From?

Most tabletop roleplaying game systems devote a few pages in their rules to the process whereby players create their in-game personas. Or, sometimes, fursonas. But True Campaign Managers don’t truck with that furry shit. And, by a few, I mean vast, uncountable wodges of dead tree and ink. Which is why it’s frigging hilarious that the out-spelled process in every roleplaying game is so wholly and laughably incomplete.

It’s true that if you follow the steps in your rulebook due jerry, you’ll get a playable character. But how many rulebooks actually address the extent to which a GM should be involved in character generation. Or discuss whether players should generate their characters at home or together at the table. Or how much the players should know before they start making characters. And that’s notwithstanding all the optional methods and variant options and optional builds and additional races and classes and feats and backgrounds and careers and kits and shit spread across ten thousand splatbooks.

True Campaign Managers recognize that how they handle Character Creation — that’s the term that encompasses all these Choices — how they handle Character Creation has a tremendous impact on the long-term success of their campaigns.

Will I be giving a lecture on this shit? You bet your sweet ass I will. But don’t bother. I’m not taking that bet and your ass ain’t actually that sweet. Sorry.

Signing the Club Charter

So, you’ve got a Campaign Vision to describe the game you plan to run. Based on that Vision you make Choices about the Rules of the Game — including problematic rules like Character Death and Character Advancement — and about how to approach Character Creation. And thus, a campaign is born.

Right?

Like hell, it is.

There’s one other broad set of Choices that Mere Campaign Supervisors often overlook or gloss over or otherwise just don’t want to bother with. True Campaign Managers, though, recognize the important role that the Clubhouse Rules play in the long-term stability of any campaign.

Clubhouse Rules don’t have much to do with planning and running the game. Instead, they’re how you — the True Campaign Manager — manage your Social Gaming Club. The most obvious Clubhouse Rule — the one everyone knows and makes a punchline out of — is scheduling. When and where will you host your game sessions and for how long?

But there’s more to scheduling than just agreeing on a date and time. What if you need to reschedule? What’s the process by which a game can be rescheduled? Or canceled? Most Mere Campaign Supervisors get as far as saying, “If something goes wrong, we’ll message on Discord.” They then assume the group can just work through any hiccups as and when they hiccup. But True Campaign Managers never, ever utter the phrase, “I’m sure we can just work things out when they come up.” At least not when it comes to Clubhouse Rules.

Scheduling is also closely related to another big Clubhouse Rule that Mere Campaign Supervisors don’t like to think about, either because it’s a pain in the ass or it feels icky, and that is the issue of attendance and tardiness. What do you do when someone must miss a game? What do you do if someone’s late? What do you do if they just don’t show up? What do you if people frequently miss games? How much of this crap do you tolerate before you pull someone aside and say, “We got a problem?”

You know we’re coming back to all this shit in future lessons. Because this shit breaks campaigns. But we’ve got a lot of future lessons in which to worry about all of that. There’s only one Choice I’m talking about today.

The Second Choice

Choice One is the choice to run a campaign in the first place. Choices Three through Ten Thousand are the ones about Campaign Visions and Rules and Character Generation that I’ve been going on about. Those of you who can do basic math — or at least count — might have noticed I skipped a number. And that puts you well ahead of many Mere Campaign Supervisors. Because most don’t know there’s a Second Choice that needs making. And the rest think there’s no choice because of some dumbass moral stance.

Game First or Group First

The Second Choice is a simple one. It’s choosing who is responsible for the Campaign Vision. Is it something you, as the True Game Master and True Campaign Manager, come up with on your own? Or is it something the group works out together?

Put your damned hand down. Shut up. I know you think there’s a right answer and that’s why I wasted an entire week teaching you about practical selfishness. You’re wrong. Shut up.

See? Pre-solving problems never works.

The Second Choice is like this: imagine you’re hosting a board game night. There are two ways to do it. First, you can call some friends and say, “I just got The 7th Citadel and we’ve got to play it. Come on over.” Second, you can call some friends and say, “Come over for board game night on Friday,” and then, on Friday, lead your friends to your giant-ass closet-o-games and decide by committee which game to play.

I call this Game First or Group First because, sometimes, it really does come down to either the Game Master coming up with a game and inviting players to play it or else the Game Master sitting down with the players and coming up with a game to play. But it doesn’t always happen exactly like that. These are just useful terms.

For example, I mostly go Game First these days. Even when I’m starting a new game to replace a finished game for an established group. My AD&D 2E Chain of Stars campaign started with the same group of players I’d been running games for for years. But when it came time to start a new campaign, I said, “Here’s what I want to run; you in?”

That’s Game First even though the players were already at the table before I came up with the game.

The Right Thing to Do

It’s this Choice right here that’s why I wasted an entire lesson on selfishness and taught you that this gaming shit isn’t about morality but rather about how you — and your players — freely choose to spend your fun time. These days, people will blow a lot of smoke up your skirt about how you absolutely must involve your players in the Campaign Vision unless you’re specifically recruiting strangers. And even then, you’re still evil if you don’t let them build half the campaign world. The smoke-blowing morons will insist that it is both the right thing to do and that it’s how you get buy-in .

You know better. You know now there’s nothing immoral or self-sabotaging or disinvesting about saying, “Here’s what I want to run; you in?” And that’s true regardless of your preexisting relationship — whatever it is — with your players. Even if you’ve got no idea what you want to run before you recruit your players, you can say, “I want to start a campaign. I’ll figure out what it is and let you know and then you can decide whether you’re in.”

And I have to waste time saying that so I can then say that most True Campaign Managers recognize that Game First Campaigns tend to succeed more often than Group First Campaigns. I shit you not.

This Ain’t One Way or the Other

Although I’m presenting Game First and Group First as two distinct options, it’s important to recognize that they’re not binary or exclusive or absolute. They’re two sides of a very wide scale. And very few Campaign Managers work at the far ends of the scale.

Game First Doesn’t Mean Group Never

Taking a Game First approach doesn’t mean that you ignore your players, do whatever you want, and demand they go along with it. Many True Campaign Managers who aren’t starting with a firm Vision in mind take some time to talk to their players. To get a sense of what their players want. When they then develop the Campaign Vision — on their own — they develop one they think will work best for the group. Others will start with an incomplete Vision and talk with the players to help them fill in the blanks. And Game First Campaign Managers will always take it seriously when a player says, “I like that idea, but I dislike this one, particular thing. Can we talk about it?”

In the end, the only thing that makes the Game First approach Game First is that the Game Master says to the players, “Okay, this is it. The game I’m gonna run. Are you in?” There are a lot of ways for the Game Master to get there,

Group First Doesn’t Mean Group Owned

On the other hand, note that the Group First approach doesn’t change your relationship to your game or your campaign. Even if you and your snowflakes sit around a whiteboard and vomit forth a Campaign Vision together, it’s still on you to take Ownership of the game and declare yourself President of the Social Gaming Club. “Here’s what we built, everyone,” you must say, “And now I take full and complete responsibility for it.”

Round and Round and To and Fro and Back and Forth We Go

Although I’m talking like developing a Campaign Vision is a thing that happens in one go at the beginning of the campaign startup process, it rarely works out so cleanly. Unless you actually do have a full-and-complete Campaign Vision that you’re posting on a game store bulletin board or an LFG message board, there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing that goes on. For instance, before you get too hot and bothered over your awesome Campaign Vision, you should probably check that your players have five regular hours every week to commit to unpeeling your ten-layer deep onion of a mystery story. And if you’ve recruited a bunch of experienced gamer randos from your local shop, you definitely want to clear it with them before you spring a non-fantasy, non-D&D-alike on them. Because nothing sucks more than saying, “Here’s what I plan to run; you in?” only to get back a chorus of nopes.

When Reality Hits the Fan

I will support the Game First approach to my last breath. But I’m a True Campaign Manager. And that means I’m a practical realist. True Campaign Managers don’t get bogged down wishing shit was different or moralizing over how things should be. They live in the real world. Maybe players should give your bizarre-ass Campaign Vision a chance. Maybe they should shift out of their WotC-approved comfort zones. And maybe that driver should stop when you walk blithely out into the crosswalk at the controlled intersection.

But moral victories don’t count for much when you’re dead. Or when you don’t have a game to run.

As a Game Firster, you must be open to negotiation and consensus-building compromise. And the reality of your situation will determine the extent to which you have to compromise if you want a game. If you’re a sexy gaming genius with hundreds of thousands of Internet fans flinging their panties on your table, you can afford to say, “Here’s my game; take it or don’t.” If you’re running for a group of strangers who’ve all played together before and who will all quit together, you’re probably running what they want you to run. But after you’ve built their trust, a year down the road, they’ll be much more open to you running what you want. If you live in a one-horse town with ten gamers and two other willing Game Masters, you might have to compromise. Or take to the Internet and run online. Which is worse.

And, of course, there’s gonna be a lesson on consensus-building compromise.

But this is why you need to be honest with yourself about what you want. You can’t compromise or negotiate if you don’t have a starting position and you don’t know what you can bend on and what you can’t. And don’t lie to yourself. You can’t bend on everything and be happy. No one can.

In the end, unless you really are pulling a pure Group First campaign — by sitting down with your friends and a whiteboard — or a pure Game First campaign — by typing up an advertisement — developing your Vision is going to involve a lot of back-and-forth. And what you go back and forth about will vary widely from situation to situation. It might be that you have to work out the schedule before you build the Vision. Your Vision might get feedback that’s serious enough to warrant coming back with a modified proposal a week later.

And apart from teaching you how to negotiate, you’re going to have to play this shit by ear.

I Can’t Tell You What to Write

So, that’s the lesson. Next time…

Wait… what? You’re wondering where the hell the lesson was? Where’s the practical advice? The how-to? The homework?

Oh man, have I got some bad news…

This Campaign Management shit? It doesn’t work like that. I can tell you, honestly, that a Game First approach is the best way to Set Your Campaign Up for Success. I can tell you to build a Vision, hand it to your players to sign off on, and then run that game. That is the best way. Except it might not work for you. You might not have a strong Vision. Hell, some of the best games I’ve run started with a pretty crappy Vision. My current AD&D 2E was, “Let’s just make some characters and then I’ll build the Vision.” My Vision was, “I will build an awesome, Plotted Campaign for whatever four random characters my players and the dice crap out.” And your players might reject everything about your Campaign Vision and it might be down to either bending or not running a game.

Teaching Campaign Management is like teaching creative writing. I can show you the elements that go into a campaign and tell you how to think about what choices you have to make and highlight the mistakes that almost always lead to a shit game and instruct you in the proper use of semi-colons, but I can’t tell you how to create or what to write. I can’t tell you how to come up with a brilliant Vision or guarantee your players will buy it.

There is no best way to do this. There’s no right way. There are lots of wrong ways. But, mostly, there’s just ways. And the success of any given way depends far more on how you pull it off — and who you try to sell it to — than it does on the way itself.

That’s just the way it be.

Sorry.