I could really get used to this whole ignoring all y’all and doing whatever I want thing.

I decided today to follow up on that tease I dropped at the end of the other day’s Feature about Personal Character Quests. I’m not waiting for a bunch of you to dance for it, I haven’t read the comments to see who wants it and who doesn’t, and I sure as hell haven’t checked in to see what arguments I’ve touched off in my Supporter Discord Community. I’m sure there are a few. I’m sure someone is fighting right frigging now over the technical definition of Personal Character Quest and whether some, specific take on them might make them okay. Like, if they arise during gameplay or if the Game Master tangles them all up in some Shared Campaign Goal, maybe they don’t count and they aren’t bad.

Those arguments ain’t my problem. I can lead y’all to the answers, but I can’t make you think.

Anyway, it’s apparently Character Arcs and Arc-Like Things that Aren’t Character Arcs week at Angry Games headquarters thanks to the giant-ass nightmare can of worms dumbasses @Sonderval and @Athetos ripped open last week. Seriously, if they’d opened a literal can of worms, it would have been full of Graboids and Saturn Sandworms and Shai Huluds.

The point is, I’ve got some momentum and I want to keep it going, so I’m sharing the secret recipe I claimed to have for the one Personal Character Quest Campaign that isn’t complete and total crap. It’s still mostly crap, but not complete and total crap.

Tomorrow, I’ll do the Character Arc thing. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll decide to do something else. Because, seriously, your feedback is the worst and I’m not listening.

But I Want to Run a Personal Character Quest Campaign

The other day, I published a Feature about Personal Character Quests. Maybe you read it? If not, go read it now. Because today’s a follow-up.

In that Feature, I explained what Personal Character Quests are and why they’re a terrible idea and then I explained all the different ways to incorporate them into a campaign if you absolutely felt the need to run a completely shit game for some stupid reason. And then, at the end, I said there was one super secret way to do a Personal Character Quest Campaign that might not turn into hot garbage. Just one. Der einzige. And I had it in my vault.

And note that I didn’t promise a good campaign, just that it might not be a total disaster. Might not be.

If you ignored all my warnings or if you’re an asshat who thinks I’m wrong about Personal Character Quests or you think there is some technicality or alternative I didn’t consider or if you think your personal preferences somehow totally invalidate the fundamental concepts of cooperative game design, this here Feature’s my little gift to you.

I’m going to tell you the one — and only — way to launch a campaign about a group of characters who help each other make their personal dreams come true.

I give you The Personal Character Quest Plus One Campaign template. Which, for ease of typitude, I’m going to call hereafter, PCQ+1.

Offer Applies to New Customers Only

Note that this PCQ+1 thing is absolutely not something you can pivot into. This ain’t a solution for Game Masters who let some of their players bring Personal Character Quests to the table — or allowed them to emerge organically through play or some other horseshit they thought wouldn’t count — and are now struggling to keep their increasingly self-centered, increasingly disinvested players showing up for their increasingly disjointed campaigns.

If you’re already neck deep in such a game, all you can do is stop treading water and let oblivion embrace your game. Sorry.

The Personal Character Quest Plus One Campaign only works if you do it from the start. It only works with the deliberate plan to run a campaign about a bunch of protagonists who each have their own quest to chase and story to tell.

The PCQ+1 approach also only works if you’re dedicated enough to make it work. You’ve got to involve yourself in character creation. You’ve got to work with each player on their character and their quest before the game starts. And you’ve got to spend even more time before and after character creation plotting this shit out — broadly speaking — to ensure everything gels.

The PCQ+1 campaign also assumes you’ve got some balls. You’ve got to be a man. Metaphorically anyway. You have to be able to tell your players things like, “No,” and “That won’t work,” and “These are the constraints you have to work within,” and “And with that, your Personal Character Quest is mine. I know what you want to accomplish; I’ll make it work.”

If you’re lazy or spineless, you need not apply. Letting the players set their own goals doesn’t mean less work, it means more. And such a campaign is really delicate. Even if you do everything right, it might just crash and burn. Or, worse, fizzle out due to disinterested disinvestment.

You’ve been warned.

Why Personal Character Quest Campaigns Are So Hard

So, in the previous Feature, I gave this speech about why Personal Character Quests just don’t work in tabletop roleplaying games despite seeming like a perfect fit for the genre. And I know some of you have already dismissed everything I said while others are looking for the technical loopholes so you can have your Personal Character Quests without the inherent problems. Like, maybe if you weave the Personal Character Quests together into a single Shared Campaign Goal or let the Personal Character Quests grow organically through play, it’ll all be okay. I’m also sure some of you have questions about, for example, how to tell the difference between a temporary goal or side quest and a Personal Character Quest. I haven’t read any of the discussions, e-mails, or comments, mind you. I just know how you think.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the time — or the energy or the patience or the interest — to clarify every issue to the satisfaction of every pedantic nitpicker out there trying desperately to prove that Personal Character Quests can’t be a bad idea because they like them oh so very much. Just remember what I said: if it walks like a Personal Character Quest and quacks like a Personal Character Quest, it’s a Personal Character Quest. And that makes it a foul idea.

Roleplaying Games Need Shared Goals

It’s like this…

If you want to do a Personal Character Quest Campaign, you have to accept and admit it’s a bad idea. And you’ve got to know why it’s a bad idea. Because the only chance you’ve got of seeing it through to the end lies in burning resources to mitigate the badness enough to maybe get a good game out of it. So, I’m going to start by re-examining just why this shit’s such a bad idea to begin with. Why does it destabilize games?

Games need Goals. The players need something to work toward to lend their actions and choices meaning and context. And a game’s only engaging insofar as the players care about achieving the Goal. You can play a game for a while just for its own sake, but without a meaningful Goal you care about, you will get bored eventually. There are a rare few players who can enjoy gameplay for its own, intrinsic sake without any care for the Goal and there are a rare few players who can cobble a personal Goal out of any system of play, but they’re the exception. You’d be a fool of a Game Master to count on getting five of them together at one table.

And, to be clear, lots of players will claim to be one of the rare few exceptions. Most of them will be wrong. People suck at knowing why shit’s fun for them.

Tabletop roleplaying games are cooperative games. In cooperative games, the players work together to accomplish a Shared Goal. That means the Goal has to do some extra heavy lifting. It’s not enough for the Goal to lend meaning and context to the individual players’ choices, the Goal also has to provide the same for team-based choices. If you compare groups with a strong sense of a Shared Goal to groups of players pursuing Personal Character Quests — if you actually sit and watch how they play the game — you can see the difference play out. You can see the different levels of teamwork and the different amounts of intraparty conflict.

Yes, I know your group of lone wolves is different. Shut up. Also, they’re not. You’re just deluding yourself.

Tabletop roleplaying games are also campaign games or legacy games. They remember. They have permanence. They’re played for months or years and, once something happens, it can’t be undone. The most extreme example is, of course, character death. Even if death can be reversed, it usually carries a very high cost and some stiff penalties. And if it doesn’t, that just means the system’s designers suck at their jobs.

But this permanence thing doesn’t start and end with death. Many gameplay actions risk permanent consequences. Consider a simple choice like whether to consume a potion. You can’t know if you’ll need that potion for something else later or whether you’ll ever find a replacement. Once you drink it, you might never have it to drink again. If you need it later, it won’t be there.

Shared Goals are thus immensely important in tabletop roleplaying games. Teamwork is a huge part of such games and every choice has the weight of months or years of future gameplay on top of it. And that’s just how it is. Those are facts. You can’t deny them; you can’t argue over them. That’s how games and game design and cooperative gameplay and teamwork and legacy games work.

It’s those things that work against the idea of Personal Character Quests as the basis for the party’s ongoing adventures. Players and their characters can pursue small, temporary side goals of their own. They can have little, additional goals to work on while they share in the party’s adventures. But there must lie a Shared Goal at the heart of every Adventure at the very least. If not at the end of every Campaign.

So, if you want to build a Campaign around Personal Character Quests, you’ve got to deal with those problems. But you’ve also got to accept that you’ll never be able to solve them completely. The best you can do is reduce their impact so they hopefully don’t shake your game apart. Or so that, at least, when your game does start shaking, you’ve got the time and leeway you need to fix it before it breaks.

That said, disaster isn’t inevitable. If it were, I wouldn’t be wasting my time on this shit. And you do have some game design forces on your side.

Metagame is Helping… Thank You, Metagame

Using Personal Character Quests as the basis for a Campaign doesn’t actually doom you to failure. It can work. And that’s partly because there are some elements of the whole tabletop roleplaying game thing working in its favor.

First, recognize that Personal Character Quests stop being personal the moment they’re the point of an Encounter or Adventure or Arc or whatever. As soon as the party decides to help Ardrick reclaim his family’s sword or to help Beryllia earn the favor of the Jade Order, those become Shared Goals. The players have tacitly agreed — wittingly or un- — to accept one character’s Personal Character Quest as a Shared Goal. Players — and Game Masters — rarely think consciously about this. It’s not a decision most groups make; it’s just a thing that happens. And that’s because…

Second, the Metagame is on your side. As a Game Master, the Metagame is almost always on your side.

Now, people like to throw the word Metagame around and they like to give it all sorts of different meanings. But that’s because people are dumbasses who think words can mean whatever they want and they can’t tell a cravat from a belt. The Metagame is the set of rules, strategies, and systems — written and unwritten, explicit and implied — that govern how players think about, approach, engage with, and ultimately play the game. Any game. The different approaches to character creation, for instance, are part of the Dungeons & Dragons Metagame.

The Metagame thing that helps you here is the unwritten, implied rule that tabletop roleplaying games are about teams of adventurers, not individuals. That the game goes where the party goes. It’s this aspect of the Metagame that keeps the characters united even if their in-game personalities and various in-game events suggest they should break up and go their separate ways. It’s this same aspect of the Metagame that dictates that players shouldn’t build characters who steal from or betray or sabotage the party.

The point is, when you — the Game Master — say, “In this week’s adventure, Ardrick’s looking for the smith that forged his family’s heirloom sword so he can get a clue as to its whereabouts,” the Metagame tells the players to accept that as a Shared Goal and do their best to make it happen. And if there are any in-character objections to that adventure, the players better find a way to not object, or else they’ll be left out of the game.

The Metagame, thus, makes it technically possible to run a game based purely on Personal Character Quests. It’ll keep the party together and force each player to accept everyone else’s Personal Character Quests as Shared Goals. But there’s a difference between something being technically possible and being a reliable and good idea.

Losing the Metagame

The Metagame will help you keep a Personal Character Quest Campaign together, but it’s not all-powerful. In fact, it’s not as powerful as it might first seem. Why? Well, there are two big reasons and a whole pile of other, smaller reasons.

The first big reason has to do with what I said above: that players only remain engaged in a game insofar as they care about the game’s Goal. The Metagame will force the players to accept all the Personal Character Quests as Shared Goals, but it won’t make the players like them or enjoy them or care about them. And here’s where the very idea of Personal Character Quests starts to work against you again.

All players are inherently selfish. All people are selfish. Most players are only a tiny, little bit selfish. And they’re mature enough to put their selfishness aside for the sake of the cooperative gameplay experience. That’s what being a well-adjusted, socialized adult means. But there’s still a voice in every player’s head whispering, “I don’t want to do this shit with Ardrick’s sword; I have my own quest I invented for myself and care very deeply about and that’s what I want to spend my game time chasing.”

As soon as you invite each player to invent a Personal Character Quest, you’re amplifying their natural sense of self-interest. You’ve created a setup in which every minute of game time is a limited resource and each player only gets a quarter of the minutes to play the story they really want to play. The one they chose.

The second big reason has to do with the fact that tabletop roleplaying games involve roleplaying. There’s this inherent assumption that the players are adopting roles and trying to play them out. That’s where the term roleplaying came from. To the extent that every player’s trying to stay true to their character, every compromise they’re forced to make on that front is inherently disengaging. When the Metagame forces a player to adapt their character to the needs of the game or the group, that player’s investment drops another notch.

Now, these are small things. But small things add up. It’s not like Adam bending his character to accept Beryllia’s quest because it’s Beth’s turn to advance her plot is going to break him. Adam will usually just make the excuse or ignore the problem and keep playing. But these small things do add up over time. A few too many and, the next time Adam’s forced to choose between attending a concert with some friends and attending the game, maybe he skips the adventure for the concert. After all, it’s Danielle’s character’s adventure this week. Does it matter if he misses one little game? Or maybe Adam doesn’t want to risk a permanent resource when Cabe’s victory is on the line. Maybe he’d prefer to save it to use on his own character’s next adventure.

Remember, most failed campaigns die not with a bang, but with a long, sad, slow, protracted whimper of growing disinterest.

What’s a Game Master to Do?

Like I said, this shit’s the way it be. There’s no point fighting it. If you want to run a Personal Character Quest Campaign — one where each player gets to bring their own story to the table — and you want the best chance of success, you have to acknowledge and deal with this shit. You’ve got to mitigate and minimize the problems. And while the Metagame will help you, counting on it’s a crap shoot. You might get lucky and it’ll hold your game your game together, or you might not and it’ll break and take your game down with it.

Game Masters never rely on luck alone.

The Personal Character Quest Plus One Campaign is the alternative to blind, stupid hope or faith that Lady Luck loves your game.

The Personal Character Quest Plus One Campaign Framework

Let me be clear: this Personal Character Quest Plus One thing ain’t, technically, a Campaign. It’s an approach to starting a Campaign. It’s a framework. In the parlance of the True Campaign Managery series — which I’m neglecting so I can help you maybe pull off this terrible idea — the PCQ+1 isn’t even a Campaign Vision. It’s a template for a Campaign Vision. It’ll tell you how to write your Vision — and what to demand of your players — but it’s on you to work out the specifics.

What you’re gonna need is some Glue, a bunch of Personal Character Quests, two Motivations for each player, Plus One Quest, and a Matrix.

A Campaign High on Glue

It’s really the lack of a Shared Goal that’ll tear a Personal Character Quest Campaign apart. Even with the Metagame holding the players together, there’s nothing to unite the characters. And that’s the point of the Glue.

Before you launch your Campaign, before anyone makes characters, before you even tell anyone what you’re planning, figure out what will keep the party stuck together. And the answer can not be Personal Relationships. If you say Personal Relationships, I get to slap you. And if you say Personal Relationships Formed Organically Through Play, I get to wear a lobstered gauntlet when I do.

Yes, Personal Relationships can — and will — help keep the party together. But they’re weak and fragile and can’t be counted on. And you absolutely, definitely can’t count on anything that’s formed organically through play. Because that’s not what formed organically through play means. You have no idea what — if anything — will form if you let it form organically. Dumbass.

The point is, that you need something solid to stick the characters to the party. Something that’ll last for the length of the campaign and something they can’t easily break off. But also something that lets the party members pursue their personal plans. Consider Farscape and Firefly as good examples. In both, the characters crewed a ship and were stuck together — in both cases, because they were fugitives — but their independent lifestyle let them go and do whatever.

The characters don’t have to be trapped together, but they need something external to hold them together. They don’t have to be criminals or fugitives, they could be indebted or indentured to a patron. Or members of an organization. A loose organization that gives its members leeway, obviously, like an adventuring guild or a college of magic. A real college of magic. Not a modern university dropped into a fantasy world like that Strixhaven cockwaffle. Think, like, postgraduate field workers or knights errant or something. Or maybe the party inherited or pooled resources to acquire a starship or a pirate ship or an airship and now their stuck sharing ownership and paying the upkeep. Or the mortgage.

Basically, you must start with an answer to this question…

Why are these people stuck helping each other on their worst days when they don’t want to and they’re kind of sick of each other?

Because that day is gonna happen.

Most Game Masters plan these Personal Quest Campaigns around the party’s best days. The days when everyone’s getting along and everyone’s out to help everyone and they’re all bestest friends and everything is all sunshine and rainbows and bunny farts. Those days are nice when they happen and you should totally hope they do. But if any shit days come along, you’ve got to be ready to hold the game together. Those are the days you have to plan for.

One Quest and Two Motivations Per Player

Once you can explain why the party’s stuck together, you can take that shit to your players and invite them to make some characters. But it’s important to be utterly, totally, transparently clear about shit. Tell the players you’re gonna let them pick their own quests and goals, but they have to work with you to make them good ones and they have to embrace the premise you’re starting with. If they can’t do that, they can’t have Personal Character Quests. Just pull some bullshit published crap like Rime of the Frostmaiden off the shelf because that’s all your players deserve.

Obviously, along with their characters, you’ll also invite — require, actually — each player to come up with a Personal Character Quest. And it’s best to sit with each player and handle this shit as a back-and-forth interview rather than to ask them to submit writeups. Because you need to exercise some oversight. And you need to make it clear that nothing’s final until you say it is.

Isn’t it funny how all the collaborative storytelling dumbasses forget that collaboration means the Game Master and the players work together? It doesn’t mean the players issue their unilateral demands for the Game Master to fill.

Anyway…

You also need to work with each player to develop two Character Motivations. Not Goals, Motivations. Remember the difference? You’d better; I’ve explained this crap a thousand frigging times at this point.

The first Motivation explains the character’s dedication to their Personal Character Quest. The second Motivation connects them to whatever glue forms your Premise.

Say, for example, that my campaign is about a group of adventurers bound to a patron who finances adventurers across the Imperial Kingdom of Federatia. Adam, playing Ardrick, wants Ardrick to recover his family’s ancestral sword. It was lost when his family’s estate was sacked and his family was killed a decade ago. That’s his Personal Character Quest.

For his first Motivation, he proposes Duty to His Family. I — sexy gaming genius that I am — suggest he’s a little less specific and suggest his Motivation is his Sense of Duty.

He’s struggling with his second Motivation. He suggests that Ardrick was left orphaned by the attack on his family and that the patron sheltered or protected him. Maybe even gave him a place in the household. So he feels obligated. I suggest either Ardrick’s Integrity drives him to pay back his patron’s kindness or else Ardrick’s Need to Belong leads him to view the patron as a surrogate father. Adam likes the idea of an orphan with a Need to Belong.

See how this shit works? Adam’s got a Personal Character Quest, a connection to the Premise, and two solid Motivations that work across a spectrum of adventures while explaining his goals and place in the world. And Need to Belong is a great Motivation to keep him attached to his fellows in the party.

You do that with each and every player. And all the while, you remember you’re going to need to use all this crap to build Adventures and Motivate the characters and keep them together. So you mold, you refine, you collaborate, and you veto when you have to. If one player’s Motivation for their Personal Character Quest is kind of selfish, for example, you push them to counterbalance it with a group-oriented second Motivation.

This shit takes finesse. Just err on the side of harmony, unity, and everyone getting along. Because — and remember this shit — intraparty conflict kills Personal Character Quest Campaigns.

The Plus One Quest

Once you’ve got a Personal Character Quest and two Motivations for each character and they’re all good ones, you need one more Quest. And this one’s all you. The point of this Quest — the Plus One Quest — is to resolve or finish the Premise somehow. When it’s done, it’ll leave the characters unglued. If they stay together after that, it’s by choice. Not that it matters because they’ll be sailing off into the sunset when it’s done.

Maybe they fulfill their patron’s goal or his dying wish or whatever. Or maybe they get out from under the debt that stuck them together. Or they kill the military commander that’s been hunting them. Or they earn a group pardon. Whatever. Anything works.

Mining the Quests for Plot Points

Now that you’ve got a bunch of Personal Character Quests Plus One Quest, it’s time to do the normal campaign plotting thing where you break each down into its Major Plot Points. Those are the things you’ll be building into full-on Adventures as you need them. And remember, it’s okay to be loose and broad and general with campaign plotting and nothing is set in stone and yaddah yaddah yaddah so we can skip the bullshit where you all tell me how plotting is evil and kills agency and how you don’t play roleplaying games to play out prewritten stories and all that other horseshit that you dumbasses can’t stop being totally and completely wrong about.

It’s important to figure out how many Major Plot Points to break each Quest into. That depends on how long your adventures tend to run and how much game you want to get out of this campaign. If you’ve got four players and want six to nine months of gaming and your adventures run two or three sessions long, for example, you break each Quest into three Major Plot Points.

For Ardrick’s, Recover the Family Sword Quest, I might break it down thus…

1. Ardrick learns of a survivor from his household. A servant or employee. The survivor can provide information about the attack, but he’s in trouble and needs help.
2. The survivor’s description of the attackers leads Ardrick to a mercenary company that was hired to attack his family. The mercenaries are not keen to reveal who hired them.
3. The information from the mercenaries leads Ardrick to a rival noble house and a scion of that house has claimed the sword. Ardrick must reclaim it through guile or violence.

Next, come up with two Minor Plot Points for each Quest that’ll serve as side quests, diversions, distractions, complications, or between-adventure events. For example…

1. Ardrick is approached by someone claiming to have information about his family and demanding a favor. The person is lying, but if the party sees through the deceptions, they can claim some valuable treasure from his corpse.
2. Vengeful members of the mercenary company ambush or sabotage the party.

Programming the Matrix

With each Quest — Personal and Plus One — broken into Major and Minor Plot Points, arrange them into a Matrix. In other words, just list them all in columns across the page. Something like…

Character 1 Quest	Character 2 Quest	Character 3 Quest	Plus One Quest
Plot Point 1	Plot Point 1	Plot Point 1	Plot Point 1
Plot Point 2	Plot Point 2	Plot Point 2	Plot Point 2
Plot Point 3	Plot Point 3	Plot Point 3	Plot Point 3
Minor Plot Point 1	Minor Plot Point 1	Minor Plot Point 1	Minor Plot Point 1
Minor Plot Point 2	Minor Plot Point 2	Minor Plot Point 2	Minor Plot Point 2

And that Matrix is a table of the adventure seeds and side events that you’ll turn into game content as needed. When it’s time to write your next adventure, just pick a column and turn the next Major Plot Point into an adventure. If you’re feeling saucy, add a Minor Plot Point from some other column. You can even roll randomly to see which story to advance next. It’s that simple.

Kind of… There are a few things to keep in mind.

First, your Campaign’s first and last adventures must be built from the first and last Plus One Quest’s Major Plot Points. You don’t start or end your campaign with Personal Character Quests. And you don’t include any Minor Plot Points in either of those adventures either. You can actually use the first adventure to play through the start of the Premise if you want to. But you don’t have to. And those two adventures can be longer than the rest.

Second, don’t move to a new row without finishing the current one completely.

Third, be ready to break the Plus One Quest Major Plot Points up if you need some extra adventures to put out a disengagement fire.

Fourth, never let the players pick what adventure comes next. You decide which Quests to advance when and you set them with incitements or hooks or whatever as and when you need to. Ardrick is always going to be asking about his family. You decide when someone finally has an answer he can pursue. You can plant the hook for the next adventure in the current adventure — as any good Game Master might do in a normal campaign — but do so such that the party can’t possibly follow the hook until they’re done doing what they’re doing. Because intraparty conflict kills Personal Character Quest Campaigns.

Fifth, when you build an adventure from a Major Plot Point — regardless of whose Personal Character Quest is in play — make it work with as many characters’ Motivations as possible. You’ve got a lot of Motivations to choose from. It shouldn’t be hard to get a few of them in there. You might not be able to Motivate every character with every adventure, but don’t let anyone go more than one adventure without a Motivational hit. And never, ever build an adventure that’s opposed to any Motivation in the party. Never. Because intraparty conflict kills Personal Character Quest Campaigns.

Sixth, when it comes time to build that last adventure — the one that frees the party to go their own way of ride off into the sunset — try to make each character’s Personal Character Quest payoff somehow. Maybe Ardrick’s family sword is super effective. Maybe Beryllia’s contacts in the Jade Order provide helpful resources. If you can’t do it, so be it — this is just gravy — but it’s awesome if you can.

You’ve Won the Battle, But the War Isn’t Over

That Matrix is a pretty awesome Campaign roadmap, huh? And with the Premise and the doubled-up Motivations, you’re sure to have a great Personal Character Quest Campaign, right?

Wrong.

This shit is never stable. It can fall apart at any time. Seemingly for no good reason. You’ve got to stay vigilant for signs of disinvestment, disconnectedness, disjointiness, and disturbances in the Matrix. If your gut tells you something’s wrong — or if your gut isn’t having fun — assume something’s wrong.

If you’re losing a single player at some point — which happens — move their next Major Plot Point up the queue. That’s usually all it takes. If you can’t, then add one of their Minor Plot Points to the next adventure. Even if you have to invent a new Minor Plot Point because you’ve already used them up. Might this lead to one player getting more spotlight time than the others? Yes. But who gives a shit?

It is a complete myth that spotlight time needs balancing. That it must be totally evenly distributed among all the players. Some people really do need more spotlight time than others. That’s totally okay because some people function just fine with less. Imbalanced spotlight time is only a problem when it’s a problem. Don’t sweat it if no one’s complaining. You have more important shit to worry about.

If the whole party’s getting a bit disconnected, it’s time to run a Plus One Adventure. Something that’ll reignite the group spirit. That’s why you might need to add extra Plus One Quest Plot Points. Or even Plus One Quest One Offs. Groups need their sense of team spirit refreshed periodically however much the players say they love telling their own stories. Remember, people don’t know what they really need and Game Mastering isn’t about giving people what they say they want.

Most importantly, though, remember that intraparty conflict kills Personal Character Quest Campaigns. Intraparty conflict isn’t generally a bad thing. It adds something to most games. But Personal Character Quest campaigns lack strong, unifying Shared Goals and focus everyone’s attention on their own stories. And while the Metagame will hold the players together, it won’t make them feel good about it. Any conflict between the characters, however small, can start a vibrational wobbly resonance thing that can shake the whole damned campaign apart two months down the line.

• Never give the players a choice about whose Goal to chase next.
• Never ask a player to push off their Goal for someone else’s.
• Never set up two adventures and ask the players to decide which to pursue first.
• Never interrupt one Personal Character Quest with another.
• Or with the Plus One Quest.
• Or interrupt the Plus One Quest.
• Never let a Minor Plot Point overshadow or sabotage any other adventure.
• Never put the characters Motivations’ into conflict.
• And never, ever put a character in a position wherein they’ve got to do something that runs against their own Motivations.

If you ever find yourself doing any of those things, abort. Rewrite the adventure, rewrite the Plot Point, rewrite the Personal Character Quest, or rewrite the entire damned campaign.

Intraparty conflict kills Personal Character Quest Campaigns.

The only conflicts allowed in Personal Character Quest Campaigns are external conflicts. That’s the only way to pull this shit off.

Then again, you really shouldn’t be doing this shit at all. And I shouldn’t be helping you.

Remember: this Personal Character Quest thing is an absolutely terrible idea and you should never do it and I am totally not responsible for the results. You’ve been warned.