Wow! Has it been three whole days already…

Kidding. Kidding. I’m really sorry. I promised this conclusion to the What Do You Do When You Lose the Plot Miniseries weeks ago. As I said in that massive update, things are way off the roadmap right now and I’m working to get them back there. I just underestimated how tricky I’d made writing this conclusion.

See, I don’t need this shit anymore. The campaign I wanted to rescue? It’s dead. Don’t worry, I have a reincarnation ritual powering up, but I can’t discuss that. Not yet. It’s got nothing to do with what I’m going to talk about today, though. My campaign recovery plan totally would have worked. It’ll work for you. That’s why I’m still sharing it and I’m gonna pretend I used it myself. But my whole situation changed for completely unrelated reasons.

If you’re a Club Slapdash member due to your level of support, you know what they are.

That aside, let’s do this…

What Do You Do When You Lose the Plot?

In the last two Features, I told you all about how I realized one day that my Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition campaign, Chain of Stars, just wasn’t working like I wanted it to anymore. Even though everyone — myself included — was having fun from game to game, I knew I was just treading water. Worse, I’d lost the passion that made me want to swim the Channel in the first place.

I referred to that feeling as Losing the Plot and holy mother of crap was that a mistake. So was sharing the mistakes I’d made over the last few months at my table to keep my campaign going even though I no longer had my eyes fixed on the prize. Because man oh man did a lot of you totally miss the point.

People missing the point? On the Internet? If only there was some way I could have seen that coming!

This Ain’t About Plot and Plot Ain’t a Four-Letter Word

Some of you took my clever colloquialism about losing the plot as referring specifically to the in-game plot I’d outlined for my campaign. Worse yet, some of you are in roleplaying gaming cults that are absolutely convinced that any level of planning, plotting, or goal-oriented scenario design is evil and terrible and enslaves players and ruins all gaming ever and pisses on the corpse of E. Gary Gygax.

I wish I was kidding.

I got a lot of shit for that, so let me make it clear — again — that losing the plot isn’t anything to do with in-game plotting. You can lose the plot doing anything. You can lose it while running a completely open-ended, player-driven, exploration-based hexcrawl experience. You can lose the plot in any long-term project or creative endeavor. You can lose the plot in a five-year business plan. You can lose the plot in your entire, actual, real life.

Not that I talk about that shit here. I don’t do life advice and I certainly don’t use this site to work through my own personal or professional problems. That’s not something I would ever do even a tiny little bit no matter what it looks like.

If, by the way, you’re in that cult — you know who you are — I gotta tell you’re brainwashed and the things you say are totally wrongheaded. Especially when you wield the phrase Player Agency like Saint Cuthbert’s bronzewood cudgel. I have never met a community that understood the concept of Player Agency less than you dumbasses. But that’s a rant for another day. I just want to make it clear that I’ve got nothing against player-driven, open-world exploration-based roleplaying game campaign play. If that’s your jam, great. But if you hold the completely dumbass, irrational, unfounded notion that anyone doing anything else simply doesn’t get roleplaying gaming or isn’t providing Player Agency or is ruining gaming forever, get the fuck off my site. Seriously. Just go. You’re the worst kind of gamer. You’re the kind of gamer I invented this character fifteen years ago to parody.

And don’t stop by the comment section on your way out. This ain’t an airport; you don’t need to announce your departure.

Sorry the rest of you had to see that.

Anyway…

I Wasn’t Asking for Help

I’ve gotten a few comments and more than a few social media messages from some very well-meaning — and not-so-well-meaning — folks trying to fix my campaign based on the mistakes I’d described. I appreciate that; I really do. The thing is that it’s really easy to fix a problem with the benefit of hindsight when the person with the problem provides a few thousand words of introspection about the problem.

Besides, if I didn’t know how to fix the problem, I wouldn’t be writing a miniseries to help other people fix other, similar problems, would I?

Moreover — and this is gonna sound rude — none of you are qualified to help me fix my campaign. Partly, that’s because my campaigns are works of frigging art — ask my players; they didn’t even notice the world was blowing up around them — and partly, that’s because you only have the vaguest notion of what I wanted to accomplish and why. I didn’t give you enough background on the campaign for you to know how to get it back on course.

This is something all of you would-be advice-givers need to learn: giving advice always starts with a clear understanding of the goal. When you write general advice for a broad audience, you have to start by explaining what your advice will help people accomplish and why that’s worth accomplishing. That way, anyone not chasing the goal — like any gaming cultists who think games with quests and plots are teh evulz — knows the advice won’t help them. When you’re giving a specific person specific advice, it means asking a lot of questions and having a really clear understanding of what they want to accomplish before you start telling them how to get there.

The point of my sharing my mistakes, though, was to show you how anyone — even a sexy gaming genius — can lose the plot. It’s a compounding problem. One that comes not from careless corner-cutting or blind panic, but rather from totally reasonable-seeming decisions that only reveal themselves as careless corner-cutting or blind panic later. Or never. It’s a nasty, insidious trap that it’s easy to see other people blunder into and almost impossible to see in front of you.

Despite my tremendous ego, I was using my personal failures to help you see the pitfalls in your own path. Moreover, I’m trying to give you a toolset for recognizing that you’ve fallen into a pit and for getting out of it whenever you suddenly realize you’ve lost the plot in anything you’re doing for any reason… when running pretend elf games.

I guess we should get to that toolset shit now before I waste my whole word count re-explaining everything I said to people who aren’t going to understand it any better this time than they did last time.

So You’ve Lost the Plot

So, you’ve lost the plot. You’ve looked around and said, “Where the hell am I? How did I get here? What am I even doing anymore?”

As I said, you’re waking up to the fact that you’ve lost the connection between your goals — your vision for your campaign or whatever — and your day-to-day actions — what’s happening at each session or whatever. In my case, I realized my sessions weren’t going anywhere. Shit was happening, players were interacting with the world, and the game was fun while it happened, but there was no momentum, no forward movement, and the game looked nothing like the one I wanted to run.

As I also said, losing the plot often comes after a combination of just getting by, of flailing and firefighting, and of acting on whims. Those aren’t the only ways to lose the plot, though. In fact, they’re usually things we do when we start to become subconsciously aware that we’re off track and try to fix it.

But it doesn’t matter why and how it happened. What matters is how you find the plot again. And I’m going to tell you how to do it in just five easy steps.

Step One: Don’t Just Do Something; Sit There

The first thing to do when you realize you’ve lost the plot is to cancel your next two game sessions.

Seriously. Message your players right now and tell them they’re off for the next two sessions. I am not frigging joking.

See, as humans, we often fall into this trap called chasing the urgent. It’s actually precisely that tendency that leads to all that just getting by and flailing and firefighting. It’s even part of why you act on whims too much.

Your brain has two different systems for getting shit done. One handles quick, snap decisions and is powered by impulse, emotion, and habit. The other handles long-term planning and strategic thinking and is powered by information, logic, and rational action. At the game table, as a Game Master, almost everything you do is quick, reactive shit. It runs in System One. When you’re away from the table doing your Campaign Management and Scenario Design, that’s when System Two gets its say. In fact, the reason to spend time on game prep is so that, at the table, System One doesn’t have to kick in too much. Because System One is really great for in-the-moment fun, but for long-term satisfaction and engagement — the thing you should really care about if you’re running any kind of long-term campaign — for long-term satisfaction and engagement, you really need System Two running the show.

The problem is that the moment you start to feel stressed, unhappy, or out of control, your brain assumes the world is burning down and flips you over to System One to keep you alive. That means, even during your away-from-table prep time, if your game’s become a source of stress and frustration — because, say, you’ve lost the plot — your System Two won’t engage and even your planning and prep-work will be quick, impulsive, reactive shit.

If losing the plot is really about losing sight of your long-term goals and well-thought-out vision and relying on impulsive, reactive action… you see it right? You see what I’m saying.

Thus, if you want to save your game, you have to take the pressure off so your brain isn’t stuck in chasing the urgent mode. So you go on hiatus. It doesn’t have to be two sessions or two weeks or whatever, but it does have to be long enough for your brain to feel like it’s got time to breathe and to think. It also can’t be so long the campaign withers and dies. Campaigns aren’t bears, they can’t hibernate for too long, or else they drop dead.

Beware Procrastination

Be ye warned…

The minute you take the pressure off yourself with a hiatus, the odds are extremely high that you’re not going to fix anything and that you’re going to land right back where you started. Why? Because you’re gonna procrastinate. That’s what humans do. Especially humans who, due to stress, have been letting System One drive for too long. I don’t have time to go into the science here. Just be aware that if you buy yourself two weeks and then wait until the last minute to try to fix anything, you’re just going to flip right back into System One again.

So, while you let your players off the hook, maybe commit yourself to keeping up your scheduled game nights. Instead of running games, though, use them to unfuck your campaign. Your players get two weeks off, but you don’t. That gets you two, solid four-hour blocks of time you already had on the schedule for gaming. You’re just using them to repair, plan, and prep.

If that ain’t your jam — or you think that ain’t enough time — schedule a few blocks of campaign recovery time. Like actually block out time in your planner over the next two weeks to commit to fixing your game. And for the love of all that is good and holy in this world, write it down.

Think Visibly

I’ve said this before and I’m saying it again…

Thinking is as valuable as the paper it’s written on. Or the document it’s typed into. If you’re just thinking, meditating, or ruminating, you ain’t doing anything. Again, there’s a lot of psychology to back this shit up, but this ain’t a psychology journal, so you can trust me or do the research yourself.

My point is, as you do this whole finding the plot thing, make it a habit to take notes. Write your thinking down or type it out. Or draw labeled diagrams. Whatever. It matters less the form your physical, visible thoughts take than the fact that you’re taking the time to make your thoughts physical, visible things. Though if you’ve been here a long time, you also know that, scientifically, writing in longhand on actual paper with an actual pen is way better than anything you do on a computer. Agree or don’t; I don’t care. I’m trying to give you the best chance to succeed. If you don’t want to take it, that’s a you problem.

Step Two: Revisit and Revision Your Vision

Once you’ve bought yourself some time for your rational, logical brain to take the helm, the next step is to remind yourself where you were supposed to be going and check whether that’s still the right place to go. So, yeah, this step’s actually two steps.

Revisiting Your Vision

If you’re like me, you know it’s important to have a written version of your Campaign Vision — or whatever you call your initial plan — floating around. But, if you’re like me, you also never bothered to write it down because you’re lazy as hell. That’s the human condition for you; we never do the things we know we should and we always do the things we know we shouldn’t.

If you’ve got a copy of your Campaign Vision hidden away somewhere, dig it out and reread it. Read every word. Hell, do it twice.

If you don’t have a copy of your Campaign Vision tucked away, you’re going to have to reconstruct it. Write down the Campaign Vision you should have written down back when you were supposed to write it down and didn’t. If you don’t know how to write a Campaign Vision, you can read my True Campaign Managery feature about Envisioning a Campaign but, really, it’s just a written description of how you see your campaign playing out both in the long term and session-to-session.

If you have to rebuild your Campaign Vision this way, it’s important that you do your absolute best to describe the Campaign you originally wanted to run. Think back to when you started your game, however long ago that was. What did you want to run? How? Why? Don’t describe the game you’re running now or the weird hybrid you think you could turn your current game into. Get back into that mindset you had when you were really excited to start the campaign.

I told you basically what my Campaign Vision was for Chain of Stars. It was something like this…

Run a six-month campaign comprising ten to twelve individual adventures interspersed with single-session interludes for travel, town business, and world interaction using the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset in which a group of random adventurers were uniquely equipped to end a threat to the kingdom due to their blend of backgrounds, classes, and skillsets. Divide the campaign into four broad acts inspired by the structure of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. In the first, linear act, the characters would come together and learn about the threat the kingdom faces. In the second, open act, the characters would explore a series of five carefully-designed dungeons in any order they chose to recover important tools, resources, and MacGuffins necessary to end the threat. In the third act, things would happen I can’t talk about where my players might read it. In the fourth, linear act, the players would confront the threat somehow based on their choices in the third act and that would lead to some kind of an ending.

Revision Your Vision

After reviewing your Campaign Vision a few times — and writing one if you had to do the make-up assignment — you might find a few things that need tweaking. It might be there’s crap in there that’s no longer valid or necessary. Situations change, after all, and it’s probably been a few months since you wrote the Campaign Vision. It might also be there’s stuff in your Campaign Vision that you’ve discovered isn’t possible or isn’t desirable.

So you want to give your Campaign Vision a frank, honest review. Make sure the destination you set is still a good place to aim for. Just be careful. See, when you’re stressed or unhappy, you tend to see everything in a negative light. That’s called Mental Filtering. It’s dangerous. That’s why it’s important to remove your game-related stress a bit before you start this work. You don’t want to tear huge chunks out of Campaign Vision thinking they were stupid, terrible ideas when you’re really just taking your stress and frustration out on your brilliant past Campaign Manager and Scenario Designer self.

My Campaign Vision is still a pretty good destination to shoot for. I love the overall plot that is totally based on the character’s skills, abilities, and backgrounds and I think I had a solid plan for the overall structure of the gameplay. That said, the idea of limiting all the travel, town interaction, and interlude crap to single sessions between the adventures — especially in the act breaks — was totally unrealistic. My players like interacting with the world and I do a great job bringing my worlds to life so it’s hard not to want to interact with it. I still want to limit that shit — this is still a fantasy adventure game, after all — but the strict one-session-between rule ain’t gonna work.

Time has rendered one element of my Campaign Vision completely moot. That six-month time limit? That came from external factors that are long since gone. I can cross it off. I still think my ten-to-twelve adventure plan is good, though. That’s the right length for the campaign. I just don’t need to count months on the calendar anymore.

Finally, there is one utterly undesirable element in my Campaign Vision that, if I were writing it today, I absolutely would not include. I’ve discovered that I absolutely fucking hate running Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition with a fiery passion that burns with the intensity of a thousand suns. Holy shit was AD&D 2E a mistake.

All right, I admit I’m overstating things a little, but this little experiment has helped me understand why I never looked back at AD&D 2E. I ran it for something like twelve years during my formative gaming years — happily so — but when D&D v.3 hit the market in 2000, I made the switch and never once felt compelled to switch back. I’ve tinkered with the odd old-school system and retro-clone here and there over the years, but I haven’t tried to run a serious, full-on campaign in a pre-modern system in a long time and I will never make that mistake again.

Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about that. That is something I’m stuck with until I put this campaign in the ground. Except it’s not and I can’t discuss that, so pretend it is.

Apart from those minor edits, my Campaign Vision is still good.

Step Three: How Is Today Going?

Now that you’ve assured yourself that you’re still aiming at the right goal — with minor corrections as necessary — you need to turn the same critical eye to the game you’re running right now. So put your Campaign Vision aside and describe — in a similar style — the game you’ve actually been running for the last several sessions.

You’ve got to be blunt and clinical here. This is raw analysis and your feelings shouldn’t enter into it. Don’t describe what you should be doing, don’t describe why you’re doing what you’re doing, don’t defend your choices, don’t make excuses, and don’t analyze anything, just factually describe the game you’re running right now.

For example, I might note…

I am running an inconsistent campaign. Although I schedule weekly, four-hour game sessions, many are canceled or shortened such that we only get two to three hours of actual gameplay every other week at most.

The players are currently traveling from town to town around a kingdom that is dealing with a drought and the threat of war. While they’ve learned a cult of astrologers perpetrated some terrible act in the past that can only be undone by gathering a set of objects hidden in ancient sites around the kingdom, their attention is primarily divided between dealing with the political machinations in the kingdom and following the trail of bodies left by the campaign’s villain. The party has recently come to fear that the villain may be targeting a character’s mentor figure and they are hustling to rescue him. Most of the challenges they face come from random encounters as they travel from location to location.

There is very little structure to the campaign. Rather, it has taken the form of a continuous sequence of events and encounters as the party talks to the world’s inhabitants, takes on minor side quests and errands, travels day by day on the road, and deals with random encounters. The closest thing the party has to a firm adventure goal right now is to outrace the campaign villain — or his agents — to an abbey in the neighboring province and then spend downtime in the same abbey doing research in the library to learn more about the threats to the kingdom and the world.

Step Four: Simply Find and Fix All the Problems Ever

This is going to sound a lot like one of those, “And now finish drawing the horse,” things. I’m sorry about that but also that’s how it be. Fortunately, this step is way easier than it sounds, you’ve got me to help you, and it doesn’t matter if you do it right. Just don’t panic and stick with me, okay?

Basically, what you need to do now that you’ve defined where you actually are and where you’re supposed to be is to identify every problem your campaign has and solve each and every one of them. It’s just that simple.

Are you panicking? Don’t panic. That’s not as hard as it sounds. See, you’ve actually already solved the real problem. Or you will have solved the real problem. The real problem was that you stopped making your decisions based on your goals. Now that you’ve reaffirmed your commitment to the goal and admitted how far you’ve let yourself get from it, you’ve done way more to fix your problems than you realize.

But…

Nothing changes without change. If you don’t actually change what you’re doing — if you don’t do something different — nothing’s going to get better and stay better. Reaffirming your goal and promising to really stick with it this time isn’t a solution. After all, you had your goal once and you totally meant to stick with it. Something went wrong. If you don’t change your ways, it’ll go wrong again.

If you want anything to change, you have to act.

How?

There Are Twenty Differences Between These Pictures

You now have two different pictures in front of you. One, your Campaign Vision, is the game you’re supposed to be running. It’s the game you want to run. The other, which you wrote in Step Three, is the game you’re actually running. The one that’s not making you happy. I want you to put those two pictures side by side and play spot the differences. Make a list of everything that doesn’t match. List everything you’re not doing that you should be and everything you are doing that you shouldn’t.

I might list, for example, that I’m not running weekly, four-hour sessions the way I pledged to. I might also note that my campaign has no structure and is just a string of “and then this happens…” sessions. I might also note that I’ve spent several sessions running what I defined in my Campaign Vision as interludes and that I haven’t run a single, well-designed, well-structured adventure in a long time. I might also note — though I didn’t talk about this — that the villain in my campaign is now an active threat which isn’t how I meant to use him and that background setting elements like the Game of Thrones political bullshit and the drought are taking up screen time as if they’re part of the main plot.

It might take a few passes and refinements to spot all the differences, but it’s worth taking as much time as you need to do so and even spreading this whole process out over a few days.

One Tiny Change for Every Problem

That list of deviations between your Vision and the game you’re running? That’s actually a list of all the problems you’ve got. Now, you just need to come up with a solution for each one. That might seem impossible, but the secret is it’s actually really hard to do this wrong and it doesn’t matter if you get it right. You should try to get it right anyway, but you’re probably not going to, even if you’re a sexy gaming genius like me, and you’re not. You’ll be lucky if a quarter of your solutions actually fix anything.

For each item on your list, I just want you to state something — and by state I mean write down — you can do differently that might bring your game closer in line with your Vision. Then, start doing that. Note, by the way, I said might.

Some shit’s going to be easy to solve. Obviously, my issue with not running the sessions I’ve scheduled is an easy problem to solve, right? Just run the sessions as scheduled. Easy peasy, right?

Well, maybe it is just that easy. But note, also, that I’m not really doing anything different there. I’m not changing my behavior or my actions. I’m just saying, “Okay, I’m going to really stick to my schedule for real this time.” That’s just trying harder. Trying harder never works.

So, what can I actually do differently? Well, what if, every time I canceled a game session or ended a game session early, I had to buy my players twenty dollars worth of treats for the next game? That’d change my behavior.

Of course, this is where some analysis can also help. In my case, the reason I cancel games and run short games has to do with prep. I don’t commit enough time to prep so I feel unprepared, so I cancel games or else run short sessions I can improvise through. That actually leads to a lot of other problems in my campaign. The solution there is to schedule prep time on my calendar instead of just doing it whenever I feel like it. Block off the time and treat it like an obligation.

Another problem I’ve got is letting all the interlude crap fill my game sessions which leads to my players’ lack of focus on the fantasy adventure part of the fantasy adventure game. I suspect a lot of that also comes down to my prep problem, but let’s pretend I’m not that insightful. In fact, let’s pretend I’ve got no clue why that happens. I just know it’s something that’s not going how it’s supposed to. So what’s something I can do differently right now that might make a difference?

Maybe…

Maybe I commit to deliberately not playing one scene each session. Maybe I purposely cover one encounter or event each session with a quick, narrative summary. Instead of playing a shopping trip or a few days of travel or a meeting with an informant, I just say, “You meet the captain of the guard and have several hours of productive conversation. By the time you leave, you’ve learned the following three useful things, blah, blah, and blah.”

I know it seems like this, “Just try any small thing you come up with that might help,” thing can’t possibly, reliably solve all your problems, but that’s okay because solving problems isn’t the whole point here. Over time, if you stay fixed on your Campaign Vision goal, most of the little niggles will vanish on their own. Some of them will go away because of the tiny, immediate fixes you throw at them. The remaining problems will be much easier to solve with deliberate action, analysis, and experimentation once you’re feeling better about the campaign as a whole.

These little solutions are very likely to create some immediate improvement though, even if they aren’t perfect solutions, and you need some small, immediate improvement to preserve your mental state while the longer-term improvements take their time showing up. Otherwise, you risk slipping back into stress and frustration and letting System One take over again. You have to keep that from happening.

This leads me to the last step in this process. The forever step…

Step Five: Never Let This Shit Happen Again… Until It Does

Remember that you lost the plot because somewhere, somewhen, for some reason, you took your eyes off the goal. You made an impulsive decision or two or three or ten instead of letting your Campaign Vision set your course and you drifted off course.

If that happened before, it can happen again, and if you don’t do anything differently this time, it definitely will.

So what can you do differently? First, you can make checking in with your Campaign Vision a major part of your Game Mastering process. Now that you’ve definitely got it written out and you know it’s solid, reread it every few sessions and ask yourself whether you’re still running the game you’ve described. If not, identify the deviations and figure out what one thing you can do to un-deviate immediately.

Hell, if you can manage it, reread your Campaign Vision whenever you prep for your game or before you run each session. Find a way to make it a regular habit.

Remember that you don’t lose the plot all at once. You lose it gradually with a thousand minor steering errors. The more often you check your course and see if you’re still aimed in the right direction, the sooner you’ll catch yourself when you inevitably do start drifting off course. Because you will.

That’s the main thing. Do that. That’s Step Five. Revisit your Campaign Vision regularly and check whether you’re on course.

There’s something else you can try too, but it’s a really hard skill to master, so it may not work for you. You need to learn to recognize when you’re acting on impulse instead of making good, rational decisions driven by a strategic plan. When you catch yourself doing so, challenge yourself. Before you plonk down some random encounter on a whim in the middle of a session, ask yourself — in your head — whether this random thing you’re about to do is aligned with your Campaign Vision and, if it’s not, why it’s worth doing. I’m not saying you shouldn’t ever improvise or invent shit on the fly, but if you challenge yourself to justify it, you’re less likely to do anything that’s actively opposed to your Campaign Vision and likely to carry you off course.

Even if you can’t master that, though, if you ever feel like you did something wrong or like something’s going on, no matter how small the feeling, pull out your Campaign Vision and check your feelings against it. You see, once you make reaffirming your goal and taking goal-driven action your habit, your gut tends to be pretty good at spotting things that don’t align with your goals. Trust your gut.

After all, now you know what an utter frigging disaster it is to lose the plot and much work it takes to find it again. So don’t ignore your gut when it says you’re blowing off course.