It’s bulls$&% time!

“What, again?!”

Yes, again. This is important. As I’ll explain. But first, Standard Bulls$%& Disclaimer.

You’re about to read a bunch of Bulls$&%. Not advice. Not a new rule hack. Not anything remotely useful. Just me bulls$&%ing about something I think’s important in a stream-of-consciousy way. Or rather, me sorting through a bunch of bulls$&% in my head. Out loud. Or in text rather. So you can watch.

I never do more than one of these a month because I know they appeal to high-minded gamer intellectuals who spend more time thinking — and arguing — about games than running them. But since I am a high-minded gamer intellectual who spends more time thinking — and ranting — about games than running them, they appeal to me. So it’s bulls$&% time again. Because I say so.

But this is important bulls$&%.

The other day or last week or whatever, I published the first part of a new series intended to teach y’all how to get your own simple, homebrew roleplaying game campaigns off the ground. As part of preparing to write that series — which I’ve had on the back burner for a while — I actually did some reading and some listening. I wanted to know, see, what less-experienced gamers knew about campaigns. Especially those gamers for whom the current incarnation of Dungeons & Dragons was the toll booth that got them onto the gaming hobby turnpike.

I had this feeling in my gut that a lot of them didn’t even know the meaning of the word campaign. I was right.

That shouldn’t matter, though, should it? Realistically, a campaign’s just an ongoing D&D game. And an adventure’s just a little chunk of that. And if you actually read the DMG — which I do not recommend — you’ll find that’s the idea. And that idea hasn’t changed. Read the little books in the OD&D White Box and you’ll find that was the idea back in 1974 too.

You played a D&D campaign. As part of that campaign, you played through adventures.

Honestly, back in the day, the word adventure was the fuzzy word. The White Box and even the AD&D 1E core rulebooks are pretty clear about what a campaign is. But in places, the word adventure’s used to refer to all sorts of things. Like random encounters. And the standard spellcaster preparation period. And that’s just when they use the word as a noun. Of course, the verb form made plenty of appearances. Adventuring being the general act of doing s$&%. Adventuring is what adventurers do.

But that’s all just interesting aside. At least, it’s interesting to me.

Point is, I was starting a series about how to start a campaign. And lots of potential readers wouldn’t know what I was talking about. It seems few people even use the word campaign anymore. They’re aware of it, but it doesn’t mean ongoing D&D game the way it used to. Some people were conflating campaign with setting. Or calling campaigns something else instead. Adventures or adventure paths or modules. Did you know no one distinguishes between adventures and modules anymore? And don’t even get me started on the word scenario.

I want to blame WotC and Paizo for this s$&%. They keep calling campaigns adventures. Or they invented the completely useless phrase adventure path. But, truth be told, TSR was publishing campaigns and calling them the S-series of adventure modules. So, this ain’t a modern problem.

But isn’t this all needlessly pedantically definitional? And aren’t I the first to slap the crap out of anyone who gets needlessly definitional? Yes. And no. Yes. I slap the crap out of the needless pedants. Unapologetically. But no. This may be pedantic. And it may be definitional. But it isn’t needless.

As I said, I had a series to title, right? And a promise to make. If I promise to teach you how to start a campaign, it’s kind of important that you and I agree on what that actually means, isn’t it?

But beyond titles and promises, if I’m going to teach you something, I’ve got to be able to tell you what I’m actually teaching you. And that’s why I spent so much time asking people to tell me what they thought campaigns and adventures were. And pointing at things and saying, “that thing there; campaign or adventure?”

I wasn’t f$&%ing with people. That was just a side benefit. I was trying to map out a problem. Find the edges.

And this is a problem. Or rather, it’s the symptom of a problem. Definitional pedantic bulls$&% is rarely a problem. But sometimes, it signifies a problem. Sometimes it’s not just internet a$&holes being internet a$&holes. Sometimes it’s a failure to understand some important, fundamental, basic concept.

This breakdown doesn’t just keep us from talking about the games we’re all running. Or planning to run. See, I get lots of requests for advice and articles and lots of questions. And certain questions just baffle me. Which is a problem. I can’t answer a question I can’t understand. And I can’t give you advice if I can’t figure out what you don’t understand.

Lots of the questions I get about wilderness adventures, wilderness travel, downtime, and s$&% like that are really vague. Confusing. Which implies the questioner doesn’t really know what they’re trying to do in the first place. They’re so lost, they don’t know what questions to ask. They just know something’s not working.

This s$&%’s all down to something that, in Let’s Start a Campaign I called The Never-Ending Adventure. I don’t think I explained it very well, but then, it wasn’t really what that article was about. In fact, this whole pile of bulls$&% is stuff that almost buried that article. Stuff I ripped out because it wasn’t what that article was about. “None of this,” I screamed as I hacked that draft apart, “is the point! No one needs this s$&%! They just want to start a f$&%ing game!”

But, there’s lots of you that do want this s$&%. And those of you who’ve moved beyond starting simple, homebrew campaigns actually maybe do need this s$&%. Because it’s all down to stuff the GM’s expected to bring with them to the table. Whether they know it or not. And it speaks to something lots of experienced GMs ignore when they’re defining their campaigns.

And that’s why this is important. Because – and I will circle back to this later — the real secret’s that it’s up to you to figure out what the hell “running a campaign” actually means to you. The word campaign does not have a single, fixed, specific definition.

Except it does. I’ll share it at the end. And it is definitely not what you think.

For now, though, let’s say the word campaign does not have a single, fixed, specific definition. Beyond that whole ongoing D&D game thing anyway. The definition’s incomplete and it’s up to you to complete it.

But… The Never-Ending Adventure. What’s the deal.

The deal is that D&D — and many, many roleplaying games both like D&D and not at all like D&D — the deal is D&D works like this:

• The GM describes a situation
• A player declares and describes an action their character takes in the situation
• The GM determines and describes the action’s outcome

With me so far?

Now, that description’s accurate. But it’s incomplete. All the rules and systems and language imply the GM doesn’t just describe a situation, the GM describes an immediate situation. The GM describes what the characters perceive right now at this moment from where they precisely are. And players don’t just declare and describe character actions. They declare and describe immediate and mostly instantaneous actions. They describe the thing their character does right now and for the next few moments.

And that works really well when the party’s exploring dungeons. Making turn-by-turn decisions, fighting savage orcs, disarming single traps, crap like that. But it really doesn’t suit a three-day trek across the landscape. Or the hours of general wandering that encompasses familiarizing one’s self with a new town. And most GMs know it. Intuitively, they know that s$&% doesn’t work with immediate descriptions and instant actions. But they’ve got nothing else to work with.

Then too there’s the issue of what happens between adventures. Moment-by-moment, turn-by-turn immediate gameplay demands there’s always something requiring the players to make a decision. Something’s always got to be happening. So, adventures don’t really have betweens. They don’t start and end. They run together. And all the crap that, logically, belongs between adventures — shopping, selling loot, carousing, making contacts — it all just happens as part of the same string of unbroken moments as the rest of the game. If there’s any time for that s$&% at all.

You see, GMs are so attuned to the fact that there’s always got to be something to do that their players never go any time at all without a goal. One goal leads to another leads to another. Patron NPCs are always saying, “thanks for doing that, now do this.” Every adventure has another adventure’s seed. And every party has a laundry list of things to do.

That’s why GMs can’t conceive of how to handle downtime and crafting. Whenever I bring that s$&% up, one of the things GMs worry about is how to allot time between adventures. How to figure out — and communicate — how much time the players have between adventures. Which leads to idiotic bulls$&% like doling out abstract downtime hours to spend like currency.

It’s all down to structure. That’s the real problem. Campaign? Adventure? Encounter? Scene? Adventure Path? Those are all structural terms. They describe how the game’s put together. What the bits are and what bits make up other bits.

The thing is though — and this is the thing the GM’s expected to bring because the game’s systems ain’t going to help  — the thing is those terms actually mean nothing. You can draw lines around the different parts of your game. “This,” you say, arranging some papers, “is Act II.” And “this,” you say, making an expansive gesture at a bunch of paper, “is Adventure Seven!” And “that,” you say, pointing at a half-page of notes, “is Encounter B12.” But if the players can’t feel anything change as they move from the Act I papers to the Act II papers and they can’t tell when they’ve left the pile of notes that is Adventure Seven, the terms are just definitional pedantic bulls$&%.

Don’t misunderstand me, though. When I talk about what the players can feel, I’m not talking about conscious awareness. Conscious awareness doesn’t matter. You can even say, “okay, guys, that’s the end of Act I, now on to Act II.” If it doesn’t feel that way, they won’t believe you.

Human brains are always looking for structures and patterns. They’re looking to assemble stories.

Every circle has that one friend who just sucks at telling stories. You know who I mean. They say, “let me tell you what happened yesterday,” and you all groan inwardly. Or roll your eyes. Or make excuses to leave. Their stories are just an endless sequence of things that happened. And useless details. You can’t ever tell where they’re going. And when they’re done, you can’t tell what the point was. You hate listening to them. It’s hard to even pay attention to them. You don’t know what they’re doing wrong. You don’t know why their stories suck. But they do.

That’s structure at work. Or not working.

But even the GMs who know a thing or two about structure still f$&% up this whole campaign thing. Why? Because everyone gets hung up on narrative structure. If you’ve ever built your own homebrew campaign, I know — I know — you spent a lot of time thinking about how that campaign’s story was going to play out. Was it going to be a single, epic quest broken into arcs broken further into adventures? Or a series of intertwined, personal stories, each advancing a little bit at a time? Or, was the big quest the A-plot, and did the personal stories take turns providing the B-plots. Or did you just go with an episodic, dungeon of the week campaign?

Thing is, even GMs who think through this crap — and this isn’t actually the right crap to think about — even GMs who think through this crap can still produce Never-Ending Adventures. And that’s because the trend in media lately is toward Never-Ending Stories. Ever heard of a bingeable series? It’s the hot thing right now, right? Well, a bingeable series is one where stuff just keeps happening. Every episode’s a series of events — a series of and thens… — and the only thing that separates one episode from the next is that episodes tend to end on slightly bigger and then moments. Except they’re not really bigger. If you took all the episodes of a bingeable series and strung them together into one long video, I guarantee you that you couldn’t tell where the episode breaks were without looking at a clock.

These stories aren’t good. They’re not memorable. They’re addictive. And they’re addictive because they withhold the parts your brain desperately needs to make good or memorable stories from them. That’s why you can’t stop watching them. But also why you don’t remember much about them when they’re done. Or, at least, six months later. This s$&% fades from your brain like a dream after you wake up.

But, as I said, this is the wrong s$&% to focus on anyway. This ain’t about story structure. Because, when it comes to an RPG:

The story is the thing we remember about the game we played.

You are not playing a story. Or telling a story. Collaboratively or otherwise. You’re playing a game from which a story emerges. If the game’s not fun, people stop playing. Either they get bored and wander away or they just put the game parts aside and make up stories without any care for the game. Which, by the way, is fine if that’s what you want to do. But if the dice and the books and the rules and stuff just sit in the corner collecting dust while you and your friends weave a story, you ain’t playing a roleplaying game anymore.

That’s why the Never-Ending Adventure actually works. Not why it’s good. Because it’s not good. But it does sustain itself. People keep playing. There’s always something to do and the immediate, moment-to-moment gameplay’s actually pretty okay. Enough to keep you playing. But the story? It just kind of fades. The game doesn’t leave a lasting impression. Looking back, you can’t remember what was really happening in the game six months ago.

And if the game goes on too long like that, eventually, you’ll get bored. But you might not know why. You might want to switch campaigns or change characters or something like that. Something to keep it fresh. Because you can’t keep playing a Never-Ending Adventure forever.

Anyway…

The reason I made a thing about gameplay structure’s because the story’s what you tell later. The game’s what you’re doing now. And how the game feels determines how the story’s going to feel later.

Truth is, the gameplay structure provides the story’s structure. If the gameplay is just an endless, samey morass of s$&% happening, then gradually, the game’s going to feel like one of your sucky storyteller friend’s tales. But it’ll take a long time to feel like that.

The gameplay structure’s the mold into which the story is poured. If your players accept a quest, undertake the quest, fight a boss monster, and receive a reward, that’s not just good gameplay structure, that’s also good story structure. It’s got an inciting incident, motivation, rising action, a climax, and falling action. Well, I say that’s good story structure. It’s minimally good.

But gameplay structure does more than just mold the story. It also helps people play the game. It tells people what to do when. If the game’s about accepting quests, doing them, and then going back for the reward, the players always know what to do next. If they don’t have a quest, they go find one. If they have one, they go do it. If they finish one, they turn it in.

Now, that’s a simple example. So simple, it probably seems like there’s not really a structure at all. It’s just, well, that’s how you play the game. And that’s precisely how structure works. It’s invisible. You don’t even see what it’s doing. You might. But you don’t have to. It’s still doing it.

Did you ever play one of those strategy games? Civilization or Starcraft or whatever the Korean kids are playing these days. They call them 4X games. Why? Because the way to win’s to follow a four-step process: explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. And it ain’t just a matter of strategy. The game makes you play that way. You can’t build s$&% without resources. But you’ve got to find the resources first. Then, you’ve got to claim the resources. Then, you can start harvesting and building s$&%. And you can’t build the good s$&% without lots of resources and lots of crappy s$&% first. So, you explore to find resources, expand your zone of control to claim those resources, exploit those resources to build your power, and only then can you exterminate the competition.

The game’s systems — the rules and mechanics — and the game’s overall structure feed into each other. It’s a feedback system.

And in open-ended games, the structure empowers players. It gives them agency. How? Say you’ve got just a half-hour before an appointment to play your favorite open-world game. Or, say you’re just tired after a s$&% day at work. You say, “I’ll just load up my save and mine a bunch of bauxite. I’ve been gathering bauxite for a thing.”

Or, say you know you’re closing in on the last part of a long questline. The climactic dungeon crawl and final boss are next. You’re excited to see this done. So, you set aside your Friday night, clear your schedule, order a pizza, and settle in for a great time.

At any given moment, you can pick the game you want to play. Because there’s more than one game to play. And because each game has a nice, clear, bright-line around it. Resource gathering and crafting are not available in the same parts of the game that completing awesome quest lines are. Exploring the landscape’s not the same as delving dungeons. Dicking around town losing yourself in the world isn’t the same as traveling between the provinces.

And each different game has different tricks and strategies. Different resources. Different means of preparation. If you’re settling in for thirty minutes of bauxite mining, you’ll empty your pack of everything except your miner’s pick and maybe one weapon in case a wandering spider jumps you. You’ll don your prospector’s helmet and your boots of ore sensitivity. That sort of s$&%.

Thing is, all this relies on differentiation. If you don’t have at least two different games — two different modes of play — it doesn’t matter how you organize your game. Or your story. If all the acts were exactly the same, three-act structure wouldn’t mean a f$&%ing thing. You’ve got to be able to divide your game — or your story — into chunks and decide which things go into which chunks.

How does this play into adventure and campaign? Well, hopefully, that’s a little more f$&%ing obvious now than it was. But, simply put, those words establish the basic, highest order structure in your game. A campaign’s made of adventures. Multiple adventures. For there to be multiple of something, each thing must begin and end. And for it to matter, the players have to feel when each thing begins and ends. Which suggests, at the very least, you probably need both adventures and space between adventures.

Moreover, since structure’s about deciding what things go in what chunks, then there’s got to be stuff that’s done on adventures and stuff that happens between adventures.

This alone does not a gameplay structure make. But it does suggest a structure should exist. A GM that knows that adventures begin and end and new adventures follow already has the power to break out of the Never-Ending Campaign. But they still need the skills to differentiate the adventures from each other. They have to know how to make adventures feel separate from each other. How to insert space between them.

I said D&D used to have mechanics that supported such a structure, but that it doesn’t anymore. Well, that’s true, but it’s also a lie, but it also doesn’t matter that it’s a lie. Because from a practical standpoint, it’s effectively true.

Yeah, I’m using Jedi truth here.

Consider this, for example: once upon a time, healing took a while. If you got hurt a bunch, you could end up laid up in town for a week. And most everyone got hurt on adventures. Which meant, everyone was going to get laid up in town once in a while. Getting hurt happened on adventures. Recovering happened between adventures. Or, at least, recovering required you to stop adventuring temporarily.

Most groups didn’t actually deal with that s$&%. Most had healers. A healer could bring a damaged party back to full health by waking up one morning, burning all their spells on healing, and then going to bed to refresh their spells. So, an adventure stopped for one in-game day. 36 hours tops. But that was still enough to suggest the dynamic of adventuring and between adventuring.

That’s just one example.

And, to its credit, the D&D 5E DMG does acknowledge the adventure-between adventure dichotomy. Explicitly. It literally says that a campaign is more than just an unbroken string of adventures. Why didn’t you know that? Because no one reads the DMG anymore. Partly because it’s not clear why anyone should read it. The PHB/DMG split is stupid. But also, no one reads rules in general. The PHB is the book DMs read to learn the rules. The players don’t read anything. And the DM doesn’t read anything else.

But there’s also this implication that anything that’s not playing the game — anything that delays the adventure parts of the game — should be glossed over or shoved aside. Sometimes it’s down to systems streamlining and simplifying. Sometimes it’s down to GMs and players handwaving crap away.

Take leveling up. Used to be leveling up was a thing you did between adventures. Away from the table. And that’s back when leveling up involved changing like two f$&%ing numbers on your character sheet. Now when do the characters level up? Assuming they have the XP, of course. At camp? Sure! Mid-adventure? Absolutely! Mid-dungeon? Why not. Mid-combat? Okay, maybe not. But, honestly, there’s tables out there that’d do it if PCs gained XP every time they dropped a monster.

Nothing can stop the game. And the game is the adventure. Which means the adventure can never end. And there’s no space between adventures. The few optional bits GMs have to serve as spacers between adventures? They don’t have a point, do they? Tell me, friends, what actual purpose does carousing serve? Or running a business?

Planning trips? Stocking up on supplies? Managing equipment? Selling loot? That’s s$&% not just for bookkeeping. It’s not just for realism. Not just for balance. That s$&% also puts some space between one adventure and the next.

Hell, these days, the heroes never have to sit around and wait for a quest. Or go looking for one. The GM’s supposed to drop adventures in their laps. Preferably before the previous adventure’s done.

All those bits and pieces — when combined with the use of terms like campaign and adventure — sneakily injected RPG campaigns with rudimentary structures. Start in town, get a quest, do the quest, go back to town to rest and recover and advance. But, now, you can rest and recover and advance anywhere. And you can adventure in town and out. The town and the wilderness are the same. So’s the dungeon. And the adventure bits and the not adventure bits run together.

This whole town-adventure-town thing’s just one example of a structure. A really simple structure. But you don’t need to say, “okay kids, now go out and have a quest and be back by nightfall” to have a structure. Or “plunder the megadungeon once a day for eight hours, then get back to the inn for a good night’s sleep.”

Games and stories with a single, big goal — epic quest s$&% — still have adventure and campaign structures. Take The Fellowship of the Ring. I know that movie’s old enough to drink anywhere in the US now, but it is still an unequaled example of classic epic-quest D&D gameplay. That’s a campaign. Well, a story arc within a campaign. And you can feel — if not see — where the adventures are. Escaping the Shire? That’s an adventure. Traveling through the Mines of Moria? Adventure. The flight down the River Anduin? That’s an adventure. And they’re interspersed between periods of rest at places like Elrond’s Homely House and Lothlorien and also periods of travel like the trek into the wilds. Structural divisions and solid, clear modes of play.

Hell, every classic console JRPG — all the Dragon Quests and the single-player Final Fantasies — have a structure despite being one long quest. The original, good Final Fantasy VII? Even the first ten hours that took place entirely in the same city managed to flit back and forth between classic explore the town and talk to everyone gameplay and fight through the dungeon of random encounters and kill a boss gameplay. And then once that was run out, the game introduced the overworld.

Without in-built game mechanics — and actual, solid explanations — GMs are on their own to figure this s$&% out. Some GMs get it. Even if they can’t explain it, their natural sense of gameplay flow takes over and they intuitively structure their campaigns. The ones that don’t struggle through Never-Ending Adventures and keep tripping over the s$&% that doesn’t fit. And their campaigns lose their luster over time. So they’re forever starting new campaigns. Or the players are constantly making new characters. Or everyone just gets stuck in a burnout cycle.

Remember those chats I mentioned? The ones with inexperienced GMs about what the hell campaign and adventure actually meant? Well, in those chats, I played this game called Campaign or Adventure? I’d point to some D&D product or some TV series or movie franchise or whatever and I’d say, “okay, you’re running that at your table. Are you running a campaign or an adventure?”

As a result of a particularly long and rousing game with The Tiny GM — which would have gone on longer if she hadn’t found her car keys and gotten away — the pair of us actually debated all sorts of different ways to tell where the ends of adventures, arcs, and campaigns might be. My favorite was one we called “how much would it suck if the GM died there?” Basically, pick a spot in the movie or book or show or whatever and assume that between that session and the next, a meteor struck the GM dead and there’d never be another game session. How much would that suck?

Not at all? Well, the campaign could probably end there.

A bit, but you could live with the suck? You were probably at the end of a major arc in the campaign. Or, the campaign could end there, but you’d secretly really want a sequel.

Kind of a lot? You were probably at the end of the adventure.

An unbearable among of suck? The GM died in the middle of an adventure.

If, for example, Lord of the Rings ended at the end of Fellowship with Frodo and Sam rowing off across the Anduin together? Or if FFVII ended with Cloud and crew standing on the highway after escaping Shinra and resolving to leave Midgar and search for Sephiroth? You’d want more, sure, but you could survive if you didn’t get it. At best, you could assume that Frodo and Sam and Cloud and Tifa eventually threw the Black Materia into Mount Doom and everyone lived happily ever after. End of a chapter. A sad place to have to end a campaign, but one you could live with.

What about after the party escaped the Balrog while Tellah the Wizard held it off? Or after Cloud fell into the Sector Six Slums when the cave troll exploded? That’d suck a hell of a lot more. But it wouldn’t be as bad as if the GM died right after revealing the Balrog or the Air Buster. That would suck a lot.

Look, this game’s just for fun. It’s not a useful tool. Though it is a good way to train yourself to spot narrative structural divisions. The suckier the end, the finer the structural division that got interrupted by the GM’s death. If that makes sense.

The reason it’s not useful? It’s because the words campaign and adventure are arbitrary. Any GM can define them however they want. Though, when I say define, I mean structure their gameplay and story around those divisions. The GM decides where the plots end and where the gameplay shifts. The GM decides where to put the beginnings and the endings and the in-betweens and the continuations. And the system’s no longer any help. You — the GM — are on your own to figure this s$&% out. And if you don’t — and if you don’t have an intuitive grasp of this s$&% so the structures emerge on their own as you run games — you’ll have a Never-Ending Adventure instead of a campaign.

But doesn’t that render all this discussion moot? The game just needs some structure. Any structure will do. The words campaign and adventure have no value except to say “don’t forget structure’s a thing you need.”

But they do.

I’m going to tell you the truth. The big secret. What a campaign really is. And what an adventure really is. And then, my players are going to beat the s$&% out of me. Because I suck at structuring my game this way. That’s why, as great as my games are, my players will tell you, “he doesn’t really run Dungeons & Dragons, he runs Dungeons that Drag On.”

Except my players aren’t that witty. They just call me an a$&hole.

Anyway, here’s the secret:

A campaign is an ongoing game of D&D that goes on for four or more gameplay sessions. An adventure is a single, one-to-three session chunk of that game.

Forget gameplay structure. Forget narrative structure. That’s what it’s really about. However you structure your game and however you define the beginnings and endings and whatever modes of play you’ve got and however you cycle through them and however you differentiate the adventures from the in-betweens, make it so there’s an in-between for every three sessions of adventure tops. Doesn’t matter if the adventures are chapters in a big story or dungeons of the week or delves into a campaign-spanning megadungeon. You can go three sessions at most between breaks.

Breaks the players can feel.