Saturday, August 13, 2016

RPGaDay 2016 #13 What Makes A Successful Campaign?

I've run a lot of campaigns over the years, some more successful than others. Even some of the lackluster campaigns had an awesome session in there somewhere.

A successful campaign is one with a well-thought out goal. Or several goals, depending how long you want to play. For a long time, I ran fairly short campaigns because I could only come up with a single major goal at a time. Once the villain was vanquished, I had the darnedest time coming up with new goals for the characters to pursue. I could dither and try to push through, but it generally just became easier to break that off and do something different.

The biggest low points of my gaming career have come from forgetting this. Focusing on paths through the plot rather than what the plot is trying to accomplish. Waiting for characters to develop their own goals really pushed my megadungeon campaigns into tedium. My old school campaign ended with the party having hundreds of thousands of gold pieces in the bank with no real plan or understanding of where that was going.

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