Starting a campaign

For whatever reason, I'm having an extremely productive day of blogging today. it's kind of ironic, as gaming has not been a super active hobby of mine for a couple of years now, since my old gaming group kind of just drifted apart, and I've been busy enough with other things that entertain me enough that I haven't been motivated to try and assemble a new one. But I still keep a foot in the door through my online activity, and currently my enthusiasm for gaming related topics and activities is a bit higher than normal, so I'm going to run with it while it lasts, even though I'm not actively gaming right now. 

I've been giving some thought to how to start a campaign. I've written stuff in the past about that, but that was all from a very different context; when I was running a d20 game that was very heavily house-ruled. Much of what I spent time on at that time was how to communicate the rules, and worrying about facilitating chargen in a system that made chargen clunky and very time-consuming. I favored a campaign brief to hand out to the players. I still do, actually—although I've rather dramatically altered my expectations of what that campaign brief looks like. I favored a so-called "session zero" before play actually started; we'd get together like for a session, but the main goal would be to create characters and get them primed and ready to go; if we actually played very much at that session zero, that would be a bonus.

I suppose if I was playing D&D as written, I might still have those preferences, but most of them are no longer necessary in my current context, and since it's not the most exciting way to kick off a campaign and my stripped down rules-lite game doesn't require nearly as much of an investment in time to get ready to play, I no longer favor the session zero at all. The "session zero" will take forty-five minutes to an hour—and that's if the players are chatty and unfocused, but realistically they probably will be—and then we're ready to play. My habit has always been 4-5 hour sessions. That was a bit long, but because several us had to drive up to 45 minutes from various directions to get to the game and we rarely were able to play more than once or twice a month, so having longer sessions was necessary, or we never would feel like we were getting anywhere. Granted, that group is long gone; dispersed to the four winds—but given my age and station in life and the people that I'd likely be willing to play with when I try to reassemble some kind of group or other, I expect that similar circumstances would prevail.

Anyway, I've put together a new sample campaign brief, based on the updates to the game system and setting that have had a drastic impact since the last ones that I did a number of years ago. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hAoT0N6baWWrQaqaobmvPka14iu-gzoG/view?usp=sharing

Along with the campaign brief, I'd have to send the rules: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1adD5NZ9b7b7Xwbe4ffcHpyNmKP2csROy/view?usp=sharing

That seems like a lot if they're not already on board with my system, but I'm taking for granted at this point that they are. For that matter, if they don't read the rules, it's not a deal-breaker; they're easy enough for me to explain as we go that they could show up cold. It might make the chargen section of the first session take a bit longer, but no biggie. Even if they do choose to read the rules, there's no reason for them to read the Appendix, which is for GMs, or the monster list, or for that matter, probably not the magic section either. That means the whole game that they would need to read is only about 20-25 pages long.

I'd probably pass along the map for the setting too. Actually, this "big" map is not the one that I'd pass along, but I don't have my smaller regional maps yet with a few additional modifications that've come up since I drew this—my next mapmaking project. Whatever. This is what I have right now, so I'd probably pass this along. 

You'll notice from my campaign brief a few guidelines, which I think I followed pretty well. They aren't hard and fast rules, so if you need to bend them, you shouldn't feel like that's any kind of issue, though. Bend or even break away as needed. But I'll explain the reason for the guidelines, so you can at least bend or break from a position of understanding the purpose of the rule.

• Keep it short. I've always had this rule, but I've since decided that it's better to be a single page of text max. This is easier with rules lite system and few if any houserules, because my prior campaign briefs took the better part of half a page or even more sometimes explaining which rules were even in play. Here it's only two short sentences. Still, regardless of how you do it, keep in mind that you want your players to actually read it before they show up, and there's something psychological about a single page of text; especially if you can keep it from looking too dense. More than that, and it's intimidating to the subconscious and it greatly increases the chance that they'll blow it off.
• Give them some setting context. The 5e books use about half a dozen or so dot-points; I think a more elegant (and civilized) way to do it, not to mention it feels less like a powerpoint from some boring work meeting, is to use text that has the same ring to it as the Star Wars opening crawl. You don't need nearly as many details as you think; look at the first little section of my campaign brief to see what I mean. With that, you've got a pretty good idea of what's going on the setting at a macro level and what the big concern/problem that they'll somehow get caught up in is going to look like.
• Tell them what you expect the PCs to do. All of that is good, but for PCs to understand how to make characters that they're not unhappy with as the campaign develops, they also need to understand the role that their PCs will take. Here, telling them in a very non-spoiler type way what I expect the PCs will at least start the game off doing gives them some guidance to make characters with confidence that they'll actually fit the game well and not be characters that will have to be scrapped and redone because they just aren't working out, at worst.
• Give the players some options to choose from as they create characters. I don't mean stuff like races and classes, although that might apply. Is there a patron or organization that they need to belong to? Are there perhaps different goals or objectives that the PCs could choose from? Different origins that they could have? I decided to give them a list of potential patrons, each with their own subtly different take on the same basic goal. This isn't the only thing that could have been chosen, obviously, but one of the reasons I did it is because intrigue and skullduggery is meant to be one of the main themes of this campaign. If the PCs all have different takes on exactly what the goal is, there's room for some tension and possibly even conflict between the patrons that the PCs are working in behalf of. For a game where the PCs are expected to work more cooperatively, I'd expect them to all have the same patron, or the same goals. I tend to believe, however, that the cooperation is between the players in creating a fun experience, and that does not necessarily mean cooperation between the characters, who may in fact butt heads frequently through the course of the campaign. As long as the players are cooperating to make sure that this is fun, then I don't have any problem with that at all. In fact, I've usually found it vastly entertaining for all involved.
• Set some expectations on tone and theme and gameplay style. If the players are expecting a bright and polite brony-themed fairy tale, and end up getting served Call of Cthulhu in fantasy drag, there's a serious mismatch between expectation and reality that will  probably disappoint somebody if not everybody. (I know I'd be disappointed if any of my players ever wanted to play a brony fairy tale, unless it was some kind of satirical short-term joke.) This is also a good time to set the stage on what kind of game it's going to be; if they expect to be led around by the nose in an adventure path environment, and you're expecting to run a hexcrawl sandbox that you just drop them in with no direction—again, mismatch. Spell it out. Although my brief didn't address this, because my gameplay style is such that I wouldn't really know this right off the bat, the scope of the campaign might be good to spell out too. Are you meeting once a week for three hours at a time, and going from 1st to 10th level over the course of two years? Or are you meeting as you can, and wrapping up the campaign in 10-12 sessions or so regardless of level? Or something else entirely?

This document doesn't have to (and couldn't really be expected to) do all things for all people, but it needs to establish enough context that the players feel like they can generate characters and get started playing with confidence that they know what they're doing and what the campaign is going to be like. There will probably be questions and clarifications asked for. That's OK. You've got time before you actually start playing, either through email as you're gearing up for the first session, or during the first part of the session when you're doing set-up and not playing yet.

As I said, I actually like the concept of the session zero, but in the case of a Dark Heritage game, it only needs take a portion of the first session, and you can still get a good half to three-quarters of a regular session in afterwards. Or, at least that's my estimation for how long it'll take players to create their characters and go through the full chargen routine. The options are simple and somewhat limited compared to full-bore D&D, so there's little reason to agonize over choices. This isn't unique to my game, of course—playing a lot of Old School games like OD&D, or an emulator like Swords & Wizardry would give you the same experience, and you could probably pull it off with a B/X emulator too. And outside of the D&D-o-sphere, there's loads of games that are rules-lite enough to do this as well. In fact, they may be more common than the alternative. 

When everyone's there and the Mt. Dew is broken out, and people are happily snacking and chatting, you start them building their characters. This shouldn't be a secretive thing; they can talk with each other about how to do it. Although some people think that a balanced party is super essential, I'm strongly of the opinion that it's passive-aggressive to make the game punish the players for not making the characters that the GM wants them to, so I'll make that clear. That said, most players still probably want to know what the rest of the group is thinking of, and it will have an impact on how they make their characters too.

After characters are all made and equipped, Dark Heritage makes sure that they go through a little minigame, if you will, where they tie their characters together so that they're not just random strangers. I got this system years ago from FATE, and I think it works very well. It's officially part of the Dark Heritage chargen system now. Fiasco has a system that could be ported over that works even better, although it's more time consuming and involved, which is a good reason not to do it, unless interparty tension and secrets and dramatic revelations is something that you particularly want to emphasize.

At this point, I'll probably call a break, chat with the players about their characters, let them noodle around with some backstory elements if they want to take a few minutes doing that, encourage them that if they do I'll find the most interesting and fun way that I can to be sure and integrate that into the game as it goes on, and maybe pull groups aside of everyone who picked a specific patron so I can give them a bit more detail about what they are asking for and what they say to the characters. Not to mention letting the characters ask any questions before it all starts as part of that backstory.

And then, everyone sits back down, and I tell them to roll for initiative. Well, I'm just kidding (maybe). I may not start the game in media res with a combat, but regardless of how I start, the game starts, and we've still got (presumably) a couple of hours at least of our regular game session time to get the game kicked off.

Anyway, that's how I'd do it if I were to run this in the next little bit. Some of this stuff only works because of the type of system that I use and its specific Spartan structure in terms of mechanics and character definition. Next time I come back to this topic, I'll talk a little bit about how I'd plan this campaign to go, and some "fronts", like I mentioned in the last post, that I'd develop for it.