Happy Gary Gygax Day everyone! Today Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of D&D alongside Dave Arneson and so-called "Father of Tabletop Gaming," would be 77 years old. He developed D&D first as an offshoot of Chain Mail, his more historically accurate medieval tabletop war game, which he and his associates eventually developed into it's own fully-fledged separate system where individual characters and stories were more important than tactics, though tactics still were the focus of its combat.
For the past three years I have played D&D, at first as a DM and then as a player. My very first world has been retroactively dubbed Titanica, after the gigantic mechanical titans left over from the war that served as the basis for the worlds history, and which would have been a greater focus of the campaign if I had known then what I know now. As it is, the titans only showed up a couple of times, and were mostly forgotten window dressing, though later campaigns (my college roommates and I have carried this same world through each campaign) have made more references to them and played up their importance and cultural history far more.
So for the next couple of posts, I'm going to kick off a renewed effort at blogging with an exploration of how to keep a campaign focused. This is an issue for many groups, and is the reason why a campaign may never end meaningfully; the stories are too sprawling and their worlds too closely covered for everything to come together for a satisfying ending.
My first piece of advice is this: always go for a smaller setting if you can fit a story into it, even at the cost of the larger setting it is nested within. Many people tend to go for two major plots, the Lord of the Rings and the Indiana Jones movie, for their campaign. In each of these campaigns, the players destinations are constantly shifting and travel becomes a conundrum for new DM's, as they realize that they've begun to lose track of why the players are adventuring or going to the places they visit. The social contract of players to "go with it" becomes a crutch, with a bunch of strangers seeking golden idols from forgotten tombs to fight powerful enemies they know nothing about in adventures they can't justify in-character until later down the road, probably making enemies out of every sociopolitical faction from East to West because the DM needed to justify including every enemy stat block and every culture.
Interestingly, Indiana Jones isn't actually like this. The Indy films usually only take place in a couple of locations foreign to the audience per film, and spend a decent amount of time dealing with those countries unique threats before moving on, usually to chase an enemy who the heroes are already invested in defeating from previous encounters in the area. Star Wars is the same way; for a world filled with so many planets, each trilogy only touched on a small handful of politically or strategically vital worlds, hopping between them only to continue a grand chase or highlight disparate scenes of victory and loss around the war front.
In my case, and in the cases of other new DM's I'm sure, I didn't do that. I created a massive list of countries and cultures and enemies to incorporate into a campaign that was pegged as one year long, and ended up getting lost and rewriting a lot of it because I figured a year was enough to read an epic, and thus long enough for a similarly lengthy campaign at one 4 hour session a week.
Now I know that's not true. So here is my advice: When you create your own campaign, zoom in on a small area of your world that really excites you, and stay there. That might be simple advice for a lot of people, but I'm going to continue diving into it in the next couple of weeks as I get this place up and running again. I'll be going into some existing published adventures for 5th Edition, and my own misadventures developing my worlds of Titanica and Starfall.
For now though, happy gaming, everyone, and long live Gygax!
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