Riffing on the subject of dungeon scale, there’s the larger consideration of TTRPG campaign scales in general. You can busily write out two thousand room keys set in the middle of a hexmap that accurately puts a continent the size of Australia down to six-mile hexes, but if you can’t get a coherent group together for longer than three months weekly, then in fact that is your campaign’s scope. And as much as I appreciate the ideal the OSR’s playing to find out the story, there’s something inherently unsatisfying about an abortive campaign that never comes to any conclusion. Just like writing a dungeon the wrong size for a given theme, it’s a mistake to bring an adventure to a given group that doesn’t match their schedule.
The easiest adventure to schedule but hardest to properly write is the good old One Shot. Often synonymous with a lair in a D&D-derived game, the one-shot is something that’s typically slotted for 3-5 hours. Almost everybody can make a one-time commitment to a single session, but the onus then lies much more heavily on the adventure’s writer, and the game master running it. To properly “do D&D” (or whatever derivative) in all its parts there’s a real challenge in designing something that small that still permits exploration, discovery, challenge, and advancement. Just like how there are only so many ways to draw a lair, there are only so many ways you can run a one-shot. Many wonderful game systems are only ever designed to be run as a one-shot. I love 2-3 games of DREAD (that Jenga tower horror game) a year, always have a great time, but it’d be nuts to try and make DREAD into something with continuity. Horror as a genre plays well with small scopes, but I’ve run and played plenty of systems in every genre for a single con game; I’m not really talking about these here. Like the bigger proper dungeon, there’s also the bigger “small campaign” or module. Definitions are fuzzy, but I’d say a good satisfying campaign minimum is something done over ~5 sessions, so call it two months’ playtime. There’s enough room there for an arc to the characters’ progression, both mechanically and emotionally as the players bond with the people they’re pretending to be. D&D-derivatives are built with leveling up in mind, and that’s hard to capture in a single session’s play. Just like a full dungeon is big enough to showcase a wide variety of tricks and traps, the module is typically enough to really explore around a live in the world a while. It’s harder to get adults to schedule regular times even for a two-month commitment, but that’s also a timescale where even millennials seem to be able control their calendars for without major life changes. It’s finally where your TTRPG really starts to shine over board or video games. It’s not until you hit the true campaign, a year or more of progress, that you can properly call yourself a hobbyist though. If you’re playing week in, week out, planning around sports seasons, holidays, and work travel, keeping continuity with a consistent group of other players...now at last you’re experiencing D&D the way it’s meant to be played. Not only do you come to know the characters and the world they inhabit, but given the way our minds work, in a long campaign you begin to identify with them, to form long term memories of your adventures. It’s a beauty of thing, if done well, but it’s got to be something that everybody prioritizes in their actual real lives, an incredibly difficult thing. Despite all of this, nobody writing or running D&D should forget the fact that the experience is broken down into discrete sessions. It's a lot easier to commit to a year-long game if every single time you sit down to play your brain comes away with a satisfying narrative. Every campaign is a series of one-shots, in the end.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWeblog of Ben Gibson, the main writer and publisher of Coldlight Press. Archives
May 2024
Categories
All
|