Not Yo Mama’s Basement: Going on Campaign Part 2-Avoiding Pitfalls

Welcome to another installment of Not Yo Mama’s Basement and we’re back talking about campaigns, specifically those blasted pitfalls which can bring about the premature ending of your campaign before its time.

A campaign is already a herculean task at times and keeping it from derailing can prove difficult, especially if you make it harder for yourself than you need to. Things like player schedules, life events, and development flaws can all be a source of your campaign’s downfall, and sometimes it fails for reasons that are completely out of your control, so don’t be disheartened if that happens to you. However, here is a list of a few things that have the potential to bring your campaign to a screeching halt, and tips for how you can avoid these problems.

1. Making the campaign rules too complicated.

This is a big one. You have a binder filled with rules that, if performed correctly, will summon up the most immersive and intense story that your players have ever seen. All they have to do is remember to check in every third prime day of the month if they won the previous game, and every day divisible by seven if they lost (trick question, all days are divisible by seven if you include fractions!). Then they just need to roll thirteen D10’s and they’ll find out what perks they can choose for the next battle they’ll fight!

This is a rabbit hole for many people who like to spend their idle waking hours coming up with abstract rules to represent chains of causality represented by our little toy soldiers being pushed over neoprene mats and styrofoam hills. Ask any dedicated DM and they’ll tell you the same. It can be very easy to come up with an overly elaborate system that we think perfectly represents the logistics of an army on campaign. But this game is literally a case of less is more.

Kings of War is such a great game because of its simplicity and cleanliness of ruleset, and the same should be applied to anything used as a campaign for that system. Limit yourself to requiring no more than 3-5 rules or actions that players must perform after each game, and these are simple actions. If playing a map campaign, having them place their token, or flag, or whatever on the area that they just conquered would count as 1 action. Having them roll for a reward off a table for victory would be a second action. Lastly, having them fill out a form, either online or in person, to report to you would be a third action. These three actions are pretty simple and easy to follow and they allow you a way to reward players and track the action of the campaign. On the plus side, it’s way less work for you!

Campaigns with a lot of rules and setups are a lot of extra work that most people don’t need, especially you as the organizer. If you start to get burned out trying to keep track of everything, then how do you think your players are going to feel trying to keep track of your rules?

2. Making the campaign run too long.

This is another pitfall you can avoid in the planning stage. It can be tempting to think about all the awesome moments you’re going to experience during your campaign and want to extend that out over months. I can tell you now, however, that this is a bad idea.

Short campaigns are a great way to build experience and memories and are far more likely to succeed than ones that continue to plug along after its momentum is spent. It’s better to leave your audience wanting more than to have them leave you before you’re through. In that regard I would put the limit of a campaign, ideally, to be around 8 weeks. Any more than that and you have the risk of running out of steam. Of course, each group is different and a longer campaign may suit yours, but I would take a good long look at your schedule and make sure you have the drive to make it through however long you schedule this campaign to be, and then ask yourself if your players can sustain that much time, too.

3. Not having an established method for players to report their battles.

This one seems like an obvious one, but if you don’t have a way for players to report their battles that is uniform and spelled out, then players will quickly lose interest in your campaign.

Make sure that when you come up with this method that it makes allowance for creative responses but doesn’t require them. My usual method for having players report is having them take 3 pictures on their phone and write one eventful thing that happened in each of their turns, even if it’s “Everyone advanced their maximum amount” on turn 1. This is a bare bones battle report that can be made more elaborate if they decide to. The more entertaining reports you can post as examples for the other players, and can give them extra rewards that you outline beforehand like giving extra victory points if the battle report is more detailed, or theatrically embellished, etc.

The Edge of the Abyss campaign supplement is an excellent example of this. Players were given more influence over an area the more detailed their reports were, but they could gain something for simply reporting battle size and who won. But bigger battle reports were rewarded with more influence and better results.

In the end it boils down to this: Have a clear idea as to how you want your players to report and how you are going to reward their reports. Make sure it is clear to your players what you expect of them and what they can expect from you.

4. Not having an end game in mind.

Every story has an ending. Every movie has a climax. Every campaign should have something planned as a finale for their players. Whether that’s building to a massive free for all battle, or a king of the hill scenario, or even building to a mini tournament where the campaign influences the battle of the tournament and the player who wins the tournament is crowned king of whatever it was the campaign was fighting over.

The point is that players should be building themselves toward something. They should be anticipating the end of the campaign and that ending should be a reward to the players for participating in whatever form that takes.

This should be the ending of the story, or the conquest of the region. Every steady player should feel as though they’ve completed a journey in some way. This doesn’t have to be elaborate or fancy, but it should feel like the ending of a good book and should be something the players look forward to from the start so that they know what they are building towards.

This one can be a bit tricky to pull off at times, so don’t be discouraged if your first few campaigns fall a bit flat in this category. Learn from each time you do this and you’ll soon get the hang of how to temper player expectations with realistic goals to produce something truly memorable. Ask yourself what kind of campaign you would like to be in and build yours towards that.

5. Not being willing to put your foot down.

People can be whiny little punks at times. Sometimes you have a bad apple in a bunch of otherwise great players. Sometimes you have to enforce the rules that you set down for the sake of the fun of other people. Even in a completely friendly group there can be things that just will not jive and it is your responsibility as the game master to ensure that these hiccups don’t ruin the fun for other players, or yourself.

Go into this with a clear idea of what things you will or will not compromise on and stick to your guns on that. This does not mean you shouldn’t be willing to read the signs and realize when you’ve made a bad choice and correct it, but it does mean that you are the organizer and ultimately the final call on anything is yours. If you let them, some players will pull away the reigns of a campaign and derail the whole thing if you are not careful, and diplomatic, in dealing with them quickly and precisely.

This does not mean be a jerk about it, either. Nor does this mean that only you have good ideas or only you can be right. Tact is a huge part of running an event like this and it is a skill that is perfected over time, and part of being tactful is being willing to admit when you’re wrong, and sticking to your guns when you’re right. But you need to know that it is possible that you will have to talk to some players at times, and if you are already familiar with the players in your group you may already have an idea about which ones that you should expect to have to do this with.

Don’t be afraid of confronting behavior or imbalances in the campaign that are hurting the fun for your players. It may be a bit uncomfortable, but in the long run will make your campaigns and group better for it. Remember that the end-all-be-all of your campaign, and your group, is to simply have fun.

So those are some of the more common problems I’ve discovered in running my campaigns and the difference between success and failure is usually directly related to my planning in these areas. What about you? Do you have any suggestions or pitfalls that you’ve encountered in running events or campaigns? Let me know what you think and what advice you’d give in the comments below, and we’ll look for you on the next installment where we will be talking about what a campaign can look like when it’s executed well!