Know Your Story

The most successful campaign is one that tells a good story. That’s really what role-playing is. The game master and players collaborate to tell the story of the player characters and their adventures. Without a story, your players are just bouncing dice and calling out stats. The story gives characters direction and motivation. It gives your players a feeling of accomplishment as they come to different milestones along the story arc, and keeps them coming back for more.

Every good story has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Typically, stories start out with a moderate amount of action and intrigue to get us hooked, then slows down a bit to give us a chance to get to know the characters. Your campaign should start out the same way. Throw your characters into harms way at the outset to get them working together as a group. After the initial crisis, you can give your players opportunities to let their characters personalities come through.

The beginning is also where your players discover what is expected of them in the campaign. How you accomplish this is a matter of individual style, but it needs to be done. If your players can’t figure out what they’re supposed to do, the campaign will quickly stagnate and the fun, along with your players, will be gone.

The middle of the story is where the characters do the most legwork. It’s the part where they take on the hurdles that stand between them and the ending. The characters search the world, raise an army, find an item, develop a cure, gather information, or whatever else is necessary to traverse from the beginning to the ending of the story. It can take as much or as little time as you want, but it has to be there. Without it, there’s no sense of achieving a goal.

The challenges to your players in the middle of the campaign should steadily rise, just like in a good story. Your characters are becoming more proficient, and your story should reflect this. The intensity and immediacy should continue to build toward the ultimate climax of the ending.

The ending of the campaign is the payoff for the players. It’s where all their hard work comes to fruition in the final struggle of good versus evil, and should be suitably stupendous. If the ending is resolved too quickly, your players will feel cheated. Nobody wants to struggle through life-and-death encounters only to come up against a low-level punk who keeps fumbling his weapon. The final encounter has to be worth the effort of getting there. It also must be the characters’ victory. It was their blood, sweat, and tears that got them through. They deserve more than just standing by watching as some NPC comes to the rescue and conquers the bad guy with little or no assistance from the players.

Know Your World

Your world is the setting for all things in your story. You must know it better than anyone else. Depending on the size of your campaign, your world may consist of just a few villages and wilderness areas. It may encompass vast continents, different planets, and alternate planes of reality. There may be mountains, plains, deserts, oceans, arctic regions, tropical isles, or anything else you can imagine. It is your job as game master to know every important detail of your world.

The key here is important details. You don’t have to know every variety of plant or animal life that could possibly exist. Unless there is some bearing on your plot, it doesn’t matter if there are seven different types of fox in the forest outside of town. Such detail is just not important to the overall story. The important details are the things that will affect your characters in their travels. What are the people in that remote mountain village like? Do bandits prey on unsuspecting victims along the highway? Are the wild animals in the forest likely to defend their territory against intruders, or ignore them? Has the relative of a defeated enemy sworn a blood-oath against the party? Of course, it’s impractical to come up with a complete history of every person populating your world, but if they’re going to have an encounter with your players, you should know a little bit about them and why they’re acting the way they do.

Your world should not be just static background scenery that never changes. Your players are moving their characters through your world, so it’s reasonable to assume that other people might move around in your world as well. As the characters build a reputation, others will talk about it. Make use of that fact to help build a richer experience for your players. Having to explain who they are and what they’re doing to the gate guard of every city your characters come to gets dull after a while. It’s more fun, and more gratifying to the ego, if occasionally the town welcomes them with open arms, having heard about the party from other travelers. It’s a lot more interesting if the party is greeted with a barrage of arrows for the same reason. Your world is a dynamic place, and you should take advantage of that.

Know Your Players

It won’t take long for you to know what your players like and don’t like. A successful campaign depends on a game master that can provide players what they want while moving the story forward. Players who enjoy smashing their way through hordes of villainous monsters aren’t likely to enjoy a session spent trying to puzzle their way through a trap-filled dungeon. Players who like investigating and questioning various NPCs to find their way won’t appreciate flashing neon signs pointing them towards the next encounter.

Unfortunately, it’s rare to get a group of players together who like or dislike exactly the same things. If you’re like most game masters, this means you’re going to have to create a careful mix to be sure that everyone has a good time. If you put too much emphasis on battles, your puzzlers will soon lose interest and zone out. If you spend the entire session negotiating for the missing piece of a treasure map, your action heroes will find something else to do. The job of a game master is to keep things moving and interesting for everyone. You’ll probably never please all of the players all of the time, but if everyone can find something to enjoy in the session and the non-interesting parts are relatively short, then everyone should feel happy about the game.

In addition to knowing what your players like, you also need to know what your players want to do. You should be able to tell what your players are thinking from the conversation around the table. Pay attention to what they’re saying. They’re telling you what they want to do, whether they know it or not. If you can work their wants into your storyline, you’ve got a much better chance of your campaign being enjoyed.

Know Yourself

The only person who knows if you’ll make a good game master is you. Nobody else knows if you’re going to have enough time, imagination, or resources to keep a campaign running. If you don’t have the time to create a rich world for your players, you’re doing them a disservice.

Knowing your capabilities and limitations is essential to crafting a successful campaign. Not every campaign has to be a blockbusting epic that goes on for months or years. If you don’t have the ability to juggle all of the details of a huge setting, then narrow the scope of your story to a small region, a few towns, or perhaps even a single village. It’s not the size of your campaign that matters, it’s what you do with it. A well crafted campaign that covers only two or three sessions is better than an ill-thought monstrosity that drags on for months without purpose or direction.

A good game master also needs to be ready to abandon plans at a moments notice. Talk to any author, and you’ll find out that their stories rarely end up where they originally intended. The successful authors are the ones who accept this and flow with the story rather than trying to force the story to follow the path they’ve laid out. The same is true for successful campaigns. It’s difficult for a game master to put a lot of work into planning the perfect session, only to have the players go off in a completely different direction at the outset. A good game master should be able to roll with the changes rather than try to force the players onto your predefined path. If you need to, call a quick break while you work out the details. Your players won’t mind. They’ll appreciate you taking the effort to work with their wishes, because that makes them active participants rather than just spectators.

Are you up for the challenge?

It’s a lot of work to be the game master of a successful campaign. You’ve got many things to keep track of. You have to balance the wants and needs of your players with the goals of the story. You’ve got to plan ahead for the different eventualities that will come to pass. You need a thick skin to handle the complaints when things don’t go the way the players hoped, and a humble attitude to keep from gloating when things go exactly as planned. You have to be willing to watch hours of hard work go to waste when your campaign unexpectedly changes directions. You are responsible for making sure your players have fun. That’s really the mark of a successful campaign: it’s fun. So how about it? Are you up to the challenge?