It's A Marathon Rather Than A Sprint: Why I Will Always Champion The "Forever Campaign"

Trawling back through his archives recently, I found myself agreeing with the sage wisdom of Grognardia's James Maliszewski, in his pontifications on a subject near and dear to my heart: the desirability of long-running campaigns.

I've mentioned a number of times on this blog my personal white whale: my dream of an open-ended "forever campaign", which I have long-considered the definitive expression of our hobby (certainly where Dungeons & Dragons-style games are concerned).

Inspired by the early practitioners of our art (from Gary Gygax's Greyhawk via David Hargrave's Arduin to Dave Arneson's Blackmoor), I'd always felt this was how the game was meant to be played.

Characters should live, grow old, and die (either in battle or in the comfort of their own keep) during the run of a campaign, but the world always carries on. Characters have long and storied careers, then retire, raise castles and families, become legends, but the world always carries on. 

The world shouldn't 'end' when a particular adventure ends (unless, of course, it's an apocalyptic adventure such as I concocted for the Tuesday Knights in The Chronicles of Cidri).

Modern campaigns, to me, feel like they have a story to tell and once it's told, it's time to pack things up and move on to another game.

For instance, while I loved playing my human fighter Syr Edvard in Simon's Dungeons & Dragons 5e Curse of Strahd campaign, we knew from the moment we stumbled through the Mists into Ravenloft we were destined to ultimately confront the vampire lord Strahd and try to free the land from his grasp. 

Us and the thousands of other gamers who have - and will have in the future - played through this campaign book, all following roughly the same story.

The details may vary, both in the plot and how the character's react, but, ultimately we all have a single primary objective.

The current crop of campaigns from Wizards are designed to take characters from 1st to 20th level, in a compressed period of time (10 to 18 months of weekly games, I believe), and then those characters go away, and new characters are "designed" (not generated)  for the next book-length campaign.

Ultimately, we are telling the story that Wizards wants us to tell. And that's okay, if that's how you want to play Dungeons & Dragons. And a lot of people do, I get that.

These are blockbuster movies, whereas my gaming interest lies more in the direction of the on-going soap opera, a marathon rather than a sprint.

I look at Robert Wardhaugh's famous four-decade spanning campaign, and the original campaigns I mentioned above, and that's what I want a piece of.

I like the idea of a sprawling, living, setting where the characters create their own story, rather than characters being created for a story.

I, again, cite my own Chronicles of Cidri as a small example of what I have in mind: when I began that campaign (taking over the reins from Pete a few sessions in), I had no end goal in mind, there was no set objective for the characters. A string of events - all driven by the player-characters (knowingly or unknowingly) - led to the final apocalyptic battle and the destruction of the world.

If Clare's character hadn't fallen under a certain curse and then hadn't chosen to trust the untrustworthy Witch of The Woods the campaign - and the world - would have turned out a lot different.

James pulled out a brilliant quote from 'noisms' of Monsters and Manuals:

"We need long campaigns. We need to sit down with the same group of people on a regular basis over the course of years, telling the kind of stories which require concentration and thought and, above all, loyalty; stories which gain their own momentum through peaks and troughs, ebbs and flows, ups and downs and ins and outs; stories in which the events which happen matter because they have a context and a background and an unknown future waiting to be discovered. We don't need the inconsequential frippery of the one-shot; we need time."

However, 'noisms' also wraps up his own commentary on the need for long campaigns, thus:

"Almost everything worth doing, knowing, reading, hearing, feeling or saying in life has the character of being unobtainable via shortcuts except in a form which diminishes both you and it. Why would you expect RPGs to be any different?"

While I have been known to enjoy an odd one-shot as a palate-cleanser, a way to explore new and different rules ideas, I want my players' characters to become enmeshed in their game-world, there to live and breathe, rather than drive one single plot forward at breakneck speed.

In his article, James said:

"A multi-year campaign is, I think, the ideal form of most roleplaying games ... and by "ideal," I don't mean some unattainably lofty goal but rather the most desirable and satisfying version of this type of entertainment."

I realise my time on this Earth is finite, I'm heading towards my sixtieth birthday later this year, and I'm plagued with a host of health issues that fate has foisted upon me.

If I'm lucky I have the time - and energy - left in me for one last, massive, sprawling campaign in the manner I aspire to. 

This is why I remain staunchly zealous (almost certainly to an annoying degree at times) about protecting the Tuesday Knights' precious, monthly gaming slots.

I'm still quite adamant that while we are bound to "one RPG session a month" (meaning a maximum of 12 a year, and we rarely achieve that for sundry health, family, and work reasons) I want to play (or, more crucially, run) something with the potential to become this kind of open-ended "forever campaign".

I'd love to see characters invested in something other than an "overarching plot", putting something back into the game world, be it building a castle or a dam, seizing a crown and struggling with the mantle of rulership, getting married, growing their dynasties etc

There would still be the grand expeditions, the megadungeons to loot, the Big Bads to slay, but between all this the characters would have lives, dreams, aspirations, passions, and growth that might not be measured in experience points, but would certainly make their personal stories more rounded and interesting.

Of course, I realise if I'd just stuck to my guns when we launched the Tuesday Knights, back in 2008, and kept my initial Castles & Crusades campaign going, there's every possibility that I would be running such a "forever campaign" as I dream about. 

But there's no point having regrets over my stupidity back in the day. At least, it was a learning experience. Albeit rather late in life.

I'll let James have the final word on the subject of extended campaigns, quoting one of the founding fathers of our glorious, and occasionally frustrating, hobby:

"Indeed, I'd argue this is the way D&D at least was intended to be played, as Gary Gygax states in the foreword to OD&D: "it is the campaign for which these rules are designed."

MORE THAN JUST A GAME, IT'S THE GAME!

With its rich storytelling, elaborate campaigns and characters, and immersive fantasy worlds, Dungeons & Dragons is the ultimate tabletop role-playing game.

In 1982, at just 14 years old, Dungeon Master Robert Wardhaugh began a campaign that’s still running many years later.

Based out of his basement in London, Canada, players from across the country gather to take part in one of the longest-running D&D campaigns in history. But how do you play it? And most importantly, how do you play it well?

In this episode, Great Big Story returns to Robert’s legendary game to explore its evolution, the secrets to a campaign’s longevity, and what it takes to play (and master) D&D for life.

Except, of course, it isn't really Dungeons & Dragons per se, as Robert Wardhaugh has replaced pretty much every rule from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - ship of Theseus-style - with his own personalised houserules.

Not that that, in any way, detracts from the brilliance, and enduring appeal, of this campaign - I'm immensely envious of pretty much every aspect of the group's set-up!

The Game, as Robert's campaign is known, now has its own website (here) and Patreon (here).

This latest episode of Great Big Story is an update on its first visit to Robert's world in 2017, which you can watch here:

History professor Robert Wardhaugh has been continually running this campaign for more than four decades - almost certainly the longest continuous roleplaying campaign.

He began at a teenager in 1982 with his schoolfriends and now, four decades later, has a pool of around 50 players to call upon, both around his native Canada and in the UK.

The adventures, which so far have covered more than 600 years of in-game history, take place on an alternate Earth that includes multiple real-world pre-gunpowder civilisations, as well as Robert E Howard's Hyboria in place of South America, and Tolkien's Middle-Earth (400 years after the destruction of The One Ring) as a bonus continent.

The game has been houseruled from its beginning, and now only bears a passing mechanical resemblance to modern Dungeons & Dragons (I get the impression Robert has been, forever, cherry-picking bits from all kinds of rules systems as he discovers them over the years).

In an interview with the official Dungeons & Dragons podcast in 2016 (see below), Robert revealed an interesting ruling that has shaped the nature of the campaign: death means death.

If a character is killed, the player leaves the game... unless the character has a family member who can inherit the dead player-character's mantle.

This has seen some player-character lineages extend to 20 generations so far!

(Note: there are other ways round this 'harsh' ruling - such as taking over a member of another player's family).

Averaging one or two sessions a week, usually of four or five hours, Robert has pledged to run this campaign for as long as he is physically able.

As well as mountains of custom terrain, he has a tens of thousands of miniatures to help bring his obviously prodigious storytelling to life for his lucky players.

Gamesmaster Robert Wardhaugh discusses his campaign - aka The Game - with Dragon Talk hosts Greg Tito and Shelly Mazzanoble.

You can watch The Twitch videos Robert mentions in the interview here:

Wired produced another mini-documentary about The Game (above).