DNAphil

A few weeks ago I wrote an article for Treasure Tables about Great Campaigns. In my career as a GM, I have had about 6 campaigns that I would truly consider to be great. By great, I think of a game that runs for more than a year and becomes an obsession with the players. In most cases after I run a great campaign with a particular system, I cannot run another campaign in the same game system; making me wonder, can you ever go home again?

The first great campaign that I ever ran, was an Amber diceless game. I ran it in the summer of 1992, while home from college and played it twice a week for three months until the Fall semester started. While it did not last a calendar year, I did get about six months of play in half the time. It was the convergence of the system, the setting, the players, their characters, and my own excitement to run diceless for the first time that vaulted this game into “great” status. Looking back, it is all I really remember from that summer, and even today, the players who were part of that game speak fondly about it.

Two years later, I decided to run a new Amber campaign for some of the same players who played in ‘92. It wasn’t the same. I am sure the players fully enjoyed the game, and we did play through the summer, but the campaign was not “great.” For me something was missing. It was Amber as I had remembered it the first time, but it was different. It was not new anymore for me or for the players. Everyone knew not to trust Fiona, and never to arm wrestle Gerard. The players had also changed. In the first campaign, they were content to explore the world as it was presented in the books, but in the second campaign, they wanted to dig deeper into the metaphysics of how the world worked. Everyone wanted to tinker with the main powers, and everyone wanted a Ghostwheel of his/her own. In doing so, something of the original mystique of the game was lost.

In 1997 I got the first edition of Conspiracy X, at GenCon. I ran a 2-year long campaign full of conspiracy and aliens. My players started as ordinary government agents and the group emerged two years later as one of the lynchpins holding the world together. Along the way they discovered the various aliens, learned their plans, and uncovered and thwarted their conspiracies. This game also achieved “great” status and was a major part of my life for those two years. Like that first Amber campaign, it was one that they talk about to this day.

After the Conspiracy X game ended, I ran a few other games, but nothing great, when one of my players suggested we play Consipracy X again. I agreed, wanting to reach another great campaign. We kept all the original players and recruited some additional players to join us. We made a new campaign world and started playing. Again, something was off. The seasoned players knew what was coming, for they had previously discovered all the cool powers in the last campaign. They did not want to be just plain government agents, they wanted to be alien hybrids, magicians, powerful psychics. The campaign became bloated with odd character types in an attempt to make it feel different from the first. Oh it was different; it never made it past 4 sessions.

After that, my group and I came to the conclusion that for the really great campaigns, you can’t go home again. That is, you cannot play a new campaign without some level of contamination from the previous one, thus diminishing the new campaign. For the most part I have found that to be true, with a few exceptions. So I started to think of why this may occur. Are there ways around it, or are there some games that are immune to it? I have come up with some ideas.

Games that are based on player discovery of the campaign world are the worst to return to. There are many games where the inner workings of the campaign world are not known to the players at the onset of the game, and are to be discovered through play. In those games the setting almost acts like major NPC and plays a central role in the game. Amber diceless is a good example. The premise is that you are playing a child of one of the Elder Amberites. The GM is encouraged to keep the players in the dark about the workings of the Elders and the greater powers. Through play the characters discover the machinations of the Elders and learn who not to trust at all and who not to trust a little less (there is no trust in Amber). Likewise, in Conspiracy X, the motivations and aspects of the alien races are initially kept from the players. Through investigation during play, these things are revealed. These kinds of games are the hardest to go back to because once played, the players have learned the secrets and are contaminated. No ban on metagaming can prevent this contamination from creeping into the next campaign. One way to combat that is to then do a remix of the world, where you change the setting around, to throw the players off, but in my experience that often comes off feeling very strange to both the GM and the players, because they spend their entire time making comparisons between the two campaigns.

Nevertheless, there are games that I think can survive being played over and over. Dungeons & Dragons is the best example. Even if you are playing in the same campaign world, the setting of the game is not a central element of the game. The real core of D&D is the economy of gold and magic. The setting is left somewhat vague so that you can have completely different games without it feeling like it has been done before. There are times when players may remember a specific monster or something, but overall each campaign feels new and unique. I think this is one of the reasons that D&D has survived as long as it has, and why you hear of so many gamers saying they have played just D&D for 20+ years.

I also think that games that focus on exploration have better chances for return play. A “Star Trek” game (pick one, there have been so many) or something like “Traveler” (pick one, there have been even more) also re-play well. They are games built on exploration. “Star Trek” has a pretty fixed universe, where “Traveler” has looser universe, but the common element of exploration allows for the creation of different worlds and situations that give both games the ability to be played over and over.

So can you ever go home again? I guess that depends on what game you call home. For me, I know there is a shelf full of books in my game room that I will always love and have may fond memories of running, but that I will never sit and play with my group again. In some ways it is depressing, because I would love to be part of those campaigns again, but part of me cannot wait until I can take another game and put it up on that shelf.

What games do you call home, and have you tried to return to them?