Campaign Structures
In addition to “game structures” and “narrative structures” and “scenario structures”, the other structure we talk about in TTRPGs is the “campaign structure”.
One Definition of Campaign Structure
I propose that scenario structures can become so big that they end up defining how most of the game is structured. This is what we may call the “campaign structure” - which is sometimes mentioned in the Alexandrian’s structures series.
Campaign structures are mentioned in that series as super macro procedures, such as “dungeon-crawl, get loot, return to town, repeat” as the basis of old-school D&D. Others identify and create similar gameplay loops that define a campaign - take this example from MindStormPress, for instance. Any one of the steps in these macro procedures might take an entire session or more to play out.
These large scale procedures often arise as a cycle of play used to define or explore the premise of the game. By “premise of the game”, I mean that when we agree on what kind of game we want to play together, we often decide on a broad fictional situation as the backdrop for it – and that fictional situation will frequently point us towards a set of events and activities that will be explored recurrently. These recurring activities, in turn, often happen in a general sort of cycle that informs what the rhythm of play will look like. Together, these things create the structure of a campaign.
It appears that we talk about campaign structures here, then, as both the general premise of what players can expect their characters will be doing as part of the game and a rhythm of play that tends to happen again and again. Thus, I’ll call this the “premise + rhythm” definition of campaign structure.
Another Definition of Campaign Structure
Elsewhere, however, the same Justin Alexander defines campaign structures differently, as “how scenarios are organized”, citing as possible campaign structures things like ‘one-shots’, ‘episodic campaigns’ and ‘sandbox campaigns’. As such, he seems to be defining campaign structures by the way individual scenarios will be presented to the players. Two examples: an episodic campaign has the GM presenting one scenario for the players, and then another once they’re done with the first; whereas a sandbox campaign would have a number of scenarios for players to choose from or the possibility of creating one wholesale.
He also tries to include into this definition the moment when the GM preps the content for the game. I.e., whether a GM creates all (or a big portion of) the campaign before ever starting the game (“holistic prep”); or just the chunks they expect the players to interact with next, one session at a time (“just-in-time prep”).
Let’s call this latter definition of campaign structures the “methods of prep” definition.
I’ll say right away that I don’t find this definition very compelling on its own – mostly because it seems too disjointed with the overall picture of “structures” that appears from comparing the other game structures Justin identifies (i.e. “GM rulings” and “scenario structures”), as well as my own understanding of them. In particular, unlike other structures, aspects of a campaign like being “episodic” or “a sandbox” don’t seem to inform GMs on what they should be prepping, only on how and when. Similarly, they don’t seem to inform the players on what scope and kind of actions and decisions the players should be making as part of the game, whereas the idea of campaign structure as a super zoomed-out scenario structure does.
At best, under this definition, a campaign structure defines the degree to which the players should be proactive in deciding their character’s overall objectives, but that is different from framing the players options. A “sandbox” campaign might tell players they should be proactive in deciding what they want to do, but it doesn’t tell them whether farming turnips is an adequate choice for this game – a “very big scenario structure” would, because it presents a premise that will either agree with that choice or not.
Whatever the case, this “methods of prep” definition of campaign structures doesn’t mesh well enough with the other forms of structure we’ve recognized so far.
“Premise + Rhythm” Campaign Structures
So, when I discuss campaign structures here, I’ll be mostly working off of the “premise + rhythm” definition, which I prefer. I do find it interesting to consider the “methods of prep” as one aspect of the “premise + rhythm” definition of campaign structures, however, since the way the GM preps and presents the organization of the scenario structures will inform the rhythm of play that is developed around them.
Now, I can see three (non-exclusive) ways in which these campaign rhythms get set: i) as expressly stated rules text of the game; ii) as a pattern that emerges from incentives baked into a system’s design, or; iii) as a pattern of action defined by the fictional premise itself.
An expressly stated rhythm would be something like Blades in the Dark explicit stringing of Scores and Downtime, as clearly distinguished play modes with bespoke rules for each, in the game text as a (loose) procedure.
A rhythm resulting from design incentives would be more like Mausritter requiring the PCs to bring the loot they get from adventuring back to a mouse community to gain XP, incentivizing players to intercalate adventures and short reprieves in towns, but not baking that rhythm into a formal procedure.
A pattern borne by the fictional premise itself would be, for instance, a campaign pitch where the PCs will be government agents that get sent on dangerous missions, which will likely form a rhythm around executing said missions - alternating missions and downtime, or around the different ‘stages’ of a typical mission (e.g. recon, plan, execution, evac).
Regardless of how exactly the broad rhythm of the campaign is defined, what matters is that it always seems to build significantly around the premise for the game - either its system or the (starting/general) fictional positioning of it.
Note that it isn’t only the fictional premise of the game that informs what the rhythm will be. The communication medium used to play, session length, frequency of play, player availability and retention, and probably many more factors besides can influence what the actual rhythm of play ends up being, since people will usually adjust how they play to conform to the physical constraints of the game to some extent. In fact, many of these might not end up being part of the initial pitch of the game, so lots of emerging factors will also affect the rhythm. But generally speaking, we try to imagine a broad kind of rhythm for the game when we decide to play together - some of what session 0 and campaign-pitching tools do is get people to align in what they imagine this general rhythm will be.
Another advantage I see in framing the campaign structure as a very big scenario structure is that this is more useful in helping GMs clearly see what the pitch of their campaign is and how it will translate into the moment to moment actual gameplay at the table. It also helps in bringing any mismatch between your premise and your imagined gameplay into focus!
If your pitch for the campaign is that players will be a travelling theatre troupe trying to bring joy to each town they visit, but you imagine (perhaps because of the system you’re using) that each session the players will be engaging in tactical combat, you’ll probably have to do some work in conciliating these two ideas, since one doesn’t flow naturally from the other. If each session the players were instead expected to get to know the townsfolks’ plights, devise a show that provides catharsis to their woes, and then move to the next town, that is much closer to actually fulfilling the campaign pitch once play actually starts.
Finally, in my mind the “premise + rhythm” definition creates more interesting questions around campaign structures.
I will now barrage you with a whole lot of them.
Questions I Have about Campaign Structures
How do we frame campaigns that change structures as they progress?
Consider the transition from bottom-rung dungeon-delvers to political leaders talked about in some old-school “donjon draygon” varieties, for instance. Is that more than one campaign structure (meaning they’re really two or more broadly different campaigns that are stitched together by continuity), or is it more useful to define it as a campaign structure that goes from one “arc” to another?
Note that these are only meaningful distinctions in this lens of campaign structures if the rhythm of play becomes significantly different as a result of the change in fictional positioning. If in the first “arc” of the campaign players are adventuring continuously just to make ends meet and their equipment logistics are a significant part of play, whereas in the second they are much more concerned with the politics of their surroundings, don’t bother tracking most resources and go out on much more select adventures, that is a significant change in the rhythm.
But if all the players do, no matter what their current resources and standing are, is “fight monster, collect reward, repeat”, never caring about resources, logistics or politics, then the campaign structure is the same throughout, even though the fictional context is ostensibly different.
Similarly, if the campaign has collapsed tiers of play, as Traverse Fantasy puts it - where a game features, from the start, all of the structures for activities that would, in another game, show up only after a certain ‘tier of play’ had been reached - that also might not be properly a change in the campaign structure. In the collapsed tiers situation, it’d be like all the ‘campaign arcs’ are getting played simultaneously, interweaving from one to the other, so they all are part of and affect the gameplay loop from the start.
How do groups negotiate and accept a change in campaign structure?
If the fictional circumstance completely changes, forcing the campaign structure to change with it, how do we handle that? What about when that change is meant to happen gradually and somewhat invisibly as play progresses? Who should be addressing this negotiation surrounding the campaign structure – the GM, the designers, the players?
As I’ve mentioned, having the game designers behind a rules text define a changing campaign structure is, surprisingly, a very old practice in the hobby, considering that it is also a somewhat unintuitive idea for how to build a game. And yet it seems somewhat natural once one considers the confluence of two factors that greatly inform most TTRPG design from the beginning: the prevalent power fantasy of becoming stronger, richer and more respected and the tactical infinity in a persistent fictional setting. Those two things together seem to strongly point in the direction of becoming an influential leader of some kind.
I do wonder how many groups actually play with significant campaign structure changes as part of their games. Certainly a not insignificant number of them do, particularly with games that expressly bake that change of pace into the rules system. But I don’t think any of my games, even my most long-lived ones, really featured a proper shake up to the campaign framework of this kind.
Then again, I also see a clear tension in the idea of completely changing the fundamental dynamics of play by changing your campaign structure - while it is deeply exciting and a powerful expression of the freedom offered in RPGs, it can also subvert the gameplay foundation upon which the fun had been built on so far. Changing campaign structures can be, therefore, a risky proposition - perhaps one with commensurate rewards, but in every case you’re breaking a gameplay loop that is already working in favor of something new.
Still, sometimes even when there isn’t a specific new avenue of play that changes the campaign structure (like domain-level management), the incremental increase in the PCs' powers or affordances alone can change the structure of the game enough for the table to notice. For D&D specifically, a lot has been said about the awkwardness of the transition from low to high-level play. There are plenty of tables that propose games with caps on whichever level, for a given edition, is understood to be the cut-off point where play starts getting significantly changed.
This means that even if the premise of the game hasn’t really changed, the increased power of the PCs allows them to tackle problems in completely different ways, changing the gameplay loop regardless. Meaning that while the premise is the same, the rhythm is not. Imagine the case where, instead of carefully exploring an unknown dark dungeon like they did at the start of the campaign, players later just scry the whole thing in advance and then make a beeline for the most valuable treasures. Still dungeon-delvers, but the way in which they go about is significantly different, changing the experience completely.
Do all campaigns have structures? And should they?
Or is there some benefit to keeping the structure undefined?
I personally find it hard to pick a campaign premise that doesn’t at least vaguely suggest a particular rhythm of play. Even very sandbox-y games tend to be structured around a rhythm of exploration of the sandbox itself, at least at the start - despite the open-endedness of what player goals can be, I think it would be weird for most sandbox games if the players decided to just hang around right where they started play and never venture beyond their hamlet, for instance. (Though I don’t doubt that at least some groups have actually managed to pull this off - never bet against the ttrpg community at large having tried something unusual in their games.)
How do we balance flexibility and specificity in campaign structures?
Should a good campaign structure be flexible enough that anything the players end up deciding to do fits somewhere in it? Or should they be more precise in the guidance they give players on what they will be doing for most of the game?
When you step outside of the bounds of the campaign premise, are you breaching a table agreement, or are you merely in uncharted territory, where the group must decide by themselves how things progress going forward?
This series of questions has to do with a trade-off I see between the benefits of a clear shared vision for the whole group of what the game is supposed to be, and the benefits of a truly open-ended game where you can pursue anything that seems interesting and play to see how the world reacts.
These two things aren’t polar opposites: the clear vision of what the game is supposed to be might converge on that very open-endedness; a game can still be plenty open-ended in what players can pursue even if there is a clear vision limiting the scope of what’s possible outside of it.
But they can also come into conflict. You might constrain player action too much by overly dictating what the scope of the game should be at the outset. You might lose group cohesion if every player is pursuing something different and there is no longer agreement on what the limited session time should be spent on.
You’ll note that for all of these questions, you can open different game texts or watch different groups playing and find that they each have their own answers to them. But often these answers are scattered, implicit, unexamined. Having this framework of campaign structures to work with, then, is all about bringing these discussions to light.
Parting Thoughts
For a lot of RPGs out there, the rhythm part of the campaign structure is directly tied to the cycles of resource replenishment and character advancement that the game offers, creating a generic rhythm of “action – rest - improvement - repeat”. This has in part to do with the fact that our games are often action-packed and/or horror-filled, and see characters get hurt, tired and stressed as a result of the primary activities the campaign revolves around, and so we need to establish a moment when they get to recover (and grow) before we toss them into the meat grinders again.
But this simple iterative cycle of “action – rest” also ties perfectly to a general rhythm of “tension – release” that makes for a pleasant narrative structure. This “tension – release” cycle, though, is also fractally applicable to every structure size, down to a single dice roll. We build tension over a long quest through the wilderness and release it when we get back to town safely; we build tension when we’re exploring a dungeon, and release it when we come out of it; we build tension when we’re facing off against a horrible creature, and release it when we defeat or escape it; we build tension when we pick up the dice to see if we can blind the creature, and release it when the dice give us an answer.
So there are these two strong conspiring forces that push a lot of games towards having this one generic “structure”, and as a result a lot of campaign structures feature this particular rhythm.
It is an interesting pattern to recognize, but it is, on its own, probably too abstract to meaningfully construct a campaign around. While it’s great to realize that this rhythm underlies so many campaign structures, it is still worth it to really spell out the campaign structure you’re working with in more specific detail, in particular because the specifics of what the tension and release are like will dramatically define what the experience is like.
It is also interesting to notice this pattern and think of what happens if you break it. What would a game where the PCs never get to rest and recover look like? What about one where they are progressively getting weaker instead of more capable? What if we structured a campaign not around filling and depleting resources, but instead on transforming one resource into another, trying to build a sustainable cycle out of them?
Breaking these “default” assumptions is also good in highlighting that these very broad structures carry a lot of thematic weight. I don’t mean to say in any way that it is bad in any way to keep to the expected loops of tension-release and continuous self-improvement that are prevalent in RPGs (and gaming in general). I am saying that it is good to consider the alternatives so that you’re not lulled into the false sense that this default is all that there can be. Picking the default should be a conscious choice, not a necessity borne of ignorance of the alternatives.
This is perhaps a good point to end this little thought exercise on: every structure says something about how you view the world (both the fictional one and the real one). A structure, at the end of the day, is a proposed abstraction you create on how the world works, could work or ought to work. The campaign structure is the abstraction that is most likely to be running continuously in the background, subtly pointing the entire game in a given direction - it is good to take note of this abstraction and recognize where it is trying to lead you to.