In the last 30+ years, I have experienced a wide range of role-playing games both from the perspective of the GM and the perspective of a player. Many were successful, but quite a few were not while some only marginally so.

Today I’m going to talk about what I think separates a great campaign from a mediocre one, the pitfalls and traps that lead to failed campaigns, and perhaps most importantly what a good GM should be doing to ensure their campaign starts and ends on good footing.

Now I will admit that I have a very unique take on running role-playing games, it definitely does not fall into the “normal” advice category. I would imagine in fact that the instinct of most GM’s as they read this article will be to disagree and that is fine, it’s just an opinion in a sea of opinions. More advice is better than less advice, so I humbly submit my take on the subject, do with it what you will.

Role-playing games are not about story

We start with the most controversial but in my opinion, most objectively true thing about role-playing games and the universally hardest truth to bare for GM’s. Good role-playing games are never about good stories. They are always about gaming systems.

So here is the thing, if you ask any player why they want to play a role-playing game almost all will tell you “for the story” and in large part, I would imagine it’s also why most DM’s would claim they want to run a role-playing game. It’s the greatest lie always told, but it is always pure, unadulterated, utter and complete bullshit.

The test is quite simple, pick a system a player or group doesn’t like and see if they still want to play. They won’t want to play that game and even if they do, the game will fail no matter how good the story is. Why? If the game is about a story, why would what system you pick matter or cause your campaign to fail if you have done a great job on the story? Why do so many people choose D&D and not GURPS? Why do people pick complex systems like Pathfinder 2e, rather than simple systems like 1st Edition Basic?

The answer is simple, system is everything. Role-playing games are first and foremost games, it’s the systems that get people to sit at the table, it’s what is exciting about the gaming experience and hobby that is role-playing. If I propose running 1st edition Basic to a 5e group, they will reject that game and likely viciously attack me for even suggesting that their precious 5th edition D&D could be replaced by another system. Vice versus, if I walk into an OSR group of old school gamers and suggest that we play Pathfinder 2e their would be absolutely no chance. They would simply rather burn all of their books and never play a role-playing game for the rest of their lives again, than play in a modern gaming system. System matters a lot to people, its not just a game often times, its practically an ID card, your identity as a role-player. People don’t just have strong opinions about what systems and playstyles they like, they are irredemably loyal to them.

Why? I’m a great DM, I have been running games for my gaming group that they themselves without any prompting from me called “the greatest role-playing experience of their lives”. Why would my group with so much faith in my ability to run a great role-playing experience outright reject a game I want to run based on the system I’ve chosen if the game is in fact about story?

The reality is that story is a byproduct, an important albeit side benefit of playing a role-paying game. We all love story, I do not question that, it’s very much a core desire/outcome of the game and why we are drawn to the game, even so far as to stretch the truth and claim it to be the main reason for wanting to play to begin with. The harsh reality is that RPG hobbyists are gamers first and foremost and the game mechanic is a central component of what creates the experience at the table. The story lives as a layer that becomes the output/outcome of the experience, but no one can ever be excited about entering into a gaming social contract without a system they are excited to execute it with. The story will never save your game, a good system always will.

Why is this important knowledge for any GM? It’s very simple. Never, under any circumstance convince yourself that the system you want to run is going to create a good role-playing experience for your players unless they are excited about the system as well. Your players have to choose the system, they have to be excited about it, and they have to love it and bare its torch. If a group has even the most minor complain about the system you have chosen, your campaign is already dead and you will never be able to do resolve that. It’s the single most important decision you will make that will define whether your campaign will find success or failure. The system matters that much, more than any other choice you make.

Remember that, accept it, and embrace it. You can write a shitty, linear story in a system your players love and it will be a booming success, alternatively, you can write a masterpiece for a system your players hate and the game will fail miserably. Never forget that, it’s the best advice I can offer after 30+ years of running games. There is no fix for this and the reality is that most games that fail, fail because of this one reason. Don’t let it happen to you.

The busier the system, the shorter the campaign

Most GM’s, when they sit down to create a campaign for their players imagine playing it for years, spinning an epic tale that puts the players on a journey of discovery with twists and turns, exciting reveals, epic battles, shocking events and so on. We all dream about running that Lord of the Rings epic for the ages.

The issue is that the overwhelming majority of systems out there are very specifically designed not to allow that and the reason is quite simple, there is no money in it.

To give an example, I ran a nearly 3 year Vampire The Masquerade campaign for which all I ever purchased was a core rulebook and a setting book. That was it, that’s all white-wolf managed to get out of me for what amounted to hundreds of hours of entertainment. If a gaming group of 5 only buy 1 or 2 books every three to four years, all role-playing publishers become completely unsustainable, and even if they are set up for a low volume, they are not getting rich doing it.

As such, most modern systems are setup to be complex, with tons of design space to create “options” and that is the name of the game for modern RPG’s. Selling option books requires you to be constantly re-starting new campaigns, so you can create new characters and buy new adventure books and so on, all so that you have a desire for more options. It’s a cycle.

The reality is that complex systems with tons of options will usually result in what I like to call “dead system stops”. This means the system kills your campaign because it lacks the stamina and structure to survive a long campaign as power advancement is at the center of the core mechanic. This is particularly true for most class/level systems that become unwieldy and unbalanced as you rise in level. It is particularly a problem with these systems not just because the increases in level creates unbalance, but because the players have an expectation to constantly level up. They effectively push for the inevitable power creep that will end the campaign early. Play D&D for three months without leveling up and your players are going to start complaining.

The best systems are those that have progression without major impact and are simple so that the character sheet is just a “log” of your character, rather than an elaboration of what your character is and isn’t, or what they can and can’t do. What I mean by that is that if your players are constantly looking at their character sheet to see “what they can do” they are also finding a list of things “they can’t do”. You are playing in a busy system that is designed to create options for players so that they can do stuff, out-level the game and start over.

A good role-playing system is not going to be about what the system does or doesn’t let your character do, it should be about what your players want their characters to do. It’s not about action economy, but about telling a story, taking “actions” should not be a mechanic in a role-playing system. What characters do should be a story definition, a conscious thought of a player imagining a scene and doing what comes naturally to them with any mechanical elements being customizable and reactive rather than something governed by strict (you can and can’t) rules.

Such systems are becoming rarer and rarer these days, people simply don’t make them that much anymore, which is why we have the OSR because there was a time in the hobbies history when all RPG’s were designed to be free-flowing and free-form story games. The character sheet was an outline of the player’s imagined avatar and it did not define them in any certain terms, it was just a sort of categorization, a layer upon which a player would create their character’s story and what actions they took had nothing to do with the system.

You picked “Fighter” and that could be anything from a Samurai to a Swashbuckler. You did not pick background, you created backgrounds through direct writing or through gameplay. You didn’t select feats and fighting styles, you imagined those things and brought them to the table through the narrative of your character’s interaction with the world. What your character could do was as much an invention of the story as the plot created by the GM. We talk about players always claiming to want the game to be about story, yet, they often choose systems that deny them the opportunity to be creative.

A system like that has no beginning or end, your character is the person you imagine and create and while they will have subtle growth in such a system, it will not offer much in the way of unlocking powers, actions or other gaming gymnastics. Your character is your avatar in such games, the one you created at the start and their progression is their story in the world they occupy, not the mechanical power level they achieve.

In such a system, your campaign can theoretically run forever.

My suggestion is that if you want to run a long campaign that stays healthy no matter how long you run it, stay away from systems that see character progression as a “power” element. That is usually the sign of a busy game not made for longevity, if advancement = power, the game has a definitive beginning and end and the faster that power creep is, the shorter the campaign will be.

At the very least you should asses the system and calculate how much life it will have, at what point you reach the dead stop so that you can plan for the campaign’s inevitable end.

Meta Gaming Is Where Good Stories Come From

As a long-time GM, one of the oddest gaming culture developments that has taken place over the last 30 years is player and GM attitudes towards meta-gaming.

For posterity, we should define what Meta-Gaming is, as there are quite a few definitions and variations of the term. To me, meta-gaming is the act of the players using player information to influence results in the game world. Meaning, the player knows what a typical Orcs AC is and they use that information to their advantage to illustrate the most basic of examples. More commonly the use of meta-gaming is less about the game mechanic and more about the game’s story. For example, a player knows that the prince is secretly a vampire, but their character doesn’t, however, they use their player knowledge to expose him as a vampire breaking the continuity of the game world. Their character is behaving as if they have information that they don’t, because the player does. A more complex example, but typically more along the lines of what people mean when they say meta-gaming.

The modern attitude and culture towards meta-gaming is that it is associated with a really negative result. Meaning, people get pissed about it and the insinuation is that it’s akin to cheating at role-playing.

I’m here to tell you that meta-gaming is the most positive thing you can add to your game and here is why.

The object of a role-playing game is to tell a cool story, but cool stories can’t be told consistently out of a vacuum or through random dice outcomes. Cool stories come from our imagination and that requires a certain level of control. Meaning if you want to make cool things happen, you simply need to decide that they do and this is the collaboration that should take place at the table between players and between players and the GM.

There is a very natural resistance by both players and GM’s to simply side with the system, despite any insistence that the story comes first. Often players and GM’s alike want to side with the dice results or with realism (what would really happen in a situation) or worse of all, with the intent to control the path of the story so as not to derail the pre-ordained set of events. In this struggle, gaming culture has vilified meta-gaming as a negative, but it’s meta-game information that actually allows cool things to happen.

What’s more interesting, a player having to pretend and act intentionally ignorant to the fact that the prince is actually a vampire, or a cool scene where the character appears to be a brilliant investigator and makes the discovery creating a feel-good and heroic moment? Who or what is hurt by the latter?

I don’t know about you, but I love feel-good moments. I want the players to succeed, to do unexpected and fun things that create unique story’s and outcomes. I want large story progressions with each session, I don’t want to delay or make players impatiently wait session after session, sitting on information they have as players because things haven’t worked out for them as characters or worse yet make them feel like they are being punished for being or acting foolish in an RPG.

This also ties into the concept of “yes” GMing. Meaning, creating a game in which the players, no matter how silly and outrageous the things they do are, let them progress, succeed, and move forward, let things work. I don’t want to punish players for doing something stupid, I want everything to appear to be smart, I want everything to be a “Han Solo” plan, something so crazy and outrageous that it works, no matter how unrealistic it is, no matter what the dice say. I want the characters to be the stars of the show, not the victims of circumstance.

My point is that meta-gaming is THE best tool that the GM and players have in their tool bag for creating a great story. Let the story happen and not just that, but push it to happen, resolve the story in such a way so that it’s always a feel-good moment. That doesn’t mean everything that happens is positive, but that the story feels good, like that feeling you get when you just watched a great movie, whether it’s Lord of the Rings or Shindlers List. You want that great storytelling impact at every session, in every scene. It should be happening all the time and meta-gaming is a fantastic tool that allows the players to help you on collaboration of creating that effect at the table.

The Game Has To Feel Threatening

Fear of losing your character has to be foremost on everyone’s mind, you have to make that fear real but you should rarely ever execute anyone. Make an example to prove the point if needed, but remember that the game is all smoke and mirrors,

This last point is short and sweet and self-evident, the question I think that needs to be answered is why I think this is critical enough to put on the list of advice.

Before I answer however, I will say that this advice lands in the “style of play” preference category more than the rest which I consider “general good practices and advice”. Still, I’m quite convinced that my preference here stems from my experience of trying all the different methods and landing on this one by default of it being the most optimal and practical for any RPG.

The other thing to note is that this is not a system thing, it’s not about “choosing” a deadly system, quite to the contrary, I would advise against using that as a crutch, this is more about perception which can be created with any mechanic. It’s a conscious choice as a GM to create an environment of high risk, not a gameplay thing, this danger should not be decided by dice.

Ok enough disclosures, why do I think players should fear for their character’s lives. The answer is actually quite simple, it creates tension and drama at the table that exists in the minds of the players. By creating an environment where the players have a legitimate reason to fear losing their character at the hands of their enemy every time they fight or face other dangers, these things become a tough, dramatic choice that comes with potentially the ultimate consequences and this tension rises up the longer the campaign goes on. The more attached the players are to their characters, the greater the drama.

More than that though, players will steer their characters very differently with such high stakes at the table and this draws the game that much closer to a role-playing environment instead of a mechanical one. Further still, when fights break out in a high-risk game, players will have the natural tendency, as will you as a GM, to elaborate on the events of the fight. You are going to want to squeeze out that last ounce of story when you know that the story of your character may very well end right then and there. You are going to want to make every in that fight a scene of deliberate and player-driven (rather than mechanic-driven) actions. It’s how you make fights less a miniature combat game and more of a role-playing scene, even if the system itself is a very tactically oriented one.

Setting Specific Games Are Better

The final piece of advice which I know most people will hate hearing, but systems made as generic genre games like D&D is for fantasy are never even close to as good as specific games with mechanics designed specifically to a setting, for example what The One Ring is to the middle-earth setting.

The reasons are many but it boils down to the fact that a setting-specific game only needs to think about how the rules apply to that one world, theme and atmosphere. Generic systems need to have this broad coverage and you always end up with an overcooked system which despite being overcooked is missing a lot of stuff you may need once you choose the specific setting you will use in your campaign. Its the default problem that systems like D&D have.

This is particularly true if you are using a setting that is pre-defined. For example lets say you want to run a campaign in Westeros, using the story of Game of Thrones as your backdrop. Now you have a lot of detail that whatever system you choose needs to cover. Could you run D&D for example using the Westeros setting? Sure, but there are no fireballs in Westeros, in fact, very little magic at all. How do you handle running your own house? Mass combat? You get the idea. The robust and complex system you picked, suddenly has massive gaps in the infrastructure you will need to run your setting and story.

A game designed to serve a specific setting is always going to give you much better results and what you will find is that most systems, even when they are in the generic category, serve a specific styleof play best. D&D for example is great for high fantasy adventure games, it is, its bread and butter.

My advice is always to do this. Figure out what world/setting and style of game you want and then pick the system that supports that, don’t try to squeeze shit into systems that are clearly not designed to support what your looking for. This advice is very much in turn with the opening advice for this article but this is a bit more specific.