My Life As A Gamer: Putting A Proper Campaign Together (Part Five)

(This is part of a series. The first post is here, the second here, the third is here, and yesterday is here.)

Your Patrons are ready to drive the campaign, and your calendar is ready to track their progress. Now it's time to remember that some tasks are done better with some tools than others.

The Rules

There are three keys to a proper campaign. One is strict timekeeping. The second is Patron-driven play. Both of them rely on the third element: complete and competent rules.

Typical RPG talk doesn't comprehend why this is necessary. That is because they do not deal in adversarial play, which is required to consider due to Patrons driving campaign play, and competent adversarial play insists upon all parties strictly adhering to a single set of rules and procedures.

Players, be they Patrons or not, rely on the rules and its procedures to inform and govern their decisions and actions. It is unwise to change these at all because the rules define the game, not the Referee. The Referee's function as administrator and adjudicator means that he--like the rules he uses--is an uncaring, unyielding, disinterested neutral party. He is not God; the game is not so because he says so.

The consequence of this necessity for a neutral party means that the rules must be fit for purpose. The problem with tabletop RPGs as a business is that well over 90% are not fit for purpose because they cannot fulfill the requirements of proper campaign play.

Therefore the Referee is required to choose the proper tool for the job; do not use a ruleset for one type of campaign play to do another for which it is ill-suited. That said, all worthy options will be complete, competent campaign rulesets with procedures and mechanics to support it.

The Options

I wrote this series, and write in general, with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition in mind because it is a complete and competent ruleset. There are other options.

I will list a few below. Regular readers will see some repeats. This isn't an exhaustive list, or a comprehensive one; omission is not necessarily disapproval.

• Classic Traveller: Still the go-to for most forms of space adventure campaigning. Lacking on stompy robots (substitute A Time of War + BattleTech or Mekton Zeta for that) and Cyberpunk (Cyberpunk 2020/Shadowrun for that), but otherwise fine. Its three core modes--explorer, merchant, mercenary--apply to most viable space campaigning.
• Gamma World: The go-to for post-Apocalypse adventure campaigning, and like AD&D the first edition is still the best. Honorable Mention to Palladium's RIFTS for being almost there but not quite making it (because, alas, Palladium can't grok proper campaign play due to Siembieda's comic background).
• Top Secret: Still solid for the spy campaign, especially set during the Cold War or earlier, where Patrons run the Agencies and other similar players. Honorable mention to AEG's Spycraft 1st Edition for almost getting there (you'd have Threats run as Agencies instead, with their own agents) and Ninjas & Superspies for kind-of seeing how things have to go (and then mucking it up because Palladium).
• Call of Cthulhu: Patrons run cults, particular entities, rival investigators, etc. as the major change to how COC plays because Crime is Spy-Lite so doing Weird Crime is Weird Spy; All Flesh Must Be Eaten, for all its faults, always focuses on scenarios where Patron play (with Domains) is an easy retrofit that always improves the experience because Survival Horror is a wargame scenario variant at its heart.
• Twilight 2000: More than any other option for "realistic military campaigning" (e.g. RECON), this '80s-era "Cold War Goes Hot Into WW3" game set in post-war Europe (but wisely making it so that you can play anywhere) runs with the excuse of "You can just read the real manuals for the details!" If you wanted something after the bomb, but not Gamma World (or its competitors, such as RIFTS and the titular After The Bomb), this remains the go-to despite it being long out of print and unlikely to ever come back.
• TORG: The only RPG that attempte the multi-genre-as-setting thing and made it work (at least in 1st edition) as a proper campaign scenario. The new edition rubs me the wrong way with its Narrative Logic creeping in, but the original 1990s game--with one rule change--is still a fantastic time despite its known card gimmick. Dismiss the potential for a great campaign here at your peril, assuming you start at the original State Of Play at launch and ignore the "updates".

You'll note that I didn't put down a superhero game, ignored all licensed games (including some that I like for sentimental reasons), and left out some others that I know I wrote about in the past.

There's reasons for that. Tomorrow I will get into why as a stand-alone post.