The Campaign: Multiple Warbands In Close Proximity Kills Muh Narrativisms

(Part Two of a series. Part One is here.)

Mutiple parties, and their warbands, are an asset when managed properly.

The Referee should, from the start, have two destinations for players to take their characters to; these should be close enough to one common base camp to permit mixing, matching, and crossing of information during Downtime.

A more ambitious Referee would have at least two such locations, each with two or more locations. (This involves a more ambitious campaign with active faction play, which I will get to in another post.)

The camp's function is to provide necessary services to the adventuring parties, including being a place to sign on hirelings and kit them out. The Referee should encourage shifts of attention between the locations, if only to keep things interesting, but more importantly for one other big reason: to create the opportunity for more than one group of players to play at the table.

Remember What Campaigning Is

A proper campaign will have over-arching objectives. Faction leaders will pursue those objectives. Most adventurers will have tangential or peripheral contact with those objectives at first, but those low-level characters going to those nearby locations (dungeons, typically) to clear out what threats lair therein and recover any tresures found. This also serves as a way to see whom among these potentials prove their worth, and may be approached with more challenging tasks down the road.

Players, in turn, should be active in seeking out problems to solve and organizing parties to do the solving- often at the point of a sword. Early on that means going to one of those nearby locations and dealing with whatever is there; later on that means getting some muscle together to deal with some bigger issues. When one character is in Time Jail, get a new character rolled up (or take another off the bench) and deal with another.

But what about multiple groups of players?

That's where the Referee either has a lot of time or some folks he can delegate to. Running multiple sessions within a given interval of time--typically a week--is a lot to ask of one man, hence why delegation is often done when this happens at all. The Referee can then worry about keeping the big picture in order, especially if he is particularly ambitious and organizes a small cadre of subordinates to run sessions in particular areas- much like administration duties in a LARP can be divided up.

These days, this often means running at least one group online if not all of them, which the array of tools now available--even just a Discord server and a dice bot--make very easy to do.

Having multiple parties of adventurers, all operating close to each other in real time (and, often, close to each other on the campaign map) completely throws out all of the presumptions of Theater Kid narrativism that invest the hobby- especially if those parties work at cross purposes.

It's the same dynamic as faction play, but scaled down to individual characters and their warbands, and that means the possibility exists for those parties to throw down if they encounter each other, something that most typical RPG people can't even compute as possible.

This is where the absolute impartiality of the Referee is paramount; if one warband seeks to initiate combat on another (necessitating that all players be present), there's a good chance that one or more of them end up dead (and that's before accounting for any hirelings or Henchmen in tow; this could be a pitched battle between two armies) and even the victors could be laid up for weeks thereafter recovering from wounds and rebuilding a battered or broken warband. (Pray that your ambush works and your side gets total Surprise.)

If there are characters in the campaign in proximity that are going to come into conflict--Assassins and Paladins, for example--this should be considered "when", not "if" and the Referee should prepare accordingly. Players, especially those unused to this possibility, should be told upon joining the campaign that this is on the table; you'd think it would be obvious, but the reactions to #BROSR reports on how Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition actually works proves otherwise.

Multiple Theaters Of Action

Having two distinct theaters that a campaign shifts attention back and forth between acts like having multiple close dungeon options, but there is a catch that needs to be stated here and now: both theathers need to be pointing to a common destination.

That destination can be a location (e.g. the Western and Eastern Allies driving to Berlin in World War 2) or an objective (e.g. the elimination of a common threat; Stormblood for FFXIV had two campaign threads on different parts of the world driving to a common objective (the removal of a common enemy from their lands, personified in the enemy's leadership)).

This becomes more viable to do as characters in both theaters get past the early levels and start to mature in their career paths; the Fighters become Captains and grow the army about their banner, and so on.

This is also where faction leaders start taking notice of players' characters and seek to recruit them as allies to advance the bigger campaign objectives. Instead of being a small gang that cleared out the nearby iron mine so that the war effort can keep going, they get asked to raid an enemy-held castle or take care of a bothersome monster lair before its denizens can threaten the baggage train, or whatever.

It is also at this point that players worth a damn, those that take action without prompting, will begin to seek out bigger opportunities to advance their own interests by way of advancing a faction's objectives. The Cleric looks at how setting up a temple in this strategic location guarantees that his god's interests will be advanced by dominating the local culture, the Thief starts looking at setting up ratlines and rackets so he has leverage over the Fighter when the latter goes for a stronghold, and so on.

Having multiple active parties, and their warbands, enforces this by inducing a sense of competition between the groups; if they don't haul ass to take advantage of this lead, or that favor, then the other guys will and get ahead of them in the campaign.

And having faction leaders do what they can to foster this and channel it towards fulfilling their ends might as well be taken straight out of the history books.

Now That Timekeeping Makes Sense, Don't It?

Welcome to the death of Muh Storygame bullshit in RPGs.