The Campaign: Careers, Not Builds

When Alexander Macris entitled his retro-clone of B/X Dungeons & Dragons, he chose "Adventurer, Conqueror, King".

This corresponds to what was already an implicit phase change in the development of a given player-character over the course of their time in the campaign. All Macris did was call attention to it and formalize the full process.

Previously I have also called out, in class-specific manners, how this is already embedded into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition by design. I reiterate now that this, not the contemporary PC-as-Mech "Build Culture", is what "character progression" actually means.

Your Man Has A Career, Not A Build

Riflemen become squad leaders, platoon sergeants, and then staff NCOs. Fighter pilots become flight leaders, squadron leaders, and eventually command entire wings. Officials go from paper-pushers to office bosses, department heads, and then to C-Suite or Undersecretary. You get the idea.

Even those who don't follow a command track tend to accrue subordinates as their pursue specialist accumen with the aim of attain pinnacle mastery of their discipline, typically being the Magic-User who hits Name Level or the Engineer that trains juniors on the job before spinning them off to pursue their own projects, or martial arts masters (be they master fencers, MMA fighters, gunfighters, etc.) training some and otherwise retaining a few assistants to handle mundane affairs.

Character progression is not "number go up" or "gear upgrades" like you see in PC and console games (or really shit tabletop products). It is the progress along the career path that the character makes, going from Noob to Master, and the changes (and challenges) that come with the transitions such a character must negotiate at each step along that path.

The boy that becomes a squire as he enters adolescence, if he survives and does well enough, becomes a knight when he turns 21 years of age. He then has to win his further fortune by a combination of martial prowess and political acumen, both of which have their perils- just look at the life of William Marshall. Not all shall make it, and while being born high in station is a clear benefit it is by no means an IWIN Button; plenty of Princes Royal get ganked well before they are crowned, and more than a few poor-born or low-born men do like Conan and make themselves king (or greater) by their own hands (as anyone familiar with Chinese history knows).

Like real life, your man's plans can be--and often will be--changed, even derailed, by events they can neither overcome nor avoid. Like real life, if they survive then they need to adapt to the new situation and chart a new path, be it to the same destination or to another.

The Campaign Has To Involve Turnover

The reason that AD&D1e specifies character going into the wilderness to clear, pacify, and civilize areas is because there is meant to be a degree of turnover.

Dave Weasely's West Marches makes this explicit, but it is no surprise that this was considered "common knowledge" in the mid-to-late 1970s when the rules were published. Other proper RPGs have some other turnover mechnanism in their design, be it due to attrition (e.g. Call of Cthulhu) or transition (D&D varations, Pendragon/Paladin, Runequest) where character move from the base tier of play to the higher tiers in the same way that a fresh 2nd Lieuteneant transitions up to Colonel or higher in time and thus is not doing basic-level work anymore.

It also means that a campaign must account for the expansion of new players on the higher tiers of play over time, resulting in a net gain in parties active at that tier and a rise in action at that tier. The tight-knit cohort of junior officers has to break up as their rise up, accrue subordinates as they gain their own commands, and only occassionally come together (with retinues in tow) to work togehter like they once did.

This is Working As Intended. It is yet another means by which players come to play multiple characters in a campaign- which Lion Rampart and White Wolf would try, and fail, to replicate first with Ars Magica and then with all the World of Darkness games (and, at some remove, including Exalted).

It's part of the Rogue-like quality of real RPGs that things work this way. Your man gets ganked, gets old, gets promoted out of the field, gets his life destroyed by something no one saw coming and has change course, or has something bestowed upon him out of nowhere to the same effect.

As with so many other things, this too has been thrown down the memory-hole decades ago. That is now over; we're bring it back.