The Culture: Embrace The General Staff, Referee

Independent arrival at the same conclusion is an indication of an idea whose time has come.

I think what we have observed is that players in a 1:1 time campaign will reach a point where they collectively want more game and more game sessions than what one referee can reasonably maintain.

The players value continuity and engagement more than the efforts of one "genius".

— Cardinal Jefforieu (@JohnsonJeffro) June 11, 2023

Jeffro speaks from first-hand experience, as he now has several players also running different areas of the same campaign, each of which have produced memorable moments and characters of their own- and often in short order.

While I take more of a top-down approach of deliberate design, Jeffro achieved this in an emergent bottom-up manner; don't be intimidated by my specific view, not when men like Jeffro are out there showing that there's more than one route to the same destination and keeping the receipts.

That said, I want you to consider doing so deliberately.

The Kaisar and His Admirals

Even Napoleon Has His Marshalls

The idea behind putting together a team is to divide the workload into managable chunks, letting each member handle something they in particular are good at, and having the sum of those efforts synergize into a whole greater than the parts- in other words, it is a more profitable use of time and energy to work collaboratively than to not.

This is not a void idea because we are talking about a hobby pursuit. It merely changes the calculus behind why you work as a unit.

Chief among these, usually said as "avoiding burnout", is to keep the individual workload down to what is acceptable for a hobby pursuit. Campaigns, especially successful ones, take on lives of their own and can overwhelm ill-prepared Referees as demand for participation increases. Recruiting a team--"assembling your General Staff"--is meant to prevent this by delegating things as required so that running the campaign doesn't consume your life. You are not a MMORPG server; you are not meant to be on 24/7/365.

The primary objective of having a team, therefore, is to ensure that you can still fulfill all of your real life obligations and pursue other interests. If it's not doing that, you need a better team, which means you need to consider what you're recruiting for.

The Staff

While I have a good head for procedures and minutes, others do not. Aside from a few core functions, what you need your team to do will vary based on what you need done that you either cannot do yourself or are better off delegating- same as any other leadership position.

The core functions your team needs to possess are the ability to run sessions, and the ability to address questions; this means being on the same page as you, even if they are running things in parts of the campaign milieu that you are not.

The other thing to do is to make sure that your team stays on the same page. If they're running sessions, ensure that results and reports get shared as soon as possible so that any characters that go into Time Jail are properly tracked and other characters that go from one region (and table) to another get a heads-up. Back when I co-ran a LARP, we did this in person at a cafe once a week and at one of our houses once a month (the latter to prepare pre-session briefs before our monthly game sessions); today there's email, Twitter group chats, Discord, and so much more in addition to hanging out on the patio cooking steaks on the grill.

Oh, and all of the usual "ensure that you don't let bad actors in" applies.

Don't Panic

You don't have to do this all at once, and despite my formal tone this is really a matter of finding capable cool guys to help out. Get what you need when you need it and you'll be fine.

But, if you want to see how this can play out in action, you can start by hitting up the #BROSR Actual Play reports and videos. Over this week I'll get more specific as to where you would want to build out towards with this team you put together.