Campaign Drift in RPGs

The Inevitable Good of Long-Term Play

Not too long ago I described how TTRPG campaigns were thought of in the early days of the hobby and how this is different from the way they are described by some today.

The most obvious difference is how official 5e uses ‘campaign’ to mean ‘a group of characters that adventure from 1st to 20th level, then everything ends’. The other, much rarer, idea seems to be that a campaign must include multiple DMs, some of whom have different settings/worlds.

Originally ‘campaign’ was derived from ‘military campaign’ and meant ‘all of the adventuring set in the same fictional universe’. This can be scores of different players, hundreds of different PCs, and multiple dMs, or just one DM, the same 4 players, and everything in between. Basically, as long as Joe was DMing in the same ‘world’ and anyone kept playing PCs there, you had a campaign. There was no demands that you have multiple anything and no expectation of a planned end.

We DID do limited run adventures, sometimes in a on-off world, but we called these all sorts of names other than ‘campaign’. ‘One-offs’, ‘Limited Runs’, and ‘Mini-series’ were common among people I knew.

But one core assumption about campaigns was that over time they would grow and expand and end up different, something I called ‘drift’ even back then. This was caused by all sorts of things, mainly DM rulings turning into rules for his campaign. Here’s a personal example.

My friend Brent wanted to play a dwarf, but he wanted a particular weapon. Not a footman’s mace, not a war hammer, but big, heavy hammer like mjolnir from the comics and too heavy to throw. Sure, why not? I wrote it up, he got one, I added it as a note on equipment lists (with other stuff like tents and field stoves i had added) and over time more PCs used the heavy hammer. Soon there were magical heavy hammers, too.

That’s a bit of drift, a non-RAW weapon.

Another example was my friend George’s campaign where demi-humans had no level limit and he added other races, like the Chagmat and the Phraint. Derek had anti-paladins, deathmasters, bandits, and other cough ‘NPC classes’ cough from Dragon Magazine. Eric was using Spell Law instead of Vancian magic, and so on. By 1985 it could be difficult, even impossible, to integrate a PC made for, say, Derek’s campaign with mine or Eric’s.

Guess what?

Gary told us this would happen. And he told us right away.

The PHB, page 8, just eight paragraphs into describing what AD&D is, Gary wrote,

“Sometimes, however, because of close interaction (or whatever other reason) two or more Dungeon Masters will find that their games are compatible to the extent that participants in these individual campaigns can use the characters created in one to adventure in the others.”

Re-read that, especially the first bit. Gary’s assumption was that two campaigns being enough alike that PCs from one could play in another would be rare and would probably required the DMs to cooperate to make the campaigns compatible.

In other words,

One of the core assumptions of the designer of AD&D is that over time campaigns will naturally drift so much that PCs from one DM’s campaign will be incompatible with another DM’s campaign.

As a matter of fact, the very first mention of the term ‘campaign’, in the Preface to the PHB, also stresses drift. Gary wrote,

“There is a need for a certain amount of uniformity from campaign to campaign in D&D. This is not to say that conformity or sameness is desirable. Nobody wishes to have stale campaigns where dungeons, monsters, traps, tricks, and goals are much the same as those encountered in any one of a score of other campaigns. Uniformity means that classes are relatively the same in abilities and approach to solving the problems with which the campaign confronts them. Uniformity means that treasure and experience are near a reasonable mean. Uniformity means that the campaign is neither a give-away show nor a killer — that rewards are just that, and great risk will produce commensurate rewards, that intelligent play will give characters a fighting chance of survival.”

Gary rejects conformity and sameness in campaigns. He expects different monsters in different campaigns and please notice his reference to classes. He says they should be “…relatively the same in abilities and approach…”, meaning he expects new classes, too. That means Derek’s use of the bandit class is anticipated by Gary, and approved. After all, Gary also added more classes in the years between the release of the PHB and him leaving TSR.

And Gary explicitly defines ‘uniformity’ to be about play style, not adherence to specific rules.

To echo something I wrote a decade ago,

If you are DMing a dynamic AD&D campaign the way Gary intended you are actively making your own game.

D&D is about hard work, having fun, and creativity. That creativity is going to result in growth and change.