Up to this point in this series (catch up on parts 1–3) I’ve laid out some philosophy about running a campaign more like a novel, providing details of some tools to use to accomplish your goals. To recap, you need to get buy-in from your players, become comfortable with winging it a bit during game play, and cheat sometimes behind the scenes, fudging situations and outcomes to drive the plot in a direction you want—and with an outcome your players will ultimately enjoy and appreciate.

Great! So, now we have come to the big question . . .

Why Run Your Campaign Like an Author?

There are a lot of different campaign styles. Some folks love pure exploration, with the GM taking a sandbox approach to the setting, letting characters wander where they will and being ready with lots of interesting sites for them to investigate. Others like to bombard their players with a myriad of plots, factions, and dynamic activity constantly going on around the characters.

There are plenty of options in between! But what all those approaches have in common is the basic sense that the characters always move forward, accomplishing goals that lead to other goals, step by step, creating a sense of steady progress.

As I mentioned in previous installments, fiction doesn’t work like this. If you understand the beats of storytelling, you know that the author spends part of the book setting the stage, creating trouble, and pushing the main character out of their comfort zone. Then the character tries to fix things, but at various points along the way, the hero runs into trouble and has setbacks. Finally, the character overcomes the adversity (both external and internal; part of good fiction is the character arc), reaches the climax of the story, and triumphs (or maybe succumbs, if it’s a tragedy).

Those setbacks are the key here. They’re the vehicle of character change and growth that help make the accomplishments feel worthwhile. If your RPG campaign is just steady progress, and “setbacks” are no more than a bad die roll or two that merely delays the palpable inevitability of success, you’re losing a huge opportunity to help your players really enjoy their character arcs. It would be like reading a novel where the main character is just too darn good at everything and never has any difficulty overcoming trouble. (We’ve probably all read one or two of those, unfortunately.)

Skip the Onion Effect

Some RPG philosophy encourages the GM to create a layered organization of foes, where the heroes peel the layers back, one by one, exposing and killing the underbosses (who happen to be the right challenge to be a surmountable foe) one at a time, until they get to the top of the proverbial food chain. There, the PCs are properly geared up and able to go toe to toe with the final mastermind.

This approach is great in many situations. But it’s not so good for giving heroes the emotional baggage they need to change and grow. If you want that, you need to—at least initially—overwhelm the characters. Give them a solid thumping, and let them retreat to lick their wounds, just like the hero does at one of those setback stages of the novel.

In a previous installment, I began the extended example of the powerful undead lord of the city and his dastardly ritual. My players sent their characters into the sewers beneath the castle, intent on rescuing some NPCs. Instead, they got trapped in there and had to witness the main villain in all his terribleness. They saw that he was way above their pay grade. Instead of the onion effect, I went in the opposite direction.

At that point, I reasoned that my Big Bad was not going to mess around and send his underlings after the characters. The PCs had shown some moxie; better to deal with them personally and immediately, before they slipped away to cause trouble later. After all, why accumulate all that power if not to use it? So, instead of sending flunkies at just the right level to become the next sack full of experience points, the head honcho went after them directly.

Then I Cheated. A Bunch.

My players wanted out of there. I had effectively scared them and made them see how overmatched they were. But I wanted to turn up the heat even further. In that moment, inspiration hit, and I decided they were going to get caught and imprisoned. Here’s where I started winging it and fudging the situation.

The characters retreated down through the dungeons into the sewers. I had teams of soldiers chasing them, and the PCs were throwing everything they could in their wake to keep the bad guys off them as they fled. But I figured my main villain had the abilities and the smarts to cut them off. He’s powerful. So, I just decided he knew where they were going and teleported to get between them and freedom.

Did I first fret over whether he had the right spells racked? No. I waved my magic GM wand and made it so. He caught up to the PCs in a long tunnel, hit them with a couple of top-shelf spells to drop them all to 0 hit points, and they were well and truly captured. When they woke up (after I decided that he had minions stabilize them), they found themselves stripped of all their gear and locked in very secure cells.

Now, my players were OK with this. They didn’t know exactly how I cheated, and I didn’t tip my hand. They were thrilled with the nerve-wracking efforts of trying and failing to escape. Even more importantly, they trusted me to keep the fun going and not thwart them at every turn forever. And that’s exactly what I did.

Their characters got dragged in front of my villain a few times to be questioned, they were selected to be the next round of ritual sacrifices, and they had to work their way free with all their smarts. It was some of the best gaming I’d participated in in a while, and the moment they got their characters out of the castle and away from impending death, my players really felt like they’d done something. It wasn’t just that inexorable march to success, it was by the skin of their teeth. I provided them with that promised payoff.

After the PCs escaped, they spent quite a while talking about what they would need to do to stay away from that villain until they could figure out a way to defeat him. Their characters were scarred by the near-death experience. They have a very healthy respect for their foe now, they’ve grown and changed a bit, and they want their revenge. I will eventually give it to them. But first, they have to overcome some obstacles. They are going to have to earn it.

A Final Word: Leave Them Wanting More

If you’ve done your job right, if you’ve used opportunities when they arise to introduce increased conflict, if you’ve winged it and cheated a bit to create setbacks, real disasters for the characters to overcome, then you are 90% of the way to a successful campaign. Now you just have to do it again.

Like a good thriller, you need ups and downs over the course of the story to keep the action intense and the players wanting more. So, never let up. Come at them again and again, throwing trouble their way like a guy coming through the door with a gun, and give them chances to fight and claw their way to the barest victory. Use cliffhangers at the end of sessions. Invent villains with horrible powers on the spur of the moment. Basically, do your worst. Then give your players the chance to overcome the odds and enjoy victory that’s all the sweeter because they had to work for it. I promise you, they’ll keep coming back for more.