Boundaries

I think the long term effects of the single game of Microscope that I played are still being felt! I was thinking about starting yet another campaign, this time a fantasy setting, some sort of city under siege. I had been reading through the Apocalypse World rulebook and liked the kind of tone the book suggested. My previous concept of a campaign in a fantasy city surrounded by a besieging army had been grounded in a very D&D mentality I think. It would have been all about attacks to be repelled, missions over the walls, and probably some epic shenanigans from monk and rogue characters. The overall goal would have been to lift the siege, obviously. My reading of Apocalypse World put me on to Night Witches, and my concept of the campaign changed a lot.

Instead of a city surrounded by a traditional besieging army, the city could somehow be cut off from the rest of the world. Maybe a dangerous mist rolled in and now everyone is trapped. Maybe monsters roam the lands around the city, but for some reason don’t cross the city walls. The only way to survive is provided by the aristocratic priests, who, in D&D style, can create food and water. For the ordinary citizens, these masters are all powerful and their whims need to be obeyed.

The idea that these nobles are all powerful makes them something like gods in any usual D&D game, but they are much closer and more personal to the protagonists. This made me realise that any campaign can have boundaries, limits to what the player characters get to do. If the campaign is set in the city that’s under siege, then the characters can’t just leave the city behind. To do that they’d have to leave the campaign behind. They also can’t take over the city and surrender, or join the besieging force. These things are all possible in a story, but not this one. Is that unfair? No, because everyone signed up for these boundaries when they started the campaign. Imposing a set of limitations on yourself is something that you do every time you create a character. Maybe D&D has become more about assigning powers to characters, to enable them to do things, rather than focusing on the things you just want to have your character do.

So defining what my new campaign is should involve me listing the boundaries that the player characters will get to act within. If I say it’s set in a city that’s cut off from the rest of the world by a besieging army, that might suggest the goal of the campaign is to lift the siege. But if I say that one of the boundaries that contains the campaign is that the city is cut off, then there is no bypassing that. If the players decide it’s no longer interesting to play within these boundaries, then the campaign ends.

I think what I’m really realizing is that most campaigns I play in or run don’t have boundaries. For the online D&D campaign that I’ve been running for about a year I think that’s fine. I started off with four players who I didn’t know at all, and we did some collaborative world building. By now we’ve had two new players and three have left. I’m still getting a handle on who the players are and what they want from the game. But if I was to start a new campaign with the three current players, I’d spend some time defining what each of us wants in the game, and doesn’t want. The Same Page Tool is good for this, but I guess it’s more about heading off arguments among the players than defining the boundaries of the story itself. That’s where Microscope comes in, where the players take turns to veto any concepts that they don’t want in the game.

So where does that leave my campaign? Well there’s a city, surrounded by some demonic force. The players can build characters that are ordinary citizens, not nobility, clergy, or army officers. Daytime activities will include scavenging outside the walls, maintenance work around the city, trying to get food, avoiding the attentions of the authorities, and dealing with the stress of the siege. Night activities include repelling assaults on the walls, rescue missions if captives are taken, and trying to get some sleep.

The boundaries then, are:

• The siege will not be lifted
• The rulers will not be overthrown
• The characters are ordinary citizens
• The characters will not leave

Wanting to do these things will indicate that the campaign is over. That doesn’t mean we drop this story, but we’d probably take a break and begin a new spin off campaign later, with its own set of new boundaries.

If the boundaries list the things that won’t happen, then they also serve to bookend the kind of activities that will happen in this campaign. So in this example, I’d need to have plenty of ideas for the players to interact with the siege, the rulers, and the city itself. One idea I had was that raids against the besieging force might yield resources, or some kind of contraband. Maybe the demons have glands that can be harvested for a drug. Maybe the rank insignia of enemy officers are traded or used in gambling. Officially these should be turned over to the authorities, but the player characters can try to sneak them back.