The Three Campaign Structures - Part 1
A Series on Campaign Pre-Production & Understanding Your Game System
It’s important to know the type of campaign you’re running because if you do not, you risk your campaign failing to get into gear. There are three basic narrative structures that all campaigns fall into. Each structure has strengths and weaknesses and importantly, each structure has to be run with different things in mind.
Understanding the structure of your campaign allows you to plan it in the correct way to maximize its potential for satisfaction and longevity, which is of course, the goal of any DM. Conversely, if don’t think about it at all, or if you mistake your campaign structure for another, you will find it respectively very random or very difficult to create a satisfying experience for anyone at the table. Further, you will find that even when you prep and run a good session, it won’t feel particularly cohesive with the campaign overarchingly.
So, what are these three basic narrative structures?
The Journey - The characters must travel the world (or between worlds) in order to accomplish their goals.
The Situation - Everything revolves around a world-changing circumstance that occurred, is ongoing, or is imminent.
The Organization - The characters are part of an organization, charged with pursuing its mission.
I shall discuss the Journey in detail in this article. The Organization and the Situation shall be discussed in detail in the next two articles.
What is the Journey? The first is the Journey, and this is the most prevalent campaign type in the TTRPG space (and as far as I know) has been for all time because it is the archetypal campaign type for Dungeons and Dragons and all D&D offshoots. A campaign follows the Journey structure if the characters must travel between polities (or regions of wilderness) in order to accomplish their goals.
Popular Examples Lord of the Rings is the most popular example of this narrative structure - Frodo must escort the ring from the starting town to the Sauron’s fortress far away in order to save Middle Earth. Firefly is another example of the Journey though it is within a completely different genre - the crew of the Firefly must fly from planet to planet to conduct trade so that they can pay for their space ship maintenance so that they can fly from planet to planet to conduct trade and repeat… ultimately to achieve a level of freedom and dignity that cannot be found elsewhere. (By the way, go read Lord of the Rings and go watch Firefly if you haven’t already.)
Best Systems to Play Any system that, like D&D, has levels and XP orients itself towards this structure because where there is significant progression of PC power level there is greater need for increasingly powerful threats that often can only be found further and further away from bastions of civilization. Traveller, though it does not have levels or XP, also orients itself towards the Journey - the characters typically have a starship and are in the same situation as the crew in Firefly. In fact, Firefly was likely inspired by a Traveller campaign. You want a system that mechanically incentivizes against sedentary behavior.
Advantages of the Structure The Journey has a lot going for it. The Journey campaign is amazing when you want the campaign to focus on exploration because the characters will be moving from place to place. This gives the DM the freedom to run one session in one area and then the next session somewhere else. You have the most leeway to explore a variety of biomes, meet a variety of NPCs, and generally-speaking, if you or the players get tired out with a certain area, you can leave it fairly expediently. The Journey is also perfect for the archetypal hero’s journey epic because there is a physical indicator of how far along the characters are from zero to hero, that being the distance they are from their ultimate objective.
Disadvantages of the Structure The Journey has a few weaknesses, and they all stem from the transitory nature of the campaign structure. Of the three campaign structures, it is the hardest for the Journey to meaningfully compound campaign events so that they build on each other making it difficult to achieve any narrative momentum. Further, when the characters move around a lot, this leaves less time for them to gain familiarity with locations in the world, really get to know NPCs, or gain the sense that they are anything more than atomized entities wandering around. It is very possible to run tens of session where each individual session is solid and enjoyable but where at the end of it all, there was no real through-line. (Spoiler: That’s okay, just make sure it’s what people want.)
How to Mitigate the Disadvantages Frankly, it is not particularly difficult to mitigate the problems above, and some of them aren’t problems if you have a certain batch of players. For example, with players who are primarily interested in combat and the mechanical progression of their characters, you can easily run an episodic campaign with minimal session-to-session cohesion or narrative build-up. For players primarily interested in achieving the personal goals of their characters rather than an external-to-the-characters plot arc, you can run a sandbox campaign where you let them journey around the world and take up whatever narrative threads they want to take up - sounds solid to me.
Further, a solid hero’s journey plot set-up where the players know who the main bad guy is that they must defeat by the end of the campaign is a very easy way to add compoundedness and cohesion to the various plot events leading up to that point even if they are separated by long distances. The through line of each encounter can be felt when they are encompassed by a broader goal.
The most important thing to keep in mind is that the only way for connection to be formed between the players and anything in the game is to give the players multiple opportunities to interact with said thing. If you want a location to become important to the players, they must be there many times doing something interesting. If you want an NPC to be important to the players, sometimes you can hit it off really well initially (this is unreliable), but more often than not you must have multiple interesting interactions over the course of the campaign. The Journey structure makes it hard to do this by default, so finding ways to bring the NPCs to the PCs where possible is a must if you want deep and meaningful connection between the players and the NPCs of the game world. In Firefly for example, the crew of the Firefly go from planet to planet but every once in a while they circle back to a given area or are forced to by their enemies - this grants the opportunity for the writers to further connections between the main crew and other characters in the story.
But some players and DMs will eventually want something different, a campaign that focuses on a single area and ensures greater connection with the NPCs therein, or perhaps a campaign that focuses on a single, world-impacting event that serves as the focal point for all action. Stay tuned.