Two articles ago, I spoke about the three campaign structures that all campaigns fall into. These are narrative structures and knowing the one to which your campaign adheres is vital to running your campaign effectively. The three campaign structures are: the Journey, the Situation, and the Organization. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend going back and reading The Three Campaign Structures - Part 1 where I both discuss the concept more broadly and go into depth about campaigns which adhere to the Journey structure. Now I shall do the same for the Situation structure.
What is the Situation? The second campaign structure is the Situation, and this is arguably the second most common campaign structure (though both it and the Organization are generally far less common than the Journey). A campaign follows the Situation structure if there is a world-changing circumstance that warps everything around it, meaning that the characters must react to it in some way. Note that the “world” simply refers to the scope of the domain of the campaign - for example, if the characters belong to a small town and something weird occurs in that small town that cannot be ignored, you have a Situation campaign. Conversely, a world-wide apocalypse is also a Situation campaign.
Popular Examples Game of Thrones might be the most popular example of this narrative structure. Game of Thrones is complicated in that there are a plethora of simultaneous stories occurring at once, but at the heart of it all is the fairly simple Situation: The royal bloodline was ousted and now every opportunistic lord and their mother wants a piece of the pie. [The legitimate king of the Iron Throne, Aerys II, was usurped and the guy who now sits on the throne does not know how to rule. Everything else stems from this. Daenarys Targaryen wants to retake the throne (a reaction to her family being ousted), Jon Snow must contend with the white walker threat, a problem which is largely created by the fact that the political instability from the usurpation prevents any of the Westerosi leaders from committing troops to the wall. Ned Stark must go to King’s Landing because the current king needs him to run the logistics of his government. So on and so forth. Some of the characters, by themselves, are more playing through Journey campaigns, but the story overarchingly adheres to the Situation structure.]
Attack on Titan is another great example of the Situation. All that’s left of humanity is forced to dwell in this one city-state whose walls protect them from giant, man-eating titans that prowl the rest of the world. Everything in that story stems from this apocalyptic situation.
Other examples include pretty much any post-apocalyptic series you can think of - the characters must react to the messed up world and everything they do factors the apocalypse event in. Another example: in the Walking Dead, there are plenty of normal character-focused stories but everything is tainted by the need to find resources and avoid zombies.
Best Systems to Play Any system that is not primarily predicated on combat works really well. The problem with combat-focused systems is that the players will want to engage in a lot of combat since combat-focused games brim characters with combat abilities, and while that’s fine and good for the Journey campaign structure, it doesn’t work so well here. You want situations to build on themselves as both the characters and their allies and rivals react to the situation - the more time that is spent with active characters, allies, and rivals, the most interesting the campaign becomes, so you don’t want the primary encounter type of your game to be one that kills people, whether they be PCs or NPCs. Further, combat-centric games tunnel-vision player and DM thinking toward combat - if you come across a group of raiders in a post-apocalyptic game and you’re playing D&D, your first thought is to attack those raiders, but if you’re playing, say, Call of Cthulhu: End Times, since you don’t have tons of hit points to burn, you’re more likely to actually consider all of the possibilities that a real person in that world would consider. Trade with them. Evade them. Pretend to be one of them. All of these options also exist in the D&D version of the game, but they are typically less effective and less apparent than just rolling initiative.
Advantages of the Structure The Situation is awesome because it provides an inherent through-line for the whole campaign that also wraps in a plethora of opportunities for meaningful character interaction with NPCs and other entities. It is the best campaign structure if you want lots of compoundedness where each event really feels like it follows from the last and leads to the next. It is the best campaign structure if there is a concept you want to explore since the players will continuously come into contact with it again and again. You also have a very narratively-powerful ending that you can rely upon at the very least to conclude your campaign satisfactorily: that is for the characters to end the situation. I’m not saying that this is always the route you want to take, but it is always an option and rarely a bad one.
Disadvantages of the Structure No matter what, if the situation which the campaign revolves around is resolved, then the campaign must end or it becomes a different type of campaign, perhaps revolving around a difference situation. This means that you must create a situation that is significant enough to engage everyone for the entire campaign. If, for example, the situation is either too-easily resolvable or if the characters can simply walk away from it, then it probably wasn’t designed very well.
Further, some situations (some of the best in my opinion) cannot be resolved at all and then they become the backdrop for adventures in that world - if you run this type of game, there is less of an obvious ending point for the campaign and you are going to have to spend more time thinking about the through-line for it. For example, the Walking Dead has gone on for so long that some of the main actors have left - it is a husk of what it was before. Now, I am not saying not to run campaigns where the Situation is an unsolvable world state, but do know that an unsolvable situation is simply world-building and then you must build the campaign thereafter whereas a solvable situation is both world-building and campaign-building.
How to Mitigate the Disadvantages The first disadvantage is easily solved by only running a single campaign. The focal point of the campaign is the situation and once that situation is resolved, the players have won and you can start a new campaign. That new campaign can involve the same characters and even continue in the same world, but the world and premises are going to be so different that you will need to prepare a whole new campaign concept, and might even want to swap TTRPG systems to accommodate the change.
The second disadvantage, the one where the situation is more of a backdrop for the world, is to not forget to also plan the campaign premise. For example, if zombies run around the world and all humans turns into zombies when they die regardless of whether they were bitten or not and there is no real way to change that situation, then you have a pretty dark and interesting world for your players to adventure in, but you must then come up with the adventure and the through-line for it. Perhaps the campaign starts with the characters simply trying to survive in the wilderness, and then they manage to find some small piece of civilization and must build it up and defend it against the main human bad guy who wants to rule like a warlord. The campaign ends once that is achieved. Although the world situation is unchanged, a small part of the world is. This is a simple and powerful way to end a story set in an eternally-dark world because in such a devastating situation, if the characters can win back a small portion of the world from the apocalypse, whatever it is, they’ve in a sense, won.
Alright, folks! Next up is the Organization campaign structure, which is actually the structure that my current campaign adheres to. Stay tuned.