#like the complexity of the discussions i've seen there from people who play dnd to people who have only played bg3

[bhaalsdeepbat]

honestly the best way to experience BG3 fandom is to split up between reddit and tumblr. tumblr is there for your in depth scene and character analysis, but reddit is there with all the lore and specific plot point details. like they're ON IT collecting canon info lmao

[pyrrhiccomedy]

hi! hope this isn't a bother, but i've followed you for a while and i have to say i'm just in love with your dnd discussions and what i've seen of your dm style. i recently started dming myself, and i was wondering if you had any advice about tackling a longer campaign? yours seem so fun and well put-together!

So, IN MY CAMPAIGNS I’M NOT SAYING IN EVERY CAMPAIGN, the core loop looks like this:

Problem -> Lead -> Mystery -> Context -> Decision

For example, let’s say the problem is that the party is broke. They get a lead: take this job, you’ll make some money. Taking the job gives them access to a mystery. What is this really about? Why did our employer want us to do this? What is the actual outcome of what we’ve been sent to do? By seeking out the answers to those questions, they learn the context for their actions. (Their employer is actually a rebel, and your attack on this merchant is going to be used to frame the prince for murder!) Knowing the context, they now need to make a decision: side with the rebels who lied to them? Warn the prince for a reward? Rescue the merchant and make a run for it?

Whatever they decide creates a new problem: now you’ve betrayed the rebels, or the Prince suspects you were involved in his disgrace and is coming after you in order to clear his name, or you’re fugitives now with a merchant in tow.

In trying to solve their new problem, they will encounter a new lead. Sometimes they generate their own leads. Either way, the gameplay loop continues.

If you just chain these together, PLMCD->PLMCD->PLMCD, you have a functional campaign that can theoretically run indefinitely. I mean, eventually your characters will level cap, but story-wise, nothing is stopping you from keeping this up forever. 

But to make a campaign that feels big and interconnected and meaningful, you have to connect those loops in more interesting ways. I think of it as nesting them inside each other, and exploding them outwards.

The simplest example of ‘nesting’ loops is the Bioware model of storytelling. Problem: the darkspawn are invading. Leads: 4 dots on the map, each of which contain several other problems you have to solve, with their own leads. While you follow your leads, always in the back of your mind, there is the Mystery: how do you stop the archdemon? Once you are done with all the Leads you have been provided, you are provided with the final piece of Context: the Grey Warden who kills the Archdemon dies, but Morrigan can do a dark sex ritual that will let you get around that. Your Decision, then, is who will kill the Archdemon, and if you’ll take Morrigan’s offer.

It’s not complex, but it works! And it illustrates the importance of having one, overarching PLMCD that encompasses everything else in the story. Everything is tied together by its relationship to the central Problem in the campaign, and adds texture and emotional heft to the final Decision you will be asked to make. You should have one of these.

To make a longer campaign, though, you don’t just want to nest these loops inside each other; you want to have them explode out. That means that your players don’t know what the big Problem is, at the start of the campaign. They lack the context to even realize it exists.

I ran a short Seven Seas campaign where the players, on beginning the campaign, understood the overarching problem of the game to be: the undead are invading Eisen.

They were swiftly presented with a Lead: if one of you masquerades as the last Imperator’s secret child, you can claim the throne, unite Eisen, and repel the undead invasion.

The Mystery following that Lead is: how do we convince the various Eisenfursts to vote for us? What are their real agendas? How do we deal with our political rivals?  Great, the players think. That’s what the campaign must be about. Let’s get started.

But they were also presented with a few other Mysteries, that didn’t seem connected to their quest to become Imperator. Like: what’s with this mysterious pale young man, who seems to draw the undead to him like moths to a flame? And: was the last Imperator somehow responsible for the undead invasion? How, exactly, did he die?

And they were also very quickly presented with a completely different Problem, that seemed to have no connection to the Problem of the undead invasion: Dragons were returning to Eisen.

In pursuing all of these things in tandem, they eventually gained enough Context to realize that actually, it didn’t matter who became Imperator, and the dragons returning was just a side-effect: the real Problem was that the great sage Mirabeau was breaking the banks of the rivers of Hell in an attempt to flood the gates of Heaven. Her action had set all of those other Problems the players had been dealing with into motion: they just never had the context until now to realize what tied all of these things together.

Having identified the actual, campaign-encompassing Problem, they were left with the ultimate Decision: work with Mirabeau and take Heaven by force, no matter the cost? Or stop her, and protect the people of Eisen from a terrible war - but remain imprisoned in a world without magic or potential for transcendence?

That was a PLMCD loop exploding outward.

I knew this would be a pretty short campaign, because actually, identifying the Real Actual Overarching Problem was not that hard, and once identified, it did not create any new problems. It was designed to be a 6 month campaign, and it was pretty much on track before I decided to end it early because playing online wasn’t working out for our group.

Our VtM campaign was 2 years long, and involved several instances of stories exploding outward, which then often led to whole new nested loops going inward, where realizing what the Real Problem was just created new problems, and investigating those problems sometimes led them to realize that the Real Problem wasn’t even the Real Problem, this all led into something even bigger.

I don’t know if any of this is helpful to read.

My point, I guess, is that the deeper you bury the Real Problem behind mysteries, other problems, and most importantly, a need for greater context, the longer your campaign will be. The more complexity you weave into these loops, the more time your players will need to actually gain a full, holistic understanding of the core challenge in front of them: by which time, they hopefully will have levelled up enough to deal with it.