Friday, May 21, 2021

Campaigns, Endings, and How to Structure a D&D Story

 Critical Role is the most popular D&D livestream show, and while I don't have any numbers in front of me, I think it's played a big role in 5th Edition's popularity. While there's nothing about it that is different than the way that you could play a game at home (except the cameras and studio) the players and DM are all so good at leaning into the storytelling that many watch it much as one would watch a beloved TV show. It leans hard into the idea of D&D as improvisational storytelling randomized by dice.

The folks at CR have indicated that the current story arc of their second campaign is going to conclude that campaign, though they say that the story of those characters is not necessarily over (they've returned to the characters of the first campaign in a few one-shots over the years, which seems a precedent for us to see members of the Mighty Nein again, assuming that they survive the current adventure).

Just as one can start to feel a bit saddened by the approach of a good book or the final season of a beloved TV show, it can feel a little sad to imagine that this campaign, with characters we've spent years following, is coming to an end.

And so I thought I'd talk about the structure of D&D storytelling and different ways to approach it.

Aside from Critical Role, my favorite D&D streaming show is Dimension 20. But Dimension 20 has both a very different tone and a very different structure.

Critical Role was designed to, as best as possible, simply transport the joys of the home game that the members played to a streamed medium. Indeed, the first campaign jumps in when the characters have already advanced from level 1 to, I believe, level 9, with ongoing plots and arcs - literally taking the game they had already been playing (in Pathfinder, in fact, converting to 5th Edition D&D when the stream started). Its players are all professional voice actors, and unsurprisingly, this group of theater kids tends to focus on the dramatic storytelling aspects of the game. That is not to say they don't get silly - just like any D&D game, things get utterly ridiculous at times. But the players also really buy into the dramatic stakes of the story, and there are some heartbreaking tragedies and major character triumphs that make the show a really exciting thing to watch beyond the obvious monster-slaying.

Critical Role also does things with a long campaign structure. The first campaign started streaming at level 9 and went all the way to, for some characters, level 20 (and I think I need to rewatch the last arc of that to get a better idea of how to run a really effective tier 4 campaign.) Campaign two started at level 2 and the characters are currently level 15. With weekly sessions that go 3-4 hours that go on for a few years apiece, it's a truly epic saga told over an immense runtime.

Dimension 20 does things a lot differently.

Formed by a group of College Humor internet comedy folks, the tone is much more comedic. These are all sketch comedy writers and performers who do stand-up and improv, and Brennan Lee Mulligan, the show's DM, clearly likes to go for high concept premises that are often patently ridiculous. For example, perhaps the darkest campaign they ran was A Crown of Candy, in which the characters navigated a Game of Thrones-style dark fantasy world of intrigue and betrayals, but every person in that world was themed around different types of food, the player characters being mostly candy. At one point, one of the characters, who is a king, reminisces with a dying friend about their days fighting in wars, but the friend is also literally a big slice of cake.

Dimension 20 is organized into seasons, in which a tight story is told over maybe 12 2-hour sessions, always alternating between a Roleplaying episode and a Combat episode. The story is a bit more "on rails" because the show also makes elaborate sets for their combats (and thus need to make sure that those fights happen) but nevertheless is fantastically exciting because of the game, strong improv that the players bring to the table.

The show is also not live-streamed, and so they edit it, adding sound effects and close-ups during combat to illustrate what is going on in a somewhat more cinematic manner. While you don't get to literally see the story as it's being improvised, the end result is more polished (and likely helps them fit the episodes into their two-hour runtimes - if you could cut all the time looking up rules or hesitating to make a decision about what to do on one's turn, I think most combats would be way, way shorter.)

But also, in terms of story, the games are confined to more limited arcs that come to a definitive end. Rather than simply having a campaign go on, a particular campaign might get a second season, which is almost like a sequel. The first season, Fantasy High, takes place in a nation in a traditional fantasy world that, uniquely, feels like late 20th/early 21st century American suburbia, with cars and "crystals" (smartphones) and computers, malls, arcades, etc., where the characters are all students at a high school for people looking to go into adventuring as a career. The first season takes them through their freshman year at the school, defeating a great evil. Then, when season two starts a few years later, they have an entirely new plot that takes place during their Sophomore year, after several seasons in which they had been able to play other campaigns.

I started running D&D before watching either of these (I think Dimension 20 started after I'd already begun playing,) but a different show was my inspiration to check the game out: Acquisitions Incorporated, which was initially created to serve as a promotional game for 4th Edition with the folks at Penny Arcade and other webcomics. Acq-Inc actually operated more like a series of one-shots with the same characters, usually tying into whatever the big plot was in 5th Edition's (once they transitioned to that) published adventures. Acq-Inc spun off its own live game with The "C"-Team, which I also watched for a while, and which was a bit more of a longform campaign.

Anyway, I think when you look at the descriptions of classes and such, the possibilities of a campaign taking players all the way from 1 to 20 looks very appealing. But it's also very hard to do - you need to sustain a campaign either over a very long time or make leveling up much faster than the game generally expects you to make it.

As a result, I think it's highly valid to limit a campaign's story in terms of scope and time frame. Yes, we want to see our characters progress and become insanely powerful, but sometimes it makes sense to keep things limited. I've been giving a lot of thought to Ravenloft games lately, and generally speaking, I don't recommend having them go beyond level 10. Frankly, there's no minimum or maximum number of levels to go through to tell a compelling story. I'd generally recommend letting players level up at least once during a campaign, as progression is part of the appeal of D&D, but you could tell a really exciting story in which the players never even hit level 5. (As an example, the Ravenloft domain of Richemoulot, which is frequently ravaged by a plague, could work as a full tier 1 setting.)

For Critical Role's second campaign, there are certainly plot threads I think they could pick up if they choose to revisit the Mighty Nein, but at the same time, the current antagonist and the arena in which they are facing that antagonist feels every bit as epic as the confrontation with Vecna at the end of campaign one - even if they don't have 9th level spells.

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