Designing for Generational Campaigns: Part IV Life Spans

The last requirement of my series on Generational Campaigns (see parts I, II, and II) is a method of dealing with character aging and natural life spans.

The first is rather obvious: a person's abilities change over their life. A old boxer may have great skill, but he's not as fast nor as strong as he once was. Ideally a Generational Campaign should reflect this. Simple stat modifiers are the easiest and perhaps the most effective solution, and that argues for a system that has defined Stats and Skills- so that they can be modified independently. This highlights the differing effects of age vs. experience, and details the characters with respect to each other.

Thus stat-less systems are at a disadvantage here, as are systems that simply add the total of Stat+Skill giving equal weight and range to both. There either is no place to apply the modifiers, or they come across as a flat 'level' decrease with is directly counter to the 'old but experience' feel we're going for.

There's a side benefit here as well, given that character's skill will generally increase with age (causing them to widen the difference between them and new characters), their stat will decrease. Thus it's easier to keep both in the same adventure (although the combat system in use still is the most important fact in doing this).


In addition to aging modifiers, one needs to be able to determine the natural lifespan of the character, i.e. when he'll die assuming he isn't killed as a result of an adventure. Again, one of the points of Generational Campaigns is to represent the complete lifespan of characters- and that includes when they die. It's in this way we get the final handoff to the next generation, much as we do in real life.

Unlike the previous articles in series, I've seen a number of game designs attempt this. At one point even D&D had charts for these matters. It has however dropped out of sight in more modern designs, and they never had the other needed elements in their systems to really support Generational Campaigns in any case. That last point is likely why we don't see such mechanics much today- at the end of the day they didn't serve any purpose in those games.

Previously in the comments for the first article in this series, it was mentioned that one also needed rules for marriage, sex, childbirth, etc.

I disagree.

I think that such things can be handled fine at the meta-game level ("I think Farren wants two children, but let's make it interesting and say he had a unexpected third later in life..."). Given how complex rules for things like this can quickly get, I don't think it's possible to actually manage it mechanically in a way that would cover all the bases. Besides individual characters are too small of a simple to reflect the wider setting- and thus realism or faith to the setting would hardly be damaged by such an meta-game or role-played approach.

Thus I consider details at this level to be more a matter of taste than requirement. In my own system I do have a table for family size (as well as determining the sex of one's siblings), but little more. And I tend to forgo its use for PC families leaving it up to the player's choice.

Designing for Generational Campaigns: Part III Advancement

Previously I've talked about the concept of Generational Campaigns and how a game's combat system relates to those goals. Another important sub-system is character advancement, and here we see yet another area of difficulty if one was using the common published systems.

In short, the advancement system must be able to handle the full life cycle of a character that might be played over a decade or more of real time and their entire life in-game. frankly most systems are not designed to do this. WotC noted at one point that most campaigns last six months, and then are closed. Thus there is little reason for system designers to deal with questions of longer campaigns.

Point Buy systems such as GURPs and HERO System are very open ended allowing one to tailor campaigns and worlds to specific tastes, this is especially true of HERO System when one can not only build the characters- but effectively the entire world.

The problem with this is the amount of attention required by a GM who desires a consistent and 'real' world. With that goal one just can't let players buy without limit or constraint, the result is a broken and inconsistent world. The amount of effort required is more than many can handle or have time for. Additionally, the constant gaining of points together with the use of 'caps' on various abilities can result in all character blurring together and losing their niche- becoming interchangable and nearly faceless game pieces.

Class/Level systems avoid this fault by constraining advancement such that character remain in concept. But typically still share a serious failing for this type of campaign- i.e. the upper of characters are so vastly powerful compared to the lower end that they are not able to adventure together. But new and old character adventuring together is a core requirement of the genre such campaigns are based on.

Generational Campaigns thus require three things in their advancement system.:

1. Constraints to protect niche and character differences
2. A slowing of advancement as one progresses to such a degree that decades of play is possible while still keeping the characters 'human' and able to adventure with new characters.
3. The ability to cover the entire possible lifespan of characters, from the greenest starting characters to the most experienced and powerful beings allowed to players.

Designing for Generational Campaigns: Part II Combat

Previously I provided a overview of my ongoing Fantasy Campaign, which is in a style I call Generational.

There I mentioned that one of the requirements was seamless play, where characters of different generations adventure together and overlap in play without skips in tiem. This was a requirement driven by much of the fantasy fiction that I favor. In Lord of the Rings for example, completely unexperienced hobbits find themselves fighting alongside much more experienced characters. The same very much applies to my other favorite series The Chronicles of Prydain.

Naturally I wanted to recreate this in my table top fantasy world. However back in 1980 this wasn't an easy task, and I note that even today it is basically unheard of.

One of the primary problems is having low and high level character on the same battlemap, and having the low level ones both matter and yet able to survive the encounter. Most rpg combat systems won't allow this, at least if you follow the rules and suggested play styles.

To use D&D as an example- the earlier editions were based upon what is primarily a resource management style of play. Everything from HPs, to number of spells, to magic items, potions and scrolls all played an important role- and frankly high level characters have such things in great numbers and low level ones don't. Add in 'skill' related items (such as THAC0) and things only get worse. Even 4th edition shows the same issues, although to a lesser extent.

Having high level character 'twink' low levels with scrolls and potions wasn't a solution. It was counter-genre and thus undesired.

The simple truth is that anything resource management based (and where resouces increase with character advancement) is unsuitable in direct proportion to its amount of resource management. Such a combat focus is unworkable for my desired style of play. Thus I needed a system that was more focused on maneuver rather than resource management.

By removing much of resource management and adding maneuver (battle maps, facing, multiple target bonuses, terrain, stunning, etc), one changes the dynamic of combat. In this way any character could be placed in danger from lesser foes by means of position or numbers. Thus lower level characters could guard a great hero's flanks, and/or engage opponents that might be a danger from due to their numbers.

The GM and world design has an impact here as well. In contrast to a group of 5th level encountering 5th monsters- the switch is made to a group of 1st to 7th levels encountering foes of 1st to 7th levels (or even perhaps 1st to 3rd as numbers now matter more).

This has the additonal benefit of being more representional of the source fiction as well. And it's always great in game design to hit two targets at once.

Designing for Generational Campaigns: Part I

One of the least common things I've encountered over the years are people playing campaigns that span generations- which is basically the only type of fantasy campaign I've ever played.

By generations I mean characters who have children, and players who then run those children who in turn have children and so on down the line. The primary campaign I've played in this style has been on-going for 28 years real-time and 80 years or some in-game time.

I've encountered a number online who do something similar, I different from most in the following two ways:

• No Skips: Skipping is a methods suggested in Pendragon and to a lesser extent Ars Magica . Skips are "let's advance thing 10 years and pick things up when...". That's not the method I'm talking about, but rather continuous play of the campaign advancing the time line naturally through play. One may 'skip' or abstract a month of travel, but not years just to get to a new generation of characters or a new point in time.

• Seamless Play: Children will enter play along side older characters, and sometimes even go on the same adventures with them. They interact as families do, not displaying the 'new group of character' mindset common to most campaigns.

Doing this successfully requires a different approach to combat, skills and character advancement. I've found that nearly every game system on the market crashes attempting this type of campaign. I'll cover some of these issues and how I've addressed them in my campaigns as the series continues.