This past weekend, my “Borderlands” campaign ended. (Named after my homebrew campaign setting and not the videogame or the module). And following that I slowly shelved the PCs’ minis, then tucked away the campaign notebook and setting binder. All the stuff that had been within easy reach for years was now being archived. Stored. Joining the other ghosts of campaigns past in a storage box.
The campaign began thirty-four months ago, in September of 2016. While we had a couple 4-month-long breaks where we played mini-campaigns as well as some one-shots, that’s still 25 months of one campaign. As many as 43 five-hour game sessions.
It’s arguably my longest campaign. Yikes!
Looking back, my Dragonlance campaign ran 24 sessions while the subsequent Ravenloft game ran 17. I think when I ran Rise of the Runelords and Skull & Shackles they each roughly took 22 sessions. With 42 sessions, while not twice as long as most campaigns, it’s pretty darn close. I’ve played in games that ran a few months longer, but had fewer sessions overall. And I did two years of Living Greyhawk with my main having 57 sessions/ARs, so that still holds the “record”. But this is my longest campaign behind the screen without the game fizzling out or the group imploding.
I could have kept going but the players wanted to move onto something else and take a break from those characters. There’s so many more campaigns I want to run that ending now felt right. But we might revisit in a year or two (or three). A one-shot or mini-game. Nothing’s impossible in D&D!!!
There’s been a curious throwback on #dnd Twitter the last few days, praising 4th Edition monster design (and to a lesser extent, 4e encounter design).
4th Edition was a divisive version of D&D that made numerous changes to how the game was built and played, and one of the most infamous revisions was in regards to monsters. Monsters had a level instead of a Challenge Rating (like in 3e and 5e), each monster had a role, and, most importantly, the stat blocks of monsters included all their abilities. This was done as a direct response to 3rd Edition, where large swaths of each creatures’ abilities were handled via keywords that refer back to discrete blocks of rules located elsewhere (creature type, subtype, feats, and spells).
The fondness for 4th Edition monster design is an interesting response to playing 5e monsters and is very clearly employing rose coloured glasses.
Because 4th Edition monster design was really terrible.
Roles Rebuttal
Monsters in 4th Edition each had a role. This was the purpose they served as a member of a “squad” in combat encounters. The roles were soldier (high defenses, medium hp), brute (high hp and damage), skirmisher (high damage, mobile), lurker (high damage, stealthy), and artillery (high ranged damage). With the sub-roles of minion (1 hp) and leader (buffs allies/ heal). There were several encounter building templates in the Dungeon Master Guide describing different types of combination of the combat roles.
However, roles are problematic. Because they limit an individual monster into serving a very particular and narrow focus.
For example, what role should goblins have? Well, you can imagine a goblin skirmishing dashing about while slashing at the PCs, and a lurker ducking out from behind rocks to throw a dagger, or even artillery that peppers the PCs with shortbow arrows. Goblins filled all three roles in 4th Edition quite easily… but they also do so in the opening chapter of Lost Mine of Phandelver. The goblins in that boxed set are lurkers in the first encounter—where they ambush the PCs — but the guards watching the entrance to the lair are artillery and many of the rest might be skirmishers. And at higher levels, the same goblins become minions that are dropped by a single successful hit. The difference is the 5e goblin only uses a single statblock occupying a quarter-page while the 4th Edition goblins for the same purposes are 4 stat blocks filling a total of a full page. Simply put, adding these variant role-specific monsters means reducing the total number of monsters in the book (because page space is finite).
Combat roles are a great tool for encounter design. But are awkward and limiting for monster design. It forces the designers to make redundant monsters or force monsters into an arbitrary box. Because while creatures like an ogre or bulette are easily assigned a role (brute and soldier respectively), other monsters—like a lich or a mind flayer—have a less clear role in an encounter and a case could be made for multiple different roles.
Similarly, locking monsters into a particular role limits their usefulness. A monster designed as a lurker doesn’t function as well as an artillery or skirmisher, and try to force the mechanics into that box is awkward and problematic. Even if the story of the monster makes it perfect for the encounter, the mechanics of the game are getting in the way of designing that encounter and telling that story.
Really, monster roles are something that should have been included in the Dungeon Master’s Guide as an encounter building tool, with rules for how to modify monsters to fit a role and effectively employ monsters of each role. Such as adding plate armour to an ogre to shift it from an iconic brute to a soldier or remembering to reduce goblin AC when they act as artillery because they can’t use their shields. Along with the encounter templates from pages 58-59 of the 4th Edition DMG. (But this doesn’t exist in the 5e DMG because, again, finite page space.)
What About Minions?
As a quick aside, there’s often the question of adding minions into 5e. Minions were monsters with a single hit point that were killed after a single successful hit. They were useful for big mobs and set piece encounters, where the heroic PCs might cut through dozens of orcs or kobolds. (Like in Lord of the Rings where the Fellowship mow their way through large numbers of orcs.) Minions were necessary in 4e because the defenses of monsters changed each level to keep pace with the PC’s abilities. Player Characters rapidly outlevelled monsters, so in order to present the illusion of facing a lower level that was now a minor inconvenience, you needed separate monsters.
But in 5e, bounded accuracy means a level 1 goblin can still theoretically hit a level 10 PC (albeit only a fifth of the time) and said PC can still miss (again, albeit only a fifth of the time), so a separate monster doesn’t exist. Additionally, monsters hp are theoretically rolled and the average presented as a convenience: while boss monsters might have maximum hit points, it’d be quite possible for the “minion” monsters faced in waves to have minimum hit points. Instead of the average of 7, the flunky goblins all have 2 or 3 hp. This isn’t even a house rule; it’s just using the full range of the rules already presented in the game.
Comprehensive Stat Blocks
One of the changes rolled back from 4th Edition monster design was listing spell names in monster stat blocks rather than the full text of monster abilities.
3rd Edition monsters were inarguably problematic, with the type of monster imparting immunities and bonuses, monsters accruing feats like PCs at a swift rate, and also the aforementioned spells and spell-like effects that required a DM to flip between pages and have multiple books open. It’s undeniably preferable to have all the abilities of a monster ready on the page in front of you.
However, there are a number of other factors to consider.
The big one is space. Adding the full text of every spell a monster might know occupies a lot of space in the stat block and means reprinting the same redundant information multiple times throughout a monster book. For many monsters, this would greatly increase the length of the monster stat blocks. Even a monster with a few small spells known greatly increases in size. For example, the mind flayer (chosen at random) has four spells known: detect thoughts, levitate, dominate monster, and plane shift. This isn’t a long list. But they’re also not simple spells: including even an abbreviated text for just those four spells would potentially add 20-30 lines to the monster’s stat block, potentially doubling it in length! And that’s without considering spellcasting monsters like the lich. And, again, with finite page space in the book, doubling the size of several monster stat blocks means reducing the total number of monsters in the book.
The catch is, increasing the size of monster stat blocks doesn’t make them much easier to run. The DM that reads all the spells for the planned monster ahead of the session shouldn’t have many problems running said foes, and can just mark those pages with small post-it notes.
The problem will always be running a monster on the fly. Trying to remember spells you haven’t read in weeks or months. But including the spells in the stat block won’t help in that situation, as reading a full page of text is daunting and slow. Having the text of spells on the page versus on bookmarked pages, screen captures from Roll20, or on spell cards isn’t significantly faster; the DM still has to absorbing the same amount of information in the same amount of time. They’re going to skim, skipping over traits and the later abilities. In the end, it’s always going to be better to read the monster in advance.
Instead, what ends up happening, is the non-combat abilities get excised. The mind flayer loses its ability to cast detect thoughts, levitate, and plane shift because those spells don’t help them in a fight. And its domination ability becomes limited in scope to fit the available space, instead becoming a simple in-combat mind control ability rather than a psionic ability to control thralls and slaves. Monsters lose flavourful and exploration based abilities. This is what happened in 4th Edition. And trying to do the same thing again won’t result in a significantly different outcome.
Challenging Encounters
The encounter design system of 4th Edition is also often lauded over the more complex system of 5th Edition. But the 5th Edition system was designed the way it was for a reason.
In both systems, you built encounters in effectively the same way: you had a budget of experience that was spent by adding monsters. The catch was that in 4e, the budget was equal to one monster for each PC of a level matching that of the PCs. Five 7th level PCs would find a fair fight with five 7th level monsters. And if you instead had nine 4th level monsters (roughly the same xp) this might still be a reasonable fight as the monsters suffered a 15% penalty on accuracy while PCs accuracy increased by 15%.
In theory at least. In practice it worked best when using at-level monsters. If using monsters of mixed levels, the math wasn’t much easier. In practice it was often easier to quickly level up/down monsters than stop and do the encounter math, or rely on an online tool.
A similar system can somewhat work in 5e. One PC is roughly challenged by a monster of a CR equal to 1/3rd the PC’s level. So the same party of 7th level PCs might be reasonably challenged by a five CR 2 creatures.
The big difference is throwing nine CR 1/2 creatures at the party will be less fair, because bounded accuracy means less disparity in hit probability.
But, again, this is also looking at the 4th Edition encounter building rules with fond hindsight. Just like the 5e encounter building and Challenge Rating system breaks down and becomes less accurate at high levels, so did the encounter building of 4th Edition. In that edition you were discouraged from using monsters four or more above the party. But it was often recommended by those who played well into the Epic tier that the PCs fight monsters that were five or six levels higher, if not throwing out the guidelines altogether. Neither system is particularly good outside the early level band.
Potential Fixes
For a currently theoretical 6th Edition or major revision of the Monster Manual, a few of the more simple spells could be included in monster stat blocks. Specifically stuff like offensive cantrips or other at-will attacks. Simple spells like fireball or lightning bolt could also be included without impacting formatting too much. I imagine something like D&D Beyond or Roll20 could also include cheat-sheets of spells with the relevant monsters. However, completely omitting secondary spells is probably undesirable for monsters, needlessly limited their abilities to the immediately offensive at the expense of flavour or utility spells.
For roles and monster combat, the easiest solution would be a product that focused on advanced combat and encounter design. Such a product could include details of potential roles in combat and some encounter groups, alternate abilities and options to enable monsters to focus on certain roles. Modifying monsters to increase their challenge and/or complexity.
As this is a topic better suited to experienced players who have a firm grasp of basic combat (and are more bored/ less satisfied with traditional combat encounters) this would probably work best on the DMsGuild. Primarily as the “experienced player” audience is less of a focus to Wizards of the Coast at this time, and they are instead focusing on adventures aimed at newer players along with variant Starter Sets. Advanced set-piece encounters and tactical combats are interesting, but much more of a niche topic. But it’s more than focused enough to make for a decent PDF product that would apparently appeal to a decent number of D&D fans.
Shameless Plugs
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As of this writing, the final movie of the “Skywalker Saga” has just reached the theaters.
The Rise of Skywalker has been met with mixed reviews, further dividing the fanbase between those who liked Abram’s movies and those who preferred Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. This has left Disney’s trilogy in an awkward position of being an uneven venture where most fans really don’t care for at least one of the films, and the final film further divided the fan base rather than bringing them together to celebrate their shared fandom. This arguably makes the sequel trilogy more problematic and uneven than the prequels: despite being comprised of stronger individual films, the lack of a cohesive story and planned narrative makes this trilogy weaker as a whole.
Regardless, the “Skywalker Saga” is over and Star Wars films are on hiatus. With Solo and The Rise of Skywalker failing to really expand beyond the domestic box office or hit the high of Force Awakens, future Star Wars films might be more modest in terms of budget and scope. Or the franchise my stick to the longform storytelling of television/ Disney+, following the lead of The Mandalorian and the planned Obi-Wan and Cassian Andor series.
All this makes now the perfect time to tell different types of campaign for the Star Wars roleplaying game, be it the older West End Games d6 system or the modern Fantasy Flight Games system. There’s an excellent opportunity to tell new stories or reimagine older stories with less worry about what’s coming next.
Breaking the Mold
Most Star Wars campaigns tend to be similar in structure. Either the heroes of the campaign are running around between the movies, setting-up the pieces for the heroes of the films to knock down, or they’re off to the side having adventures that kinda sorta matter, but don’t really.
This is roughly the same formula Star Wars Rebels followed. The series showed a bit of backstory related to the founding of the Rebel Alliance, how certain heroes joined the Rebellion, and the like. Meanwhile, it also had the rebels of Phoenix Squadron liberate a previously unmentioned planet. They saved the day, but in a safe, confined way that didn’t impact the heroism of the movie heroes, diminishing their accomplishments.
This is largely because Luke and company are still the big damn heroes. (Or Anakin/ Rey and company depending on the trilogy.) The big galaxy altering events are being done by someone else. The Player Characters are seldom allowed to make major changes to the status quo
But why not?
In a world where the next few Star Wars films are years away and likely not galaxy altering, the PCs can completely change the galaxy. They can be the ones who fully defeat the remaining forces of the First Order and restore the Republic. Or they can be brave trailblazers (or local warlords) seizing power in the galaxy, following the dissolution of all major political figures in the galaxy.
They can be the big damn heroes.
Episode X and Beyond
The obvious campaign is to ask what happens next. To tell the story of the Resistance following their victories in The Rise of Skywalker. Maybe the First Order is still around and a threat and maybe not. Maybe the Jedi Order is restored and maybe not. Maybe another Republic rises and maybe not.
Such a campaign could take place immediately after the current film or jump ahead a decade or two, so as to chronicle the adventures of the subsequent generation and their struggles with the recurring enemy of hatred and fascism emboldened by the Dark Side.
Or the conflict of this trilogy could be something else entirely. Maybe it tells the tale of the inevitable droid revolution, forcing the PCs to pick a side between droid rights and the status quo. (Such a campaign could even answer the question posed by Triple-Zero in the excellent Darth Vader comic, of whether droids could use the Force if they drained someone’s blood.)
Advancing the timeline allows the players to have some buy-in regarding the setting and events, creating a galaxy they want to adventure in. A session zero where the players take turns outlining what happens next and generate conflict is a good idea, while simultaneously ensuring the players are familiar with the world and current events.
Restoring the EU
When Disney purchased Lucasarts, one of the first things they did was the controversial erasure of the Expanded Universe: the tales of Star Wars told in comic books, novels, and video games. While elements of the old EU have made it back into the new canon—such as fan favourite Grand Admiral Thrawn—large swaths of the Expanded Universe are still erased. Both the bad and the good.
It’d be easy to take the best elements of the EU and use that to build a campaign. Retelling the events of Knights of the Old Republic with a twist. Or having the Yuuzhan Vong War occuring after the events of The Rise of Skywalker. A GM could also adapt the events of several X-Wing novels or Dark Forces games to the new era.
This is certainly the easiest route, as inspiration is provided and favourite novels or video games can serve as inspiration, so you don’t need to come up with a plotline, NPCs, and worlds from scratch. Such a campaign can run into trouble if your players are familiar with the source material, but a few key changes can prevent that from being an issue. Make the stories your own, much like how Marvel Studios does when adapting classic comic book stories for the big screen.
Other Side of the Galaxy
One of the major complaints of the Sequel Trilogy is that the scope is vague and uncertain. The size of the First Order is unknown, and the New Republic was apparently confined to a single star system. This uncertainty becomes a strength for a roleplaying game set during the same period as the sequel trilogy.
It’s very possible that instead of a big galaxy-wide event (like the Clone Wars or the massive galactic Empire) the events of the sequels could have been confined to a relatively small portion of the galaxy. The First Order was one faction that arose following the collapse of the Empire and the New Republic destroyed during the Starkiller Incident was another small nation. There might be two or three other large empires, republics, or alliances in the galaxy uninvolved with the events of the sequel trilogy, who still exist and are in need of saving/ defeating.
You could run a campaign set to the Galactic north, about the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, and their own problems with a different Imperial Remnant. Or the Mandalorians, Hutts, the Lost Tribe of the Sith, or something else altogether. The “good guys” might even a section of the Galactic Empire that broke away and democratised, and is struggling against internal problems such as conservative elements hoping to restore the Empire’s past glories.
The events in this other quadrant of the galaxy could be just as momentous as the conflict involving the First Order and the Resistance, against a threat just as dangerous and oppressive as the First Order.
There’s lots of room for more stories and major events in a space as big as a galaxy.
Alternate Sequel Trilogy
Another option is to dump the events of the sequel trilogy altogether, and tell your own story about the next generation. Your own Episode VII.
This could be a very different tale about the end of the Skywalker lineage, albeit one more planned from the beginning and designed so all three “episodes” are to your liking. Such a campaign could pull story beats and characters from the Extended Universe as well as the films, combining and blending them as necessary. Or it could be wholly original, and based on your own desires for what happens next.
Again, a session zero where the players get together and brainstorm, building their own future can work. With the players pitching ideas and slowly creating a future that seems reasonable and fits their expectations, while avoiding elements they found they disliked. Such a trilogy could also give the heroes of the Rebellion happier fates, perhaps not having their successes and accomplishments negated by the immediate rise of a new Empire. Or it could take an even darker route, and have the Rebellion fail following Return of the Jedi, with the Empire having a resurgence and remaining in power.
A variant sequel trilogy could run with the idea that the Saga is about Anakin Skywalker, and focus on his legacy. A main character (either a PC or MacGuffin NPC) could be a literal reincarnation of Anakin, reborn through the Force to fulfil an incomplete destiny. Alternatively, the story might follow the route of the sequel trilogy and instead focus on the Skywalker bloodline. One or two of the players could be the child of Luke Skywalker, struggling to live up to the impossible legacy of their father and grandfather, while facing their own problems.
The villains could be the Empire or some form of Imperial Remnant, other Sith, or a Cult of Vader inspired by the dark lord and hoping to avenge his death.
Infinities
A very different take on a Star Wars is running one in an Infinities reality. Similar to Marvel Comics’ “What if…?” brand, these stories tell alternate histories, of how events could have unfolded under slightly different circumstances. Such as if Luke’s torpedoes had misfired during the Battle of Yavin, or Han Solo doesn’t make it to Luke in time to stop him freezing to death.
A single change can really ripple outward and make for a very different galaxy. There’s a myriad different options for how these stories could unfold. What if the troops on the Star Destroyer at the start of A New Hope had remembered droids were a thing and destroyed R2-D2 & C-3PO’s escape pod? What if Han and Chewie had fixed the Falcon’s hyperdrive before fleeing Hoth? What if the Rebels hadn’t befriended the Ewoks? Or what Luke had listened to Yoda, and stayed to finish his training?
That last one is a good example, as in theory it wouldn’t change much: Lando would have helped Leia escape while Han would still be frozen. But, with further thought, without Artoo, the Falcon wouldn’t have escaped Vader and Leia would have been re-captured. And without his artificial hand, Luke might not have stopped attacking Vader on the second Death Star.
My favourite example of a potential Infinity is “what would have happened had Obi-wan died in the fight against Darth Maul while Qui Gon Jin had lived? Would Anakin still have fallen to the Dark Side if he’d been trained by an experienced Jedi Knight, let alone one mourning the loss of a Padawan? Suddenly, all kinds of things change and you end up with a setting that’s still Star Wars and very familiar, but one different enough that the players can leave their mark on the galaxy and make a difference.
A Galaxy of Your Own
And that can be your Star Wars. The new Star War. One where your heroes aren’t just holding down the fort until canon heroes can save the day, or are maintaining the status quo so the “real” heroes can make a difference. That’s the point: you don’t have to settle for having the PCs off to the side doing stuff that kinda sorta matters… but really doesn’t. Instead, they can change the galaxy. And should.
This is, until at least 2030 when we can expect an Episode X through XII about the plucky Revolution fighting against the imperialistic Third Reign led by a mysterious dark force user in black, which overthrows the failing Neo-Republic and the only hope is a kid raised on a desert planet with family ties to a legacy character.
