The Long Game (Part I)

Earlier this week, a reader asked me:

Can you do a post where you outline your process for prepping and running these long-running campaigns? You must be doing something right, as you've run several.

It’s a good question and one I’ve touched on before in several posts over the years. Rather than linking to them all, I thought it might be worthwhile to distill some of my thoughts and experiences into a few broad maxims. These aren’t exhaustive or definitive, but they reflect the principles that have helped me referee campaigns that last not just months, but years. In a follow-up post, I’ll go into more specific detail about my preparation habits and practices (if you can call them that).

Whenever I reflect on what made a campaign successful, I keep returning to the same handful of guiding principles. They’re not glamorous or novel, but they’ve proven their worth time and again. Of course, they’re just that, principles, not rules. I’ve “violated” all of them at one time or another, often during the course of my most successful campaigns. That’s inevitable. Each campaign is a unique thing with its own temperament and trajectory. There’s no foolproof formula for success, however one chooses to define that elusive term, but these are the things I’ve found most helpful over the years.

Play with Friends

This is the cornerstone. Roleplaying is, at its heart, a social activity. It thrives on camaraderie, trust, and a shared sense of commitment to the game. You don’t need to begin a campaign with a table full of close friends – some of my longest-lasting campaigns began with strangers – but what matters is that friendships develop over time. When the people at the table (real or virtual) genuinely enjoy one another’s company, everything else becomes easier. Disagreements, when they arise at all, are easier to resolve. Player engagement rises. The game becomes something people look forward to because they want to spend time together. Without that level of friendly intimacy, I suspect it’s much harder to keep a campaign going in the long term. Roleplaying depends on a degree of vulnerability, imagination, and trust that is best nurtured among people who like and respect one another.

Stay Consistent

Consistency builds momentum. Especially in the early weeks of a campaign, nothing matters more than regular, dependable play. Weekly sessions, even imperfect ones, create a rhythm that reinforces the campaign’s presence in everyone’s lives. It becomes a shared ritual, something to anticipate and plan around. Of course, real life has a habit of interfering. People get sick, travel, or have other commitments. That’s normal. But a campaign with strong momentum can absorb these disruptions without falling apart. That’s why I’ve always aimed for a weekly schedule. Anything less frequent makes it harder for a campaign to take root and find its footing. In my experience, campaigns that start with a fortnightly or monthly schedule rarely last.

Accept the Lulls

Not every session will be exciting. Some will be slow, distracted, or even dull. That’s part of the process. In a long-running campaign, those lulls are often just as important as the thrilling moments. They give contrast to the high points and contribute to the texture of the shared experience. They also cultivate a kind of patience and persistence, which are crucial to the long game. If you can accept that not every session will be a triumph, you’ll find that the campaign as a whole becomes something much greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the dull sessions are often forgotten entirely as the months and years go by. What remains instead are the high-water marks, those moments of triumph, disaster, or revelation that become the stuff of legend.

Be Flexible

No campaign plan survives contact with the players. Over time, they will zig when you expected them to zag, and the campaign will evolve in directions you never imagined. I don't resist this, but embrace it. Some elements will fizzle. Others will flourish unexpectedly. That’s all to the good. A long campaign is less like a novel and more like a sprawling oral history – messy, inconsistent, filled with odd detours and loose threads. It doesn’t need to be dramatically coherent or tightly plotted. In fact, I'd argue that concerns for such things are the road to campaign perdition. What a campaign needs is forward motion and a willingness to follow the players’ lead when they seize on something unexpected. This also means being comfortable with unresolved threads. Not every mystery will be solved. Not every adventure seed will bear fruit. That’s fine. 

Don’t Cling

A good referee is, or should strive to be, an idea factory. Hooks, schemes, adversaries, rumors, location should flow constantly. But don’t get too attached to any of them. Players won’t bite on everything you throw at them and if you cling too tightly to a particular idea, you risk turning the game into a soliloquy rather than a conversation. Let ideas go. Toss them out like seeds. Some will take root; others won’t. So be it. There’s always more where they came from. I’ve left entire adventures, factions, and NPCs on the cutting room floor simply because the players weren’t interested. I didn’t try to force them. Instead, I focused on what did spark their interest and let that guide the course of play. And sometimes, those discarded ideas can be recycled later in a new form. Players might not bite the first time, but a variation on the same concept might work wonders down the line. The important thing is not to become precious about your ideas. In a long campaign, flexibility and responsiveness matter far more than cleverness.

As I said above, these aren’t really rules and they’re certainly not the only factors that contribute to a successful campaign, but they regularly work for me. I share them here in the hope that they might help others find the same joy in long-term play that I have.

There’s a unique kind of magic in watching a campaign world  and the characters who explore it – evolve over the course of years. It’s a slow magic, but all the more rewarding for it. When a campaign lives long enough to gather history and memory, to surprise even the referee with its twists and turns, it becomes something truly special: a shared story that belongs to everyone at the table and could never have existed without them.

That, I think, is the real reward of the long game.