The Indefinite B/X Campaign, Part 1: Downtime in B/X and AD&D

There are a lot of rules differences between B/X and AD&D, but B/X Blackrazor has me persuaded that they aren't mere rules differences. The AD&D rules naturally lend themselves to an indefinite or open-ended campaign. The B/X rules allow for such a campaign, but it requires much more intentional effort from the DM and players.

The B/X rules support campaigns that work like series or collections of novellas or short stories with overlapping characters and settings. In the Basic rules, apart from possibly interviewing the retainers, nothing but dungeon adventuring happens "on screen." Everything else is background. There is almost no need to track campaign time. The rules do specify that characters recover 1d3 hit points per day of complete rest. However, the effect of that rule is mainly just to give dungeon denizens some time to reorganize and respond to PC incursions when the PCs leave to go heal up.

The Expert rules expand the games scope to include wilderness adventures and wilderness campaigns. 

Wilderness campaigns, as described on p. X19, begin much like dungeon adventures. The DM gives the players information about where they are, who the important NPCs are, and some rumors for the PCs to follow up on by traveling to locations in the wilderness nearby. The players then choose the goal of their adventure, equip themselves, and set out.

The game's focus remains squarely on adventuring, and the adventuring is described is still fairly episodic. Now, however, adventures don't have to end where they started. Exploring a wilderness area is an adventure. Traveling through the wilderness to get to a dungeon is an adventure. Traveling from city to city is an adventure. The PCs (or players) decide where they want to go and why they want to go there. Then you play out the journey, and the PCs' efforts to overcome its obstacles.

But the Expert rules also have this interesting passage (p. X4):

Most important, the characters in the wilderness campaign do not exist in a vacuum. The DM should have events going on elsewhere that may affect (or be affected by) the actions of the players. There may be any number of "plots" going on at once, and the DM should try to involve each player in some chain of events. These should develop logically from the actions of those involved. It is important not to force the action to a pre-determined conclusion. The plot lines can always be adjusted for the actions of the players.

Additionally, the Expert rules add magical research to recovering hit points as a time-consuming non-adventuring activity. They also mention various other things NPCs might do—such as building the PCs' stronghold or training animals. Those don't quite qualify as downtime activities, however, because PCs can adventure while they are happening.

Adventuring time is a resource PCs must husband at all levels. In the Basic levels, time spent uses up light sources and triggers checks for wandering monsters. Adventuring time at those levels is a matter of turns. Once wilderness adventuring begins, adventuring time also passes in days. Just as turns in the dungeon use up light and risk wandering monsters, days in the wilderness use up food and water and risk more wandering monsters. As the characters reach even higher levels, time and money become even more important resources for them. They have money to spend to on constructing strongholds, hiring specialists, and magical research. But construction, specialist activities, and magical research all take time. Adventuring takes time, and higher level characters can travel deeper and deeper into the dangerous wilderness. How the plots described on X4 evolve and develop can depend on how the PCs decide to spend their time.

If the "plots" put competing demands on the PCs' time, there will be reason for them to assign retainers to addressing some of those demands. There may also arise some cases in which a player's PC isn't available to adventure with some other PCs, but the player wants to play. Then it might be natural for a character stable to develop.

And now we come to that crucial difference between B/X and AD&D. B/X allows for an open-ended or indefinite campaign, but the DM has to take some special steps. In particular, the DM has to make sure that the evolving plots put potentially conflicting demands on PCs' non-adventuring time and create situations in which a PC is not available to adventure. The unavailability of PCs is essential, because it encourages the development of character stables and keeps the campaign from focusing on the stories of a particular set of PCs. 

AD&D 1e, on the other hand, has a variety of additional built-in mechanisms that take PCs out of play temporarily: such as training for levels, recovering from having been at 0 or fewer hit points, diseases and parasitic infestations. And those mechanisms are not voluntary. (Okay, training is technically voluntary, but everyone has to do it eventually.) If you have a PC, there will be times that PC is not available to adventure, but other PCs are available. And those other PCs might not want to wait around accumulating upkeep expenses for your PC to become available again. They will want to adventure and gain treasure while your PC is away. For a player to participate, they'll need to send a henchman to help or use a backup PC. The mandatory downtime generates character stables, which in turn help to drive the indefinite campaign. An AD&D campaign that doesn't ignore the rules for upkeep, training, disease, infestation, and recovery from injury can naturally evolve into an indefinite campaign. 

If you want an open-ended B/X campaign, then, you have a few options. One is to lean into those "plots" described on X4, make sure they put competing demands on all the PCs' time, and require or encourage your players to have character stables. Another is to import some or all of the AD&D mechanisms of forced downtime. For my Blacknight campaign, I've done the latter, but I admit that might be a mistake. There is something elegant about simply setting up the campaign so that characters naturally feel competing demands on their time, without having to force it mechanically. But that is certainly much easier said than done!

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Indefinite Campaigns and Downtime in 5e

This week: A quick thought about 5e campaigns.

The (2014) 5e DMG presupposes that a campaign that has a more or less novelistic structure. It has a beginning, middle, and end, with different adventures linked together by the overarching story of the campaign.

That is far from the only possible or legitimate campaign structure. In general, I call campaigns "finite" when they focus on a fairly fixed group of PCs working together to accomplish a campaign-defining goal or solve a campaign-defining problem. An alternative campaign type is the indefinite campaign.

If a finite campaign is like a novel, an indefinite campaign is like a soap opera. It has multiple, overlapping and interleaved storylines, multiple central characters, but no fixed protagonists. Plotlines resolve or get abandoned, and characters come and go, but the campaign itself persists.

Indefinite campaigns can be highly immersive, and they only get better as they continue. They are like open worlds or sandboxes, taken to the next logical step. Not only can the characters do anything they want, but their decisions leave their mark on the setting and can influence the what other characters do.

For an indefinite campaign to work, characters who need to be resilient enough to be played over a long period, and interesting enough for players to want to play them for a long time. Yet, characters also need to leave play, either temporarily or permanently, often enough for the campaign to have a varied cast. Not all characters will be available for play at all time. Some will be engaged in downtime activities, such as healing, training, or crafting magic items. Some will retire, and some will die. Character death should be rare enough that the campaign isn't a frustrating churn of low-level PCs, but it should be common enough that surviving and gaining a level feel like achievements rather than forgone conclusions.

Additionally, players in an indefinite campaign need the freedom to try out varied character concepts and to pursue diverse character goals. All that freedom, however, needs to balanced with the DM's need for a coherent and believable milieu that supports the whole indefinite campaign. DMs running indefinite campaigns needs to be able to say no to their players, and their players need to be able to hear it.

Under the standard 5e rules, PCs have good survivability. There are, if anything, too many character options, so the challenge may be for the DM to decide what not to include. 

There are also some variant, optional, or often-overlooked rules in 5e that will be important to an indefinite campaign. They are, mainly, the rules that force characters to take downtime, give them things to do with their downtime, and turn time into a meaningful and limited resource for characters. Here are some of the important ones:

• Every race has a lifespan in its description. If nothing else, characters know their time on the Prime Material plane is limited.
• Living expenses need to be assessed regularly in an indefinite campaign, though "practicing a profession" can make them irrelevant in some cases. It may be a good idea to require characters to maintain a minimum lifestyle based on their level or tier, as some other games do.
• Training to gain levels is essential. It puts the brakes on adventuring, avoids the ridiculous 40-day progression from 1st to 20th level, and forces characters to be more aware of what is happening in their world.
• Slow natural healing is a variant rule that changes how long rests work. Instead of regaining all your hit points at the end of a long rest, you can spend Hit Dice. As usual, you regain half your previously expended Hit Dice at the end of a long rest.
• Injuries that occur when a character has been reduced to 0 hp (or when they fail a death saving throw by 5 or more) can require a character to take at least a little bit of time off to recover, or to find someone who will cast regenerate on them.
• Downtime activities give characters reasons to voluntarily take time off from adventuring. The exception is "Practicing a Profession," which is really just an excuse to ignore living expenses, but even it gives characters something to do while others are engaged in other downtime activities.

If you have a lot of players, you can run an indefinite campaign in the West Marches or open table style. But in that case, keeping track of everyone's multitude of characters might be a headache. You can relieve the headache somewhat by using 1:1 time. For every day that passes in the real world, one day passes in the game world. Characters who do two weeks worth of activity in a game session, then, aren't available to be played for another two real-world weeks. But that only relieves the headache, it doesn't make it go away.

With only a handful of players, there is less to track. It's a good idea to use a spreadsheet or calendar to indicate when each character's last activity was, when "today" is in the campaign, and when various future events (including the conclusion of downtime activities) will occur.

You also need to make some decisions about downtime activities that take a very long time, such as crafting magic items, building strongholds, and training for levels. All of those can take a character out of the campaign for months or even years at a time. (Worst case: a solo crafter making a legendary item requires 20,000 days, or almost 55 years, of downtime.) Players will be be rightly reluctant to do downtime activities that take too long. If a character has to be out of play for 200 days to make +1 armor, is it really worth doing at all? Even the 20 days required to train for levels 5-11 can seem like an eternity for characters who have adventuring goals. Who wants a castle if it takes you out of the campaign for 400 days to build it?

To mitigate this problem, you could simply reduce the downtime required for these activities. Xanathar's Guide to Everything dramatically reduces the time and cost of crafting many magic items, for example. You may also find, though, that it's convenient simply to advance the timeline by jumps of months at a time periodically. When some characters are involved in long downtime projects, you don't have to fill every moment of that with adventuring opportunities for everyone else. You can push the timeline forward as far as it needs to go whenever that's convenient and makes sense for your milieu.