The Expeditionary Campaign Model (Or how to get all twenty or so my my gaming buddies playing the same campaign)

In this post [link] Risus Monkey makes an excellent point about Old School campaigning. Essentially, most of the original old school campaigns, (Blackmoor, Greyhawk, Ryth) had a floating pool of several dozen players, who would enter and leave the campaign on a regular basis as their schedules permit. In other words, the exact party composition was different almost every time, both in terms of the characters present as well as the players.

Now who do we know who has a shed-load (well, a double-decker bus load) of gaming buddies he'd love to game with but can't because of his crappy work schedule?

Me. The same guy whose last campaign probably suffered quite a bit from the general inexperience of the players when faced with an unfamiliar concept (the notion of Old School Gaming).

Which led me to do some thinking. I have about two dozen friends who, since I moved back to Glasgow, I'm gamed with at some point or another but whom I now rarely see. I'm also about to start a new OSRIC campaign, once I've finished with the one-off zombie game at least. However, many of the gamers in question are followers of the plot-based rather than sandbox-based gaming philosophy. This would have posed a problem to my nascent master plan if not for one simple little helpful fact.

Risus addresses the same problem in that very article. Or rather, he refers us to another blog article on Ars Ludi [link] wherein the author explains how he managed to juggle a pool of 9 to 14 different players in a plot-based rotating party super-hero' game. Eureka!

Problem solved. I already prefer running a strange bastard mixture of sand-box and plot driven games, where there are anything up to a dozen plot-lines on the go at once for the characters to pursue or abandon at their leisure (and which still progress even when the party isn't following up on them). So why not throw in one of those plot-matrix tables the author of Ars Ludi mentions and give it a go. That should keep players on both sides of the sandbox/plot divide happy and give me a damn good excuse to keep in touch with folk I'd only normally see otherwise at weddings and birthdays.

Cool post Risus. Thank you, Chronicles or Ryth and Ars Ludi for the inspiration.

Now I just have to run it past my dearly beloved. But don't worry. I'm sure she'll love it.