What Drives Your Campaign?

In a comment on my A World of Adventure post, the ever emerald TheKelvinGreen responded to my desire for a open world exploration focused campaign by saying, "I've always wanted to play in a completely open exploration game. Alas, I only ever get to play mission-based or plot-heavy games, with little exploration."

My hearts go out to Kelvin to be sure. At the same time, his statement got me thinking about I what such campaigns would be like. TRPGs with 'little exploration' are not something I'm deeply familiar with. More or less exploration I can conceive of but 'little' just doesn't compute in my adventuring-into-the-unknown oriented brain.

I thought I would take this opportunity to talk about campaign design as it relates to games that are Mission Driven, Narrative Driven, and Exploration Driven. 

Mission Driven

In my mind, a Mission Driven campaign has the PCs largely reacting to and engaging with adventures given to them by an outside entity. The typical Mission comes from a patron; an individual or group capable of hiring you to go perform a task for them. It could be a wealthy merchant, a secret government agency, or even a regular person who needs your character's/party's particular set of skills and abilities. 

Examples of strongly Mission Driven campaigns would be most Superhero games, most Star Trek games, Espionage, and Ghostbusters. 

Superheroes are alerted to criminal activity by the Major or the Trouble Alert.

Star Trek characters are sent to investigate strange anomalies by Starfleet Command. Espionage parties get assignments from Control.

Ghostbusters receive a call from the Manager of a Fancy Hotel about a Ghost.

It is also possible the one giving you your Missions is antagonistic towards your party; you work for them to pay off a debt or their harm you or someone you care about if you don't. In either case, the scenarios come to the PCs and they largely wait for that to happen. Like Firefighters, they don't [usually] roam the streets looking for fires but instead are on stand-by until a call comes in. 

Narrative Driven

Narrative Driven campaigns feature the party of PCs going on an adventure for reasons conditional to the story being told. Maybe its to avenge the destruction of their homeland, to prove they are worthy of being the rulers of a kingdom, or because their dying mentor told them of a great treasure hidden in a distant place. The adventures they go on are all tied to a story and driven by emotions and personal goals. It could be THE story, an overarching tale that influences the entire campaign but it could just as easily be about the members of the group helping one another in pursuit of all of their individual stories. 

Examples of this are tough for me to come up with as this sort of campaign can be created in nearly any kind of setting or genre. A Dungeons and Dragons campaign COULD be Narrative but so could a Horror, Superhero, or virtually any other kind of game. The key is story first and everything else after. 

I can see a number of games of this nature also have Missions and Exploration within them, though I'll address more on this towards the end of the post.

Exploration Driven

By far my favorite type of campaign and the one hardest to execute these days (see below) is the full on Exploration game where a map is made or a region described and the 'adventures' depend on where the PCs want to go and what they want to do there.

Often the Exploration is connected to some idea or theme that governs why the group of Player Characters are exploring the area they're in but what happens because of that motivation is anyone's guess. Once the PCs interact with whatever their destination has in-store for them things can literally go in any direction.

This is my preferred way of running Medieval Fantasy games, Traveller and other Spacefaring Sci-Fi, and I've used it to good effect in other genres as well. There are several games that are traditional viewed as Mission Driven that I think benefit from being a mix of Mission and Exploration (keep reading and you'll see what I mean). 

What Actually Drives Campaigns

Generally speaking, most campaigns are a mix of all these classifications. At least mine are and I would imagine so are most of yours.

Granted, the particular 'levels' of each would vary from Gamemaster to Gamemaster, Genre to Genre, and Campaign to Campaign. For the most part, my Star Trek campaigns are mainly Mission Driven with a great deal of Character Narrative and a good amount of Exploration. Likewise for Superheroes. My Traveller, Star Wars, and other Sci-Fi Space Adventure campaigns are mainly Exploration, with a great deal of Character Narrative and a good amount of Missions. While my Fantasy campaigns tend towards a Exploration, Narrative, Mission format, The Winghorn Guard games [being heavily influenced by the Superhero genre) are Mission, Exploration, Narrative. I think Ghostbusters would be considered Mission, Narrative, Exploration. 

A campaign missing any one of these elements would be pretty odd. These are the key ingredients of Tabletop RPG campaign and adventure design at its most basic after all [IMHO]. I can honestly say I would want to run or play in a campaign with no exploration and no story of any kind. No missions? It's weird to say maybe but I feel that's the only one I could do without and at the same time, I can't imagine an ongoing game that doesn't include missions.

The biggest issue I face these days is that Exploration Driven games require proactivity on the part of the players. You need the people participating to enjoy looking around and interacting with your world or universe. I ran a Traveller campaign not that long ago wherein the PCs were hired by the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service to help them complete the Grand Survey, since the IISSS didn't have enough ships to cover the entirty of Charted Space. Basically their job was to explore the planets in a particular Subsector, catalog key stats and information on them, and report back to the IISS on their findings. If they found particularly useful data such as major resource deposits, a hidden pirate base, an unusual lifeform, or whathaveyou, the PCs would get a 'finder's fee' bonus.

One of my players just couldn't wrap his head around the idea. He didn't understand what we were doing. What was the 'Mission'. He needed to be told, 'Go to Planet A. Do X thing', or it was all too vague for him. Exploration for exploration's sake wasn't a strong enough motivator for him [even though I made it clear he and the other PCs were also getting paid with bonus for more interesting finds]. The game didn't last that long and it made me overly nostalgic for my own High School campaigns of exploring just for the thrill of finding something new. 

What about you? What's your preferences and what do you actually end up running? 

Let me know. I'm really curious!

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Barking Alien