Good Fences: Setting Boundaries in an RPG Campaign

posted Jul 2012

Good Fences: Setting Boundaries in an RPG Campaign

Advice Boundaries Campaign Culture GM Group

It’s said that good fences make good neighbors, and it’s been posited here that good rules make for a good role-playing game. In a related corollary, today I’d like to suggest that setting some good boundaries for a campaign can make for a good role-playing experience.

Establishing the limits and parameters that will define the culture of your game can add just as much to the campaign as the right setting or an interesting character. Good fences for a campaign aren’t as much about what you play, but rather how you play.

WHY?

We have to start by talking about what motivates these boundaries. More accurately, I want to point out what shouldn’t motivate them. Let’s compare!

Good fences are motivated by definition, clarity, and common understanding. Bad fences are meant to cramp, restrict, and hold back areas of a game. Good fences follow natural borders in your campaign, while bad fences are artificially installed- almost forced into place at times.

Good fences should be easily visible and widely known, and acknowledge a common accessible area wherein all game play occurs.

WHAT?

Ultimately, good fences should address areas of a game that naturally present questions or ask for interpretation or personal judgment. Some examples of areas that might need some good fences built are:

Missing or absent players
In-game vs. Real life conversations at the table
Common races, classes, or attitudes toward magic
Tracking resources, wealth, and ammunition
Character access to powerful items, experimental weapons, or legendary allies
Necessary party roles, duties, or composition

WHEN?

Before. You. Start.

Ok, that’s the ideal. Building these good fences prior to needing them helps to avoid making anyone feel like the boundary is being established in the moment to cut them off or hold them in.

We’ve got to be a little pragmatic about this, however; no one can predict every discussion or debate that will arise in a game. (I bet no one ever expected to need the Armor Class for a goat, and yet…) In recognition of that fact, it’s good to settle upon a policy for deciding where these fences should go once you’re in the midst of a campaign.

In most cases, the game master will have to make a judgment call in the moment, and arbitrate as best they can. Once that moment has passed, however, the topic may need to be researched or revisited. The GM’s original interpretation may stand, but when your group has a policy in place that assures group members a say in a permanent place for that fence, it will feel more natural and make it easier to respect that boundary in the future.

WHERE?

This is actually a matter of debate in our group right now. Again, “all together in the same room” is probably the ideal answer. We’ve even talked about including a ‘planning period’ as the first meeting before each campaign. At present, however, that’s just not possible.

Real life commitments and long distance group members make game time around the table a valuable commodity, so our group is loathe to give that up when other options may suffice. As such, the ‘planning period’ idea quickly evaporated. Some other options we have used or are using are:

Email between players, or between a player and the GM
Online forums or micro-blogging
Private Wiki site
Text messaging/Phone calls
Peer editing/voting

While the online options mentioned above allow for universal involvement and flexible access, the challenge in using them is often the same: they lack any consistency or immediacy. Most of these potential boundaries will find their solutions through a series of cumulative comments, and sorting through these on most web sites means scrolling through pages and pages of random thoughts, old replies, and cross-referenced data. It can be done, but it lacks true navigability.

That said, we’re pushing through these digital feeds so we can start our much-anticipated Victorian Era ‘Dresden Files’ campaign! I’m sure we’ll have more to pass on about the “Where?” question once we sit down to play that first episode.

WHO?

There are some fences that can only be built by the game master. Based on the type of game they want to run and the type of story they want to tell, the GM will usually have some boundaries in mind that will help define their campaign. Role-playing is rarely, if every, a democracy.

That said, there are some questions that may be opened up to the group as to what kind of culture they do (or do not) want to create for their game. Despite my earlier observation, peer voting may get some of these lines drawn around your game. The process of jointly defining their limits can certainly help a party bond before their characters even get introduced. It also creates some firm player investment into these areas that may otherwise cause friction or frustration. If players have a hand in building the fences, they’ll also be far more likely to respect the boundaries they represent.

Has your group developed a progressive process for building good fences? Have they found some fences that needed tearing down? What other gray areas have you purposely defined prior to kicking off a campaign? Don’t keep us out- tell us in the comments!