Coordinating a regular schedule of D&D game sessions, to keep a campaign active and vibrant, can be a challenge. If the campaign’s only Dungeon Master or enough players aren’t available, the next session might have to be postponed, and repeated problems of this sort can endanger the continuation of the campaign.
In short: in a world filled with distractions, it can be hard to keep a campaign going. Enter the concept of the shared campaign.
In a shared campaign, more than one member of the group can take on the role of DM. A shared campaign is episodic rather than continuous, with each play session comprising a complete adventure.
The largest shared campaigns are administered by the D&D Adventurers League and overseen by Wizards of the Coast. You can also create your own shared campaign for a school D&D club, at a game store, a library, or anywhere else where D&D players and DMs gather.
A shared campaign establishes a framework that allows a player to take a character from one DM’s game to another one within the shared campaign. It creates a situation where almost nothing can prevent a scheduled session from happening. The roster of potential players can be quite large, virtually ensuring that any session has at least the minimum number of characters needed to play. If everyone shows up to play at the same time, multiple DMs ensure that everyone can take part.
In order to be successful, a shared campaign needs a champion-someone who takes on the responsibility of organizing and maintaining the group. If you’re interested in learning more about how to run a shared campaign and seeing how the Adventurers League handles certain issues, then the rest of this appendix is meant for you.
Code of Conduct
Time and time again, the core rulebooks come back to the point that the most important goal of a D&D play session is for everyone involved to have fun. In keeping with that goal, it’s a good idea for a shared campaign to have a code of conduct. Because people who don’t normally play together might end up at the same table in a shared campaign, it can be helpful to establish some ground rules for behavior.
On the broadest level, everyone in a shared campaign is responsible for making sure that everyone else has an enjoyable time. If anyone feels offended, belittled, or bullied by the actions of another person, the entire purpose of getting together to play is defeated.
The basic code of conduct for a shared campaign might be modeled on a similar document that another organization or location uses. Beyond that, some special policies might need to be added to account for what might happen at the table when players and DMs interact. As a starting point, consider the following material, which is excerpted from the Adventurers League code of conduct.
During a play session, participants are expected to:
Follow the DM’s lead and refrain from arguing with the DM or other players over rules.
Let other players speak, and allow other players to get attention from the DM.
Avoid excessive conversation that is not relevant to the adventure.
Discourage others from using social media to bully, shame, or intimidate other participants.
Make the DM or the campaign’s administrators aware of disruptive or aggressive behavior so that appropriate action can be taken.
Designing Adventures
Designing adventures for a shared campaign involves a different set of considerations than designing for a standard group of players. Most important, the adventure must be timed to conclude when the session is scheduled to end. You also need to balance combat encounters for a range of levels, since a wide range of characters might be experiencing the adventure at the same time.
Adventure Duration
Every adventure in a shared campaign begins and ends in the same play session. (If a group of participants wants to take longer to finish and all are willing to do so, they can exceed the time limit.) A session or an event can’t end with the adventure unfinished, since there’s no way to guarantee that the same players and DM will be available for the next session.
Typically, adventures in a shared campaign are designed to take either 2 hours or 4 hours. In each hour of play, assume the characters can complete the following:
- Three or four simple combat encounters, or one or two complex ones
- Three or four scenes involving significant exploration or social interaction
Within these constraints, it can be difficult to create open-ended adventures. A time limit assumes a specific starting point and endpoint. A good way to get around this restriction is to create an adventure with multiple possible endings.
Location-based adventures also work well with this format. A dungeon presents a natural limit on character options, while still giving the players choices. The adventure could be a quest to defeat a creature or recover an item, but the path to achieving that goal can be different for each group.
For more narrative adventures, try to focus on simple but flexible encounters or events. For instance, an adventure requires the characters to protect a high priest of Tyr from assassins. Give the players a chance to plan out how they want to protect the temple, complete with authority over the guards. A few well-fleshed out NPCs, some of whom might be suspected of working with the temple’s enemies, add a layer of tension. Consider leaving some details or plot points for the DM to decide. For example, the DM might have the option to pick which member of the temple guards is the traitor, ensuring that the scenario is different for each group.
Combat Encounters
Design your adventure for one of the four tiers, as set forth in chapter 1 of the player’s handbook: tier 1 includes levels 1-4, tier 2 is levels 5-10, tier 3 is levels 11-16, and tier 4 includes levels 17-20. Within each tier, it’s a good idea to use a specific level as a starting point. Assume a party of five 3rd-level characters for tier 1, five 8th-level characters for tier 2, five 13th-level characters for tier 3, and five 18th-level characters for tier 4. Use that assumption when creating combat encounters, whether you use the encounter-building rules in the dungeon master’s guide or are making an estimate.
For each battle, provide guidelines to help DMs adjust the difficulty up or down to match stronger or weaker parties. As a rule of thumb, account for a party two levels higher and for a party two levels lower, and don’t worry about balancing the adventure for parties outside the adventure’s tier.
Rewards
Adventures in a shared campaign that uses variant rules for gaining levels and acquiring treasure (such as those described below) don’t include experience point awards or specific amounts and kinds of treasure.
Character Creation
A shared campaign’s guidelines for character creation might include definition of which races and classes players can choose from, how players generate ability scores, and which alignments players can choose.
Player’s Handbook plus One
You should think about which products players can use to create a character. The Adventurers League specifies that a player can use the player’s handbook and one other official D&D source, such as a book or a PDF, to create a character. This restriction ensures that players don’t need to own a lot of books to make a character and makes it easier for DMs to know how all the characters in the campaign work. Since a DM in a shared campaign must deal with a broad range of characters, rather than the same characters each week, it can be difficult to track all the interactions and abilities possible through mixing options freely. We strongly recommend this rule for any shared campaign.
Ability Scores
For generating ability scores, we recommend allowing players to choose between the standard array-15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8-and the option presented in “Variant: Customizing Ability Scores” in chapter 1 of the player’s handbook.
Starting Equipment
For the sake of simplicity and efficiency, it’s a good idea to require that beginning characters must take the starting equipment specified by a character’s class and background.
Variant Rules
A shared campaign might use some variant rules to handle certain aspects of the game. The Adventurers League, for instance, has variant systems for gaining levels and acquiring treasure. These “house rules,” presented below, serve as a sort of common language, ensuring that the rewards all characters receive are equivalent no matter what kind of adventure a character experienced.
See the Shared Campaign Variant Rules entry for more information.