Advice request: How far ahead do you plan for a campaign to go? Do you usually have an idea of the Final Big Bad they'd face, and what level they should be at when they face them? Or is it more transient than that?
DM Advice: Ghosts on the Horizon
There’s a lot wrapped up in this question, so I hope you don’t mind that I’m going to try and break my response down into particular sections:
I largely think that trying to pre-plan the end of a campaign is a foolish endeavor that only serves to distract you from making your current adventure the best it can be. While good novelists can start with an ending in mind and move backwards, we’re not novelists: we’re storytellers working in a collaborative, serialized medium that has a chance of falling apart at any moment.
When I’m planning a campaign, I work almost exclusively on the arc the party is currently playing in, only starting work on the next one once the party looks like they’re going to finish up their current adventures. Every other plot point exists like a Ghost on the Horizon, a vague and undefined landmark that I may or may not be working to depending on how the actual adventure unfolds. That’s actually one of the reasons that the Dailyadventureprompts format exists the way it does: an almost modular form of story planning where short, punchy plotlines can be socketed in as needed.
My villains are the same: held in reserve until the party gets to an appropriate level or story beat, then manifested into the ongoing plot as if they were always there. There’s no chance a lvl 1 party could stand a chance against a lvl 20 villain, and so the villain remains a ghost, only one of many potential options that my party might encounter as the campaign progresses.
This technique also interfaces with the one I described here, regarding planning your adventure arcs like attractions at a themepark, with the biggest and baddest looming in the far distance, inspiring your party to move about to the “fair ground” in order to sate their curiosity.
Secondly, and I can’t stress this enough: Good campaigns are created sequentially, not made up whole cloth. When we match ourselves against the media that inspired us, be it books, videogames, or movies, we are comparing our personal artistic talent to professionals or teams of professionals who’ve had YEARS to perfect their art, art that we only consume when it’s in a mostly finished state. Measuring your own creations against these, or worse yet, trying to create something on a comparable scale on your own, is always going to be an exercise in artistic frustration. No one has enough mused-blessed talent to create the equivalent of LOTR from scratch. Instead think of your campaign like an extended storytime jam session: sketchy and halting at first but iterated upon until you’ve worked up a good flow. Using this mindset of constant improvement is going to keep you from getting burnt out trying to reach too far above your abilities, and is going to ensure a better game over all.
Art
