A few weeks back, I found myself reminiscing about the Old School concept of the Campaign on one of @vixensdungeon's threads.
After mulling this over in the back my mind for a few days, I had an epiphany:
My Early Gaming Experience was Not Standard, even for the era, and that has shaped my approach to role-playing and my expectations for campaigns ever since.
Back In the Day, the Platonic Ideal was the Campaign, as Vix described: the persistent world in which characters adventures. Players might come and go, characters might level up and retire, grand epics might be told -- but the Campaign was always there. The idea of "the same game" running for years or decades was always the unspoken goal -- bold indeed, when the very concept of an RPG had been around for less than a decade. My gaming in high school was largely tied up in a couple of intertwining campaigns -- as I think I've mentioned recently, characters weren't as locked into their "home games" as they tend to be nowadays, and it wasn't uncommon for a single player to have more than one character in a campaign, or even to play more than one character in the same session.
There was my own campaign, which I ran during lunch hours at high school, and there was the Big Campaign run by my friend K, who was in college. K's Campaign really did seem to be working toward that Platonic Ideal: a persistent setting with multiple and constantly-changing groups of players and PCs.
I only got to play in K's games at conventions -- I lived in the Middle of Nowhere in North San Diego County, and he lived smack in the middle of Orange County (Anaheim, I think). Mind you, I went to a LOT of conventions in my high school years, so I was hitting one every couple of months.
Between those games, however, K, our other friend J, and I kept things going via the United States Postal Service. We'd churn out thick, multi-page missives detailing what our characters were doing between adventures.
Remember the Stronghold Rules in AD&D1, where all the different classes got to establish different kinds of forts or castles or temples after they reached a certain level? They were one of those things that nobody ever paid attention to, and got dropped by the time 3rd Edition rolled around.
Well, we used them. A lot. And tweaked them, of course, because that's how we rolled in those days. The cleric built her Temple; the ranger built a great Hall where rangers and druids gathered and trained; the wizard bought the Tavern That You All Meet In almost before it became a cliché.
And that's one of the things that the letter-writing side of K's Campaign largely focused on: developing our strongholds, interacting with our henchmen and hirelings, tying new PCs into the existing narrative scaffold.
A few years later, Aaron Allston would introduce the concept of "Bluebooking" in the Champions supplement Strike Force, and it was basically the same idea: the game doesn't have to stop when you leave the table. In any event, because of all this, and a few other games with their own between-session in-character interactions, I always assumed that blue-booking was the norm. I thought most people did this: dove into their backstories, had in-character interactions between formal game sessions, played side adventures and solo sessions when the opportunity arose. For forty-five years, I thought that was a mark of a successful game.
I ran an online game on Discord for several years, and because we frequently had scheduling issues and I am not the most reliable of GMs, I set up a specific channel for "Unmoderated RP", a place for the players to have in-character interactions and conversations between sessions.
It basically went unused. And I thought that reflected a general disinterest in the campaign itself, even though everyone mostly seemed to enjoy themselves during actual sessions.
And that's what I have finally figured out, after all these years: my unconscious expectations for TTRPGs have not been reasonable.
The game doesn't have to stop when you leave the table -- but it doesn't have to keep going, either. And for most people, it doesn't.
Most people walk away from the table and leave their characters there.
(Don't expect me to do that, though. I'm here to make blorbos, and I will hug them and squeeze them.)
