There's really only one trick needed for a successful duet campaign: the narrator and player have to harmonize. To a large extent, that sums up my advice in the last 35 articles of this column. Of course, achieving harmony can be really tricky, but it is the ultimate goal. If the narrator and player can figure out a way to come together, then everything else falls into place.

Windancer Campaign

Perhaps my longest running duet campaign was a D6 Star Wars campaign where my wife began playing a minor Jedi during the Galactic Civil War and eventually worked her way up to being a Jedi master during the New Republic Era. There were a lot of reasons this campaign was so successful:

NPCs. The campaign had lots of memorable NPCs and most of them hit their emotional marks more often than not. The PC collected a reliable cadre of NPCs as the campaign progressed that she could mix and match for adventures and story-arcs. More importantly, the NPCs grew and developed often due to the actions and encouragement of the PC. The PC encouraged relationships between NPCs, sent them off for opportunities, and gave them meaningful individualized responsibilities. The NPCs showed the evolution of the campaign and the setting in personal terms.

Story Arcs. There were some big story arcs in this campaign. Admittedly, the ones at the end became a little silly because the scope of the campaign had become so broad, but for most of the campaign there were a series of distinct story arcs. I had no one mega story arc for the campaign; that is a recipe for tedium and frustration for the player. Instead the campaign was broken up into smaller story arcs reflecting the focus on the player: conflict with villain (Moff, Hutt, Dark Jedi, Ancient Evil, etc.), period of association (Rebellion, New Republic, Scout Service, New Jedi Order, etc), time of travel/exploration (Seeking Masters, Exploring Ruins, etc.), and arcs of building or establishing something (Rebel Networks, Jedi Sanctuary, etc.). Each story arc was distinct and, while they often built on one another, arcs were bundled tightly.

Progress. A lot of RPGs use 'power', i.e. levels, to mark the progress of a character and this campaign was no exception. However, it is the more discrete aspects of character growth and progress that make duets successful. Romantic relationships, children, status, and connections all give depth to a campaign and were the hallmark of this particular campaign, which my wife still reflects fondly on decades after its end. Related to this is the passage of time, which is very important to giving the player a sense of progress and makes a campaign dynamic. The setting needs to change and evolve, which was certainly the case here; the PC's actions affected not only the adventures and personal relationships of the PC but also the entire New Republic setting.

So how did we harmonize in this campaign? The player took control of the direction of the campaign and the narrator focused on making that direction interesting and exciting. That's all, though obviously making that actually happen is a lot harder than it sounds. Players don't always take control and sometimes when they do they go in directions that are difficult for narrators to get excited about.

Which brings us to how you define success.

Focused Success

I have narrated a lot of focused campaigns that went brilliantly for a brief time and then ended too quickly in my opinion. Vigilante superhero, bodyguard to a queen, legislator to an exiled government, and scores of others that were great concepts and began fantastically but then faltered and failed. Some ideas simply aren't broad enough for a long-term campaign, which has to support a wide range of story arcs and adventures to keep the player engaged. Other ideas are so broad that they fail at the outset because the overarching campaign concept takes precedence over running fun adventures, which fundamentally is what keeps a campaign going.

Ultimately, this is why I feel that it's necessary to drop the assumption that for a campaign to be successful it has to run for a long time. In my experience, campaigns like the Windancer campaign described above are the exception, not the rule, and you're setting yourself up for failure if you approach a campaign with the idea that it will last for years of real-time roleplaying. There is a broad continuum between one-shot adventure and epic campaign and it is somewhere between these two extremes that you'll often have your greatest success with duets. A one-shot by its nature is a shallow experience and an epic campaign can easily overwhelm. In contrast, a mini-campaign can give you the depth and fun you want from roleplaying without the pressure of striving for an epic campaign.

This is something I wish I had realized years ago. Too often, I've started campaigns that were too narrow to have long-term potential or, in the alternative, so focused on a sweeping story-arc that my player started out already demoralized by the scope of what was before her. A mini-campaign allows enough time to develop a meaningful PC and setting but does not require a massive commitment for either the narrator or the player. Thus another benefit to the mini-campaign is that both narrator and player may be more wiling to try a new idea out if both know that the new idea will run long enough to give it a real try but also be limited enough that an end is in sight.

No matter what length campaign you're striving for, it's important that you inform your player of how long the campaign will last and then you have to stick to that. This is a crucial part of narrator-player harmonization. By stating up front what general length of campaign is anticipated, you're helping to establish the definition of success for the campaign, which can help ensure that you both feel satisfied when the campaign does wrap up. Harmonizing pacing on both ends (PC goals and adventure/setting progression) allows a campaign to develop organically, conclude naturally, and linger long afterwards as a positive and rewarding shared experience.

Like most aspects of duet roleplaying, getting harmonization right takes practice. As I've said before, when a campaign 'fails' always take time to reflect on what went wrong. Sometimes, the only thing that really went wrong was in having an unrealistic definition of campaign success at the start, or having had conflicting definitions of success between the player and narrator. If you can have an honest discussion about what you both expected as compared to what actually happened, you can head off future problems. For instance, my wife and I have had multiple failed campaigns based on 1 or both us trying to recapture the successes of the Windancer campaign, which was really an outlier campaign in many ways. It's unrealistic to expect that you can replicate the entire scope of a successful past campaign in either feel or duration; it's similar to how so many movie remakes are pale comparisons to the original classics. Instead, you both need to focus on aspects of the successful campaign (character goals, setting, NPC relationships, etc.) that you want to re-envision in a new campaign. Then, you can work on harmonizing your expectations while introducing new elements to make the new campaign its own individual success.