Designing an Epic Campaign for TARPG

 

High on last week's wishlist for future publications for Talisman Adventures is an epic Crown of Command campaign.

Such would surely be the (*groanworthy pun alert*) crowning achievement of this game. For anyone steeped in the boardgame, and comfortable with throwing a session together with minimal preparation (see here for thoughts on Taking A Slapdash Approach to the game), waiting for someone to write and print the book isn't a good reason to prevent your players from experiencing the joy of one final victor raising the Crown to their fevered brow, or screaming to their never-arriving-doom in the Horrible Black Void...

I have thoughts (entirely unoriginal and derived from the boardgame) about the Enemies, Strangers, Locations and Events that might feature in such a campaign, but this week I want to think about it in the merely structural sense of  how many such encounters there might be, and how long it would take to play.

Following guidelines in the rules, an encounter in TARPG can give a hero from 0 to 4 Experience Points. Call this an average of 1.5 XP. XP needed to level up start at 7 for 2nd Level, then 8 for 3rd and so on until 15 are needed to pass from 9th to 10th Level. 

In 2 hours of uninterrupted play, I think there will tend to be an average of three such encounters. There'll be times of course when one combat takes an hour or more, or when an entire session is taken up with banter and folly - but averaging three XP-worthy encounters in 2 hours seems feasible.

This results in the following approximate (and liberally fudged) calculations for a 1st - 10th Campaign:

Level	Cumulative XP	Cumulative Encounters	Hours	Cumulative hours
1
2	7	5	2	2
3	15	10	3	5
4	24	16	5	10
5	34	23	8	18
6	45	30	10	28
7	56	37	12	40
8	69	46	15	55
9	83	55	18	73
10	98	65	21	94

Based on the above, it would take about a year of weekly play* to complete our Epic Quest, assuming each session includes a solid two hours of play. Allowing for interruptions this might be a 3 hour meetup - if you have dedicated players who put in a full 4 hours of concentrated gaming per week you will crush these expectations - but based on my own groups, two hours is the average amount of concentrated gameplay per RPG session.

Of course, no one is obligated to follow Rules-As-Written to award XP and level up. You might want to consider having a flat progression, and letting heroes gain a level for every two sessions. You might then plan a campaign based on it having ten chapters - which would surely be a fun and epic experience for everyone concerned. Huzzah!

Nonetheless, the above calculations give an idea of what an epic TARPG campaign should involve, as baked-in to the game design. The now proven to be entirely scientific and non-arbitrary figures of 65 encounters gives us a starting point for thinking about what the Quest for the Crown might actually involve. This leads to my next thought - what should the general composition of the 65 encounters be?

Illustration: knights quest Holy grail dragons flying battling zombies warriors in the style of Frank Fazetta (OpenAI) Maybe mis-spelling Frazetta is responsible?

* The assumption of  one-session-per-week is entirely aspirational. For my own RPG campaign group (currently committed alas to The Other Game), one-session-per-month is closer to the mark - so we'd be looking at four years to manage this. Unfortunately the same calculations put us at about 20 years to get to the end of The Other Game, so the Quest for the Crown remains strictly in the thought experiment realm.