The Clubhouse as Campaign Information Center
How The Clubhouse Facilitates Campaign Play
Too many still think that Fantastic Adventure Games are all about one Referee and a handful of players, each one one man and only one man, doing everything together as a unit.
That’s fine, but it’s not what campaign play is. It is one part of the whole. It is saying that Kelly’s Heroes is the only group active in Europe during World War II, when we all know that it is not.
Band of Brothers, Where Eagles Dare, Hogan’s Heroes, The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and many others—representing other Referees running other parties operating on the same map at the same time—make clear how campaign play works in campaign play.
Last time, quoting BDubs, I mentioned Convergence and Diffusion. Let me define them, in brief, here:
Diffusion: Each actor in the campaign operates on their own, pursuing their own agendas to achieve their own objectives and deal with their own threats, separate and distinct from everyone else.
Convergence: Two or more actors in the campaign arrive at the same place in the same time to contend (in a fashion that cannot be Win-Win in outcome) over a common objective.
This runs parallel to the Two Tiers of Campaign Play: Faction (Big Picture) and Adventurer (Small Picture), and does not exactly map to the above. General Patton whipping II Corps into shape upon taking command in Africa is Diffusion. The bomb plot against Hitler dramatized in Valkyrie is Convergence.
The common objection to this characterization of proper Campaign Play rests on the presumption that there is only one Referee who runs all sessions, arbitrates all actions, and thus is overwhelmed with the work necessary to do this for more than one small team of adventurers acting as a unit.
Enter The Clubhouse
Wars are not conducted by independent commands anymore, and they have not for far longer than the formal Combat Information Center seen in naval warships (invented by legendary American author E.E. Smith in his seminal Lensman series) existed.
Wargames, therefore, are not so conducted either. Campaign play compels the use of a Campaign Information Center, curated and maintained by the Referee with the aid of the various members of the Clubhouse participating in the campaign.
The Clubhouse makes proper campaign play viable because it is in that institution where the means to track all these parties doing their thing is viable and practical. It is the Clubhouse that makes players run a rotating roster of mans due to timekeeping forcing mans on and off the bench viable and practical. It is the Clubhouse that makes multiple Game Masters working with the Referee viable and practical.
Why?
Because you have one central place to consult that tracks all actions, tracks how long they take on the calendar, tracks distance traveled (and encounters had) on the map, and all of this makes proper campaign play convenient and easy to execute because it is the single tool that gets the job done.
That, folks, is how you make the cyclical process of Diffusion and Convergence apply to the campaign, as well as applying both Faction and Adventurer tiers of play; you track all of those actors’ actions, see where they can interact, and have those actors play out those interactions. Lather, rinse, repeat until someone wins or everyone loses. It’s this simple.
A map and a calendar, a wall to mount them on, a place for players to submit their actions (important for action out of session, i.e. Downtime) and their After-Action Reports, and channels for players to communicate and organize- this is what the Clubhouse offers to its members, to the hobby, and makes campaign play work as intended.
Without it, you cannot achieve proper campaign play; you get Conventional Play, and the Game Master has to ape what the real hobby is by “making up a story” or other wholly-inappropriate use of Narrative Logic to (poorly) replicate the emergent results of player-driven conflicts and other interactions. This is the origin of the Cargo Cult of Conventional Play- an attempt to poorly ape the forms of proper campaign play without understanding what it is, how it works, or why they lack both the tools and the acumen to accomplish it.
This is not commercially viable, or some publisher would have already pivoted into being a Clubhouse already.1 This negates the Consumerist paradigm of the publishers pushing the aforementioned Cargo Cult of Conventional Play, as you don’t need to buy product regularly to solve known issues with Conventional Play or “keep up with the setting” or some other Consumerist presumption that isn’t valid in the real hobby.
Once you have this up and running, you will find that you have no need for further product purchasing; players’ actions will generate all of the playable content and so on that members will ever require. This hobby is anti-Consumerist by its nature; buy once, cry once, done forever.
That is why this is the future of the hobby, and neither Wizards of the Coast nor any of the also-rans and never-weres are going to endure once WOTC abandons tabletop for its new all-digital/always-online edition of Official D&D, ripping out the load-bearing pillar and causing a product category collapse that will be apocalyptic.
Are you ready to seek admittance? Form your own? Better choose soon, before WOTC chooses for you.
Wizards of the Coast is trying to do something like this, but it’s the Gatcha Model, and their business model is hyper-Consumerist accordingly. Not good for the hobby, and not at all the model I’ve presented.
The more you describe this clubhouse, the more I wish it was real.
I would love to immerse myself in a D&D or Pathfinder game this in-depth.
The closest I ever got to something like this was the last D&D game I got to play. Our group thought beyond the current adventure to what could happen next. My character and the CE thief started looking at infrastructure at the places where we stopped incursions and around the towns we freed from bandits, and started asking the DM if we could invest in ways to fortify the towns, dig for iron ore, and create trade among the towns.
Of course, the DM told us to stop it because he wasn't thinking beyond the current game.