I completed National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again this year which makes 10 years I have been doing it to varying levels of suces. Short version - 3 first drafts worth a damn, 4 I never finished, 3 that probably could be salvaged for parts. Maybe.
With these multiple runs at the goal I have identified a couple of success factors that I think can be relevant. Below we see word count per day; this is more or less independent of working circumstances. Of three high-rate success cases (2014, 2016, 2019) I was hard at work for two of those and the thing got written on my commute. Mediocre cases happened when the plot did not catch fire, which we will pull apart below. Fail cases mostly failed because I had no plan at all; some to the point that I never participated.
Lessons I would pull from this for campaigns are:
- do not over plan: too complex is brittle. For writing I found it dull as paint, no discovery remaining. For campaigns it becomes railroading and robs the players of agency. If the story is meant to play out a certain way, why are they even there? For the Nano's that failed, I had over-planned and there was no excitement. Where I set up a launch rail and knew what the characters wanted to go but not the play by play of what would happen, the book almost wrote itself.
- time spent on characters is rarely wasted: the books that worked well were ones where the characters had their own drivers. Chuck Wendig puts it well as creating a logline for each character which gives a very quick sense of who they are and what drives them / what do they care about. For NPCs this is setting motivators which then lets you the DM figure out what they would do off-screen or want while on screen.
- picture the force acting on the setting. If everyone sits still and does nothing, what happens? This ties to Chandlers Law - if in doubt have a man with a gun come through the door. If the party spends the next month crawling the taverns of the town or growing a hothouse flower for a wizard, what will happen in the back ground? This can be both 'impending doom' or it can be 'the good king consolidates the realm' - in any case it means that when the party emerges and asks 'what happened in the last month' you can easily serve up news as campaign glue a la Hill Cantons.
- work on something where you care about the outcome: the Nanos which ground along at par-word-count were those where I sketched together an idea but beyond a big hook or a couple of set pieces I did not really care. This is one I am still figuring out as a writer but as seen above it is rapidly apparent when something is not working. For campaigns, I would say this is playing with 'opt-in' players - not assembling a table and declaring 'I am DM'ing so we're running X'. I realise this may seem bonkers to some but that is a thing out there. My current approach is similar to Matt Colville - a handful of campaign pitches to see which the players like then a session zero to nail down what we all want. The hardest lesson for me to learn was 'the players have to want in' which I hated back in the day because I wanted to run things so badly. Just because I have a new wild notion doesn't mean the players want to come with you.
As a sidebar, through college I had a successful series of single-shot IOU games which gave a sandbox for people to go bananas and all sorts of shenanigans to be run. Single shots are a great place to test things - people will be much more likely to test something for a night and see as opposed to commit to something big when they may feel unsure. On the flip side - for a one shot, make it super easy to rock up and play. Pre-gen characters or whatever it takes to just get going and see if the game has a home at your table.
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