This is broadly the set-up I came up with, with a fair chunk of 'host/hospitality' mixed in on top. My gaming set up has always had 'home' and 'away' set ups based on how much junk I was willing to haul around. Minis, battlemats and other bits of big hardware were never my thing even when I was home because I ran free-wheeling 'do what you please' games so I was not putting up with the constraints of not having the right minis - we just did theater of the mind and tokens/meeples as needed.
Home Campaign Rig
Ducal House (home campaign) is like a coelecanth; this is me running a 'perpetual campaign' in the grand old AD&D tradition I first learned.
- system is 3.5e
- three players, only play with all three; trying for twice a month, life oft gets in the way but we tend to overbook slots and accept some attrition.
- gather at my place (also shared with one of the players (in-house testing team)).
- three standard modes - morning start (1030), afternoon start (1300) or night slot (2130) which differ in that morning start will include a break for takeout and probably a stop for someone to go to their evening shift or a party. Afternoon slot has no big break, runs to exhaustion or child pickup time. Nightslot runs to exhaustion.
- set up is players on the couch; table stacked with snacks - grapes, dates, crisps, biscuits - plus a carafe of coffee (morning/afternoon) or herbal tea (night). I have my DM screen at the end of the table, set up behind that.
- We typically get in, chat for a bit - any news since last seen; usually just a week or fortnights worth.
- Sessions launch with the bard doing a recap from their notes then I do 'time, place, immediate activities' and then the players decide what they are doing.
- This campaign is completely player driven; they decide what they are getting after from their big to-do list then I throw spanners or flowers at them as they try.
- Typically this involves a lot of discussion among the players, in player arguments about what to do then of late liberal use of scry and message to wrangle far flung resources before setting out to do things themselves.
- Campaign as a whole is being run in a Trad-ish style - I throw fistfuls of hooks out and the players get after what they feel like. There are big problems in the world they are trying to solve. I try to keep it interesting by having things beyond their level kicking about, albeit clearly signposted. There is no linear plot I am trying to execute because the players ricochet around like pinballs. We had a two session diversion to the moon recently.
- There tends to be a lot of investigation and social wrangling, coralling the NPCs of the realm, before setting out to wallop things themselves.
- Mostly done theater of the mind unless we get into really crunchy combat then I use dry-erase markers on an A4 card in a plastic pocket and put meeples on it.
- Travel of late involves liberal use of teleport so travel encounters have gone way down, making the game somewhat more point-crawl-ish.
- I have the stack of 3.5e PHB/DMG/MM nearby, maybe with another session relevant book - Draconomicon, whatever. The PHBs get referred to a bit for spell use.
- I will have this sessions notes plus two stacks - session archive and world notes that I use to run the game. Everything is pencil-and-paper; almost all rulings I just make, we interact with rules just during combat (the Monster Manual) or when using spells (PHB) both of which are physical look-up. On the rare occassion it goes beyond that, the sorcerer googles things.
- As per the 'single page session notes' system I have worked up through this campaign, the session sheet is a list of hooks or 'news/consequences' that tie to previous actions along with either my notes that or an index reference to the session sheet with those expanded notes.
- This system is currently creaking under the weight of lore but it still works well enough that I am not yet in 'got to rework this' crisis mode.
- Pre-game I do prep by prepping a new sheet for the coming game, noting consequences, updating clocks, etc. I wrote this up for the prep-bandwagon if you want more detail.
- Where I end up with a ton of spare time, occassionally I do a 'Chekovs Hooks' scrub of outstanding loose ends.
- Very rarely I will integrate a set piece adventure where it plugs in smoothly; equally rarely a site, otherwise it is all coming off my own notes.
- Sessions wind up and we typically chat through the next 2-3 game slots ~ typically 1-2 solid, 1-2 fuzzy so we have them on the calendar then folk head off.
Cafe Gaming Rig
For my 'away game' set-up I have talked through the Tools of the trade I bring with me - everything that packs into a courier satchel and how it unpacks for cafe gaming (Gaming setup - to sprawl or not to sprawl).
All the organisational set-up I talk about in Open Table Procedures - Euro Edition. I have dialled things back this past year from fully open table set up to just running the Hexcrawl25 campaign at the friday night venues - about 1-in-5 is a proper open table game anymore. The set up for those remains the same.
Once everyone is sat to table at the 'open' games I usually
- Go around the table and get everyones RL names, forum IDs and character names
- Point out the code of conduct, do a world intro, ramp into the 'where we are right now'
- Go around the table again having them describe their characters as they appear to others
- Kick things off - for these open games I tend to try and run some adventure in a session - see the Actual Play tag for examples - so things are a lot more linear and run-to-tempo.
- Post-Brancalonia campaign I have gotten pretty good at marshalling a party through an adventure without it feeling rail-roady or bogging down; mostly by giving big clear quests for these one-shots and not trying to get too clever about that.
- These games tend to have a lot more combat since adventures will have their 2-3 combats built in. I get everyone to roll initiative then tick around the table - it has been pretty good of late at keeping moving, been a while since I had a table that bogged down in indecision.
- I run everything pen-and-paper, with a few DM aides like the Single Page Monster Manual. Players tend to use a lot of D&D Beyond on their phones, which mostly I do not love because the dice rolling is anti-climatic but hey-ho, the price of convenience.
- These games I pay a lot more attention to spot-lighting since they are often a varying melange of experience and preferences on being 'roleplay forward'. I try to keep things even though I have noticed a growing tendency for players to wander off and split the party since ~ mid-2024. Do not know why.
- Spin down from these open games involves me packing up, maybe some chit-chat, answer any questions folk have then book.
- For open table games I typically drop a short write up on the RPGVienna forum afterwards (hence the forumID request).
Two different muscles
The home campaign and Hexcrawl25 campaign are continuous, I let the players noodle around and follow their noses wherever, pretty much unconcerned at them getting any big or interesting stuff done in the session. They usually manage to dig themselves into enough trouble for an interesting session without my nudging them.
For the open table games - Hexcrawl dual-mode, Brancalonia, etc. - I run a much more structured episodic session and it tends to work quite well; I have gotten good at lining folk up for the big finish with enough time on the clock that we are done by midnight - the trick I have found is to block out an initial noodling around bit, let people do whatever, then compress or expand the core part of the adventure depending on their pace to bridge from when they finally decide to finish messing about to whenever they need to start the finale.
I have a virtual set-up I might document another time - I do not have any on-going virtual campaigns.
Other nice write-ups of this blogwagon come from Phlox, Louis of Garamondia, Jo of Was It Likely and Dom of Infernal Pact.
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