Tuesday 5 October 2021

The Single Class Campaign

I have never run a single-class campaign (defined as one in which all the PCs are of the same class: everything is magic-users; everything is paladins; everything is thieves.) But I would like to.

I suppose you could call me single-class-campaign-curious.

The interesting thing about the single-class campaign is that, in closing off many old possibilities, it opens up new ones. A campaign in which all the PCs are magic-users is not going to involve a lot of combat. It is going to be one in which they have to use their wits to get by. It is going to revolve around searching for spellbooks and scrolls as much as treasure. A campaign in which all the PCs are paladins is going to involve heroism and unreconstructed good-guy antics (because the PCs are going to have to stay paladins). A campaign in which all the PCs are thieves is going to involve a lot of sneakery, deception and plotting, because that is how the PCs are going to get treasure and hence XP. One in which they are all fighters is going to be combat-intensive, but will also revolve around resource management and good relations with NPC healers. And so on. 

The tone of the single-class campaign partly derives from mechanical incentives, of course. An all magic-user campaign will naturally be low on combat because the players will avoid it - their PCs are fragile. But it will also derive from tone. D&D is a roleplaying game; if the PCs are all paladins (or whatever), the players will act accordingly.

As well as setting their own specific tones, single-class campaigns would also seem to provide their own justifications and origins. The magic-users are all members of a secret cabal; the thieves are a Heat/Ocean's Eleven style joint criminal enterprise; the paladins are a band of holy avengers cleansing the world of evil; the fighters are a band of warriors trying to get by in a high-magic world; the clerics are all members of the same faith, seeking to gather disciples; and so on. 

The only class that I would find too cringeworthy for a single-class campaign is bards. A "band" of wandering minstrels is just too on the nose for me and too ripe for jokes and Mick Jagger impressions - as long term readers will recall, I'm firmly of the view that D&D has to be the straight man

40 comments:

  1. I have literally just started an all Wizard campaign in the last couple of months, and it's been the oddest GMing experience of my life.

    What I'm finding is that NPCs - mentors, vendors, other cabal members, etc - have really come to the fore in a way I wasn't really expecting. The minutiae of being a wizard has got everyone really excited, and the campaign has almost become an "NPC-crawl". Wizard circle politics came to the centre of the game straight away and we've had one combat in five sessions. None of that was planned on my part.

    I have to say, Yoon Suin has proved really useful as a reference for these sessions, even though I'm running a completely different setting. It does "weird minutiae" really well!

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    1. Yes, that's kind of what I imagined. The constraints of being an M-U combined with the players getting into the 'minutiae' producing a particular flavour of game. Nice to hear it is going well!

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  2. Our group ran a bunch of thieves from Modron who traveled down the Estuary of Roglaroon to City State of the Invincible Overlord. City State is a great place for thieves, whether the party is working with or apart from the Thieves Guild is great fun. CSIO is really entertaining for a bunch a rubes because they really have to learn the city. Also the social encounters with folks on the street (the tables are pretty broad) create interesting situation when everyone in the party is trying to pick pockets all the time.

    I suppose your locale would determine a best single class campaign - Thieves/City, Fighters/Fortress or war, Magic Users/Planar, Clerics/Aboriginal New World.

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  3. I did the magic-user option once. Kind of fun little romp where there was some moving towards other classes (stronger MU's filling in as sub-par fighters, etc.) but for the most part there was a lot of running away.

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    1. "A lot of running away" has its appeal!

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    2. Entire campaign of Rincewinds would have a certain appeal.

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  4. I’ve always wanted to do a single-class campaign of magic-users.

    Everyone else in the world would be part of the magic-using elite or essentially pitiful commoners, though the latter have the potential to be slightly-to-somewhat dangerous (eg through sneak attack or overwhelming numbers)

    The world would be a magical stone ecumenopolis shaped not by the constraints of architecture but by the imagination and desires of its conjurors.

    The world would be divided into many different factions, causes and undergrounds; the uniting factor would be magocracy. Exceptions would be rare and isolated, like lowbowrn republics in the age of aristocracy.

    Perhaps there would be competing monstrous societies; chromatic dragons ruling despotically over human dracotheocracies, illithids infiltrating the magocratic realms, and beholders teasing out malign schemes from the furthest airless moon.

    I picture giving everyone the run of all official Wizards or TSR spells from all books depending on the edition. Either all spells would be available in the society, or all spells would be discoverable. Players would be mechanically differentiated by spell choices, not class.

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    1. The last point is definitely important. In a single class campaign I think that, contrary to expectation, you would end up with much more interesting PCs, because there would be no differentiation by class. The other choices (what weapon my fighter uses, what spells my M-U has, etc.) become much more significant. This may make for richer choice.

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  5. I think an all-bard campaign could work. The PCs are a travelling band of actors who are paid to put on shows by the local elite and constantly get sucked into politics.

    Think the players in Hamlet but getting mixed up in the main plot.

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    1. It could work, for sure, but my worry is that it would tip into parody very quickly.

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    2. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? Could be intriguing...

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  6. I have a hard time imagining the Single Class Campaign to be fun. The only way I could see it is if you weren't actually using Classes.

    I've played and run Traveller games where all the PCs are members of the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service and therefore are all Scouts. However, their actual Careers (the closest thing to Classes in Traveller) were Scientist, Diplomat, Navy Officer, etc. Maybe one or two were actually Scouts as a Careers but all of them were Scouts.

    Bard is the only one that actually makes sense to me in D&D, since Bards are a little Fighter, a little Thief, and a little Magic-User. Different PCs being focused on different aspects could make for PCs that don't all seem so same-y. Plus, Wandering Band of Mistrels is about as Medieval Fantasy as it gets.

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    1. The idea I think is that if all PCs are the same class they focus on different things to differentiate themselves. Other choices become more important (see comments above).

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  7. Sorry to burst your bard bubble, but I have some friends who are playing exactly this in an Ultraviolet Grasslands campaign… (Tho actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if they are literally all bards. I do know they are playing ‘a band wandering the Grasslands in a minivan’)

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    1. Haha, well, whatever floats their boat. I do like the conceit of having the PCs being a travelling band of "X" though (circus performers, conjurers mercenaries, blood bowl players...).

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  8. Back in the 90s, one of my friends ran a short all UA Barbarian campaign. Lots of magic item smashing and fighting, that's about all I remember from it.

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  9. One of these days I hope to run an all-dwarf campaign. Maybe allow one halfling and one MU.

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    1. Allowing an MU is cheating.

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    2. Rather traditional, though. Of course the MU has to leave the game at whatever point seems most inconvenient to the party (usually shortly after the halfling finds a Ring of Invisibility on a side quest) and only return for the final session or two.

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  10. I really like the concept, but people nowadays (or, ever!) are so obsessed with 'party balance' that simply engaging a decent group of people would be very hard!

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  11. I've seen people complain that this sort of thing is limiting, but it works well enough for Pendragon, which everyone agrees is the Best RPG™ so it should work in D&D-types too.

    A friend of mine played in a campaign in the Before Times that, through player-character attrition, ended up as an all-druid campaign. He said it felt a bit wonky at times, but it was good fun.

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    1. The 2nd edition Druid's Handbook recommended an all-druids campaign in which the PCs were protecting nature from despoilers. I always wanted to try that.

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  12. We ran through the 5E Tomb of Annihilation campaign with an all-druid party - 5e druids are pretty versatile so we had a Moon Druid front-line fighter, a Spore druid, a Land druid, and a Shepherd druid and it all worked pretty well.

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    1. Weren't druids always the class of choice for min-maxers in the 3rd edition days?

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    2. Yes, druids in D&D3 could do a little bit of everything, like bards, but unlike bards, they were good at everything too. Cast spells like a cleric! Cast spells like a wizard! Fight like a fighter! Plus you've got an animal buddy!

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  13. What might be interesting, is being all of the same profession (merchants, entertainers, bureaucrats) but having different class-bases to carry it out. The rogue merchant is a swindler and harper, the bard merchant heavily into advertising, wizard merchant has novel ways to create and transport goods, etc.

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  14. I've long fantasized about an AD&D campaign in which all the PCs are barbarians (Gary Gygax's version of the class from issue 63 of Dragon magazine).

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    1. That sounds a bit like what Monte Cook was trying to do with that Iron Heroes thing. A bunch of fighters raging against the dying of the light in a world of high magic which they hate and fear.

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  15. As you say one feature of this sort of thing is that it encourages differences to become more important. When everyone is a wizard then the sphere of magic you use becomes more important. Paladins by the god they serve or the chapter house they originate from.

    This could also lead to an increased importance of prestige classes, either expressly for mechanical differentiation, or in game (he's a knight of the red barons, and he's a night of the crimson band, which mean that they are bound in public to oppose each other, but in private conspire against the azure knights)

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    1. Yep - it's a bit like how Space Marines are basically all the same so you get creative in the things you can change (background, colours, "personality", etc.).

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  16. Let's not forget the old Thieves' Guild game, an RPG in which everybody is a different kind of thief.

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    1. Or the much more modern Blades In the Dark, which is basically the same thing.

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  17. A few years ago, R.A. Salvatore and his kid ran a Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rasalvatore/demonwars-reformation-0) that took place in his world Corona, and in that release the game was designed *only* for monk classes:

    > We narrowed this down to the Abellican Church ... because we wanted to be able to give each group the focus they deserve, without the constraints of fitting them into a short class entry in a larger book. By focusing their monk's training in one of four unique disciplines—or spreading training among two or more disciplines—players can still get a great amount of variety and flexibility out of this one “class”. We’re also able to explore the organization and its place in the world of Corona in great detail, complete with a new story arc. If this project is successful, we would love to produce further products with new character classes, new story arcs and with more detail on different areas of the world.

    I don't think this RPG was actually very successful, but it was funded so there's at least a thousand of us out there with this book ^-^ I found the concept of an "all monk" party quite interesting. I usually have a lot of board gamers at my table, and usually none of them want to ever read the rules - this is usually my job. Many of my players just want to be fighters because they think it will be the least amount of reading, for example.

    Having a single-class campaign is a good way to enable players to share knowledge, discoveries about their characters. In 5e, your sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards have very little in common and really can't help each other manage their characters.

    You described a good bit there about how the mechanics of the game change around this single-class party, which is definitely enticing :D I think another interesting thing is that it can help players have unified goals for their characters. I often find I have a fighter who is on the edge of their seat waiting to find the next cool sword that they hope isn't cursed, while I have a bard who wants to woo the local townsfolk, a cleric who wants to find abolish the followers of all other gods, etc. - the way that a lot of published adventures try to unify the goals of the party is by throwing a big bad guy or a promise of treasure.

    With all of that said, I think the idea of a single-class campaign might be a great way of onboarding new players to the game - they can share learnings about their characters, help each other understand their characters abilities better, and come up with a unified goal that will keep the pace of the game engaging.

    Great post here! Thanks for making my brain think ^_^ cheers

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    1. Thanks. Yeah, it would I think lead to things being intrinsically more cooperative both in the game itself and among the players.

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  18. Carcosa was almost a single class campaign, with its Sorcerers functioning like fighters with knowledge of (very slow) arcane rituals. As an exploration of pulp fantasy it worked well, might need some tinkering to compensate for the loss of DnD's mechanical complexity.

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  19. A single class campaign just means the PCs are all one class right? They can still have hirelings and henchmen. Sure an all Thief campaign could focus on stealing more, an all Magic-User campaign could focus more on gaining knowledge, an all Cleric campaign can be missionary work and crusading as thematic elements and an all Fighter group...well would look like D&D 74-81.

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    1. Yes, so I suppose you could still have the group of M-Us dungeoneering with a band of hirelings when they need to get a particualr spell component, magic item, spellbook, etc.

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    2. That almost describes Ars Magica, although usually an "adventuring party" would only have one or two actual mages involved, with everyone else playing skilled "companions" (henchmen, in D&D terms) and taking bit parts as "grogs" (your basic D&D hirelings). Every player creates a mage though, they just rotate between which one is "on stage" in a given adventure while the rest do the downtime stuff that gives them most of their actual improvements as a spellcaster.

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  20. Currently playing in a campaign that started out with all (2) clerics. We were sent to a town to help the local baron who was interested in the faith. . .and several years later we are running half their army in a quest to remove an massive curse from some of his lands. We briefly had a PC half-elf figher/magic-user, but have mostly relied upon NPC fighters and of course the 60 men-at-arms we now command. It's worked out well.

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