I would define a mission-based campaign as one in which PCs have a fixed "patron" (be it a specific NPC or a large organization) that regularly sets up the action by doling out assigments, missions, quests.

Conceptually, this is distinct from a sandbox in that the premise for action is handed over to the PCs by the patron; the buy-in is theoretically automatic and stems from some in-game reason to obey the patron (oath of fealty, chain of command, divine mandate, etc.); and for the same reason they tend to stick to the patron, instead of taking jobs from multiple other patrons.

And while it may lead into a railroad, it's not granted as long as there's the possibility that PCs will screw up, abandon or even sabotage any one mission at any time.

I did this once with my Day After Ragnarok campaign. Players were having fun but I felt adventures had become formulaic. There was little opportunity to develop the world in any detail because of the globe-trotting span of most sessions, resulting in PCs interacting only for a little while with places all over the Earth, and as a result it didn't feel very immersive.

If anyone's had a good experience with mission-based campaigns, I'm all ears.

Quote from: The Butcher;830142I would define a mission-based campaign as one in which PCs have a fixed "patron" (be it a specific NPC or a large organization) that regularly sets up the action by doling out assigments, missions, quests.

Conceptually, this is distinct from a sandbox in that the premise for action is handed over to the PCs by the patron; the buy-in is theoretically automatic and stems from some in-game reason to obey the patron (oath of fealty, chain of command, divine mandate, etc.); and for the same reason they tend to stick to the patron, instead of taking jobs from multiple other patrons.

And while it may lead into a railroad, it's not granted as long as there's the possibility that PCs will screw up, abandon or even sabotage any one mission at any time.

I did this once with my Day After Ragnarok campaign. Players were having fun but I felt adventures had become formulaic. There was little opportunity to develop the world in any detail because of the globe-trotting span of most sessions, resulting in PCs interacting only for a little while with places all over the Earth, and as a result it didn't feel very immersive.

If anyone's had a good experience with mission-based campaigns, I'm all ears.

I've done a number of these. A couple of my games (Terror Network and Servants of Gaius) are built around this sort of concept. I think the key to making them work is either have a really strong core premise that keeps the players coming back for more or allow for it to evolve into non-mission based action. Also giving the players plenty of freedom in the field is important. With my Terror Network games they might have a mission as FBI agents to investigate some incident in downtown New York, but they have freedom to explore once they are there (in a way it is a bit like a contained sandbox).

The mission based campaign is also not mutually exclusive to other structures. In my current wuxia campaign, there are sects up the wazoo and all the player characters belong to one (with the majority of players belonging to Purple Cavern Sect). Things meander in and out of them receiving direct orders from the their master to going off on their own (or having some general goal issued by the sifu, like "go get me a bunch of powerful manuals so I can destroy this other sect"). There is really a balance here of some mission based stuff with plenty of sandbox most of the time.

In my Servants of Gaius campaigns there was often a blending of many different kinds of adventures. This made it less formulaic. They might go do some other things independently then eventually report back to the emperor for their orders.

Military type RPGs fall easily into this category. I ran Robotech and a homebrew Wing Commander game like that. Here is the mission, do the mission, toss in a complication so that the players don't get too complacent that their mission is a railroad.
A mercenary campaign gives the players a choice in what missions they want to accept, and some leeway in how they accomplish it, while still having the mission structure.

Star Trek campaign, all sessions were either mission based or something we blundered across while performing some mundane mission. Pretty much just like Star Trek OS and STNG.

Several Star Wars campaigns

• One group of PCs evolved into mission based once their PCs joined the Rebel Alliance.
• One group of affiliated PCs stayed mostly independent and was kind of in between sandbox and mission based.
• One group of smugglers had an underlying campaign arc, but the group of players broke up due to real life moves and graduations.
• One group of PCs stayed unaligned with sandbox and hooks. That group eventually broke up some of the surviving player/PCs joined the Rebels, others stayed independent.
• One group of smugglers was sandbox and hooks. Then they signed up with a smuggling organization that was secretly part of Black Sun. This gave them mostly a mission based campaign.

Call of Cthulhu We have several independent groups of investigators in a shared universe. Some characters interacted with multiple groups, some do not. One large troupe of PCs formed an organization, the Guardian Foundation. The Foundation provides a certain amount of mission focused adventures. But most of the time the players just have their PCs bite on whatever weird events they read about in the papers or respond to the strange letter they get in the post from an old college chum asking for help.

Honor+Intrigue has been predominantly mission based with a series of patrons. It could have been sandbox, but this group of players seems to prefer a mission focus. Recently a group of the PCs have all come to work for Cardinal Richelieu so more of the adventures are mission focused. But there are also random events or interactions with NPCs that generate other adventures.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;830144I think the key to making them work is either have a really strong core premise that keeps the players coming back for more or allow for it to evolve into non-mission based action.

One thing to remember is that even in mission based campaigns, PCs will have some leave or off duty time in which they may be able to pursue things the PC/player is interested in. This may be lead to adventures that are mainly romantic or family subplots, attempts at personal revenge, searching for a better patron or whatever.

I like to open up with "Mission-based" campaigns as a "phase" of a normal campaign usually during the beginning/low-level part, usually in games where the system is new to us, but not always.

It usually builds a sense a camaraderie for the PC's as they're learning the ropes of the game.

I've never run a Mission-based campaign that did not go full-sandbox. For me its the nature of the beast. As you pointed out - usually there is a patron/mentor/organization, and the PC's can often transcend that initial relationship and become shotcallers on their own.

i have a theory that such a campaign would be effective at avoiding the problems normaly encountered with an evil campaign, I have yet to test that theory though

Quote from: Bren;830150One thing to remember is that even in mission based campaigns, PCs will have some leave or off duty time in which they may be able to pursue things the PC/player is interested in. This may be lead to adventures that are mainly romantic or family subplots, attempts at personal revenge, searching for a better patron or whatever.

heroes of battle has some good advice on that subject you may want to check out

Well, my first D&D campaign starting a year after my son was born (June 2008) was a simple mission-based 'dungeon of the week' campaign using published TSR and Goodman DCC adventures. Also my final 3e campaign. It was easy to run (I used TSR-D&D or C&C monster stats vs the 3e PCs), but in hindsight was pretty unsatisfying compared to my sandbox campaigns. It was designed for variable player group at the Meetup. I think if it had taken a bit of time away from the dungeon to look at the personal lives of the PCs it could have been a lot richer. My current games tend to have a lot more 'talky stuff', and I think mission-based games need the time & space for off-mission stuff too. Generally a cadence something like:

1 session of mission/action.
1 session of half talky stuff/off-mission, half mission/action.

Is best I think. Some players may not want to do any talky stuff and get bored, while the thespians hog the off-mission time. That doesn't bother me too much, but the rule of thumb is to aim to get *some* action in every session unless you're sure the whole group will enjoy 3 hours playing out the Summer Ball.

Quote from: Bren;830150One thing to remember is that even in mission based campaigns, PCs will have some leave or off duty time in which they may be able to pursue things the PC/player is interested in. This may be lead to adventures that are mainly romantic or family subplots, attempts at personal revenge, searching for a better patron or whatever.

Exactly.  I've done a fair bit of mission-oriented play over the years, but the PCs always, always have the option of saying "No thankew."

The mission based campaign is sort of a default for my group. Due to other commitments we can't play every week, and the mission structure lends itself to one adventure per session. However, in our investigative games, some sessions are linked as part of a larger investigation - but usually in a different location for each step of the investigation. (The PCs work for the League of Nations in the 1930s, so as such they deal with international criminals). My players like to deal with PC's love lives and  other relationships, and this is good in adding variety to a session (it's not just about the mission). Also the relationships with other members of their organisation also comes in here.

The investigators have full autonomy in how they get the job done, so that freedom stops any railroad.

I've also run sandbox (sword & sorcery and Firefly) successfully, but my players love mission based games just as much.

I think a lot of campaigns almost need to start mission-based. You provide a set up, a group of linked characters that are tied into that initial situation, and the first few sessions are often a mission or quest established by the gm to cohere the group. But then the key is that you run it like a sandbox, letting the characters go about interacting with the world, establishing relationships, enmities, hearing rumours, getting glimpses of dangling plot threads, just floating around waiting for them to pick up on the interesting ones. I've come up with a simple set up for my latest campaign that explains why the characters are all together, a team, and gives them their initial mission and over arching campaign goal. They're the last remaining crew of a pirate ship the captain of which has lost the ship in drunken gambling. They're now stranded in a small colonist's port on Monster Island, and planning schemes to get rich quick to buy the ship back. Their first treasure hunting mission was brought to them by old Koredoth the ship's apothecary, who found a madman with a treasure map and crazy stories about a black god's lost temple, but after that they're on their own, in a sandbox environment, looking for loot with a campaign goal of leaving the godforsaken island back on their ship. Koredoth can act as a quest giver if they're at a lose end, but I fully expect them to find their own ways of making money, and possibly, who knows, change their objective; they could join another crew, settle down on the island, pursue shamanic vision quests with the natives, discover the infiltrating serpent men in the colony, get involved in power struggles between the colony's factions ... Or all of these. Point is, they have someone to turn to for missions, but they can also interact with the environment, and they already have love interests, enemies, rivals and discovered secrets to contend with. They do have an over arching mission, which gives them a real reason for classic tomb raiding, treasure seeking mini missions, but they're free to follow that lead or not, as the fancy takes them. I could see them over the course of time having different goals for each character, and pursuing those while occasionally seeking out larger missions from their convenient old sage ... I feel like this structure lets me play some of the clichés in a way that they hang together quite well....

Quote from: tenbones;830157I've never run a Mission-based campaign that did not go full-sandbox. For me its the nature of the beast. As you pointed out - usually there is a patron/mentor/organization, and the PC's can often transcend that initial relationship and become shotcallers on their own.

That's my experience as well.

Missions have consequences and those consequences may well result in the PCs doing things that are outside their missions.

So, PCs might rescue an imprisoned friend, kill an enemy, do a favour following a botched mission, realise they are on the wrong side, or whatever.

Quote from: The Butcher;830142And while it may lead into a railroad, it's not granted as long as there's the possibility that PCs will screw up, abandon or even sabotage any one mission at any time.

It is no more prone to railroading than sandboxing is.

The crux is to make sure the PCs have lots of options and that once they choose one. That they have freedom, usually, to go about that mission as they deem.

Semi-good example is the Hoard of the Dragon Queen module. You have the mayor pointing out a few problems around the keep. The party cannot stop all of them and have to prioritize. Once they decide and set fourth they have a certain freedom to go about getting the job done. Some of that freedom may be constrained by circumstance. But that is true of most any adventure.

Even if there is only one mission. Make sure there are several ways to go about it. Or several branches of which the party might only ever see one.

You can even sandbox that. Just present the basic premise and let the players concoct some plan to stop it and adapt accordingly as they go.

Quote from: Omega;830244Even if there is only one mission. Make sure there are several ways to go about it.

Sometimes I don't make sure there are any ways to go about it. This totally avoids me having a preconceived notion of what the solution ought to be. One of my co-GMs has a phrase for when she did this.

"At this point, my notes just say, 'Play out.'"