Talking about scope in this context relates to the size of the area your players are likely to travel throughout the campaign. Is most of your game going to take place in a single city or location? Will it be limited to a group of locations, a whole continent perhaps? Will it occur across several land masses and oceans or is it much larger and will multiple planets be visited often?
You won’t always know the answer to this question right away but most of the time you should have a pretty solid idea on where you want your core setting to take place, if you don’t then spend some time thinking about it.
Timescale is referring to how long you envision your campaign lasting, how often you host your games and how long they last. You don’t need to have an end date in mind of course and many create a campaign they imagine will last many years or span many iterations. Any campaign aiming to last a long time can plan one initial overarching story and simply move on to another arc when the first comes to a close.
Using these two bits of information you can split the story or narrative into broad sections and doing this gives you two main things. Firstly, you can build plot points for each section, spreading out your main story (evenly if desired) and allowing space for secondary stories and other events in between. Second of all, you can see at a glance where your ideal story pace is, allowing you to make corrections based on your players actions if they go way off track like they sometimes do.
It’s important to remember this is a tool for broad planning and analysing so when breaking your story down into sections in this way it is good practice to use vague, non specific language. You are not breaking your story down session by session but section by section. As the one running the game, you define what a section is, and leave it open to how many game sessions fill that section. A dramatic twist in your story could happen in “section 2” instead of “game session 9” specifically for an example.
Using a very generic story as an example to keep this short, let us put a story progression into bullet points.
I might want this to span an entire year and using rough percentages I could assign time values or player level values to each bullet point or section like the blow. You can use both measures, just one or another of your own choosing that makes sense.
| Section | Percentage of Time | Player Level Range |
|---|---|---|
| One - Village Life | 10% | 1-3 |
| Two - Expanding Horizons | 40% | 4-7 |
| Three - Discovering Secrets | 30% | 8-11 |
| Four - Fighting the Dragon | 20% | 12-13 |
With your basic structure in place you can plan where you want sidequests or other story elements to fit into your timeline. That deep dip into a character's back story might fit really well into the second section, just before or after perhaps.
This data can work well in a variety of formats, tables only being one way of expressing them. Spreadsheets, mind maps, flowcharts and simple lists all have their pros and cons and you’ll soon discover what works best for you.
If you would like to go into more detail on how to best work the above and more into your campaign then take a look at my campaign management course.