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I wrote a bit about the question of whether or not 4th Edition D&D (and by implication, other 'advanced' RPG systems) make it harder to add depth to a role-playing campaign. My feeling is that it doesn't.

This kind of begs the question, though -- why do you want depth in your campaign?

I also provided a fairly informal definition of campaign depth in the previous post, but one I think works for our purposes: campaign depth is the sense that the world itself changes when the PCs aren't looking at it. Sometimes it'll change as a result of player actions, either for good (a popular PC cleric of a certain deity founds a shrine in a town, then returns later to discover the shrine has been maintained and has even had a church grow up around it) or for ill (after exterminating the kobolds in the caves outside of town, the PCs depart the area, then return later to find that the giants who had been capturing kobolds to use as slaves are now preying on the local halfling population instead). Sometimes, though, the campaign will change slightly even without any overt PC activity; the PCs may even investigate the change, leading to an adventure.

What kind of benefit is that to a D&D campaign?

Well, some of the benefits should be obvious just from reading the examples above: some players will get excited when they see that their actions can have a lasting effect on the campaign world, which both increases their enjoyment of the game and gives them additional ideas for ways to have an impact on the world. Other players may not care so much about their personal impact, but will find satisfaction seeing that the campaign allows their characters to choose adventure hooks rather than feeling forced down a specific path of encounters.

To my mind, the biggest benefit of depth in a campaign is that it adds verisimilitude. Verisimilitude is, to paraphrase the dictionary definition, the sense of truth; when a setting has verisimilitude, the things that happen there seem plausible and reasonable, even if they're not strictly realistic. So when your players head back to the adventuring shop they've refitted at since second level and discover that the shopkeep's daughter, who'd flirted with them when they'd visited previously, married the butcher's son and the shopkeep is now a grandfather, some of them will chuckle, nod, or even have their characters discuss the situation with the shopkeep, while others will simply fill in their character inventories and wait until it's time to head back into the wilderness.

It's worth pointing out, in the midst of all this celebration of the joys of campaign depth, the things that depth can't do:

- Depth can't replace understanding of the rules. If your players enjoy passing through town, but seem frustrated every time they enter a combat or skill challenge because the rules are getting in the way, maybe you'd be better off swapping your D&D campaign for a group story circle. It's a fallacy to say that every D&D player would rather be swinging a sword or casting a spell than role-playing, but those skills and powers are on the character sheet for a reason.

- Depth can't overcome dull adventure and encounter design. No matter how faithfully you've set up your dungeon ecology, if the entire six-level complex is composed of encounters with the same four monsters from Monster Manual 2, it's going to get old.

- Depth can't overcome fundamental disagreements between players, or between the players and DM, over what the campaign should be about. In the former case, depth can help mitigate the problem, for a while anyway, by giving each player what they want for some period of time, but if your campaign features at least one unhappy player at all times (because that player is 'stuck' doing something they don't enjoy), then the campaign is still going to be in trouble in the long run. In the latter case, depth can't even mitigate the problem, because the game the DM is trying to run, no matter how much depth it has, isn't the game that the players ultimately want to play.

What depth ultimately does is take a game from 'decent' to 'let's give it a few more sessions', and from 'good' to 'that game we always talk about to a new player'. It doesn't hurt your reputation as a DM, either. If you're a gamer, then those things alone may be enough.

One of the complaints I hear about Fourth Edition D&D in general, and about Living Forgotten Realms in particular, is that the adventures seem to lack depth. People play the same adventures, approach them in much the same ways, and don't have a whole lot to contrast between their experiences and those of other players, save in the rare event of a TPK or other party disaster.

In a sense, we can blame the designers for this one.

Compare 'Keep on the Shadowfell', arguably the defining Fourth Edition adventure thus far, with 'Keep on the Borderlands', one of if not the defining adventure for Basic D&D back in the day:

- Both adventures provide a region in which to adventure, with a dangerous enemy at the core of the troubles in the region.

- Both adventures provide a base of operations from where the adventurers can strike out into the unknown.

You'd think they're a lot alike, from this analysis. But the biggest difference between Shadowfell and Borderlands is, oddly, similar to the difference in childhood between today and the early 1970s, when I grew up. There were activities for kids when I was growing up (Little League, dance lessons, etc.), but they were far less organized than the activities of today, and sometimes our parents would ignore them altogether, preferring to just send us outside to romp around and discover our own means of keeping ourselves busy and entertained.

OK, let me get to the point before I start talking about 'free range DMs'...

Shadowfell does a great job of presenting a DM, likely harried and without a great deal of time to prepare, with a sensible, structured adventure that he can run relatively hassle-free. Players can pursue the occasional side-quest, but the main plot is fairly easy to follow, and the DM shouldn't have to do a lot of 'PC wrangling' to keep this adventure moving at a decent pace.

Borderlands didn't bother with any of this. As a DM, you had to spend a lot of prep time with Borderlands, not only to understand how the different groups represented in the module interacted, but to digest the module's advice on how those groups would react and respond to the players' actions. Borderlands assumed that your goal wasn't just to spend an entertaining evening or two, but to present an environment that seemed alive with possibilities; a place where your players' characters could live, if they chose.

The easy conclusion from such a comparison is that, by limiting the difficulty the DM has in setting up the adventure, we also limit the depth of that adventure, and there's at least a little bit of truth in such a conclusion. Discussions of runs through Shadowfell tend to focus on memorable encounters or actions within encounters, because that's where the adventure is strongest and where the design emphasis is most visible. Discussions of old-school gamers remembering their Borderlands runs, though, frequently end up talking about things that were only barely in the adventure, fleshed out by their DM or spontaneously riffed on by a serendipitous combination of player brainstorm and DM reaction. The truly deep campaign world, one that feels as though you could live there, or use it as the setting for a series of novels, really only comes from that kind of time-intensive study and thought that you pretty much had to do as a DM for Borderlands.

The conclusion is also an oversimplification: there are plenty of folks who played through Borderlands and almost immediately forgot it, because they played with a DM who barely, if that, put the effort into really getting into the setting. It was exactly the kind of 'set up the monsters and let the PCs knock them down' gaming that some criticize Fourth Edition for being. The reality is that the new edition makes it easier for a DM to run an interesting session even without a great deal of prep time; that in itself doesn't mean that a DM who does have the time and inclination to put in the prep time can't make a Fourth Edition adventure more memorable, with greater 'depth' than the adventure designers alone could put in.

So, to answer the title question, no: I don't think advanced RPG design principles have cost us the ability to add depth to our campaigns and adventure sessions. What advenced design may have helped, however, is in convincing DMs that, since there are so many more bells and whistles in the modern game that classic hooks like campaign depth aren't as meaningful anymore.

It'd be a sad day for adventure gaming everywhere if too many DMs assumed that attitude.

In the book "Things We Think About Games" (gameplaywright.net/?page_id=101), one of the items is "A DM runs the kind of game he really wants to play." (That's a paraphrase, but not an inaccurate one, I think.) If the folks who've played in my campaigns notice a fair amount of depth in the story lines and settings, that's only because my favorite games to play have had depth in spades (and clubs, and the other suits). Hopefully, I can share some of the things I've learned here.