I just finished running a BattleTech session (it's Friday, this journal entry is a bit late), with Donald being the only one to show up. This is my first long term campaign; which started July 1997. It runs every week and has been fairly successful, I think.

Let's go back farther, another three or four years. I ran a short running BattleTech campaign -- actually I ran two. In one, all the regular gamers participated and it quickly became an Aliens parody. Unfortunately I lost my nerve and killed it after three sessions. I won't even mention my second attempt.

A year or two later, we're finishing up the current Friday campaign, which I don't recall what it was. We were out of ideas and I foolishly volunteered to run a BattleTech game. By then the Friday game was rather small with only four players, so I felt confident that I could handle that many players (one reason I didn't enjoy the previous attempt was trying to deal with eight players).

Now, I try to be different and an individual. I also want to be just a normal person. Luckily, this works out such that I try to be different than my friends, who are *not* normal people. So my campaign had to be operationally different than the campaigns we've run before.

Science fiction campaigns are not something we run often. We've had abortive Traveller TNE and Hawkmoon campaigns. Star Wars did run for a year or two. So right off the bat BattleTech is something different. Fighting in Mechs is fun. The milieu is also more combat oriented than some of our other campaigns. It's more board-gamey.

Most of our campaigns are paced according to what the characters are doing. So if we're doing a lot of stuff very little game time passes. This can lead to some slow-paced campaigns. As a change of pace, I set my campaign to run at one real week being equivalent to one game month. Also, time passes whether or not I run a game.

I wanted the style of the campaign to be modeled after television shows. So each session is a new episode that lasts only that week. There have been very few multiple-part sessions. There are some recurring characters and threads, but each session should be playable by itself without knowledge of other sessions.

One thing our group does is have all characters in the game. Even if a player is not present, if their character is needed then it will be played. Because of the episodic-style, I don't do that in BattleTech. If the player is not present, their character is not present.

With one month per week, I wanted to run the campaign through a set period of time. So at the beginning I picked the 4th Succession War as the climax of the campaign. Starting the campaign at 3020 gave the players a few game years to build up their unit. This also timed the campaign to end just before 2000.

Adventure point awards are based on showing up. Whether we play or not, or if we do something else on Friday, characters will get some APs.

I also write a weekly news briefing wherein sometimes there are clues to the next episode, but it's more of a "what's happening" elsewhere in the universe. I wanted the players to feel that they're part of a larger universe, interacting with some famous personas from the various sourcebooks.

I'm proud of what I've done with my campaign. I did it the way I wanted to, the way I've thought about doing it for several years. If I run another campaign it'll be different somehow. It's been really fun and a lot of work. I've put in 4-8 hours a week for over two years, writing a hundred-plus news briefs, and documenting the campaign. The reason I started this web site was so I could up the BattleTech stuff for the players to read. So a lot of good things have happened because of this undertaking.