I prefer making up most of the campaign as we play so I can shape the story around the party. I find it far easier then shelving entire campaign plans cause the players wanted to go there instead. If I’m going to build a linear campaign where I expect the pc’s to follow the breadcrumbs that I’VE left for them I let them know its on rails ahead of time. for the most part if it didn’t make it into the module it isn’t relevant.
After the 3rd or 4th month worth of world building tossed due to my players inability to focus on the task given, I decided to save myself the headache and put more focus on what the players wanted. So unless I’m building a single scenario for a con or something on the shorter side. I let the party know the story is on rails and anything else irrelevant.
Table Rule #1 Everything you say or do… EVER! Will be used against you in game.
I’m a more casual GM and encourage game related out of character banter between the players as long as its not too disruptive to overall gameplay. In most cases they both love and hate it, they like to guess at what I’m going to throw at them and they have better ideas than I do at times, generally anything they guess at or focus on no matter how mundane gets thrown at them at some point later in the campaign whether it was a joke or not.
Every why in suggested by the OP I would deem a plot related question most of which should be some sort of question directed to an NPC or a knowledge check. if something I either forgot or is completely irrelevant ill make it up on the spot depending on the results of the check.
If they answer yes to “is your character asking Mr. bandit why he’s attacking?” well that’s just a bonus to the attack roll After 2 or 3 encounters wasting resources healing the damage from the free combat round the PC’s CHOSE to give the bandits they will mostly likely stop asking bandits why they are attacking. If they continue well that’s your new plot. why ARE the bandits attacking YOU? better figure it out before the get it right.
Story length affects my approach. If I’m starting a totally open-ended campaign, I’m creating situations large and small that the players can jump into. What happens from there is totally up to them, and I’m only thinking about the implications of what they do on the rest of the situation. As others have suggested, what the PCs choose not to do may affect the campaign world as much as what they do choose. In this sense there may be one or more overarching meta stories that develop over the course of the campaign, but I never know what that’s going to look like. Often PC actions create new plotlines I never would have thought of.
For a more limited campaign, where we’ve decided we’re going to run this game for 5-6 sessions or whatever, I’ll have a little more crafted sense of where I expect them to go, and how I imagine the story unfolding. There’s still a meta story, but the sessions may have some episodic resolution that provides a shorter-term sense of achievement, but also serves to move the bigger story along.
For a one-shot, I try to employ a technique I learned from a great DM I know. Narrow-wide-narrow. The adventure opens in media res, funneling the players in the direction you want. But then you go wide, giving them optional paths to pursue. The key, though, is that at the end, you get them pretty well back to a satisfying resolution you have planned. I’m not very good at this, but I’ve played with a lot of DMs who are brilliant at crafting a 4-hour experience with endings you never see coming.
I have been writing a war campaign recently using 5RD (Five Room Dungeons) as a session planner. Each session or dungeon has a few levels of success that affect the overall war effort. So the whole thing is technically written out but done modularly so parts can be pulled and put in different spots to accept the Heros’ wildly crazy choices within reason.
The biggest thing for me is that there is an agreement between players and GM that the game setup is the game we are all playing. So when I run session 0, we discuss the plan for the game is loose terms and make sure everyone is on board. If I am planning a linear war campaign, the players know and build characters for that with motivations that make sense with that campaign. This prevents a lot of the more derailing craziness, like a player making a character who hates the king and country and will therefore be trying to help the enemy or murder hoboing instead of completing missions.
Some may call that railroading, but I think of it as just agreeing to play the same game.
Yeesss my presssious. I’ve started many a game where the players told me what hazards lay ahead, without even realizing it. “Oh the bad guys will foo the fee!” Must be a prophet because they did. I use all the brains at the table, not just mine.
My current games includes an 11 year old and a 15 year old who require a little more guidance so the game was geared to Agents working for someone else who at times points them in directions while leaving the world totally open to do as they please.
I don’t really have “linear story problems” because I don’t run linear games and I think “story” in an RPG context means something completely than it does in a novel or TV series. For me campaign design is about setting up some things that will happen. I have an idea of what comes next, but depending on the players’ actions, it could change everything.
Most of what I had to proffer has been posted. It’s interesting to see a solid consensus on campaigns having overarching concepts as the glue, yet leaving adventures adaptable to session play. That boils my approach into one sentence.
Pretty much the first adventure, segue to the second adventure, and the final scene can be planned reasonably well. But in between it’s best to have concepts of areas, entities, and groups planned out, with only methods of how they relate to the finish planned out, and flesh out the details in the prep between sessions to guide the players through more fluid adventures.
It’s work. But so worth it to deliver a working thing that makes sense out of the general mess the players might make of your plans.
What’s a “PlotField”?
It’s a Field from which a Plot will grow.
A PlotField Diagram illustrates the relations between objects (including NPCs and groups) at a glance, but does not indicate any plot or order of events. This is because all NPCs are both motivated and free-willed, and everything is subject to change as the PCs decide what they want to do. This story, after all, IS ABOUT THEM, not me.
Yeah, I agree with @Magnolia. I’m going to get a telework job and then move near you. Is that creepy? I’m not really an RPG stalker. Please make sure you update your profile. Thank you.
I like this. This is the most succinct I’ve seen explained what I try to do when running a game. If I were the God of Thumbs Ups, I’d hold up at least a million thumbs.
It’s the result of 40 years experience and a preference for unpredictable creativity, boiled down to the smallest possible method I could devise (and still make sense). My whole thing with CORE is about minimizing all points of mechanical intrusion and maximizing narrative potential. WE make stuff happen, the dice are just there to help out when things get… umm… dicey.
Now, this can be done with a massive set of random tables, but those are a lot of work (especially for a single session or one-shot), and the stuff they generate can be either brilliant or frikkin stupid. So I prefer to go the other way: Abstraction. Simplicity. Tags. Prompts. Two-word connections. “Fruitful Voids,” as Vincent Baker calls them. Give you just enough words to make your brain go click.
So my prep is suggestive but not scripted. What will happen when the balls start moving and the PCs enter the tableau? I don’t know! But with the help of my Players, we’ll find out when we get there, and all of us will be surprised.
I’ve always found that the more I try to plan out, the more unpredictable the players tend to be and the more impossible the task becomes. If I mapped out every single little town in my entire world, including developing the NPC’s that live there with names and backstories, but I left one tiny little village of fertilizer farmers in the middle of absolute nowhere unmapped and undeveloped, that’s the very first place the players are going to go.
And they’re going to spend the whole campaign there, defending this little shit village and the shit farmers that live there. Unless you feel like designing an entire world, and have the time to do that, it’s easier and better in my opinion, not to plan ahead much at all. Keep plans for the future vague so they can be adapted on the fly and plopped down wherever you need them in the story.
While this method requires you to really hone your improvisation skills, it also means that you can world build on the fly and react to situations as they arise. For me, not having something laid out ahead of time gives me the freedom to find answers and solutions that make sense as the need arises. My NPC’s and the world itself just react to the events in the world and the characters actions in it. Cause and effect, actions have repercussions. I think it’s easier to figure those things out after the events have occurred rather than beforehand.
This sounds like an insane amount of front-load work for world-building, but I love your approach. I’m doing basically the same thing but I’m also doing a lot of world-building on the fly too. Characters tend to come into existence when I need them to rather than already existing in a big list.
I don’t do plots per se. I create a situation, offer the PCs a hook, and let them go about things however they wish. I always try to remember that the opposition is active, even at time when the PCs aren’t. So, if the PCs are stuck or dragging their feet, they may find themselves on the defensive until they start taking initiative. I also try to remember that the actions of the PCs have consequences – some bad, some good – and to let them play out. This way the players feel that they’re actually affecting their world instead of just being characters in a story someone else has already written.
A good site to check out is The Alexandrian; he’s got a lot of great tips for creating adventures that work this way.
I used to be the prime proponent for Situational GMing - I even named it - but I realized that people do what they want to do, in the style they prefer, so I haven’t mentioned it for years. I just run my games that way.
The naming issue. You don’t want every NPC named Joe or Jane.
?My solution was naming charts. Pure grunt work as I came up with 100 common names, male female and surnames, for every culture and race.
This solid week of grunt work over a steaming search engine and word processor is free to use. I don’t require players to use it, they have it available, but it is mainly for ME, All those fiddly NPCs. If #Farcaster ever enables uploads I’ll do that.
While they will not be universally applicable to everyone’s game, they are at least inspiration. Presented here X3 Appendix Naming Charts
I decided to just use name generators that already existed, but you’ve essentially gone through the time to make your own, which probably works just as well if not nicer, so good on you! Because I totally agree, having every NPC be named Steve or Bob just doesn’t work out very well for the feel of most worlds. But you do have to come up with names on the spot a lot, so might as well have the name generators handy.
I wanted something that fit my world like a glove. That of course means it fits nothing else. Yes it is set up for dire rolling. I can grab a name off it at any point.
After 2 or 3 encounters wasting resources healing the damage from the free combat round the PC’s CHOSE to give the bandits they will mostly likely stop asking bandits why they are attacking. If they continue well that’s your new plot. why ARE the bandits attacking YOU? better figure it out before the get it right.