PDA

View Full Version : Too many campaign ideas



Gralamin
2011-03-22, 01:14 AM
I'm a DM. I DM Very often. Unfortunately, I also commonly come up with campaign ideas... So many now that I have 15 on the backburner, in various states of completion.

So, when you come up with too many campaign ideas, how do you deal with it?

(As a note, when I say campaign ideas, I mean "ideas which could be theme/central idea behind a whole campaign").

nihil8r
2011-03-22, 01:23 AM
is there any way you could combine several of the ideas together? :)

Gralamin
2011-03-22, 01:28 AM
is there any way you could combine several of the ideas together? :)

For some yes. But that way lies madness, since it leads me to having about 32,768 ideas instead of 15 :smalltongue:.

Part of this is, admittedly, my own fault, since there used to be a time I DMed 5 times a week, plus a few PbPs :smallcool:. In that case, I could just throw more games at the problem and it'd go away.

Doc Roc
2011-03-22, 01:29 AM
I abandon the ones I like least, and put perhaps a small note about each in a google doc. My Gdocs account is like a flipping graveyard of dreams.

Lord_Gareth
2011-03-22, 01:31 AM
You could try turning a few into short stories or novels.

Gralamin
2011-03-22, 01:34 AM
You could try turning a few into short stories or novels.

That has two very unfortunate problems, in my case:
1) I am not a very good writer, in terms of actually committing things to paper.
2) The only reason I don't have more games is because of time which these would take up anyway.

WeeFreeMen
2011-03-22, 02:01 AM
Why not ask the players what they want to experience and play in next?
For example, if they say "We want Horror/Adventure!" You can run thru your list of ideas and apply the "Ideas" that pertain to their interests.

Template them or Writing a short summary (Not of the plot, of the World) is what I give my players, usually 3-5 at a time and they Rank (from 1-3 or 1-5) by Interest. Its pretty good feed-back.

If there is no players to ask, I ask myself, What one do I want to DM the most? I love me some Mercenary combat/Adventure. :]

libermortis
2011-03-22, 02:10 AM
draw a map of what the player know, and expand with your idears, into the unknown areas.
thenn dont think about them until the players aproatch them, that way you have somthing to remember them by.

unless its a realy specific to a person and not a place.

you can also write your brainstorming down.

Garwain
2011-03-22, 02:24 AM
My Gdocs account is like a flipping graveyard of dreams.

My personal folder is a graveyard of ideas, stuck in their dream phase.

Jerthanis
2011-03-22, 02:28 AM
One thing I've done is take my campaign ideas, write out essentially what I expect would take place in these games, the themes, conflicts, cool parts and so on. Often, when I break it down in this way, a few of the campaign ideas will have only one or two interesting things while others will have so many I have to stop writing at some point. The ones with the handful of interesting parts are probably going to end up gimmicky and one-note, so I can eliminate them.

The remainder often share a few of their central themes, and so from there I decide which to run based on which one I think will express those themes the best.

Firechanter
2011-03-22, 03:55 AM
Share them with us. I want to start a new D&D campaign and haven't decided on a theme yet.

MerlinTheWizard
2011-03-22, 04:22 AM
You could give some of them away, perhaps to friends so they can DM them or just to anybody. I find that rambling about campaign ideas makes me want to do them less because then I have shared the idea. You could also try turning some of them into side quests. Combining them isn't a bad idea, but if that's too much, try taking out the coolest elements of each idea and implementing them into one of the others. So if one campaign is cool because you get to travel through the planes, maybe just make planar travel a recurring element in a different campaign. That way you don't have to do the full thing but you still get the good part.

mint
2011-03-22, 04:47 AM
I have a small black notebook which may or may not be bedazzled. Put everything down in it.
Ideas for characters, plots, endgames, builds, mean and spiteful things to say. I think ideas for campaigns are pretty rarely discrete enough that you can't piece them together.
Maybe you can't combine the set of ideas going around your mind right now. When you save them up over time, it seems unlikely that you won't be able to do so.

dsmiles
2011-03-22, 05:55 AM
I'm a DM. I DM Very often. Unfortunately, I also commonly come up with campaign ideas... So many now that I have 15 on the backburner, in various states of completion.

So, when you come up with too many campaign ideas, how do you deal with it?

(As a note, when I say campaign ideas, I mean "ideas which could be theme/central idea behind a whole campaign").
I have a 5-subject notebook that I keep for just such occurrences. I write an outline in it, and hope I get to use it someday. So far, the notebook is approximately 65-70% full. I've used about 5% of it in campaigns. Not through lack of trying, though, through lack of play time. :smallannoyed:

valadil
2011-03-22, 08:31 AM
I come up with ideas all the time. They go in the idea pile, which is a google document I've created so that I never have to lose ideas. When I feel like running a game, I look through the document and see what would be fun. I kinda lasso together all the ideas that make sense within a single campaign, and call that a game.

eepop
2011-03-22, 12:53 PM
Maybe you should start a thread on this board for excess campaign ideas. It gets them out of your head and they might do someone else some good. And people may have some input on one of your ideas that turns it from a "kinda cool idea I won't have time to get to" into "Holy Crap! This is what we are playing the next time we start a campaign!"

~Nye~
2011-03-22, 04:32 PM
From my experience, I often create too many ideas. I then get bored of certain ideas and think "Oh thats too much like Akira." or "This is just disneys bambi but with a sadistic voodoo twist." Currently I'm running a campaign thats solo based. My players cant make a session at the same time during uni term, so I play a couple of sessions with individual characters every week. It means you can be a bit more in-depth with certain things and then your PCs can share the convoluted nonsense they have perceived, then when the PCs meet through idea 'X' they have alot to share.
This however can be like a runaway train, but at the moment it's working for me, Since my new world is at war, some ideologies or scenarios are only experienced by the players in 'X' Region. My players give me loads of positive feedback, because A) they love the DMs undevided attention. B) Alot more gets done C) They say my world is a lot more life like. They feel imersed in it considering silly ideas which I reject I often twist into folklore or events that happen whilst they're in my world.
Hope this helps.