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Morithias
2012-04-08, 04:07 AM
I've noticed recently that my methods and forms of Dming tends to create a lot of heated arguments or at least people telling me off. So I'm here to try and change that and try to improve my dungeon mastering skills.

So the logical place is to start at the beginning of the campaign. Namely the creation of them.

This is generally how one of my campaigns gets created.

1. Something inspires me to create a campaign. The Miki character from Sengoku Rance inspired the Demon King Campaign. The shadow queen from Paper Mario, combined with the Hero's backstory in Dragon Quest 8 created the cliche campaign. A few days on Puzzle Pirates with some Wing commander Privateer created the Sandbox Pirate campaign. Hordes of the Underdark inspired the alchemy island campaign. I can literally give you the inspiration for every campaign I have ever run.
2. I give the basic 'concept' of the campaign to my players. How the plot is going to start, what to expect as enemies, etc, and get basic feedback.
3. I alter the campaign according to that feedback.
4. I come to this forum and proceed to create a few threads asking for advice, opinions, and other such details to aid in the creation of the finer details for concepts. (This step is skipped for less-detailed campaigns like the beta campaign, and the x-crawl campaign).
5. I create a document file outlining all the variant rules, what is banned, what is allowed, what is recommended, what is not recommended, and so on, then I send it to all my players.
6. The campaign is run. Begin at step 1 when something else tickles my fancy.

So how do you create your campaigns? Do you just "sit down" at a table and start drawing things up? Do you improv your first session's encounters so you don't overwhelm your PC's. Is most of the first session roleplaying with no encounters?

Any advice to improve my methods would be greatly appreciated!

NOhara24
2012-04-08, 06:32 AM
I tend to do a pound or so of cocaine and then just start typing. And by that I mean a lot of my ideas fall into my lap at entirely the wrong times, randomly and at the MOST inopportune times. They're all completely unrelated to the situation that I'm in as well. I take these ideas, put them in a logical order and throw in an overarching plot to make it all make sense, put it in the microwave on "defrost" and then I've got a campaign on my hands.

It's best to focus on what those who play in your games actually find wrong, vs. starting from the ground up. There is no WRONG way to create a campaign or a storyline.

As far as encounters go, I evaluate them as follows.

1) I make note of who is playing in my game. Obviously experienced players will be able to handle harder encounters.

2) I make note of what class the most dangerous players are playing. Case-in-point: In my current campaign I've got two arcane casters that will eventually become a God Wizard and Mailman Sorcerer, respectively. As soon as the Sorceress starts taking levels in Incantarix, I know that it will be time for me to start making things more difficult. I learned very quickly not to go easy on my party.

3) Does the enemy fit the setting? (Forest, beach, urban...etc.)

4) And ultimately, how lucky would they have to be to win it? If I know for a fact that my characters will have to get lucky at multiple points in the fight for them to win, it's likely too tough for regular fight. Generally, characters should only lose the typical encounter through extreme bad luck on their part and good luck on the part of their opponent. "Boss" encounters require the opposite.

Hope this helps.

Milo v3
2012-04-08, 08:55 AM
I strangely can't write what I want to plan down properly. Instead I have it all in my head. The reason I can't write it down is my though process which doesn't exact form a normal way of making a setting.

This is how my brain comes up with ideas:
1. The Seed: Over time I naturally start to become obsessive of single thing or concept. This might be Kobolds, Realistic Science-Fiction, multiple views of a single religion which causes it to be several religions, or super powers. Then finally something brakes out from this seed, a way on using it in gaming.

2. Crunch: I then proceed to figure out if the mechanics can reflect what I want. Generally this is fine and this step can be skipped but it sometimes needs tweeking if I use 3.5e. If the mechanics don't fit it, I reflavour things until it does fit, even if I have to edit something completely unrelated as it would effect a thing, which would affect a thing, which affects it.

3. The Web: This step is actually my normal thought process for most things. I think of one thing like Super Powers, then it branches into different things like how were they gained, say a organisation made them, which means they must have a lot of funding, where do they get funding from, governments wanting weapons, if they are used as a weapons then mind manipulation is likely made, all of its workers would be indoctrinated, which means they are likely fanatics, which means they would lack ethics to achive their goals, which allows them to gain test subjects from kindnapping, which means player can be people who have been kidnapped, but they must not be indoctrinated, so there must be a duration required for it to take effect, which means it could be turned off part way through, which could be part of the escape, maybe some people already escaped and assist in the escape of the players, how did they escape, likely through powers, what powers did they have ....

And it goes on like that until I have built a whole campaign.

STsinderman
2012-04-08, 10:21 AM
I tend to get the idea of the kind of characters i want the game to create, what feel i want for the game and how long i want it to last. After which i take some time creating the relevant npc's inc what they want and their personalities then how they will be introduced.

The most recent campaign i have run was after i watched Being human, so you can get the gist of what the nWod game is about. And we have had some great character interactions.

Perhaps if you were to put up a list of the aspects that cause the conflict in the games then others may be able to perhaps suggest some methods of different dming that could help?

Morithias
2012-04-08, 11:01 AM
Perhaps if you were to put up a list of the aspects that cause the conflict in the games then others may be able to perhaps suggest some methods of different dming that could help?

Ironically I've never had a conflict "in game" I've just found myself endlessly being told off on this board that I'm 'too harsh' or 'too self-centered' or some variant thereof.

It keeps coming up so I figure they might have a point. Or maybe it's just the depression speaking, and I'm just giving into peer pressure who knows.

Either way, all your methods sound interesting...I will analyze them and see what I can reverse engineer from them.

Eigenclass
2012-04-08, 04:49 PM
I believe that the best entertainment is relevant, and engages you in something that you care deeply about. Based on this, I keep a long list of plot hooks based in real-world history, and parables exploring some philosophical, moral, or scientific concept... Involvement with historical events in the D&D campaign settings is popular as well, because people read and like these stories and like being even peripherally involved with them.

I don't always follow the Gygaxian principle of DM vs Player, where I get into games of one-upmanship with the players, throwing difficult situations at 'em and trying to sabotage their solutions... Don't get me wrong, that's a big part of the fun of DMing, however it gets really boring as the focus of a campaign - maybe not the first time, but soon.

My approach is more to try and immerse the players in the story and get them to take ownership of it, create NPCs and encounters that are personally relevant to them and burden them with decisions about what happens to the plot. Note that I said players, not just their characters...

One way to reel in a player is to give them access to resources, like a stronghold, an artifact, or a special cohort that give them certain advantages that they get to rely upon, then threaten those resources with a plot hook. This is kind of like what Rich did with Roy's sword and the meteor arc, actually - Roy was attached enough to his weapon to deceive his own party.

Another trick is to throw in encounters that are deeply relevant to the players' interests. For example, in a campaign back in college, I had players that were taking philosophy classes - so I modified one of my NPCs into a great wyrm silver dragon that had grown nihilistic and disinterested with the world, but held the key to defeating great evil.

In addition to performing various quests to procure luxuries for the dragon (so it continued to tolerate their intrusions), there was a role-playing component, to craft a philosophical argument to convince the dragon that action was better than inaction even in an uncertain world. The reward for this optional was XP for defeating an ancient silver dragon (for an ECL ~10 party) - sufficiently tempting for the players to take it at least as seriously as their characters' tasks.

pffh
2012-04-08, 04:53 PM
"Wait I'm DM-ing? Why didn't anyone tell me? Okay write up your characters I'll come up with something"

Paraphrased of course but it's usually something like that.

dsmiles
2012-04-08, 07:26 PM
I get an idea in my head, and like a MF'n handegg I run with that bad boy until the players tackle me right before I get to the endzone. THAT'S how my campaigns start (and usually end). :smallbiggrin:

http://www.nastyhobbit.org/data/media/1/football-handegg.jpg

Corolinth
2012-04-08, 09:36 PM
I start most of my campaigns in a bar/tavern, or whatever is the setting's closest equivalent. Lots of people talk on the internet about how it's trite, cliched, and unimaginative and that's exactly why I do it.

TheCountAlucard
2012-04-08, 10:05 PM
1. Something inspires me to create a campaign.Only rarely does a single thing inspire me to create a campaign; more often, I'll pick up little bits of things from a dozen different books, movies, comics, TV shows, et cetera., and it will snowball around in my head 'til I have to do something with it.

If I decide to start a game with it, of course, the next step is to boil it down and refine it a few times.

I'll give you an example: my Infernals game. My inspirations have varied from Manual of Exalted Power: Infernals and Compass of Celestial Directions: Malfeas, to Tetsuo's theme from Akira (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b9BuP8rkTE), to pictures of cities and deserts, to discussions on non-Euclidian geometry, and probably a thousand other things. As time passed, I filtered through it all, and then said, "I want to run an Infernals game. I want to use this great, glorious Demon City that I can see, and the titans that make it up."


2. I give the basic 'concept' of the campaign to my players. How the plot is going to start, what to expect as enemies, etc, and get basic feedback.That's also a good idea; I'll continue with my Infernals example.

I told the players that I wanted to run an Infernals game. I told them that they would be Hell's Rockstars, the Chosen of the imprisoned architects of the world. I explained that while they would be recruited to take back Creation from the gods who usurped them, that the plot would not be about the Reclamation itself, because I'd much rather the story be about the PCs.

In turn, I got a number of interesting character concepts.


3. I alter the campaign according to that feedback.This step is important.

Thanks to my players, I was able to start the game with a number of rivalries, enemies, and goals already in mind.


4. I come to this forum and proceed to create a few threads asking for advice, opinions, and other such details to aid in the creation of the finer details for concepts. (This step is skipped for less-detailed campaigns like the beta campaign, and the x-crawl campaign).Not a bad idea, but not one I implemented; at most, I probably posted a couple of relevant questions and called it a day.


5. I create a document file outlining all the variant rules, what is banned, what is allowed, what is recommended, what is not recommended, and so on, then I send it to all my players.Also not a bad idea, but again, not one I implemented; I sat with my players and talked it out with them personally.


6. The campaign is run. Begin at step 1 when something else tickles my fancy.And so the cycle continues.


Do you just "sit down" at a table and start drawing things up?Not really. I do a lot of improvisation, even when I know exactly what I want. :smalltongue:


Do you improv your first session's encounters so you don't overwhelm your PC's? Is most of the first session roleplaying with no encounters?Depends on what you call an "encounter," but yeah, most of the first session of Infernals was roleplaying and establishing how they came to the Demon City.

TARDIS
2012-04-09, 01:33 PM
I'll be honest - most of my campaigns start off with me getting a great idea or inspiration for a setting, spending a few weeks building that setting, writing out geopolitical information, religions, cultures, magical traditions, and the like, creating a 6-page or so setting handbook PDF, and e-mailing it to my players saying 'READ THIS AND MAKE A CHARACTER THAT FITS!'

And then I get them to explore the setting with only a vague idea of an overarching plot for most of it :smallwink:

My longest-running campaign was an exploration of the steampunk/Victorian-era setting called the Empires of Caelea, and most of the missions were simply 'go here and retrieve this artifact' by the party's bosses in the Seekers (a church-sponsored dungeonbuster group). There did end of being an overarching story woven in that started about a third of the way in that involved stopping the return of the elder fey, but hey, it seemed to work!

Of course, I always try to work with my players so their concepts can fit in... but sometimes that means no catfolk in the Ravenloftian game I want to play or no elves in the Sci Fi-Western. I do worry about being a bit of a jerk by refusing character concepts, but I feel that creating a solid, immersive setting is a bit more important than letting everybody create what they want. (The one time I tried this was absolute chaos and it ended up being no fun for anybody - so I tend to put my foot down in terms of materials. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice... umm.. I... I won't get fooled again?)

Now to trade off my self-centered setting creation, I try to make my players the main characters of the story (that means I've a very forgiving DM - though don't tell my players, because then it'll ruin some of the suspense). This includes figuring out some ingenious way of getting all my characters together (including putting them all in the same train car in my Newumbria campaign or having them all being recruited into the Seekers to get them out of prison in my Caelea campaign - that was a fun one. "You're all in prison for one reason or another. Can be justified or unjustified - just be creative." Result? One of the players blew up an entire city block with alchemy. Another was a former necromancer who was in prison for grave robbing. A third was a paladin who was locked away for killing a petty tyrant without trial - you don't do that in civilized places!)

Ultimately, you should create a campaign that your players want to play - for me, the trick is creating a setting that my players want to explore, for others it might be a story your players want to see through. That kind of idea should really be, in my opinion, what fuels setting creation.

valadil
2012-04-09, 03:05 PM
I'm always planning on plotting. Sometimes I do so verbally. When other players take interest in something I've said, usually a game materializes.

Because I'm always planning I don't have a ton of writing to do at game start. Mostly I look through my collection of ideas - which could be whole plot lines or just a draft of an NPC - and group up the ones that look like they have a common theme that relates to the idea I mentioned.

I prefer getting written backstories from my players. Ideally this will happen a couple weeks before I start the game. Backstory isn't just homework to earn 100xp for me. I take notes and highlight stuff. Anything that the player intended to be a free plothook or NPC is picked up on the first read through. After that I like to see if I can find things in common between the backstories. If two players had a blacksmith mentor, obviously they'd been trained by the same blacksmith. Same goes for nemeses if possible.

I also do this between player backstory and any ideas I'd already written. Basically I want all plots and NPCs to be as content dense as possible. I'd rather have one blacksmith that two players know than a blacksmith for each of them, so long as it makes sense. The only exception to this is that I don't want to give them a quest giver NPC who is the only person doling out quests. NPCs can be involved in 3 or 4 quests, but they shouldn't ever be the source of more quests than that.

At game start I fail miserably. That's because I try to throw all my plots at the wall and see what sticks. After a couple sessions I've usually figured out which plots interest the players and ignore the rest. The players of course act like one plot was obviously the main plot and don't understand why I tried to bog them down with sidequests. I don't think they realize that everything is a sidequest at first and it's up to them to make one of those quests more important.

nedz
2012-04-09, 03:23 PM
I have more campaign ideas already than I will ever get to run. The last time I started a campaign I typed up half a dozen ideas which appealed to me most at the time and emailed them to my players. They chose the one I put in for, well, ... I suggested an all Dwarf game simply because I have a lot of Dwarf figures. I was not expecting this choice, but it has worked very well.

Next time I start a campaign, well I have this one idea I really want to run, ... so I better be very very sneaky. :smallbiggrin:

Trekkin
2012-04-09, 03:34 PM
Well, here's my method, tentatively titled Babes & Explosions after one of my players jocularly referred to it as such:

1. The Explosion. This is usually literal, where the setting supports it, but it can be some other kind of catastrophe, like a magitech tornado. Something to reduce the players' motivations, at least temporarily, to survival and rendering aid, used to hand them a real and immediate window into some conflict I've planned for them to explore.

This serves as a shakedown cruise of whatever mechanics we're using, as well as a chance to throw some combat or other dramatic action at the players and get people rolling dice and being engaged. It also compensates for my addiction to melodrama and lets me get my fix before we move on to player-driven stuff. Lastly, it lets me get uncooperative or contrarian players moving. I've had problems with this before, where they'll let the helpless die or whatnot, but most people move out of a burning building, so I can work with that.

2. The Babes. This usually isn't literal, but in some campaigns it is,depending on the feel I want. I don't put my big bads and big goods near The Explosion, but I'll figure out which of their beloved or feared representatives was on hand to potentiate it, why they did it, and who was trying to stop them. Having the good guy's second in command lay waste to a town is always a good one. If the Explosion shrinks their motivations, the BBEG/BBGGs femmes and hommes fatale are there to expand them. As a last resort, they can always pin it on the players and give them a short amount of time to change the mind of the magistrate before the hammer drops.

As well as a window into the world, these let me toy with the players a bit. I tend to know what they like and don't like, and I fling these at them, depending on whether they respond better to carrots or sticks, just to get them motivated. If they tend to ascend to the heights of power, I show them something astounding to give them a goal to go for. On the other hand, I've got a few surly players who like gaming but like messing with me more, and I play to their baser emotions: the last time I tried this, one of my players was an arachnaphobe, so I inflicted his character with a curse that made him half-spider.

Once I have that set up, it's ready for the players. I give them the requirement only that they have a valid reason to be in Place X at time Y, and I've often found it helpful to build back from there. As an example, let's say one of them was in town acting as a mercenary. Who gave him his contract? Why did he take up mercenary work? Who taught him to fight? This then gives me, in inverse order, loose ends to tie into the campaign, which also lets me flesh out the world. If he wants to have grown up in a monastic order of sword-and-board fighters, great (if odd), that order now exists and has historically been a secret front for recruiting the BBEG's death knights from his higher echelons, and he'll find that out if he starts trying to use his order to investigate the Explosion.

Once they're enmeshed, on into the first session. Things go boom, people die, agents of greater powers are glimpsed (and usually do something flashy and cool to establish their bona fides), and the players choose a direction and start adventuring. I put things in their path and at their objective, and generally let them start driving the campaign. It's a weird method and takes a bit of troubleshooting, but it's worked for me thus far, especially when one or both elements are inverted.

As a final note, if they really don't want to do anything, there can always be more explosions, and these can involve the characters' stuff. A character would rather go study wizardry for sixty years than get involved in these petty crises? Great. Smells like a book-burning to me. It sounds spiteful, but it's also in the spirit of showing that the heroes are needed, and things will get worse until they deal with this.

Jay R
2012-04-10, 10:24 AM
I've occasionally used an additional useful tool after the game is underway:

Who looked bored at the last session? Look over that character's backstory and find a minor plothook for the next session.

bokodasu
2012-04-12, 11:24 AM
Ironically I've never had a conflict "in game" I've just found myself endlessly being told off on this board that I'm 'too harsh' or 'too self-centered' or some variant thereof.

It keeps coming up so I figure they might have a point. Or maybe it's just the depression speaking, and I'm just giving into peer pressure who knows.

Maybe you're just not as good at explaining yourself in writing as you are in person? Maybe you run niche games and have found a core group of players who enjoy that particular niche? If you & your players are happy, it's not so important what people who are neither you nor your players think.

That said, maybe you are trying to control too much? Would it really make a difference if someone was the bastard son of unimportant NPC Lord So-and-So, exiled to the wastes to spare him embarassment? Is it going to wreck your plot if your players decide to head north instead of west? I suggest splitting up step 5:

Step 5A: Create document with Rules and Guidelines.
Step 5B: Set it aside for a couple of days. Don't look at it. Don't think about it. Go watch tv or take a hike or something.
Step 5C: Take a good hard look at each of those rules, and ask yourself: Is this essential to my vision? What would happen if someone did X or Y instead? Try to think flexibly - instead of "This cannot happen," think, "if This happens, then This Other Thing will happen". Cut, revise, rewrite. And if the answer is "yes, if someone is an elf it WILL utterly ruin my entire plot of trying to find the last surviving elf in the world," then stick to your guns and don't let anyone sweet-talk you into changing it.
Step 5D: Send document to players.

Me, I pick a couple of overarching threads and a general location, then throw whatever sounds interesting into a huge text file and pull out bits when they look like they might be relevant. NPCs, locations, plots, puzzles, whatever - it's all born from sitting through Really Boring Meetings and Pretending To Take Notes. But even I make houserules and character creation limits to fit the setting/theme of the game.