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View Full Version : Overzealous Collaborative/Improv Campaign Idea



Jacob.Tyr
2013-07-31, 11:34 AM
So, my DM'ing style has always veered closer to improv than actually planned. I prefer to give my players the ability to do just about anything, and mostly only have a few rough ideas of areas ahead of time. I tend to throw together a few generic encounters and areas, reskin/fluff them for what the players are doing when I need to use something. Add a world on top of it, some ideas of how the world interacts, and cut loose. The results vary...

Anyway I was hoping to try a campaign with practically zero prep beyond generic unskinned areas and encounters. There will be:
No world map
No city Maps (they will start in an alley in a poor portion of one city)
No defined race makeups (The only definite will be the ones the PCs start as)
No defined plot (player backgrounds will hopefully throw some of this into the game)

The idea will be that players can essentially "create" the world as they go along. Some of them are fairly veteran players, and are all WAY more into the Role part of roleplaying than I have ever been. I'm wondering if they can actually pull a story out of: "You are in an alley, you do not have your weapons and armor on you. There are 4 other people in the alley with you, dressed in various street-clothes."

They will be able to declare why they are in the city, creating aspects of the city as they go along. "I'm here to see the king about XYZ" establishes that the city is ruled by a monarchy, and that XYZ has occurred. Visiting the local mages academy to study in the library? The city now has a mage academy with a library.

High knowledge checks will create the information, relying on the players to make up facts on the fly. Fighting a creature? A low knowledge roll might let you name what it is. A higher one will let you know what it is weak against. None of these will be decided beforehand, essentially.

In the absence of knowledge skills, I intend to let the players roleplay having experience. The fighter recognizes the creature coming after them as a minotaur, and knows that they can be easily shaken if you stamp your feet loud enough. This will be a limited power, some number of times per session perhaps.


My question for you, then, is how can I make something like this easier to transition into? How can I make the power inherent in deciding the world be balanced? Has anyone attempted something this freeform before, and has it worked out?

elliott20
2013-07-31, 03:05 PM
Spear of Dawn is an EXCELLENT game built on this entire premise you're talking about. There is almost no prep what so ever. Or rather, there is only as much prep as you want there to be.

The way that it works is that you use tables for EVERYTHING. The most critical one though, is the quest seed table. These are not strictly hard guides you must follow, but just oracles that you can use to create a random hook.

In the early stages of this, your job is to basically expose them to as many seeds as humanly possible, and see which one of them takes a bite. The one that gets a bite, is the one you develop.

The idea of using knowledge checks to create facts around the campaign is a good one, and is one that is used in the Fate system to help flesh out the world. The key here is flexibility and let them really put their knowledge skills to use.

I also strongly recommend using some form of an action point system to help manage this interaction. Something simple like x action points per session, with points being useful for bonuses, detail creation, and oh-crap-recovery moments are all good uses of it. It also helps them signal you when something is important, as that's what they'll be spending points on.

You can make it more involved if you want, but that can take a bit more work and balancing.

The background stuff while I am all for having the players setup the details, I wouldn't do it ALL on the fly, as everything on the fly can create some weird, incoherent results. What I do recommend is you take some time to do a collaborative world building. Your job is to just define the borders of the map, just so you don't end up spending 5 sessions on just world generations.

I would spend one single session on this, and then just leave the map on the table for the players to add when they get an interesting idea.

We used a simple system for this in our group. As the GM, I put down a central base point that is major backdrop to the setting, i.e. a city of some sort.

Then, each player takes a turn adding one feature to the map. The feature could be anything. Farmlands, mountains, old fortresses, tribes, anything. They can also add one adjective/phrase to one of the objects on the map. It can be just about anything.

One of my players wrote on our current campaign map "crystal space dragon" as a phrase for one of the fortresses. What does it mean? We don't know yet. but it sure as hell sounds like it could be awesome. Is it a cult? Is it an ACTUAL dragon? (maybe not from space, but I can probably figure out how to work it in there) Is it the name of a person? Is it just the landscape? What?

Use this map in conjunction with your quest seed table to figure out what to do with these.

Another thing here is, don't be afraid of meta-game knowledge. That stuff is going to spill over anyways, so just embrace it. Any time they are meta-gaming, ask them to pay for the knowledge either through a check of some kind, or an action point.

The last thing is, after every session, talk to your players about their agendas. You will have gone through a bunch of stuff with them already, and some of it hopefully will have sparked the player's appetite. Ask them what they want to explore, or if they now have any goals.

Use these goals to help draw up more details.

Once again, templates and tables will be your best friend. You should NOT spend any time crunching stats if you don't want to.

re: weakness of monsters
The way I handle this is I let the players create their own quest to figure out the monster's weakness. Whatever it is they do, as long as they put in enough effort into it, they'll find something.

What is that something? simple.

When you have finally felt that the player has put in enough time into whatever it is he's doing, take any save-or-die/save-or-suck spell out of the book, one that is powerful enough that if it worked on the monster, it would make the encounter doable. That is your weakness template.

Ask the player(s) to come up with an interesting way of access this. This will be a one time, narrative based thing that they can do. If they succeed in doing whatever it is they came up with (and the key here is INTERESTING, not HARD), they get the spell's effect, no save required. It could be TOTALLY nonsensical. It could be something like, saying a particular rhyme, dropping a certain kind of material on the creature, wearing a certain color, ANYTHING. It just needs to be interesting and counter-intuitive enough that it makes sense nobody has stumbled onto it yet. You can come up with a justification for WHY it works later.

These are the big ones I can think of. hope that helps.

Knaight
2013-07-31, 04:01 PM
Go for it. This can work with some groups and some systems and it can fail miserably with others, but it is certainly worth trying. As long as you are doing this though, I would suggest a very light system (my homebrew, Titled could work here) with extremely rapid character creation, where the players can hop around in multiple groups, including those opposed to each other. Maybe one character wants to go to the kings court about a situation, then you jump to that court and that situation and see how things play out there, so that there is more established and there are PCs on both sides when everything eventually starts to happen.

elliott20
2013-07-31, 08:05 PM
to build on Knaight's suggestion, use a scene structures to structure your game sessions. Don't spend too much time on scenes that don't deliver anything. It's okay to make this explicit to players. This way, the game stays focused on the meat of the matter.