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Lady Minevra
2014-01-25, 02:17 AM
Hello all! Brand new DM here; after my friends and I borrowed my uncle's tabletop RPG set to play the test drive Savage Worlds adventure on a lark one day, we all agreed that we'd like to play more and I went out and got a rule book and dice of my own for Christmas.

Here's my dilemma: My friends are HUGE Avatar: The Last Airbender fans and they've insisted that the next session(s) we do are set in that world, whereas I had initially planned to run a few more pre-scripted adventures to become more familiar with the ruleset. Though I've found a good rule conversion for the universe, I haven't found any campaigns set in the ATLA universe and so I need to write my own.

I've never played or even seen tabletop RPGs played except for the one 5 hour session we did about a month ago (combats took quite a while). And although I did DM for that session, I certainly don't feel very comfortable yet either with or the rule system or as a DM, and I definitely am extremely nervous about writing my first campaign on approximately zero experience. And so, I am hoping to mooch off of the much more experienced DMs and players in this forum so that first attempt at creating my own campaign does not end in a massive failure.

I'm looking more for general campaign writing/planning strategy tips rather than Savage Worlds specific ones; I've found good posts on their forum which I can use for creating and converting NPC mooks and such.

My questions:

What sort of campaign-writing mistakes do you often see inexperienced DMs make?
What are your tips for writing within an established universe? (i.e.: I've planned on modeling most of the major villains after the series's villains, does that generally come across well or poorly?)
Plotting out the general arc of the story before we start to give them a goal to work for: Good/Meh/Are you TRYING to ruin the campaign?
Would creating NPCs to travel alongside the party be acceptable as long as they're underpowered, their have a primary purpose in the plot, and the PCs can choose to reject their help? (I've only got two players and an occasional third, and I don't think either of them would want to create a survival-focused character to allow them to camp in the woods or a melee non-bender to soak hits.)
Any other words of wisdom you'd give to a newly minted DM?


Thanks in advance for all your help!

AMFV
2014-01-25, 02:40 AM
My questions:

What sort of campaign-writing mistakes do you often see inexperienced DMs make?

The two big ones are either having too little preparation or too little flexibility. You have to be prepared for the players not to take your plot direction and instead go in a different direction, and you have to be prepared for them to latch onto minute details.



What are your tips for writing within an established universe? (i.e.: I've planned on modeling most of the major villains after the series's villains, does that generally come across well or poorly?)

There are generally two schools of thought on this subject, one is to focus on the main plot events the other is to focus on things that are not related all. They have completely different virtues, on the one hand your plot will be constrained by the events of the show, but many events will be around. The other side allows you to be peripherally involved but you have a lot more flexibility. I much prefer to not be directly involved in major plot events.



Plotting out the general arc of the story before we start to give them a goal to work for: Good/Meh/Are you TRYING to ruin the campaign?

It depends, giving them goals is probably a good idea, just don't be surprised if they go in a different direction.



Would creating NPCs to travel alongside the party be acceptable as long as they're underpowered, their have a primary purpose in the plot, and the PCs can choose to reject their help? (I've only got two players and an occasional third, and I don't think either of them would want to create a survival-focused character to allow them to camp in the woods or a melee non-bender to soak hits.)

Possibly, it really depends on the tone of campaign and the use for the other characters.



Any other words of wisdom you'd give to a newly minted DM?


Don't be afraid to improvise, and don't get too hung up on things going in one specific way.

[QUOTE=Lady Minevra;16861878]
Thanks in advance for all your help!

Raine_Sage
2014-01-25, 04:20 AM
Plotting out the general arc of the story before we start to give them a goal to work for: Good/Meh/Are you TRYING to ruin the campaign?

There's nothing wrong with having a general idea of where you want the story to go, but it's a good idea to leave things as open ended as you can in the event the party decides to try the...uh unorthodox method.

Like, say you have a villain with motive X and they plan to accomplish this through action Y. To take an example from the show, Ozai wants to definitively end the war in his favor and he plans to accomplish this by basically burning everything. This is about where story planning should end.

You then come up with at least three possible ways the players can throw a wrench in this plan. Maybe they can stop it via espionage (acting as spies, sneaking into the castle and stealing sensitive information) or maybe they can stop it by rallying the other nations into a preemptive strike before the fire nation can properly get its pants on, or maybe they can have a big climactic showdown at the 11th hour. However these are all only suggestions of a possible course of action, if the players think of something you might have overlooked and want to try that instead then that's where the story should follow them. Maybe they don't even want to overthrow the fire lord maybe they want to join in on all the burning, that's a perfectly viable option. Don't feel obligated to give things happy endings.

The easiest thing is to write on a session by session basis. For example in my group I have a Villain, and I have a Conflict, but how the players are guided towards this conflict largely depends on how they interact with the setting. Recently two of the players decided to take on assassination missions. So for the next campaign their dealings with criminals unearthed some conspiracies. If they decide to follow up then the story will branch one way. If they don't it will branch another. If they take a third option then I just write a third branch between sessions.

Yora
2014-01-25, 04:39 AM
If you are running an Avatar campaign, there's a couple of things you could do.
One would be a group of Earth Kingdom soldiers and Earthbenders fighting against the Fire Nation, or some Watertribe warriors who went to the Earth Kingdom to help. The longterm goal could be to defend a specific area from getting conquered by the Fire Nation, or driving them back out of it. If it's a somewhat remote area, the Fire Nation probably wouldn't send in a massive army to keep it controlled, while they are much more bussy with planning to take the major cities like Omashu and Ba Sing Se.

If you have a story-based campaign, and not a dungeon crawl, it's generally a good idea to leave the story open ended. Decide who the villains are and what they can do and what troops they have. When the heroes take over a fortress or destroy one enemy unit, you have to think as the enemy commander what he would order his people to do, now that his plans have been upset. It's a back and forth between the Heroes and the villain.
For a campaign like that, you need to have a rough idea what resources the villains have, what they want to achive, and how they plan to do that. But you should make more specific preparations only for two or maybe three play sessions in advance. Further into the future, things are hard to predict and it would likely be a lot of wasted work.
Given the setting of the campaign, there's quite a lot of things that the heroes could be doing. Attacking enemy outposts and taking them over, ambushing supply carts and stealing them, kidnapping enemy commanders, stealing documents out of the enemy base, rescuing your own commanders who have been taken prisoners, destroying bridges and blocking passes, escorting supply carts, getting a spirit to help you chasing away the enemies, get a spirit to help defending your base, and so on. For the beginning, it is often a good idea to have the heroes get their orders from a commander. In that example, probably an Earth Kingdom general who is the leader for the area. First he tells the heroes what he needs them to do, but its usually more fun if you don't tell them how they have to do it.

Dungeons should usually be a network of tunnels with several branches and intersections, that allow the PCs to take different routes to their target. It's usually not neccessary to defeat every single enemy in battle. If the players can chose to go one way and deal with the dangers they are likely to encounter there, but don't go the other way that would pose a different obstacle, the players get to make meaningful choices about how they are using the resources and time they have available. And it's often much more fun to get around a group of guards in a clever way, instead of just bashing them all on the head. It's also a lot more in the style of the setting.
Another thing to mention here is that each area in a dungeon shouldn't be just an empty room. There should almost always be something interesting in the room, that could possibly be used to something. Even if it's just a room that is full of pillars or very dark. Or it's knee deep full of water, or there are several large forges, walkways overhead, or a maze of chests and crates. When PCs get to deal with enemies in such places, they will usually come up with something to use their environment. But you have to tell them what interesting things there are in the room. It doesn't have to be fancy, but when you are making the dungeon, try to make one or two notes about something interesting for each area.