Starting to DM / big world story

[Iceking]

Hey

I want to make a story, but looking for 2 advices:

1: How do you become a better DM (is there any easy readable guide) i allready know a lot of rules and can improvise good, but never DM'd before. (I will mostlikely DM with more advanced players then me and dont want to be owned by them)

2: I look for a story that goes over different country's (kingdoms) with each kingdom having its own terrain, skills needed, puzzles and quests.
Would love to have my players to need to find item / complete quest before they can have acces to other kingdom.

I was thinking about something were all kingdoms have been guarded and you need kind of talisman from other kingdom to proceed. (you can see this like the pokemon version where you need x badges to go to tournament)

How can you make sure that each world / country / kingdom is big enough to keep some freedom of choise to the players?

How many quests (main / side) do you need to forsee in each kingdom?
How many NPC's do you need to forsee. (i know you can find such things in DMG but like to have your oppinions.

I would like it to make them lvl up after each world/kingdom.



Any toughts?

(i do have spare time to make worlds out)

[rexx1888]

first part about being a better dm.
http://angrydm.com/ <<<this is a good place to start. You may find you disagree some of the time, an thats ok. The most important thing is to never tell yourself you know it all already. Keep trying to be better. Thats pretty much the rule with everything in life, dming is the same.

second part is a little more complicated. normally, when you make a big country, its the location of a single campaign. If you travel lots of countries, then the travelling is the campaign. That doesnt mean you cant do what you want, but it does mean its complicated. If you want to make each country feel like something unique, you may have to run a few side quests there, as well as the main quest to get the macguffin that lets you go to the next country. Rinse, repeat.

This all sounds like years of game time. Lets assume you play weekly. you manage a country every three months, with say 3 sidequests and a main dungeon. Thats a lot of content to get through in 3 months, but i imagine it could be done. It runs the risk though of just sort of hopping from place to place. Becomes more like a tourists tour than an actual trip. Something like "hey, look out the left window, see the waterfall, aint it great. Alright, now on your right is a big statue. Weve seen lots of stuff, you having fun yet" If you can, you want to avoid that weird disconnected feeling as much as possible. journeys are normally long. Thats how we all think of them. When they pass in the space of a sentence they feel cheap. it cant be helped.

So, lots and lots of pre campaign prep is my best suggestion. Map out each region, and the mcguffins you need for each. Where they are, how players get them, key players in regions. Then do the same for sidequests. Then try to give your players enough information that they feel the need to follow your campaign and see how they go from there. There is the major risk that they will get sidetracked, so good luck.

Try to keep them off the rails if you can, otherwise it may cause issues... wow theres a boatload more that could be said, hopefully others way in with some good stuff.

[Talos]

If they are more advanced players like you say. DO NOT LEAD THEM AROUND BY THE NOSE. make your game play alittle more sand boxy for them. ie give them plot hooks let them decided where they go. Then through your story from behind the scenes get them to where you want then to go. it is important they do not FEEL like they are on a train track with no options but yours.

[Shining Wrath]

First, every DM is different. If you're dealing with advanced players they'll probably cut you quite a bit of slack and help you out rather than trying to break your game.

Your first rule is, you are telling a story. And each player is telling a story, too, about their PC and how they grow and develop. All these stories are important. Yours is the most important, though, because you are providing the context for all the other stories. Good players will understand this.

What you need, then, is a story where it makes sense for the players to follow your plot. If you want them to finish nation A before going to nation B, in your story it has to make sense for them to do that.

Second, if you've got multiple nations you've got politics. How easy it is to travel from one nation to another depends on politics. If X and Y have fought 5 wars in the last century, travel between them will be difficult. If X and Y are both chaotic good, the border may be marked by a cheerful little sign "Now entering X! Thank you for visiting Y!" and the only real difference will be whose face is on the silver piece you get in change at the tavern.

So, why would logical players stay in the first nation rather than leaving? Because they've got business there. Give them something to do - a noble who has hired them, a fair maiden to rescue, whatever. Give them a story to participate in that they'll enjoy being part of.

EDIT: So, the answer to "how many quests / sidequests" is "I dunno. What's your story?". Write the story. Then figure out how many "scenes" there are. If it seems thin, throw in a complication - the fair maiden was kidnapped by bandits, but the bandits were raided by gnolls and now she's been double-kidnapped and may be eaten rather than ransomed. If it seems "thick", simplify, simplify. In fact, simplify first, then pad it out a little. If you're anything like me, you'll think of far more details then your characters will want to deal with.

[jedipotter]

To be a better DM, no guide can really help. Like a lot of things you just need to practice being a DM to get better at it. So one thing you can do is game more.

I think the key to unlock a kingdom is way to video game like. One of the big differences between video games and pen and paper games is that you can go anywhere any time and try to do anything. Why do you want to lock kingdoms anyway? What is the point? You just want to say ''you stand at the border of the kingdom of Vaster, but an invisible wall blocks you from entering. A when you touch the wall a ''bur-bur-thump'' sounds from no where.

I would not do this. In general the characters are not going to ''kingdom hop'' anyway. And if they do so what?

One main quest per kingdom is good. Then 3-5 side quests per kingdom......plus 5 random anywhere quests.

You will need a good 25 NPC's per kingdom. Plus make at least that many generic ones.

[Iceking]

the reason i do this (the closed world story), is that i have some villains in my mind that i will make by encounter lvl. I dont want my players to go directly to a stronger villain.

Each country / kingdom / ... will have its own terrain where the villain will come.
Forest for druid
Runes for undead
Mountain for dragonborn
...

so if i make my dragonborn EL 5 i dont want my characters to go there directly.

[Knaight]

2: I look for a story that goes over different country's (kingdoms) with each kingdom having its own terrain, skills needed, puzzles and quests.

Would love to have my players to need to find item / complete quest before they can have acces to other kingdom.

This seems extremely odd. As jedipotter said, it's video gamey. It's also the sort of thing that shatters verisimilitude. You'd be much better just pitching the game such that staying within the same kingdom is better. For instance, you could say something like this to the players:

"I have an idea for a fantasy game in which you are a set of freelance trouble shooters, brought into various small kingdoms to solve the local problems. The idea is for the game to be highly structured on a grand scale, in which the characters are brought in as troubleshooters on a contract, then left to attend to the details. This also involves an episodic structure, with each small kingdom serving as a distinct arc. Is anyone interested?"

That gets everyone bought in to the core concept. Alternately, they aren't interested, and that's the sort of thing that's good to find out before the game starts, rather than half way through when everybody is bored.


How can you make sure that each world / country / kingdom is big enough to keep some freedom of choise to the players?
It's not a matter of size. You could set the entire campaign in a small village of 100 families with a whopping square mile (2.6 square kilometers) of territory and still have a fully player directed game, and you could have a galaxy with uncountable habitable planets and a total railroad.

In the context of your game, with heavy traveling, I'd recommend small kingdoms. Better yet, duchies or baronies could work pretty well. Since you want some degree of natural obstacle between them, and because the terrains need to differ, an archipelago is pretty much ideal here. You need a boat to get between them - which means that the characters can, but it makes sense for them to choose not to, and the rest of the differences make sense.

As far as choice goes, this is why you don't want to set things up in advance too much. Let the players decide how the characters go about things, introduce material in response to this. Do not plan a particular plot which they have to follow, and most definitely do not plan endings.

How many quests (main / side) do you need to forsee in each kingdom?
I'd go with one main quest, in keeping with the general structure of the game. As for side quests, those emerge naturally in various ways, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. As far as pacing is concerned I recommend playing things out based on most plausible results for the most part - but, there are multiple highly plausible results to most character actions, and it probably works best to favor the emergence of new obstacles near the beginning (first side quest or two) and favor things coming to a close later (after a few side quests).

That said, abandoning side quests entirely works just as well. Think rather of complications which have to be worked around, first favoring their emergence, then favoring things going smoothly, but not mandating their existence or nonexistence at any point and instead basing it on player choices. Think of who else is involved and might take an interest in the PCs, and what implications this can have.



It depends on the complexity involved. You want a handful of generics - guard, soldier, guard captain, minor mage, artisan, etc, which can mostly be pulled from the DMG NPC classes, but are nice to have on hand. It's fine to reuse stats here, though you could also have stat variations noted as traits (so your guard stats might have a line that says "High Strength, +2 to strength, +1 to strength based skills, +1 to damage" and another that says "High Wisdom, +2 to Wisdom, +1 to wisdom based skills, +1 to Will save"), which are pretty easy to handle.

Beyond that point, it depends on how much improvising you want to do, how much time each kingdom dictates, etc. I've GMed games where I made no NPCs ahead of time, and instead relied entirely on improvisation. Heck, I've got a political game which started with exactly one NPC actually named and given a personality, with the rest left to improvisation - though I have hard stats, detailed relationships, etc. between a good 13 factions, and this is just in one city, and the named and characterized NPC list grows quickly. I've had others which were based much more on the personalities of individuals than people, and those have started with 14 person character lists of just the important ones, and quickly grown from there.

You seem to prefer preparation, and given the broad strokes here there's a bare minimum of 2 NPCs per country - whoever involved the PCs, and the villains in use. I suspect you'll want to involve the kings as well (though my recommendation for Dukes and Barons stands), and if they aren't the ones to personally bequeath the task on the PCs that gets you 3.

You do not need all of these at once. If you're aiming for politics a quick character map of a whopping 10 NPCs and factions should more than cover it. You've got County 1 King, Country 1 Court, Country 2 King, Country 2 Court, etc. Establish the basic relations between them, establish what they want to some degree, and you're done. Then, establish Country 1. Countries 2-5 do not need to be established yet, and Country 1 only needs broad strokes. You'll need more later, but you can handle that between sessions, or just improvise it.

Also the DMG advice is largely regarding population, and is honestly kind of terrible in a lot of ways. You do not need every last citizen filled out. You do not need maps accurate to the house. You do not need to pre-plan every single little detail the way the DMG implies. Their advice is largely lousy, and I recommend taking it with a giant grain of salt. Parts of it are still worth reading, but it has a definite bias towards needlessly complicated planning that is not helpful.

[QUOTE=Iceking;17170130]I would like it to make them lvl up after each world/kingdom.
This could work. Again, it's pretty structured, and again, you want your players on board with this. Lay it out to them directly, and I mean something to the effect of this:

"In keeping with the highly structured and episodic game, I'm scrapping the experience system. Instead, characters will level at the beginning of each new contract."

[Shining Wrath]

I like the idea of the archipelago, for one additional reason:

weather.

If your archipelago has frequent storms, it doesn't matter if the PC's own a boat, or 5 boats - they ain't goin' nowhere nohow until the storm abates. In the meantime, here's this problem right here on the island to solve.

For variety, sea serpents. Or sahuagin. Anything that makes sense in-game and keeps the PC's where you want them.