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Lateral
2016-05-06, 12:26 AM
So I'm about to start running a game. It's not my first time GMing, but it is my first time writing a campaign with a real plot (all the others have been either modules or plotless dungeon crawls). Because of that, I'm not really sure how to go about it; I've got the hook and the introductory portion all written out, I know what the overarching plot threads will be, and I know where I want it to conclude, but I'm not sure how much I should plan out the middle in advance. I mean, I don't want to write too much and risk railroading the PCs, but I want to be prepared enough that the progression feels natural.

So, GMs in the playground, how do you go about writing a campaign? Do you plot it out all in advance, or do you let it develop more naturally? I suspect it varies depending on the type of campaign, so to be clear, this is the kind of campaign with a central plotline and a central set of villains, but in which I expect the players to be coming up with their own plans. In other words, the overall objective and enemies aren't ones that the PCs can ignore, but how they want to pursue them is up to them. For example, the PCs might discover that the kidnapped princess they've been tracking down is being held at Baron von Moustache's castle; they'll have to go there at some point, and there might be a time limit (e.g. she's going to be sacrificed to dark gods at the next full moon), but exactly how to rescue her would be up to them. If they're clever enough to capture Baron von Moustache and interrogate him while they're there, they might be able to discover the secret password to the Vault of Horrors even though I had only intended for them to find that out ten levels later; I'd be perfectly willing to let them try to enter it now, but hopefully they'd realize that they're not nearly strong enough to survive the monsters locked within it.

(I can't give too much detail on the actual plot, because the players frequent these forums, but I can say that the central threat is of an apocalyptic nature.)

JNAProductions
2016-05-06, 12:34 AM
First things first-give plot information so we can help you, but...

Do it in spoilers.

That will make it a lot easier.

Second off, NEVER ASSUME THE PLAYERS WILL DO ANYTHING. Be prepared for them to do the wildest, craziest, stupidest, smartest, etc.iest crap imaginable. So no-you can't prepare for everything they do.

Related to point two, build characters more than stories. That way, they can react naturally to the actions and events, and stories will form naturally.

Darth Ultron
2016-05-06, 01:04 AM
Second off, NEVER ASSUME THE PLAYERS WILL DO ANYTHING. Be prepared for them to do the wildest, craziest, stupidest, smartest, etc.iest crap imaginable. So no-you can't prepare for everything they do.


I'm on the other side of this one. Simply know what your players will do. Simply know your players. Most players, like most people, are 100% predictable. The ''crazy wacky player'' is more of an urban legend.




Related to point two, build characters more than stories. That way, they can react naturally to the actions and events, and stories will form naturally.

Unless your players are jerks, they will react and do things normally. And you can plan for that.

If you write ''lord Doom will kill the princess at midnight on the 3rd'' then lots of people will say that alone is railroading as your *forcing* the characters to take a set action at a set time. And if you have the princess locked in a tower with guards, it's railroading as the character *have* to deal with the guards somehow. And so on. The point is everything is railroading to some people.


A good trick is to make a couple random tables for each important NPC. Give them 1-20 things that might happen each day to the NPC. That way they are not just ''sitting around''.

It is also good to add things that take the control of the game away from the DM. For example: Lord Doom's brother Lord Gloom loves to hunt, and take his brother along. And lord doom ''must'' go every time. Set a nice 50% chance every day that this event happens.

Mutazoia
2016-05-06, 01:21 AM
Best advice I can give is to draw up an outline of how you want the story to progress, but don't work in too much detail, except for your beginning, and the very end. Keep the middle of the campaign as vague as possible, to allow for player wimsey, because, as the old saying goes, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." And no campaign plot ever survives contact with the players.

For the most part, you'll want to design "important" encounters so that they can be fitted in anywhere in your game world. Nothing sucks more than needing your players to head to the shining city of Eestegypt to encounter a sub-boss, but instead having them decide to head to Northern Buhmphuk, on the opposite side of the world, for no reason what-so-ever.

This will let you have an open, sand-box, style world, but still allow you to control how the story progresses.

To that point, design a few generic towns, cities, etc. that can be encountered just about anywhere with very little pre-prep. Have several different NPC's that have the same information (basically just have the same guy pop up where ever he's needed (just looking different)) just in case your players decide they don't WANT to interrogate the bad guy before shoving a delayed blast fire ball up his nether regions.

Only have a few places that the characters HAVE to go all detailed out. So if your players have to find and explore the lost and long abandoned dwarven city to find a piece of the magical mcguffin that will strip the BBEG of his powers? Great....do all the fine fiddly bits on the city. Is the final battle with the BBEG going to take place in his floating castle? Detail the hell out of it. But if the characters have to go to City X and search the library for information about the dwarven city, put that city (or even just the library) pretty much anywhere the players decide to go. ("You need to scour the Library of Alexandria for information." "Let's head to Thebes!" "Once in Thebes you quickly find the Library of Alexandria!" "In Thebes?" "Yup! It was built by a woman named Alexandria, but she built it in Thebes.")


Basically, the less you plan, the less of a chance there will be of your plans being ruined.


EDIT: I should point out, that you want to do your outline with character levels in mind. For example, some time around lvl 10, they should encounter NPC X, by lvl 15 they should have a specific item or piece of information, etc. Where you put those things can be fluid, and adapted to the player's actions, but make them level (or level range) specific so you can keep the plot moving with out "railroading" the players.

Kid Jake
2016-05-06, 01:24 AM
The ''crazy wacky player'' is more of an urban legend.


Off the top of my head I've had players flush themselves out of airlocks; swan dive out of 10th floor windows; singlehandedly start zombiegeddon; feed their quest giver to a spider; drown important NPCs; set fire to a haunted house; set fire to an unhaunted house; set fire to a Walmart; challenge a dragon to a chess match; stab a fellow Pokemon trainer rather than battle him; negotiate their way out of an assassination; put a random NPC through college and join the same terrorist cell they were supposed to be bringing down. All without trying to be disruptive.

What you expect to happen and what actually happens in the heat of the moment can be vastly different.

Mutazoia
2016-05-06, 01:44 AM
Off the top of my head I've had players flush themselves out of airlocks; swan dive out of 10th floor windows; singlehandedly start zombiegeddon; feed their quest giver to a spider; drown important NPCs; set fire to a haunted house; set fire to an unhaunted house; set fire to a Walmart; challenge a dragon to a chess match; stab a fellow Pokemon trainer rather than battle him; negotiate their way out of an assassination; put a random NPC through college and join the same terrorist cell they were supposed to be bringing down. All without trying to be disruptive.

What you expect to happen and what actually happens in the heat of the moment can be vastly different.

Personally, I derailed a campaign due to a privy. My thief, whilst robbing a merchant's home, decided to slip down the privy into the sewers, rather than fight his way out past the guards. I then realized that every noble and merchant in the city had privies...none of which were guarded in any way (not really worried about poo elementals, were they?) So I spent quite a lot of time (game time and real time) popping out of privies to rob people.....

veti
2016-05-06, 03:19 AM
Make sure the world changes around the players, regardless of what they do.

Give the Evil Plan a timeline. Assuming the players don't interfere, then it will accomplish this sub-goal on day 20, this goal on day 30, by day 50 it will be unstoppable. And so on. But don't, whatever you do, try to stick to it - adapt it to what your players actually do, because whatever it is, it will interfere with the plan somehow. Even if the players' only plan is to "retire and open a franchise of quality bakeries", you can come up with some reason why this is a threat to the BBEG and compels it to change its plans.

The point of the timeline is (1) to map out exactly how you're going to throw the PCs at the plot (if their base city gets destroyed by a mysterious pink fog, that's a pretty powerful signal that it's time they got off their butts and did some world saving), and (2) more importantly, to give you some context for all the improvising that you will definitely be doing, if you're not going to railroad them to heck and back. You can think "okay, at this point the Dread Warlock Jimmy has just formed his barber shop quartet and is intent on winning a slot in the superbowl half-time show", and then you'll immediately see that about now the party should be encountering a harrassed and nervous advertising executive who promptly dies horrifically as soon as he leaves the room.

Yora
2016-05-06, 04:00 AM
I would say, don't plan the ending. That's the most importnt part of the campaign where player agency matters. If they can do the middle part the way they want, but the ending will be by the script regardless of what they did so far, it's still bad railroading.
I think most player would rather have a scripted campaign in which they have a few decision points that will affect the ending, then to be allowed to roam freely but none of their choices ultimately mattering.

Good preparation before the campaign starts is defining who the different factions of the campaign are, what powers their leader have, what resources they have, and what they are planning to do. Then, as each adventure comes towards its end, you start preparing the next adventure based on what resources the factions have still left and how they would use them to keep pursuing their goals.
I recommend reading this (http://theangrygm.com/schrodinger-chekhov-samus/). It's somewhat long, but a good examination of keeping campaigns flexible.

Thrawn4
2016-05-06, 04:31 AM
So, GMs in the playground, how do you go about writing a campaign? Do you plot it out all in advance, or do you let it develop more naturally?
1. You probably have some neat ideas. Think how you can make them likely to occur in your campaign (e. b. imbed your dungeon of despair into the main story by making it the location where an important artefact is hidden)
2. Provide plot hooks /incentives
3. Provide obstacles, but prepare only the circumstances, not the solution. No "the players have to fight the bandits", but "there are bandits hiding nearby which are likely to rob travellers", so the players are not railroaded into doing something.
4. Provide means to convey the important things (e. g. if the dungeon is dangerous, players should know before they enter; legends, corpses....)
5. Make sure the campaign does not depend on players doing a certain thing (the infamous puzzle trap comes to mind).
6. Depending on how good you are at improvising and which system you use, you might need to prepare some stats or names.

Misereor
2016-05-06, 04:37 AM
So I'm about to start running a game. It's not my first time GMing, but it is my first time writing a campaign with a real plot (all the others have been either modules or plotless dungeon crawls). Because of that, I'm not really sure how to go about it; I've got the hook and the introductory portion all written out, I know what the overarching plot threads will be, and I know where I want it to conclude, but I'm not sure how much I should plan out the middle in advance. I mean, I don't want to write too much and risk railroading the PCs, but I want to be prepared enough that the progression feels natural.

Game mastering is complex. You need to be a writer, architect, biologist, entertainer, poet, historian, politician, and criminal mastermind (although the last two overlap somewhat).
But for lazy people like me, there are ways around most problems. This is what I did when I started GM'ing some 30 years ago.

Step 1: The neophyte campaign.
Find a handful of pre-written adventures you would like to run, and tie them loosely together.
No overarching plot, just a bunch of players running around a sandbox world, that you keep expanding as you go along.
You can literally start off with a single village and a dungeon. As the players explore, you add whatever surrounding villages, baronies, towns, and eventually countries you need.
You learn from adventures and sourcebooks designed by people with more experience than yourself, and you can concentrate on DM'ing rather than spending all your time coming up with stuff.
Actually running modules provides experience for designing people, settings, and plotlines that simply reading stuff will never give you. Besides, your players will ruin every expectation you have of how gameplay will proceed anyway, and you need to learn how to deal with that, so you will need all the breathing room you can get.

Step 2: Pulling the strings.
Once you are reasonable comfortable with step 1 (or your players start complaining) start modifying stuff.
Try expanding a dungeon so that it has a working eco-system. Connect the dots between two pre-designed cities by adding trade and politics. Expand standalone plotlines to influence each other. Add extra NPC's. Substitute monsters and treasure. And remember that you can retroactively change stuff as long as it doesn't influence what the players have lready experienced. Basically take the prepainted canvas you have and make your own paiting.

Step 3. Introduce your own stuff.
By now you should have run plenty of both thematically designed as well as more random adventures and settings. So start creating your own.
Once you are comfortable with designing adventures, choose somehing else to focus on, like major campaign arcs. You don't have to be George R. R. Martin, but by now you should be able to create something more intricate than you did as a beginning GM. Also, learn how to invent stuff on the spot. If the players want to know about a certain merchant house, you dont need to design every NPC for them, when it will usually be enough to roll a few dice and tell the player that they are allies of A and enemies of B, and that the founding member was a third cousin of the royal family, which is why their sigil portrays a drowned chicken. If on that basis the player jumps to some completely unfounded assumptions that you could plausibly add to your plotline (preferably along with a few surprising twists), so much the better, as it makes for player immersion in your world.



A few things to avoid as a new GM.

Don't spend months on designing a complete campaign world, that your players wil never see more than a tiny fraction of.
Well, of course you can do that if you want (most of us do), but it is important not to let it eat into the time you need to spend preparing for your players' enjoyment.

Nor should you should start off by writing a 900 page plotline that will only start coming to fruition once the players are epic level. Wile you are doing that you are spending loads of time on that rather than what the players are doing right now. If at some point you need campaign filler, remember that you can do stuff retroactively, so design for that by always leaving a few options open, and spend your time productively.
(Oh, and never let your players know when you retcon. Major revelations are always cooler for the players when they think that it was part of some master scheme right from the start.)

Never believe that the players will follow a certain path.
Lesson 1 as a GM is that the players will never do what you expect, so learn to improvise early on. (Don't worry, they will give you plenty of opportunities to practice this.)

RazorChain
2016-05-06, 04:54 AM
Off the top of my head I've had players flush themselves out of airlocks; swan dive out of 10th floor windows; singlehandedly start zombiegeddon; feed their quest giver to a spider; drown important NPCs; set fire to a haunted house; set fire to an unhaunted house; set fire to a Walmart; challenge a dragon to a chess match; stab a fellow Pokemon trainer rather than battle him; negotiate their way out of an assassination; put a random NPC through college and join the same terrorist cell they were supposed to be bringing down. All without trying to be disruptive.

What you expect to happen and what actually happens in the heat of the moment can be vastly different.

One player I knew played a Orc barbarian called Thronk Pigsvomit. Now whenever a house, castle, village, town or whatever get's burned to the ground in our games it's called to Thronk the place. You can guess why.

When faced with a zombie apocalypse my character grabbed a chainsaw and a beer dispensing hat.

One player character in my group jumped off the tower and then decided to cast a levitate spell. Good luck with that!

When asked what one of the PC's wanted as a reward from the alien hive-mind creatures, for helping them get off the earth. The PC asked for a continental buster atomic bomb, that was connected to his brain psionically. The wrong thought and everything would go BOOOM.

When presented with the Heart of Winter, the PC grabbed it gleefully placed it in his own chest and became the King of Winter...and a NPC. The player is still bragging about that HE is the king of winter.

My character once destroyed the whole multiverse by accident.


These are just a few things from the top of my head from some games I've played in.

Yora
2016-05-06, 07:11 AM
One player character in my group jumped off the tower and then decided to cast a levitate spell. Good luck with that!

Now this is a completely sensible action and it is clear what the player intended and thought would happen.
If it's not actually possible or very unlikely to work, it's the GM's job to inform the player and ask him whether he still wants to do it under these circumstances. Players having misconceptions about how the GM applies the rules is never the player's fault. Having the character suffer the unexpected effects is to be blamed entirely on the GM.

Darth Ultron
2016-05-06, 09:59 PM
What you expect to happen and what actually happens in the heat of the moment can be vastly different.

Well, it's hard to say as all your examples are out-of-context, but it would seem more like the problem is that you expect very little and/or only one thing.

Like take the assassin one. Your saying that you never, ever expected that the players might ''negotiate their way out of an assassination''. Even though that is a very obvious way to ''defeat'' an assassin. So like the Dm just sat there and thought ''well they must fight the assassin, die or run'' and those are the only three things that can happen. So when the players said ''we stop and talk to the assassin'' the DM was all shocked and fell out of his chair.

RazorChain
2016-05-06, 10:09 PM
Now this is a completely sensible action and it is clear what the player intended and thought would happen.
If it's not actually possible or very unlikely to work, it's the GM's job to inform the player and ask him whether he still wants to do it under these circumstances. Players having misconceptions about how the GM applies the rules is never the player's fault. Having the character suffer the unexpected effects is to be blamed entirely on the GM.

Well it happended like this

Player: I jump off the tower
GM: Ok....you jump off the tower and fall to the ground
Player: Eh....yeah I cast a levitate spell
GM: Well your acceleration is 33 feet per second and the tower is 60 feet high

Morrandir
2016-05-07, 12:34 AM
It's good to have an ending in mind, so that you can try to nudge players in that direction, but it's important to both 1) not be attached to the ending, as players might turn up something you think is better (or just go off on a complete tangent) and 2) not actually plan out the ending until that's definitely where things are headed. I ran a Dark Sun campaign that was going to end with a long journey into the Dead Lands to race some evil wizards for an artifact, but instead the game turned into a courtroom drama after they got tied up on the Silt Sea. They all had lots of fun trying to prove their innocence after they cursed a couple guards, then after that inevitably failed, to escape before they were executed, which had... mixed results, IC. If I'd actually planned out the Dead Lands bit that early, that would have been days of work down the drain.

The best way I've found to write things myself is to get the idea for the beginning and the ending, talk with my players about what both I and they want to do, but leave the middle undone. That's what you have players for, after all, they're the ones doing most of the writing for you. By all means, prep each session, just don't go too far ahead. At that, most of the actual prepwork I do is based on the big NPCs. Give them a couple short- and long-term goals, and ask yourself "How does this person react to what the players did last session?" Everything flows pretty smoothly from there.

Kid Jake
2016-05-07, 01:22 AM
Well, it's hard to say as all your examples are out-of-context, but it would seem more like the problem is that you expect very little and/or only one thing.

Like take the assassin one. Your saying that you never, ever expected that the players might ''negotiate their way out of an assassination''. Even though that is a very obvious way to ''defeat'' an assassin. So like the Dm just sat there and thought ''well they must fight the assassin, die or run'' and those are the only three things that can happen. So when the players said ''we stop and talk to the assassin'' the DM was all shocked and fell out of his chair.

Here's some context then.

You're on a space ship when a common, albeit potentially dangerous pest is seen flying around inside your storage bay. Do you:

A. Shoot the damned thing.
B. Ignore it until you dock.
C. Flush yourself out of an airlock.
D. Literally anything else.

You're a dwarven warrior hired to find and deal with a serial killer targeting nobles; there's only a single witness to the grisly crimes and you've come across his hotel room while he's down the hall in the communal baths. Do you:

A. Wait to speak with him.
B. Search his room for clues.
C. Steal his clothing.
D. Literally anything else.

For the followup question I'm going to naturally assume you've chosen to steal his clothing in some kind of bizarre power play.

The noble returns to his room to find you stuffing his underwear into your pockets and screams for hotel security. A pair of guards arrive to find you stripping the noble down and politely ask what you're doing. Do you:

A. Fight them.
B. Attempt to explain yourself since you're on important business.
C. Jump face first through a window 100ft in the air without a second thought.
D. Literally anything else.


You're a skilled swordsman that has recently returned to life as a ghoul and are now hunting for the men who murdered you in cold blood. You go to ask a powerful merchant for help in finding these men, but as he's a busy man his guards insist you make an appointment. You're in a hurry, so do you:

A. Draw your weapon and fight your way past.
B. Talk or bribe your way past.
C. Bite every single man, woman and child you see and then jump into a river.
D. Literally anything else.


You're on the run from a powerful Duke and find yourself alone and hunted in the middle of nowhere. The local sheriff is an orc that doesn't much care for the Duke and offers to put you up until you get back on your feet. He even offers to pay you if you help him with some spiders menacing the town. Do you:

A. Accept his offer, taking his assistance and gold.
B. Reject his offer.
C. Accept his offer; lure him into the spiders; knock him unconscious and let the spiders eat him. Hide what's left of the body along with a forged letter from a 'distant friend' warning that the Duke intends to steal the townspeople's land as part of some fiendish plot. Then after a few days lead a search party to 'accidentally' discover it; taking advantage of the townspeople's panic and grief to trick them into voting you sheriff and swearing a blood feud against the entire duchy.
D. Literally anything else.


Etc...

If C was your default answer to all of the above questions then you're in the same mindset as my players.

In the assassin scenario they'd already defeated the assassin that had been sent after them (knocked him out and sacrificed his soul to a devil actually) and then proceeded to track down the organization that had sent him and petition them for membership. The game began to change from a tale of local politics to one about larger than life murderers for hire pretty much overnight.


You say that I expect 'very little' but it's the exact opposite. I expect them to surprise me because that's where MY entertainment comes from. You might be able to guess what they'll do 90% of the time; maybe even 99% of the time if you really know your players. But unless you're dealing with immensely boring people, then you aren't going to see all of their decisions coming; because people have spur of the moment ideas that aren't always based in logic.

So if I say "You see a glint of gold in the barn's loft." then one player might say "I climb up to get it." which is a perfectly valid answer.

Another might say "I throw my grappling hook up and attempt to snag it." which is also perfectly fine, though it seems like unnecessary extra work.

But then every now and again the third might suggest just burning the whole place down and sifting through the rubble. Maybe they're trying to be hard to get along with, maybe they think it's funny...or maybe, just maybe, for a brief second it completely slips their minds that they have 20ft of rope or the ability to effortlessly scale walls and you get to see the thought process of somebody who desperately wants a shiny bauble and doesn't have a Plan B.

So as I, and several other people, have mentioned; players that throw out borderline ridiculous solutions to seemingly simple problems aren't 'urban legends'; they're just another aspect of the game. Not one to be intimidated by, but one that many people encounter and even enjoy.

JAL_1138
2016-05-07, 07:00 PM
Don't write a campaign. Write a setting, and figure out some major players and what they want. Set their plans in motion, set up several hooks, and then see what happens as the players interact with the world. Don't write a plot from start to finish. Prep for each session based on what happened last session.

Yora's and Miseror's recommendation is spot on, but I'd add this to Miseror's--you don't need to run prepared modules as they're written. You can also use them as sources for locations and premade encounter stat blocks, but otherwise completely ignore the module's plot. You can also take bits and pieces of something from a module or several modules, break it up, and recombine it. Don't feel chained to the module story and instead look at them as big toolboxes you can use.

Lateral
2016-05-08, 03:13 AM
Okay, so there's a lot here. A fundamental point, on which I'd like to be clear: This is nowhere near my first time GMing. Advice on the actual practice of running a game, though well-taken, isn't quite what I'm looking for here. What I'm unfamiliar with is the prep work for an organized, continuous plotted campaign. As if I were running a campaign module, but with more flexibility for PCs to affect the plot. Mostly, I was hoping for personal examples of how other people prepare for similar campaigns, or at least advice for making plot points feel continuous— I don't want it to fall into a rut of "find this guy, get exposition, kill these guys, get exposition, lather, rinse, repeat."

Oh! I should also probably mention that this is for a PbP, which should make my job a lot easier in terms of adjusting for players' decisions on the fly, but also makes quality of narrative that much more important.


Don't write a campaign. Write a setting, and figure out some major players and what they want. Set their plans in motion, set up several hooks, and then see what happens as the players interact with the world. Don't write a plot from start to finish. Prep for each session based on what happened last session.
I've done this before. This is how I'd approach a sandbox campaign— you set up a setting, make sure the NPCs have motivations and goals that the PCs can interact with, and let them run wild. This is not that sort of campaign.


It's good to have an ending in mind, so that you can try to nudge players in that direction, but it's important to both 1) not be attached to the ending, as players might turn up something you think is better (or just go off on a complete tangent) and 2) not actually plan out the ending until that's definitely where things are headed. I ran a Dark Sun campaign that was going to end with a long journey into the Dead Lands to race some evil wizards for an artifact, but instead the game turned into a courtroom drama after they got tied up on the Silt Sea. They all had lots of fun trying to prove their innocence after they cursed a couple guards, then after that inevitably failed, to escape before they were executed, which had... mixed results, IC. If I'd actually planned out the Dead Lands bit that early, that would have been days of work down the drain.


I would say, don't plan the ending. That's the most importnt part of the campaign where player agency matters. If they can do the middle part the way they want, but the ending will be by the script regardless of what they did so far, it's still bad railroading.
I think most player would rather have a scripted campaign in which they have a few decision points that will affect the ending, then to be allowed to roam freely but none of their choices ultimately mattering.

Good preparation before the campaign starts is defining who the different factions of the campaign are, what powers their leader have, what resources they have, and what they are planning to do. Then, as each adventure comes towards its end, you start preparing the next adventure based on what resources the factions have still left and how they would use them to keep pursuing their goals.
I recommend reading this (http://theangrygm.com/schrodinger-chekhov-samus/). It's somewhat long, but a good examination of keeping campaigns flexible.
Well, I mean, I'm not going to plot out the whole ending, but... it's more like, "What does the villains' ultimate endgame look like, assuming the PCs don't manage to disrupt their ultimate plan at an earlier point?" If the PCs are very clever, they might figure out a way to thwart their plan at some earlier stage, which would change the whole endgame. Still, like I said, it's an apocalyptic campaign— they may be able to change where and how, but at the end of the day, they have to save the world. Or die trying.


Best advice I can give is to draw up an outline of how you want the story to progress, but don't work in too much detail, except for your beginning, and the very end. Keep the middle of the campaign as vague as possible, to allow for player wimsey, because, as the old saying goes, "No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy." And no campaign plot ever survives contact with the players.

For the most part, you'll want to design "important" encounters so that they can be fitted in anywhere in your game world. Nothing sucks more than needing your players to head to the shining city of Eestegypt to encounter a sub-boss, but instead having them decide to head to Northern Buhmphuk, on the opposite side of the world, for no reason what-so-ever.

This will let you have an open, sand-box, style world, but still allow you to control how the story progresses.

To that point, design a few generic towns, cities, etc. that can be encountered just about anywhere with very little pre-prep. Have several different NPC's that have the same information (basically just have the same guy pop up where ever he's needed (just looking different)) just in case your players decide they don't WANT to interrogate the bad guy before shoving a delayed blast fire ball up his nether regions.

Only have a few places that the characters HAVE to go all detailed out. So if your players have to find and explore the lost and long abandoned dwarven city to find a piece of the magical mcguffin that will strip the BBEG of his powers? Great....do all the fine fiddly bits on the city. Is the final battle with the BBEG going to take place in his floating castle? Detail the hell out of it. But if the characters have to go to City X and search the library for information about the dwarven city, put that city (or even just the library) pretty much anywhere the players decide to go. ("You need to scour the Library of Alexandria for information." "Let's head to Thebes!" "Once in Thebes you quickly find the Library of Alexandria!" "In Thebes?" "Yup! It was built by a woman named Alexandria, but she built it in Thebes.")


Basically, the less you plan, the less of a chance there will be of your plans being ruined.


EDIT: I should point out, that you want to do your outline with character levels in mind. For example, some time around lvl 10, they should encounter NPC X, by lvl 15 they should have a specific item or piece of information, etc. Where you put those things can be fluid, and adapted to the player's actions, but make them level (or level range) specific so you can keep the plot moving with out "railroading" the players.
So I'm generally not a huge fan of this style. Making every location interchangeable stretches verisimilitude and makes my job boring. It's set in an established setting (Eberron), part of the fun is letting the PCs explore it as they piece together the clues leading to the main plot.


Second off, NEVER ASSUME THE PLAYERS WILL DO ANYTHING. Be prepared for them to do the wildest, craziest, stupidest, smartest, etc.iest crap imaginable. So no-you can't prepare for everything they do.
I should probably mention that I'm not playing with a pack of insane murderhobos. l know these guys pretty well. They're crazy, but in the "like a fox" sort of way. If they do something off-the-wall, it'll be for perfectly good reasons, which means that even if it's something I didn't predict, I should be able to work with it.

Brendanicus
2016-05-08, 10:53 AM
Before you do ANYTHING, know what your players advice, if your players...

...Don't mind a little railroading, tell them the plot hook to your adventure in advance, and then tell your players to make characters who would be interested in such a quest.

As a DM who typically runs more linear adventures (Not SUPER linear; my players will have a fixed goal, but how they accomplish it is up to them), I usually start with the goal first, then work backwards. Flipping through the monster manual helps me a lot with this, as monster fluff text provides many a hook once you get an eye for it. Also, I've found that players tend to remember monsters more than humanoids, whether they be allies or enemies.

An advantage to a more linear adventure is that you get more time to refine and tweak you plans well in advance, which means things like NPCs and set-piece encounters can be more polished than they otherwise could be.

...Like things to be more open-ended, (IE, your players choose the ultimate goal), build a setting with a central conflict. I recently had a conversation with friend of mine, a fellow DM who likes sandbox games, about how he preps sandbox campaigns. The first thing he does is prepare an overarching conflict for the setting. For example, he ran a 3.5 campaign where the world has been blasted with a magical disaster of apocalyptic proportions, or a Star Wars game, where the Rebellion is starting. The point of having an overarching conflict is that it provides plot hooks for your players no matter where they go and what they do. Eventually, their actions will get them involved in any number of factions based on how they behaved. Therefore, you should prep your setting before anything else in a sandbox.

That said, he has also admitted that sandboxes have their strengths and weaknesses. He like that sandboxes give players a chance to make the story about their characters, and they can pursue what they want. On the other hand, he also finds that sandbox campaigns can lose focus every once in while, and constantly adapting to players can be a big time investment.

-------
That said, think about your players. If they want to follow a cool plot, or aren't huge on RP, go with something more linear. If they love RP and discovering things on their own, go with a sandbox. Either way, don't pressure yourself into running the absolute most perfect game possible; DMing is a skill that takes years to master. I certainly haven;t come close, but I;m a hell of a lot better than I was 3 years ago. Hope this helps

Darth Ultron
2016-05-08, 12:39 PM
Well, example one needs a lot more context to make sense. It looks like your saying ''a guy saw a rat in a warehouse and then killed themselves''. And that sure sounds down right crazy...like the player just said ''I kill my character'' and then goes home.

Example two, well again might need or context as it again just sounds crazy. Why is cop dwarf stealing underwear?

Three is a little better, but not much. I guess your crazy player did C?

Four...well C is awesome, I would have so done that one.

Note that if you expect your players to surprise you..your setting yourself up for that. Your not thinking of all the ways something can happen because you want to be surprised.

The ''C'' prayer just looks like a jerk to me. I'd give him three strikes and at the third stupid crazy thing he did to disrupt the game, he would be gone.

Morrandir
2016-05-08, 04:06 PM
Okay, so there's a lot here. A fundamental point, on which I'd like to be clear: This is nowhere near my first time GMing. Advice on the actual practice of running a game, though well-taken, isn't quite what I'm looking for here. What I'm unfamiliar with is the prep work for an organized, continuous plotted campaign. As if I were running a campaign module, but with more flexibility for PCs to affect the plot. Mostly, I was hoping for personal examples of how other people prepare for similar campaigns, or at least advice for making plot points feel continuous— I don't want it to fall into a rut of "find this guy, get exposition, kill these guys, get exposition, lather, rinse, repeat."

Oh! I should also probably mention that this is for a PbP, which should make my job a lot easier in terms of adjusting for players' decisions on the fly, but also makes quality of narrative that much more important.

I'll admit that I haven't run (nor even played in) a PbP, so I'm unsure how well the rest of this can apply, but I'll expand on my process for writing up a campaign. Mostly in the event other people are after it, you yourself can probably just skip down to the mid-campaign point.

Pre-Session 0: Think up the system, setting, and themes I want to use, and jot down any ideas that come to mind, but don't really expand on any just yet. Ask my players if there's both interest and anything in particular they'd like that would go along with it. Then work on expanding things enough to have a good Session 0 where everyone's on the same page and you get the info on just what exactly you have to work with for characters.

Post-Session 0/Early Campaign: My players tend to appreciate things being a little more structured than the rest of the campaign would be here so they can get their feet wet and feel out their characters better. As such, I try to give them a few options to avoid being totally on rails, but everything is still fairly "A leads to B leads to C." In the aforementioned Dark Sun campaign, this ended up being "Your caravan leader is murdered, after you chase away the bandits you find a written note (which is a very Big Deal in DS) and a map, this leads to a cave where you find a magic compass, which leads to a long-forgotten village in the forest beyond the mountains."

Mid-Campaign: Here, things open up and I let the players have more agency on where they'd like to go and what they'd like to do. As such, I cut out prepping the "leads to" part of things and instead work on making set pieces I can slot around more freely. At the basic level, I just plan out my plot MacGuffins and any interesting encounters, and sprinkle them around as appropriate. Done right, players won't notice that this wasn't fully structured. Why, of course the Amulet of Doomness was where you guys thought it was! Or maybe it wasn't, but instead you found a trove of your new +3 gear, so the trip wasn't a waste after all. That dungeon you guys went through? Whether it's a deep forest or a dark dungeon, same map for wherever they go. Just replace the owlbear with a gargoyle depending on what's appropriate. Keep in mind the big NPCs and what they're doing, though. If my players want to just sit around doing nothing, I have things happen to light a fire under 'em. Have an NPC they like come forward with some info, or the BBEG sends an assassin after them, or they spot a well-known pickpocket walking away after bumping into them, but when they check their stuff, they find he didn't steal anything, he planted something mysterious on them. But I let the players come to the conclusions they want and run off of them, plonking down set pieces and making it look like I'd planned this all along.

Plan out the whats and whys, but never the hows; that's what the players do. If you try and come up with 150 ways they could reach your plot MacGuffin, their initial "This is obviously what the GM intended!" plan is going to be #151.

Late-Game Campaign: Here things start getting a little more structured again. Players should know who the bad guy is, be coming up with how they want to stop him, and have explored the themes of the campaign to satisfaction. As such, I can provide them more concrete choices on their approaches to the endgame, and be a little more in-depth with the planning again, taking what new ideas I've had as the campaign ran to give it a more satisfying ending. Sometimes the players come up with something that's really cool halfway through the campaign, and by leaving the ending until the ending, I can incorporate it.

EDIT: I suppose it would help to add in my usual schedule for these things, I never have a written down plan more than 2, maybe 3 sessions in advance. Odds are my players will have done that thing players do and made it almost completely worthless, which is why focusing on making set pieces instead of fully planned sessions can help.

Louro
2016-05-08, 07:59 PM
My 2 hints:

A) Prepare.
Yes, prepare a lot of stuff. Scenes rather than plot-stuff. Dungeons, hordes, traps, castles, towns... Lots of characters and so on.

B) Never say no.
You should allow players to do whatever they want to do. Doing this most of what have you done in point A is wasted. BUUUT... You did it, all that stuff is on your mind and papers, so you can improvise on the fly using your previous work with just some minor adjustments.

EXTRA: For the main plot, just plan the BBEG moves, along with relevant people (King, dragon, church...). If players care you should think about how they will get some piece of information about enemies moves. If they don't care... Well, they will find out, eventually.

gatewatcher
2016-05-09, 10:59 AM
So below is my humble opinion of how to draft a campaign from a high level, without flushing anything out, and using what I know of literary approaches or storytelling in this context. This is put in order of what to do as best I can. This is also approaching published campaign level planning; use what you feel is useful.

Break the story into pieces
A big campaign is just a bunch of similarly themed modules (events) that all circle a single story. Think of it less like a series of events and more like a perfect storm of unrelated things whose net result is this bigger threat.

Maybe the villain caused these events, maybe they are simply enabled by them. Or maybe this event is just a fun story and has no reliance whatsoever.

You may wish to have more events in your head then you ever intend to run. Think of all the possible things that could be happening and how they relate to the main plot. Flush them out only when you know it's inevitable and drop ideas that are no longer interesting.
Setting
You create the setting and the events at the same time. Ensure that characters are reflective of the threats and think about why said threat hasn't been dealt with before now. If this town has so many troubles why aren't people just leaving? This is more important in a campaign as it doesn't make sense for everyone to always be calm when they are constantly, and repeatedly, under clear and immediate threat from increasingly more dangerous threats.

Include hints of your events both present and future even if nothing will come of it at this stage. This will make your world feel larger than it is. Maybe there is a gang in the city slums and you plan to have them kill a noble later so you tell the group about the gang as some foreshadowing. Later you decide it's not worth doing that event but your players see that the world is bigger than the main story.

Organize Pieces into a Timeline
Once you have an idea of what things are going to happen come up with a basic timeline. No dates at this point; just an idea of "if the players are here they could go do these 2-5 things whether they know it or not". This gets harder with multiple locations.

Map it out. The more overlap the more open ended that point in the adventure is and the less control the DM has in the players movements or how long the players will take to complete them. If you are writing a sandbox you should have fat stacks based around location. If you are story focused limit yourself to running 2-4 of these events.
Timeline Interest Curve
Look at each event and ask yourself "is something big happening here?" on a scale of 1-10. tracking down a rogue wizard is pretty tame compared to an important town being under siege by an army.

Map those values on a line graph. This is your campaign's overall interest curve. You want a curvy line (sin wave). On a story base campaign, with a finite ending, you want it to slop gradually up with it's highest point during the end. In a sandbox you want the curvy line to itself be curved like a sin wave - the high points being when a major plot thread resolves.

or more information on interest curves see "Extra Credits: Interest Curve" on youtube

Timeline Single Event
Make a point on the timeline when only one event is occurring count by making it world changing. This is turn even in a tight story. Kill an ally NPC, destroy a town, have the players capture an important enemy. This will ensure the players are too focused on dealing with the change that they ignore the fact that they have no options. Use this sparingly for greater affect.

Never allow a series of single events back-to-back unless that's what your group enjoys. Mapped out like I stated above this will look like a series of train cars - literally the origin of the term Railroading.

This is a good idea as the players transition between level brackets or need to move from one area to another for a lot of reasons.

Progression
With a list of events and a timeline you can begin to look at what level the players will be and how much loot they might have at any given point. Again without ever flushing out a single encounter.

You'll want them to make a level when your interest curve peaks. Maybe it peaked because they did a lot of side quests or maybe they nearly died to a boss. In either case it will feel rewarding; like we'll be better suited to even greater threats/

You can begin to sprinkle in loot "magic item here" is enough at this point. Mark which ones they will get before they proceed and which ones are sort of optional - maybe because they are hidden or on an event which was optional. Count them up over the timeline and make a line graph - if the line of mandatory items verse total possible diverge too much you'll need to be mindful of that as you run the campaign else risk of too many or too few items from your expected value.
Event Size/Scope

As you map your events on the timeline keep in mind their size; will this take 2 battles or 7? Will this be deadly, fun, filled with puzzles? This may diverse another line graph to ensure you don't pile the events too high and they level faster then you expect.

When you go to flush out your events reference your timeline to determine how much experience and loot they should receive. Scale monster or number of monsters accordingly.

Mission critical events can be flushed out well in advance because you can accurately predict their strength, even if you don't know what happens between now and then.

Transitions
Teach the players to explore and reward villages and other areas. This will make the "looking for adventure" the default adventure. Of course they find adventure behind every corner because you are making it up on every turn; they know it's a lie but this is a part of the suspension of disbelief.

Exploring a town for things to do is a low point on the interest curve. Some players may get bored. Determine how much your group enjoys this and lengthen or shrink it by controlling how centralized your hooks are. If they hate it have all quests on a job poster or have a single NPC be a central contact for people's needs. If they love it you're going to need to flush out the village with interesting NPC's. This can drastically change your prep work!

The best time to have an NPC's "quest list" change is right after one of the single event points in your timeline. The world has changed, it makes sense for the NPC's to have changed as well. If they don't have a quest ensure they act differently to ensure the players don't talk to one person, go "oh, nothing has changed", and stop.


Let me know if this is useful or if I'm full of rubbish. I'm genuinely interested in getting better in this and the above is how I am building my current campaign.

SirBellias
2016-05-09, 11:10 AM
I never plan much beyond the first part of the adventure, as usually the character personalities (for those that have them) develop throughout the first part of the adventure, and you can't predict something you don't know yet. I have a couple major threats planned out, and a couple ideas for how the minor ones can be chained together, but I don't usually plan ahead past the next dungeon (or two, if there's a good reason for them to go in either direction).

Mutazoia
2016-05-10, 02:09 AM
So I'm generally not a huge fan of this style. Making every location interchangeable stretches verisimilitude and makes my job boring. It's set in an established setting (Eberron), part of the fun is letting the PCs explore it as they piece together the clues leading to the main plot..

Not EVERYTHING...just the really important "Players MUST HAVE THIS" stuff. Sure...go ahead and put it where you want, but being able to drop it in elsewhere, just in case, means a lot less back tracking and/or railroading ("no you HAVE to go to city X, and get this information, or the BBEG wins")

This let's the PC's explore anywhere they want, but still get the information they need, when you decide they've farted around enough.

goto124
2016-05-10, 02:33 AM
Not EVERYTHING...just the really important "Players MUST HAVE THIS" stuff. Sure...go ahead and put it where you want, but being able to drop it in elsewhere, just in case, means a lot less back tracking and/or railroading ("no you HAVE to go to city X, and get this information, or the BBEG wins")

This let's the PC's explore anywhere they want, but still get the information they need, when you decide they've farted around enough.

In video games, a lot of important plot points are set in specific places. This is because in a video game, it's acceptable or even expected that part of the point of the game is for players to spend time exploring the place, restricted by the video game medium, to find those plot points. This is on top of many other video-game-exclusive assumptions, such as players being there to follow the pre-written plot (instead of letting a collaborative plot unfold).

Lesson: Don't run TRPGs like video games. I learnt this painful lesson from experience.

Mutazoia
2016-05-10, 03:24 AM
In video games [stuff about video games]

Lesson: Don't run TRPGs like video games. I learnt this painful lesson from experience.

Pretty much.

Having a few essential plot points not nailed to one specific location allows your players freedom to explore and still be able to forward the plot.

The main problem with a collaborative plot is that some people don't want to follow the same plot as everybody else.

Case in point: A SWD6 game I was in a few years back. The general plot at the time was that we, as Rebels, had to intercept an Imperial ship that had managed to salvage a bunch of encrypted data from an old Rebel base. Part of that information was our real names/identities. This meant that if we didn't stop the Imperials from making it to a base and decrypting the info, we were burnt, our families would be in danger, not to mention those of hundreds of other agents.

So, what does the smuggler do? Time to fly to another planet and go shopping for cargo. And since the rest of the characters were on HIS ship, they got toted along for the ride.

Campaigns are not "collaborative plots." They are a main plot and any "collaborative" elements are sub-plots that get worked in around the central story. Otherwise you are just doing some free-form story telling in a shared setting. More group therapy than a campaign.

hifidelity2
2016-05-10, 07:35 AM
I tend to have


• Outline plot (which only I know) – get the 5 parts of the “staff of power” for example
• I also know where the 1st part is (but might not yet have worked out where the rest of them are)
• Start the players off on a seemingly random dungeon crawl
• Slowly introduce more info
• Re- introduce the info as they missed the 1st hint
• Provide more hints and let the party start the understand that they are mixed up in something that is far bigger than them


While this is happening I have high level timeline for what will happen if the players don’t do anything

I will have mapped out principle characters, their motives and goals
I also will encourage the PC’s to give me their own personal (Character) goals and weave them into the plot
(in the last campaign) by the end two of the PCs go married and ended up ruling a new realm, one became head of the magic guild, another became Genghis Khan etc. I will have plots that help them gain there goals – another PC wanted to become head of the bards guild so I have the guild split with half working for the BBEG and (the weaker) half against and so rallying behind the PC

I also try and be as flexible as possible as how to solve the problem – after all they could
1. Find the 5 parts and use it against the BBEG
2. Destroy the parts
3. Something I have not yet thought of

In my last campaign they did option 3 and removed 99% of the magic from the world (as the BBEG was a being of Magic it banished him from this plane and removed any way for him to get back)

So
Have a high level plot
Adapt the plot to help the PCs gain their long term goals
Accept they will do the unexpected and be flexible enough to let them

Lorsa
2016-05-10, 08:17 AM
I'm on the other side of this one. Simply know what your players will do. Simply know your players. Most players, like most people, are 100% predictable. The ''crazy wacky player'' is more of an urban legend.

I am sure that your mastery of behavior prediction must have generated a large body of published scientific articles in fields such as Psychology, Sociology and Economics.