Running two campaigns simultaneously against one another.

[TheGoldfish]

To preface, I've been missing my DM mojo for a while. I ran a 2 year long campaign in the 7th Sea system and once that wrapped everything else has felt kind of...less than. That is until I started rereading/catching up to OOTS and I got a pretty rad idea. I have an established gaming group that I have been rolling dice with for half a decade, who were kind enough to suffer a 2 year campaign with me as previously mentioned. I've also been making a good deal of friends lately through doing stand-up comedy locally in my hometown. A good deal of the comics I've met are pretty nerdy, but have mostly never played any tabletop RPG before. So, my plan is to run an evil campaign with my experienced group, because I can trust them to play evil and not turn immediately to cannibalism and torturing puppies for funsies, while I establish a party of good heroes that are all entirely new to the campaign because it is really hard to play villains well when you're new. The overall idea here is to have both parties working towards opposite goals, constantly foiling each other without ever actually meeting. That is, until they do meet at the end of "Season 1", we get some PvP, a little bit of fist shaking, maybe a dramatic player death, and "Season 2" begins with the aftermath as the parties won't meet again for a long time.

So, has anyone else tried something like this? Running two campaigns against each other? Was it successful, and what pitfalls should I look out for if I decide to try this insane idea?

[weckar]

I've seen this done in a VTT environment. The main pitfall of such games tends to be synchronicity; in two forms:
- In one way or another, one party at all times needs to be well ahead of the other to avoid meetings (unless they are both influencing a third plane from two separate material planes?). This puts that team at a perpetual advantage.
- If for whatever reason one group needs to skip a session, the other group's session will likely suffer for either catching up too much or having nothing to do at all.

[TheGoldfish]

My current plan is to start the evil party at a slightly higher level and with more pieces of the story at their disposal. I intend to mitigate the level difference in xp by giving rewards for "acts of heroism" to the good guys. Hopefully that will mitigate the "one party is ahead" level problem. I am super concerned about the party schedules not syncing up. I dont want to be a tyrant and say "be here when I say or else" but I also dont want a party to get stuck doing 1000 side quests.

[weckar]

When I talked about being ahead, I didn't mean level. I just meant that it will always be one of the parties responding to the actions of the other, never the other way around.

[Jack_Simth]

When I talked about being ahead, I didn't mean level. I just meant that it will always be one of the parties responding to the actions of the other, never the other way around.

There's also the time sychronicity problem: If one team goes on a three week hike and then stays highly active, but the other stays highly active without the hike... what happens?

[ATHATH]

I recommend the Play By Post format for this kind of game.

[TheGoldfish]

I recommend the Play By Post format for this kind of game.

I can definitely see that as being the best option, but the concern is I'm introducing new players to tabletop gaming as a whole as part of this. They're very interested but it's very new waters for most of them and I think play by post is a little further outside their comfort zones than they would be willing to travel.

[Lorrdernie]

I think that the problems with the groups getting ahead of eachother could be solved by simply running some one-shots or shorter campaigns/dungeon crawls while the other group catches up. Alternately you can have a point at which you want the groups to be coming together and wait until the group that is ahead is right before that and then run the other games to allow the rival group to catch up. There are a lot of great pre-written modules out there and it can be a really nice change of place to play a different style of game for a little bit.

The in-game time issue doesn't seem like a major issue to me. A similar solution of giving the other team some downtime to catch up. Maybe their devilish ally has to make a month's journey to another plane to get the mcguffin they need to meet up with the other party, maybe the ritual can only be performed on a full moon and gosh you just missed it. Plenty of other options too of course including just fudging it.

Having the more experienced players higher level than the other group does seem to be sorta asking for trouble in a conflict situation to me though. Unless the party of inexperienced players is larger or something I'd think it would be better to have them meet at the same character level. The levels the various parties are at when they meet seems pretty firmly in your control. I always fudge experience though and have people level up when it makes sense to though so I'm maybe not the best resource on this aspect.

[Thurbane]

Closest I came was running a short pre-campaign for my main game.

Only two of the five players were available, so I ran a sandbox game in the same campaign setting and area, from level 1 through 5.

WHen the main game started, the two players re-started with new 1st level PCs, along with the other three players - but I had the events the other characters were involved in happen immediately before the main campaign, and some of their actions has consequences for the new characters.