Freelance GM
2016-07-02, 12:55 AM
Simultaneously, several of my D&D dreams have all been realized at once. I get to play in a high level 5E game, and I get to DM a high level 5E game. At the same time.
We're currently going through Curse of Strahd, so this won't start until that ends. Everyone's having a blast, but the party's failing pretty miserably. That's a wonderful story of it's own, but long story short, we're only four sessions in, and it may end as early as next week with Strahd completing his last 2 objectives, a TPK, and the words, "game over."
Anyways, once that's over, we'll probably break for a few weeks. Then, we've already got an exciting and different idea for our next campaign in the works. Here's what we've got:
Elevator Pitch: An episodic intrigue/RP-centric kingmaker campaign with a rotating GM and two PCs per player. I told you it was crazy.
Characters. Everyone gets a Level 11, their "main character," who plays a major role in ruling the kingdom, and a level 5 apprentice. However, they don't play their own character's apprentice. For example, I'm playing a Wizard, but my level 5 character is serves under the party Rogue. That way, we can role-play out all the master/apprentice drama, instead of the protege simply being another set of skills and stats.
Most of my campaigns end around levels 9 to 12, so starting at 11 is unusually high-powered for my group. Should be fun.
Kingmaker-Style. A king with a cursed key bankrupts his kingdom in search of a magical treasure vault. The party steals the reins of his kingdom in the aftermath of a bloody revolution. As rival nations make ambitious moves into their territory, the heroes must survive the game of thrones, as their agents try to break the curse that haunts their new kingdom. The idea is a campaign primarily based around intrigue and role-play, and still leaves room for episodes of intense action and dungeon-crawling.
Rotating DMs. Our group has 2 novice DM's (less than 1 year of DM experience) and 2 veteran (5+ years of experience each) DMs. All of us want to play in this game, but all of us would love to try DMing it. So, the two experienced DMs are going to coach the novices on writing self-contained 2-hour to 4-hour adventures. The hardest part will be setting a consistent tone for the adventure, but I'm hoping that it will help if all four of us collaborate on the world-building for the game.
Episodic Style. Since we'd be cycling DMs, an episodic style would be almost essential. I'm imagining scenarios like cutthroat negotiations and espionage with a rival kingdom one week, dealing with Efreeti from an inexplicable rift to the Plane of Fire the next.
The Ghost. As if the campaign wasn't crazy enough, we had the idea of one player being a spy. But that's not fun, because one player is very obviously doing sketchy stuff and the rest have to try not to metagame it. What we came up with instead is that each session, the curse or a malevolent spirit possesses a random party member. That player is given a simple, seemingly innocuous objective to complete in secret, and gets some in-game reward if they succeed.
I've got a lot of experience GM'ing, but this is so crazy and different compared to my usual thing that I figured I'd ask for some guidance. Has anyone in the Playground done anything remotely like this before? Are there any pitfalls we need to look out for? Any advice you have about running episodic games, games with multiple GMs, or games with multiple PCs per player would be helpful.
My main question is this: what's the best way to go about planning a game with several GMs? Just spend a day world-building? Let everyone do their own thing, or collaborate on a pool of adventure seeds, and then pick our favorites? Especially since two of the GMs are relatively new, how much help and hand-holding should the two vets offer?
We've got at least a few weeks to plan, so no rush, but any advice we can get would be appreciated!
We're currently going through Curse of Strahd, so this won't start until that ends. Everyone's having a blast, but the party's failing pretty miserably. That's a wonderful story of it's own, but long story short, we're only four sessions in, and it may end as early as next week with Strahd completing his last 2 objectives, a TPK, and the words, "game over."
Anyways, once that's over, we'll probably break for a few weeks. Then, we've already got an exciting and different idea for our next campaign in the works. Here's what we've got:
Elevator Pitch: An episodic intrigue/RP-centric kingmaker campaign with a rotating GM and two PCs per player. I told you it was crazy.
Characters. Everyone gets a Level 11, their "main character," who plays a major role in ruling the kingdom, and a level 5 apprentice. However, they don't play their own character's apprentice. For example, I'm playing a Wizard, but my level 5 character is serves under the party Rogue. That way, we can role-play out all the master/apprentice drama, instead of the protege simply being another set of skills and stats.
Most of my campaigns end around levels 9 to 12, so starting at 11 is unusually high-powered for my group. Should be fun.
Kingmaker-Style. A king with a cursed key bankrupts his kingdom in search of a magical treasure vault. The party steals the reins of his kingdom in the aftermath of a bloody revolution. As rival nations make ambitious moves into their territory, the heroes must survive the game of thrones, as their agents try to break the curse that haunts their new kingdom. The idea is a campaign primarily based around intrigue and role-play, and still leaves room for episodes of intense action and dungeon-crawling.
Rotating DMs. Our group has 2 novice DM's (less than 1 year of DM experience) and 2 veteran (5+ years of experience each) DMs. All of us want to play in this game, but all of us would love to try DMing it. So, the two experienced DMs are going to coach the novices on writing self-contained 2-hour to 4-hour adventures. The hardest part will be setting a consistent tone for the adventure, but I'm hoping that it will help if all four of us collaborate on the world-building for the game.
Episodic Style. Since we'd be cycling DMs, an episodic style would be almost essential. I'm imagining scenarios like cutthroat negotiations and espionage with a rival kingdom one week, dealing with Efreeti from an inexplicable rift to the Plane of Fire the next.
The Ghost. As if the campaign wasn't crazy enough, we had the idea of one player being a spy. But that's not fun, because one player is very obviously doing sketchy stuff and the rest have to try not to metagame it. What we came up with instead is that each session, the curse or a malevolent spirit possesses a random party member. That player is given a simple, seemingly innocuous objective to complete in secret, and gets some in-game reward if they succeed.
I've got a lot of experience GM'ing, but this is so crazy and different compared to my usual thing that I figured I'd ask for some guidance. Has anyone in the Playground done anything remotely like this before? Are there any pitfalls we need to look out for? Any advice you have about running episodic games, games with multiple GMs, or games with multiple PCs per player would be helpful.
My main question is this: what's the best way to go about planning a game with several GMs? Just spend a day world-building? Let everyone do their own thing, or collaborate on a pool of adventure seeds, and then pick our favorites? Especially since two of the GMs are relatively new, how much help and hand-holding should the two vets offer?
We've got at least a few weeks to plan, so no rush, but any advice we can get would be appreciated!