Campaign's time investment

[SCOTTEPIPPEN]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign? How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do? Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions? How much freedom should a DM give to the players? :smallconfused:

[The_Jette]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign? How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do? Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions? How much freedom should a DM give the players? :smallconfused:

Also know as "how to start a flame war on GitP in 4 easy questions!"

grabs popcorn

[SCOTTEPIPPEN]

Also know as "how to start a flame war on GitP in 4 easy questions!"

grabs popcorn
I really wanna know, I wanna start DMing because I just played as PCs for 3 years.
Also war, war never changes.

[Karl Aegis]

Know where the loot is. Know who knows where the loot is. Know who wants the loot. Know who doesn't want the loot taken from them. Know where loot can be spent.

[Boozy]

I've run campaigns for over twenty years, across probably dozens of platforms. Some, like the White Wolf Storyteller Series, emphasize different elements of narrative than others. Still, there is one cardinal rule to running a successful campaign: Know your players, why they play, and find out before you start.

Not everyone plays for the same reason. Some players just want a fun time with friends to tell jokes, roll some bones, and kill stuff. If my whole party is like this, I pull out PP Undercity, or old HeroQuest boardgame. They'll be fine.

Some enjoy the granular detail of combat, and see tabletop as a narrative version of miniature wargaming. For a party like this, I prepare all the maps, encounters, and statistics in advance, and brush up on all of the rules particular to the session in advance. These guys are homework intensive.

Some players come for the interactive narrative first, and roll dice as a way of creating dramatic tension. For a party like this, your best preparation is in developing details of the setting, NPC's and motives, and being willing to fluidly adapt the sessions as the players go off the map. Still preparation intensive, but a different kind.

Finally, some players just want to win. They want to beat you, and each other. This is usually the most challenging style of player, not because you lack the tools, but because their motive to play means that someone has to have a negative play experience. Just remember you always have more tools than them, and if you make consistent rulings, you can at least maintain a respectful relationship.

The catch is, most parties and players are a jumble of these motives and styles. My approach is to beforehand get them all together, ask them questions about what they enjoy about gaming, and make them hear and discuss their characters together. If players are aware of the varying motivations of each other, they are more likely to collaborate in initial formation, and accommodate each other once the dice drop and the story begins.

[Godskook]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign?

Depends? I spend <20 hours developing new adventures for a pre-existing campagin setting I'm usually running games in. Typically, my mind is focused on learning generalized best-practices for encounter design and adventures, and I improv the rest.

For instance, the last game I played, the final piece of the night was a ship v. ship battle with 10 Fighter4s and a Wizard4. PCs loved it, and I literally never wrote a statblock. Kept it all in my head.


How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do?

I give the PCs goals to work on from an explicit in-game boss. But I don't tell them how to do it, only that there's a thing that needs doing. Which often surprises me as to how it does eventually get done. I generally prepare the area to some degree and then try to improv the details as I go.


Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions?

Railroading is a DM-crutch mostly, and a story-telling tool sometimes. Minimize your use of it.


How much freedom should a DM give to the players? :smallconfused:

As much as possible within the constraints of the story you want to tell. If you're telling a story about a group of evil assassins who are tasked with murdering Cuthbert before he ascends tomorrow, then obviously, no Paladins, and no personal quests, but that's a fairly pressing goal that'll come off as railroading. Otoh, if you're telling the story of 4 guys who met in a bar and then that's quite a different thing.

Personally, I find its best to go full-NCIS on the game. Tell nothing but short stories, and embrace any epic arcs the Players try to include that emerge from gameplay. On top of that, seed the storylines with tidbits of various PCs' backstory. The best part about this is that you can pivot really fast if a PC dies or quits.

[NOhara24]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign? How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do? Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions? How much freedom should a DM give to the players? :smallconfused:

1) As many as is required to allow the DM to be comfortable with the product he's putting out to his players.

2) Everyone DMs differently - this is something that will come with time.

3) Railroading, if it's happening, should be totally imperceptible by the players. The carrot is what motivates players along in the direction desired- not the rails.

4) This is also something that comes with experience DM-ing & feeling out your players. My players have all the freedom in the world, but what I never do is leave them without some kind of objective or something to discover.

[Uncle Pine]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign?
As much as it takes to the DM to have a good idea, and then some. However, good plots don't just happen, unless you're idly running TVTropes' Story Generator (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/storygen.php) every now and then fishing for ideas. Once you have the skeleton of a campaign or adventure (the start, the ending or ideally both), getting ready for the first session shouldn't take too much, 5-10 hours at best give or take, and that's assuming you're using custom encounters with many humanoids or creatures with class levels that take a bit to build. If you plan to use MM monsters and just swap a few feats around, it should take a lot less.


How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do?
Having as many encounter prepared, or knowing exactly in which manual and page you can find or get them, is a key factor. Past that, whether you need to prepare material for a specific encounter or not depends on how much you can improvise and once again whether you want to use many custom encounters and humanoid opponents: a time will come in which you'll be able to wing convincingly 4th level characters just because you remember all the bonuses and class features really well, but doing it from the start is hard. For now, I'd advise you to stick to monsters by the book when you don't have too much time to prepare for a session and to take your time building custom encounters when you have it.
Remember that writing down any wild idea you may have really helps cutting down preparation time: one day I might need an acquatic encounter to put somewhere in the next session and then I'll remember about that time when I noted on my phone about a "variant shambling mound" disguised as a giant sargasso, and just stat that. Another time I'll pick open that notepad on my desktop and scroll down to see that I built a two-headed zombie purple worm at some point in my life and never had the occasion to use it: a new adventure is born!


Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions?
Railroading is generally bad. Telling players "no, you can't go there yet!" is especially bad, but placing reasonable restrictions is good:
- Whenever the party enter a town, the characters may not be allowed into certain buildings or parts of it because of various laws.
- If a player is about to accidentally or voluntarily suggest an action that's highly illegal or is likely to go horribly wrong and derail the entire plot, like pulling down the king's pants during a speech, you can reasonably hint that such action is questionable or wouldn't suit the player's character and if s/he persists, deal with the results quickly (the king's pants go down? So does your head).
- Related to the above, don't punish players just because they don't do things the way you want them to, because they won't. Make whatever punishment you feel like inflicting fair and appropriate.
- Time can be a factor too: if the PCs are trying to prevent something that will happen in two weeks, it's not railroading if you remember them about their deadline whenever they decide to spend two days relaxing at the hot springs.
In general, you want to leave enough agency to the players that they feel free. It's important to note that the amount of freedom perceived by the players is much more important than the amount of freedom they actually have: just like you as a DM can decide that the hydra was indeed behind Door #3 as the characters enter the new room, you're free to adapt the story to their choices, instead to force them to adapt their choices to your story. Do not abuse this.


How much freedom should a DM give to the players? :smallconfused:
See above. The short answer is "as much as they want", a longer answer would be that you only have to give them as much freedom as the story dictates, with the addendum that you have to know whether your players will enjoy more a political setting with a lot of restrictions dictated by laws and etiquette or a sandbox world where they can go everywhere. This comes from experience if you're playing with your usual group of friends, or asking if it's a new one.

[Crake]

You can just be like me and TOTALLY WING IT!

In all seriousness though, improv is one of the greatest tools you can have as a DM if you're running your own adventures/campaign setting. If you're running modules, it's more important to know the module back to back, but even that is simply so you have the bredth of knowledge available to improvise for anything the players do.

I personally find it easier to make my own adventures/campaign setting for that reason, it's actually easier to improv when you've decided everything rather than having to read through a module and improv by their guidelines. It does help to be able to approximate enemy stats on the fly, and have a list of names ready to go for random NPCs that the players interact with. We made a joke about one of our other DMs about how you can follow the named NPCs for the plot. If the barkeep's got a name, talk to him, if he's just 'the barkeep' then carry on, the plot is somewhere else. Don't be that transparent, give the NPCs names, come up with simple backstories, see what sticks with the players, and expand on that between sessions.

If you take the above advice, I also highly suggest you either a) have a near eidetic memory, or b) take a LOT of notes to make sure you maintain consistency.

[Darth Ultron]

How many hours should a DM work to set a good campaign?

A long time, many hours. Really, it is a lot like a second job.




How much should he prepare: should he write in advance every encounter or should he write down just the main things he expects the players to do?

Well, writing down the 'main things' is not really doing anything.

Assuming your running a linear normal adventure that makes sense, they you would want to have any encounter you think might happen during the game created and prepared ahead of time. Generally, at least 3-5. You might not use all of them, but you need to have them ready.




Is railroading a good thing if only used for a couple of sessions?

Railroading is only bad if your doing the extreme jerk monster tyrant version of railroading. If your such a bad inhuman person that your players are leaving the game crying and saying they will never play the game again...you likely are not this type.

Other then that, railroading really just becomes finger pointing by bad players and internet posters. Really, on a whim, anyone can just say anything they don't like is ''railroading'', so that makes it hard to even talk about. Even something as simple as a locked door to a vault, a few gamers will say ''ok, a locked door the PCs can't open is normal'', but way too many players will whine and cry that if the DM does anything that stops their PC from doing anything is railroading.

The normal ''accepted'' defense vs the accusing railroading jerk players is to have an explanation that you can spell out to the player(s) and they will accept. So if you can convince the jerk player that, for example, a bank vault is locked at night and has a good lock'', then they might agree it is not railroading...at least that one time. Of course, you will need to be ready to defend all your actions, or at least all the ones the players, on their whims, decide are railroading. It's a lot of work and makes the game very ''DM vs players'', but it is what a lot of games do.

Of course, you might get lucky and have good players that don't complain and just play the game too.



How much freedom should a DM give to the players? :smallconfused:

Well, 100%?

This is a bit vague as what is ''freedom'' to you. In a general sense, the players should be allowed to try anything in the game.

Though if you have a serious game, you might want to take away the players ''freedom'' to be dumb jerks. You also might want to limit the players ''freedom'' to do adult things beyond ''pg-13'' or so. You might want to limit the players ''freedom'' to be a jerk and ruin the game for others.

[SCOTTEPIPPEN]

Well, 100%?

This is a bit vague as what is ''freedom'' to you. In a general sense, the players should be allowed to try anything in the game.

Though if you have a serious game, you might want to take away the players ''freedom'' to be dumb jerks. You also might want to limit the players ''freedom'' to do adult things beyond ''pg-13'' or so. You might want to limit the players ''freedom'' to be a jerk and ruin the game for others.
I got your point, i was just saying indirectly "how many manuals/combos should I ban?" or "should the players be allowed to go anywhere they want?".

[Zanos]

You can just be like me and TOTALLY WING IT!

In all seriousness though, improv is one of the greatest tools you can have as a DM if you're running your own adventures/campaign setting. If you're running modules, it's more important to know the module back to back, but even that is simply so you have the bredth of knowledge available to improvise for anything the players do.

I personally find it easier to make my own adventures/campaign setting for that reason, it's actually easier to improv when you've decided everything rather than having to read through a module and improv by their guidelines. It does help to be able to approximate enemy stats on the fly, and have a list of names ready to go for random NPCs that the players interact with. We made a joke about one of our other DMs about how you can follow the named NPCs for the plot. If the barkeep's got a name, talk to him, if he's just 'the barkeep' then carry on, the plot is somewhere else. Don't be that transparent, give the NPCs names, come up with simple backstories, see what sticks with the players, and expand on that between sessions.

If you take the above advice, I also highly suggest you either a) have a near eidetic memory, or b) take a LOT of notes to make sure you maintain consistency.
Yep. This. No carefully constructed adventure with hundreds of hours of writing put into it survives contact with players, and suddenly you're forced to improv anyway. I come up with a very loose skeleton of what the players want to do next week and take notes as we play so I remember what happened.

It helps if you have a large library of miniatures and monster stats ready to go for this, though.

[Mendicant]

There's lots of good advice here, but don't forget to have fun yourself. You're not a computer and you're not getting paid, so make sure the time you're investing isn't an unmitigated chore. When I was younger, I *loved* building characters so much that I'd make dozens that barely saw play, just because a blank character sheet was calling me. They'd generally end up as NPCs or enemies, and frankly, a lot of times most of the effort that went into detailing them was "wasted," since that detailed spell list isn't going to see a lot of play if the character is one-shotted or ignored. It didn't matter, since the prep itself was fun. Now it's less so, I have a kid and a job, and I'm more selective about who gets that sort of loving attention.

If you're bored or overwhelmed, it's probably not worth doing and your players likely won't have a good time either.

[Darth Ultron]

I got your point, i was just saying indirectly "how many manuals/combos should I ban?" or "should the players be allowed to go anywhere they want?".

Very different question. You should feel free to ban anything for any reason. You are the one running the game and you should not feel forced to do anything your not conformable with or like.

Most games ban a lot. Really both 3X and Pathfinder have tons and tons and tons of stuff that most DM's ban.

Some players won't like some of the things you ban, but that is just how life goes. All most no DM runs a game without a ban list. And even that complaining players, if they were to DM a game, would most likely have a ban list. And you might not like it or agree with his list...

[Someone Else DM]

Yep. This. No carefully constructed adventure with hundreds of hours of writing put into it survives contact with players, and suddenly you're forced to improv anyway. I come up with a very loose skeleton of what the players want to do next week and take notes as we play so I remember what happened.

It helps if you have a large library of miniatures and monster stats ready to go for this, though.


Made me lol and drool out a bit of coffee on this. Yep, this is so true. Carefully constructed campaign + PC's = What the hell just happened, you were not supposed to do that. Now I have to improv.


Along with all of the other great advice given, I suggest you read and incorporate your player's backstories into the game. Plan up front for future encounters for each of them. Let their ideas be a part of the story. It doesn't need to be an integral part of the story, but it definitely makes it more memorable for your players. It can also spur thoughts of other directions to take the game if/when it gets turned sideways...

[Godskook]

I got your point, i was just saying indirectly "how many manuals/combos should I ban?" or "should the players be allowed to go anywhere they want?".

An easy system for DMs to run while still, imho, being a fun system for PCs to play in is E6 or A6*. Keeping PCs at a near-constant ECL relative to the monsters they face lets you as the DM construct your worlds far quicker and easier, since PC strength doesn't fluctuate as much, and you can get used to how to challenge them over time.


My WIP Approach rules:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/16FfgVpvPDWm2DAHznP5AU4BRkI3nf_mfBOekEv4750s/edit?usp=sharing