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Trask
2020-03-16, 01:19 AM
So my friends and I have been playing D&D for quite a while now, but never with any kind of cohesive continuity between campaigns. Some of us had our own settings, other people used official ones, and ultimately the history we have is a little bit of a mess, but its OUR mess. So we hatched the idea of using all the things we've done and characters we've made and fitting them into a new setting of our own creation.

My question to you is this. Have you ever shared a setting between friends? How did it work out? What are the best ways of making it work without everyone stepping on each other's toes?

I like the idea of having all our characters still out there existing in the worlds we've made, but I'm not sure if this is something thats really feasible long term. If you've ever done it, please let me know how it turned out.

Altair_the_Vexed
2020-03-16, 07:52 AM
This is exactly what we're doing in our current game setting, and what I've done with several groups before.

There's no trick to it. We just agree not to mess with any part of the setting where it looks like another of the GMs is building something up. And we accept that if one of the other GMs accidentally does mess with a part of a precious secret plot, then we just have to deal with it.
For example, one GM had created a matriarchy vs patriarchy religious conflict, but not explicitly stated the gendered division - so when another GM ran a game using that conflict as part of their adventure, they didn't realise that there was a gender divide. But rather than stepping in to "correct" the other GM, the previous GM didn't comment - she (the original GM) just updated her plot to include a mix of allies on both sides of the conflict. Probably that's better verisimilitude, anyway.

Of course, in this group we're all responsible adults, we're all pretty experienced gamers, some of us are long experienced GMs - so a certain amount of social sensibility comes with the territory.

We did do one thing we did in the current shared setting that might be helpful:
After we'd had a few sessions of effectively one-off games in the setting, we had a session of mapping and world establishment. We used a flip chart to draw a rough land mass outline, and took turns to put things on it - some of those were the places we'd already used in games, some were new placed we made up. Most of it was very broad strokes - "the Icy Wastes" and "the North Sea", etc.
When someone uses a remote location, we add a few details to the map.