Gnome Alone
2020-06-18, 03:11 PM
Greetings, playgroundateers - in the immortal words of Jim Anchower, been a long time since I rapped at ya. Family reunion out of the way, I thought I'd ask some advice. To invert a The Simpsons reference, I may have turned a mere Three Mile Island into a potential Chernobyl.
I'm mostly a player, but DM'd a few 3.5 games about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm a big fan of both Ursula Le Guin and Watership Down, and since good artists borrow but great artists steal, I made an archipelago world with true-naming magic as in Earthsea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea), and an anthropomorphic rabbit race called "the lapine" that, while not truly indebted to Watership Down, is one of those things that is so obviously a labor of love that the players couldn't help but get into it, I think. So, that's a bit of background. Not super relevant yet. Sorry, I'm long-winded.
For a year or two, I've been brainstorming another game set in this world, this time a 5e one (btw I am very impressed with 5e so far, it seems like they fixed almost all of the obvious problems with 3.5, and yet it still feels like a realistic and fun version of D&D, and if there aren't quite as many Legos, the Lego sets they've picked are so shiny I almost don't miss, y'know, dreaming up a Swordsage 13/Ferocity Barbarian 1/Hit-and-Run Fighter 1/Cleric 1/Binder 3 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?378237-In-Which-I-Attempt-to-Make-the-Kind-of-Speedy-Finesse-y-Warrior-That-Is-Hard-to-Make) but I digress, again. (Look, it all creates a vibe, right? This all...emotionally relevant background information. I hope.)
This world features, as character races, only humans, wooden golems called clockworks, a moblin race that's just goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and bugbears all crammed together as a subrace of the same species which I've also turned fae, and the lapine. It's a sort of a viking rabbit steampunk thing with a splash of Zelda vibe.
I've been calling it "Viking Sim City." I want the players to be the local nobles (or their retainers) - to be the kind of people who normally give PCs the quests. I want them to politically and economically manage a small island (although not with an obsessive level of granularity - the example I gave in the campaign's introductory document was "What I’m picturing is less 'How many pounds of crops did our farmers produce this season?' and more “Should we plant more cash crops to increase our treasury, or should we plant more staple food crops to increase our self-sufficiency and stores for the winter, just in case?”)
But I don't want it to be JUST that. It wouldn't really be D&D anymore, plus I don't know how much "roleplay the city council" juice I or my players have in us. I want them to be doing "adventures" too. Now, the question that is always asked of questgivers in RPGs is, "Why can't you do this yourself?" Inverting that, why would the local nobles risk themselves doing their own dirty work? And my answer, for why the local nobles will be doing quests themselves, is that this is a warrior culture and an honor culture. As I told the players, I've been saying "Viking" but I could as easily have said "Klingon." If you aren't the ones who can handle it, you shouldn't be the ones in charge - so thinks the kind of culture I am envisioning.
Okay, long story medium - this idea has grown some wings. I now have ten players. The players are my three brothers and son, five good friends we occasionally play with, who really wanted in on this, AND my brother's wife, trying D&D out for the first time. So, this question is obviously about how to manage this many people, but, kicking anyone out is out of the question, because a) half of them are my literal family or near-enough-as-makes-no-matter, and b) almost all of them are displaying the kind of enthusiasm for this campaign that some DMs would kill for.
Further complicating this is, cuz of both distance constraints and the, um, worldwide pandemic, we're playing online.
So my question, gentle readers, dear dear friendos who've read all the way through this frost giant of a thread...How am I going to run a role-play heavy game for ten people? Three of them want to be sailors, one is a visiting famous artist, the rest are council members or their retainers...Good gravy, I should show you the full bios of all the PCs. It simply will not make sense either to have all of these people always together roleplaying Civ 2 or whatever, nor to have them always all going on the dig-through-a-dirty-dungeon quest.
I have a few ideas: one, make what other games call "downtime" the main focus of the campaign. A very low combat game, which occasionally erupts into adventure. But really I'd be starting a whole bunch of different story threads, which would end up interacting. Two, and possibly related, to not be afraid to do what is anathema in other games and split the party (DUN DUN DUN!) There's already gonna be a long time between turns sometimes, so maybe having them be in completely separate places or scenes isn't quite as much of a stretch/disaster as it would be usually? Maybe if it was only two or three separate places to start off with? Even seeing this written out now is kind of making me skeptical, but, I have a feeling I could just manage to pull that off.
I guess I could split the campaign into two separate nights, but, we only have one night a week we could play, and "a huge ensemble cast, Game of Thrones-style [although my world-building and thematic style owes more to Robin Hobb] where we all make an epic story together" was a big part of the draw in the first place.
Any other ideas? Thanks in advance, to any brave souls who both read this and will offer advice.
TL:DR: Any advice for dealing with ten players in an online, role-play heavy, "city management" kind of campaign?
I'm mostly a player, but DM'd a few 3.5 games about 5 or 6 years ago. I'm a big fan of both Ursula Le Guin and Watership Down, and since good artists borrow but great artists steal, I made an archipelago world with true-naming magic as in Earthsea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthsea), and an anthropomorphic rabbit race called "the lapine" that, while not truly indebted to Watership Down, is one of those things that is so obviously a labor of love that the players couldn't help but get into it, I think. So, that's a bit of background. Not super relevant yet. Sorry, I'm long-winded.
For a year or two, I've been brainstorming another game set in this world, this time a 5e one (btw I am very impressed with 5e so far, it seems like they fixed almost all of the obvious problems with 3.5, and yet it still feels like a realistic and fun version of D&D, and if there aren't quite as many Legos, the Lego sets they've picked are so shiny I almost don't miss, y'know, dreaming up a Swordsage 13/Ferocity Barbarian 1/Hit-and-Run Fighter 1/Cleric 1/Binder 3 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?378237-In-Which-I-Attempt-to-Make-the-Kind-of-Speedy-Finesse-y-Warrior-That-Is-Hard-to-Make) but I digress, again. (Look, it all creates a vibe, right? This all...emotionally relevant background information. I hope.)
This world features, as character races, only humans, wooden golems called clockworks, a moblin race that's just goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and bugbears all crammed together as a subrace of the same species which I've also turned fae, and the lapine. It's a sort of a viking rabbit steampunk thing with a splash of Zelda vibe.
I've been calling it "Viking Sim City." I want the players to be the local nobles (or their retainers) - to be the kind of people who normally give PCs the quests. I want them to politically and economically manage a small island (although not with an obsessive level of granularity - the example I gave in the campaign's introductory document was "What I’m picturing is less 'How many pounds of crops did our farmers produce this season?' and more “Should we plant more cash crops to increase our treasury, or should we plant more staple food crops to increase our self-sufficiency and stores for the winter, just in case?”)
But I don't want it to be JUST that. It wouldn't really be D&D anymore, plus I don't know how much "roleplay the city council" juice I or my players have in us. I want them to be doing "adventures" too. Now, the question that is always asked of questgivers in RPGs is, "Why can't you do this yourself?" Inverting that, why would the local nobles risk themselves doing their own dirty work? And my answer, for why the local nobles will be doing quests themselves, is that this is a warrior culture and an honor culture. As I told the players, I've been saying "Viking" but I could as easily have said "Klingon." If you aren't the ones who can handle it, you shouldn't be the ones in charge - so thinks the kind of culture I am envisioning.
Okay, long story medium - this idea has grown some wings. I now have ten players. The players are my three brothers and son, five good friends we occasionally play with, who really wanted in on this, AND my brother's wife, trying D&D out for the first time. So, this question is obviously about how to manage this many people, but, kicking anyone out is out of the question, because a) half of them are my literal family or near-enough-as-makes-no-matter, and b) almost all of them are displaying the kind of enthusiasm for this campaign that some DMs would kill for.
Further complicating this is, cuz of both distance constraints and the, um, worldwide pandemic, we're playing online.
So my question, gentle readers, dear dear friendos who've read all the way through this frost giant of a thread...How am I going to run a role-play heavy game for ten people? Three of them want to be sailors, one is a visiting famous artist, the rest are council members or their retainers...Good gravy, I should show you the full bios of all the PCs. It simply will not make sense either to have all of these people always together roleplaying Civ 2 or whatever, nor to have them always all going on the dig-through-a-dirty-dungeon quest.
I have a few ideas: one, make what other games call "downtime" the main focus of the campaign. A very low combat game, which occasionally erupts into adventure. But really I'd be starting a whole bunch of different story threads, which would end up interacting. Two, and possibly related, to not be afraid to do what is anathema in other games and split the party (DUN DUN DUN!) There's already gonna be a long time between turns sometimes, so maybe having them be in completely separate places or scenes isn't quite as much of a stretch/disaster as it would be usually? Maybe if it was only two or three separate places to start off with? Even seeing this written out now is kind of making me skeptical, but, I have a feeling I could just manage to pull that off.
I guess I could split the campaign into two separate nights, but, we only have one night a week we could play, and "a huge ensemble cast, Game of Thrones-style [although my world-building and thematic style owes more to Robin Hobb] where we all make an epic story together" was a big part of the draw in the first place.
Any other ideas? Thanks in advance, to any brave souls who both read this and will offer advice.
TL:DR: Any advice for dealing with ten players in an online, role-play heavy, "city management" kind of campaign?