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xPANCAKEx
2008-04-29, 08:09 AM
YEt another nubby DM question for you all

how do you string a camapign together - obviously you don't want it to be all "ok, you've gone from a to, now yo've rescued dude C and he is saying visited old wise man D", - so how do you plan ahead without rail roading?

do you write a up a sequence of random events? or just various plot hooks the players can bump into?

Lucyfur
2008-04-29, 08:14 AM
My DM introduces new plot points using a town crier yelling the news in the morning.

Dervag
2008-04-29, 08:22 AM
There are several different philosophies about this.

One is to 'railroad'- give the players little or no choice in what course of action they pursue, so they have to go on to your next planned adventure.

Another is what I call 'soft railroading.' You don't force PCs to follow your adventure path, but you make it very stupid for them not to do so.

I think the best method is to have two "quest objectives" running at once. Give the players one important thing to do, an overall objective, and one less important immediate objective. For instance, the overall objective might be "drive the Brassclaw Orcs from the Kron Hills", while the less important immediate objective might be "Escort the envoy from the Kneebiter dwarves through the hills so they can coordinate with the elves on the far side of the range."

Escorting the envoy is a good adventure, but it won't win the war by itself. So they'll have several missions under the umbrella of 'drive out the orcs,' without any railroading required. Then you have a few choices:

You can let the victory over the orcs be the end of a story arc and let them go wherever they want to find their next overall objective.

Or you can place hooks for the next overall objective at the end of the story arc following this overall objective. For instance, the PCs might find clues that an evil cult worshipping an unknown deity played a key role in making the Brassclaw orcs start raiding settlements and otherwise acting mean enough to deserve being driven out of the hills in the first place.

Tsotha-lanti
2008-04-29, 08:33 AM
YEt another nubby DM question for you all

how do you string a camapign together - obviously you don't want it to be all "ok, you've gone from a to, now yo've rescued dude C and he is saying visited old wise man D", - so how do you plan ahead without rail roading?

do you write a up a sequence of random events? or just various plot hooks the players can bump into?

How do you string a novel or a movie together? How do you string an episode of a TV series together, or an entire season?

There's several ways - the big variance being whether you're "continuous" (like The Shield and Babylon 5) or episodic (like Star Trek).

Since episodic is pretty simple (it works on the out-of-character premise of "the GM is going to throw a hook at us and we're going to take it and see where it goes"), I'll assume this is for continuous. (Note, though, that if your campaign is episodic, and your players don't understand this and accept that they're going to have to grab on to any hook you throw at them and go with it, you will have a lot of problems. That means it's time for... dialogue!)

The answer is, of course, motivation. You need one. Or, rather, the players and their characters need one, minimum. It's not complex, either. Maybe the PCs get orders from a superior. Maybe the PCs have a personal vendetta. Maybe each PC has their own complex goals, born of an intricate background, weaving together and conflicting with each other and those of other characters, PCs and NPCs both, in a way that weaves a deep, involved net of intrigue and adventure. Watch any TV show or movie, read any book, and you'll see there's a motivation, no matter how badly written.

If you can be more specific about your problems, we can be more specific about answers. If introducing motivation is your problem, for instance, there's no end of advice to be given on that.

Maxymiuk
2008-04-29, 08:35 AM
Personally, I tend towards a more open style of campaign. I believe it's called node based GMing - the typical scenario involves several groups with conflicting interests that are either locked in a stalemate, or getting ready to make a final push right when the party arrives, with the PC's being a force able to throw the balance either way.

Example scenario:

Group of Bandits A is operating from a ruined watchtower somewhere in the woods.
Group of Bandits B wants to push Bandits A out of the area and claim the watchtower for themselves. They're currently planning an attack.
A party of Paladins is currently tracking Bandits B to bring them to justice (i.e. kill them). They could handle either Bandits A or Bandits B easily, but would be outmatched against both groups at once.
A Thief who's been hired to retrieve a family heirloom stolen by Bandits A in a raid is staying in a local inn, trying to figure out how to sneak into the tower.

Enter the PC's.

The first session or two would feature little combat (unless the players attacked first). Instead, they'd have a chance to familiarize themselves with the situation, meet representatives of each group. The Thief would offer them a share of his pay to help him retrieve the heirloom. The Paladins would ask for help and (grudgingly) offer a share of the spoils from the battlefield. Both Bandits A and Bandits B would attempt to hire the PC's to help them against the other group.
The PC's would be free to decide what they want to do, who to help, or how to play each faction against one another. The key would be to make them aware that they themselves are too weak to take on everyone at once, but strong enough to help any group they side with prevail.

Finally, add a timeframe. If the PC's putz about, things are going to happen anyway. Bandits B will attack Bandits A, perhaps. The Thief will be in the tower at the time, having chosen the worst possible moment to make his move - he'll be mistaken for an enemy of either side and die. The Paladins will take a look at the proceedings and decide to sit it out and mop up the survivors. Or something completely different will happen.

The advantage to this style of play is that it both gives the players a feeling of much greater control over what happens in game and an illusion that the world they're in. Also, such an approach to GMing requires much less work - the above scenario took me 15 minutes to come up with, for example. All that's left is to stat out the NPC's, come up with a few names and maps of possible combat locations (an inn, the watchtower and environs, a forest clearing), and you're good to go.
The disadvantage is that this method requires an ability to GM by the seat of your pants and a flair for improvisation - not only are there no set paths, but you have to contend with the creativity/stupidity of all your players, and the inherent unpredictability of thereof. Additionally, it requires an active participation of the players themselves - they have to take active part in deciding what to do next, who to trust, arguing which option is the better one, etc. New players especially can sometimes find this somewhat difficult - they tend to expect the GM to just tell them what to do next.

I hope that helps.

valadil
2008-04-29, 09:03 AM
I write a dozen or so plots. Sometimes they're full fledged plots. Sometimes just a hook to see where the players run with it. Then I make even more plots as the players run through the world. Finally I merge plots. This is easier than it sounds. Just take an NPC from one plot and an NPC from another plot and BAM! they're the same guy. Obviously you'll have to check for consistency. Oh and it'll seem like there's a lot of silly coincidences when you write the game this way, but in actual play the PCs don't really notice.

nargbop
2008-04-29, 09:15 AM
I do a similar thing to valadil. The trick is not to devote too much time planning a particular plot line, because the players may not ever see it. You have to learn how to adapt the stories you've prepared on the fly to fit where your PCs are going.

its_all_ogre
2008-04-29, 09:18 AM
maxymiuk just described my style.
however i have players who do expect to be told what to do, 4 of my 6 person group are like this...
it's hell being me :smallfurious:

Tsotha-lanti
2008-04-29, 09:48 AM
maxymiuk just described my style.
however i have players who do expect to be told what to do, 4 of my 6 person group are like this...

That's why motivation-based GMing works well. It doesn't really matter whether the motivation is internal (comes from the player/PC) or external (comes from the GM, through NPCs/the world in general).

Of course, if they actually lack the initiative to decide what to do step-by-step when they already know their goal, well... er, I never did figure out what you do with players like that. Wait for them to mature or just let them hang on and be mostly bored and confused until they get enough, I guess. Can't change people.

valadil
2008-04-29, 10:27 AM
I do a similar thing to valadil. The trick is not to devote too much time planning a particular plot line, because the players may not ever see it. You have to learn how to adapt the stories you've prepared on the fly to fit where your PCs are going.

The other important trick (which has a lot to do with the motivation style just mentioned) is that no plot belongs to the DM. Plots are something created by NPCs. Since you relinquish ownership of the plots to your NPCs it becomes much less frustrating when players miss or crash a plot because it's no longer yours. This mindset also helps with a world that runs on its own. Once a plot is set in motion, the NPCs involved will keep it in motion whether or not the players are participating. Treating NPCs as actors in the world (by which I mean people who take action, not as theater performers) will lead to a dynamic and eventful world for your players to take part in.

Squash Monster
2008-04-29, 11:30 AM
Early in your campaign, plan one day's adventure, with all the possible side-forks and weird decisions that your players might make. Make sure any dungeons have excess forks that the party won't actually need to keep track of.

Keep each fork and twist of the adventure separate. Write them on separate notecards or in separate files or something. As your players go through this adventure, set aside all the notecards you end up actually using.

At the end of the adventure, gather up the notecards you didn't use. Update these as needed to make them relevant for the next adventure. This shouldn't take much time: maybe a fork of a cave becomes a hall in a ruined castle, but it's really just the same thing with different description. The hardest part is updating monsters to match the party's level.

The players will never know you're reusing content because you only reuse content that they haven't seen yet. Additionally, after that first adventure where you make a ton of extra content, you only have to write one adventure's worth of new content per session.

Yay hybrid approaches.

Bryn
2008-04-29, 12:52 PM
For the game I'm currently running, I make the whole thing up as I go along. This is based on what happened last time I planned out the sequence of events; rather than helping the professor in his search for the ancient Warforged deep in Xen'drik, they hijacked the airship, slaughtered the crew, and decided to become pirates over the Thunder Sea. Then, they changed their minds ended up causing chaos in Sharn. All the - fortunately incomplete - plans I'd made went out the window.

So, I don't plan. Instead, I come up with what to happen in a session right before it happens, and everything runs on description and Lords of Madness. If something seems awesome at the time, it will happen. Once, I blew up a city just to get the game moving again. This then turned into the overarching plot of much of the rest of the campaign.

Sure, a DM who plans well will probably make a better game overall. But my players enjoy it, my game is flexible to abrupt changes in direction, and I can still make them flee in terror down dark corridors from horrible tentacled abberations. I think they're enjoying it :smallbiggrin:

Fiery Diamond
2008-04-29, 02:56 PM
My DMing style is somewhere in between what maxymiuk said and what Z-axis said. I pretty much come up with some setting, throw some hook or another at them, and then let the players take it away. I usually don't plan for more than one session at a time unless there will be a dungeon crawl, or I have a major plot idea: such as someone who I know will betray them - I plan ways to get them to trust him, but I wait to see whether they trust him before planning how he'll betray them.

And sometimes, even the limited amount of prep I do is completely overturned, such as when the party was going to storm a noble's mini-castle, and I statted the NPCs and came up with a few possible reactions on the NPCs' parts. The party rogue went in first, without letting the rest of the party know, and leveled a third of the house with a Quaal's feather token Tree. Chaos, and no way of predicting it. But it was fun anyway, and I came up with what happened next on the fly.

-Fiery Diamond