Players building v players exploring a campaign

[werecorpse]

In the old days the DM built the campaign and the players explored it. This is pretty much how I prefer to play whether as player or DM. The players were in charge of their character and little else. Apart from killing stuff and getting loot a big motivation was to explore the world the DM had created, solve its mysteries etc. it was all unknown and in someone else imagination. The shared story part wasn't sharing the story of the world it was sharing the story of the characters interaction with the world.

Some of the newer rpg stuff (well not that new now) suggests that the players and Gm together build the campaign - that the GM ask the players to describe different bits and that becomes the world, the King, the reason the elves live where they do etc. To me as a player this makes the world less real if I (as a player) excised the dwarves hate gnomes because they stole a crown in times past. It feels more like it's just made up (yes I know it is but you know what I mean)

what do you do and what do you see as the benefits of each method?

 

[Lanefan]

In the old days the DM built the campaign and the players explored it. This is pretty much how I prefer to play whether as player or DM. The players were in charge of their character and little else. Apart from killing stuff and getting loot a big motivation was to explore the world the DM had created, solve its mysteries etc. it was all unknown and in someone else imagination. The shared story part wasn't sharing the story of the world it was sharing the story of the characters interaction with the world.

This.

As player I want to learn about the game world by exploring it. As DM I want to (try to) design something interesting and then watch as the players (via their characters) learn via exploration what makes it tick.

Lanefan

 

[Gilladian]

I, too, prefer the traditional model. In addition to our reasoning, I find that worlds built in-game have a very choppy, shallow feel. Someone says "dwarves in this world are blind and live underground, never emerging into the light of day." But the questions about how that affects their society are never addressed. The Pcs just meet a bunch of blind dwarves, and then go on to the next encounter.

I prefer to think about things and develop a history and a feeling of complexity. I am not afraid to listen to my players, and if they have ideas, I sometimes use them. My Pcs recently fought a group of cultists, and they thought the cult symbol (a crashing wave) looked like a vortex. So I'm going to use that concept in the main headquarters temple if they ever go there. And they will be tickled that they were "right". But I decided it fit the world and I will work other nihilist elements into the cult and their myths as well, to deepen the effect. It won't hang there as a meaningless fact in isolation.

 

[Eltab]

The DM can create the basic assumptions of the campaign, and a sketch map, important NPCs, &c.

It never hurts to sit down with the players - as a group and individually - show them the drafts and ask, "What do you think? What needs to be filled in?" Listen and take notes. Use what sounds good (or is popular) so later on your friends get to have an "Aha, I was right!" moment.

You may have to change some things.
For instance, if you wanted the overarching Metaplot to be "the King exerts power over fractious Noble houses" and you imagine a combat-heavy "Ultima ratio regnum" (the king's final argument: a cannon) campaign, but the players want the king to use 3 Musketeers' politics-skullduggery-influence-intrigue ... go ahead and change that.
Maybe your King was a big strong physical guy but he died young and the new King is his physically frail younger brother. This guy can't go out and challenge some Duke to a duel - he'd get creamed! - so he has to be sneaky and indirect about establishing whose say-so sticks.

 

[Celebrim]

Collective world building through narrative results in a story that, if it goes for a while and is actually mentally examined which it probably won't be, at best results in something like 'Lost' or 'X-Files'. It will be disjointed, rambling, and often incoherent and contradictory. Chekov's Guns will be introduced and rust unfired and forgotten. Plot lines will be introduced with bangs and then never touched again. Things that ought to have huge meaning and implication for the setting and the characters will appear by 'rule of cool', or as deus ex machina, or techno-babble resolution, or as McGuffins - and then disappear, their implications and meaning never explored.

Of course, the same sorts of problems can happen with any sort of bottom up world building and all RPGs are always at least partly bottom up. And any well planned story is still subject to whim and randomness, and ought to be subject to whim and randomness because what's the point if the players are on rails?

The only benefit of leveraging the players as world-building resources is it creates the illusion that you don't have to do the hard work of carrying a story along as the GM. It appears to alleviate the need for all that sweat and blood you have to shed to create a world.

The cost is simple. You go from the experience of being within a fantasy story - maybe a bad fantasy story but hopefully a good one - to the experience of being one of a team of screenwriters hammering out the draft of a screenplay around a table. It's not possible to be in the story you are creating. GM's are never immersed in the story the way a player is or can be. If you make everyone wear that hat, then every one is interacting with the story primarily at the meta level.

Or in short, it's no fun to read a 'choose your own adventure' book when you are not only making the choices, but you are writing out what happens as a result. It's for those as yet unseen pages that you are reading and rereading the book. As soon as you know the book well enough that you know what each choice results in, you put it down. The story teller takes vicarious pleasure in their discovery and invents as needed, but he cannot discover anything for himself. The reader explores the story, but cannot create anything beyond his own unique narrative path through the story. Though that path, the reader has (hopefully) a grand adventure and experiences what would otherwise be impossible - living the life of an adventurer through that adventurer's eyes.

If you try to violate that, no one at the table has that last experience. Everyone ultimately has the experiences of working out what the pages in the story are, which is a very different thing. There was recently a very good episode of Wil Wheaton's tabletop where they played FATE that's definitely worth any GM's time to spend some time analyzing the play.

1) There is a famous trope in D&D (so famous, it merited an page of 'Order of the Stick') where during the fortune step, players begin hunting for fiddly +1 modifiers to their roll, that ultimately end up totally changing the resolution. This is generally considered a fiddly undesirable (if inevitable) gamist step of the game as players understandably struggle to achieve as much narrative force as possible. Compare with the actual use of aspects at the FATE table. Is there really a large contrast, or is the primary excitement of an aspect in play basically the same as the player remembering his +2 flanking bonus or the +1 morale bonus he has from the cleric's prayer spell, and changing his own fortune?
2) For all the cool trope-y goodness that went into naming the aspects, how many times in the whole episode were aspects really invoked for their narrative impact rather than their mechanical impact? How many times where the aspects invoked in such a way that the name really mattered to the story, compared to the times that the aspect needed to be fit to the story. For me, it was absolutely jarring to see these little ideas that wanted to be nourished, and grow, and one day be part of a real story, to be slaughtered like so many lambs for their mechanical crunch no matter how vague and ill-fitting their role was in the story. In the background, I think I heard 3x5 note cards weeping.
3) I often suggest that what makes a game fun is the illusion of success. That what any sort of game offers is the experience of being successful at something without nearly as much risk and hard work as real success has. What these collaborative techniques seem to offer is the illusion of success at story building. Nowhere did this feel more true for me than the moment the GM invokes the trope 'Better Living through Chemistry' to send a protagonist literally to Hell... for just one 'round', in a way that was so meaningless, that even the player understands that despite having disappeared literally into Hell, this literal arrival in Hell has no real impact on the story and he'll arrive again back in the 'real world' largely unscathed (and barely changed) as soon as it is his turn. While there is profound ego stroking going on there, there really isn't anything else going on related to story. True 'Shining Moments of Awesome' require more investment than that, so that the moment is a true payoff of something that has mattered to the story for a very long time. They require resolution of a conflict. But no conflict was invoked, just something called 'Better Living through Chemistry' and literally going to Hell was what... better living through chemistry? Only an RPG could get away with that sort of thing. If it happened in a novel, you'd be going, "Wait a minute... this seems like it ought to be an important plot point..."

 

[pogre]

I generally run a traditional campaign. The creating is part of my enjoyment as a G.M.

However, I did have a campaign that I started as more of a collaboration and it worked quite well. There was a twist though - the players' descriptions of the world was what their characters believed. In other words, they created many of there characters' perceptions of how things were. During the "creation" process I told them this would be the case. That gave me a fair amount of creative space and spurred some ideas. For example: One PC decided their cleric's god had the death domain and was a fairly benevolent deity, basically a R.I.P. god. I decided that this was one aspect of the god, but in fact, the god also was a deity of vengeful murder. The cleric eventually figured this out and it created an interesting quandary for him. Clearly, there has to be trust between the players and the G.M. to make something like this work, but it was a very fun campaign with lots of twists and turns.

 

[Redthistle]

I generally run a traditional campaign. The creating is part of my enjoyment as a G.M.

However, I did have a campaign that I started as more of a collaboration and it worked quite well. There was a twist though - the players' descriptions of the world was what their characters believed. In other words, they created many of there characters' perceptions of how things were. During the "creation" process I told them this would be the case. That gave me a fair amount of creative space and spurred some ideas. For example: One PC decided their cleric's god had the death domain and was a fairly benevolent deity, basically a R.I.P. god. I decided that this was one aspect of the god, but in fact, the god also was a deity of vengeful murder. The cleric eventually figured this out and it created an interesting quandary for him. Clearly, there has to be trust between the players and the G.M. to make something like this work, but it was a very fun campaign with lots of twists and turns.

Yeah, this.

I created my campaign world over a span of decades starting in my mid-teens (a not uncommon scenario among lovers of make-believe), in my case in the late 1960s, re-directing it when I began playing RPGs.

I've borrowed heavily from both published material and the imaginations of other players, because I most certainly don't own the patent on creativity, I like other people's ideas interacting with my own, and sometimes, frankly, this lazy old boy appreciates other people doing the work.

Ever stood around watching a construction site? You know you have.

Still, the world and its history have my personal stamp. What my players contribute comes mostly from their characters' backstories, however sparse or detailed they may be, as I flesh those out to provide their PCs with relationships with NPCs that they can refer back to as fits the continuing campaign.

As Chris Perkins mentioned in a recent Sage Advice tweet, a DM can put all kinds of time into building the background history of a campaign world, but the players are not likely to see most of it. Best to just prepare enough that you can effectively wing it when the need arises for game-world information to be revealed.

 

[Sunseeker]

I do a little bit of both.

As a DM, I prefer to sketch out the world and only detail in the parts of it that players either need to interact with via plots I've established within the game, or as they approach those areas and plots. IE: There's a big bad mummy-lord with a secret lair in the desert. Name, goals, time-table, specific events only come about as the players progress towards that event. If the players never pick up the lead-in quests, or never randomly wander out into the middle of the desert, I never detail this in further.

But info-dumping on certain things players should know about is difficult. Like, lets say my player Mike is playing a dwarf. I could develop a whole dwarven society, or I could sketch it out "there's a king", "they like digging" etc... and let Mike fill in some of the details for me. What are the politics like? What's day-to-day dwarven life like? What sort of enemies do the dwarves have? What sort of relations to the dwarves have with other races?

Mike and I will role-play this out as part of Session 0. I will do the same with other players. He'll give me some detail like "the Kingdom has a parliment made up of members from notable dwarven families" and then I'll add something like "and the King is elected from whichever House holds the most favor, and everyone knows of House Thurson's thirst for power." And we'll go back and forth like this for a little while until I feel we've sufficiently established whatever we're working on.

Of course not every player's input needs to be as grand. Joe the elf could say "I'm an outcast from Elven society for *reasons* and know little about it." In which case I will take the way Joe's reasons for being outcast and establish that elements of elven culture are opposed to those sort of things. Or maybe Sue comes from a small human fishing village where people are poor, but humble fishermen and know little of the big human world. But even that tells me a lot. News travels slow in the human world. They have one, probably more poor fishing villages, so the human civilization is likely near a coast, and the wealth of the inner-kingdom does not flow to these fishers, or perhaps for some reason fishing has dried up over the last few years.

It's nice because it's still the game-world I know, but it's a little different with each group I play in it. Major elements I will still provide, but I like to keep everything to "one page or less". Players are of course not required to read up on any world-lore I provide or even listen to their fellow players, but while information I provide is always considered "available", I do not expect players to type up documents of what we role-play, so if the other players aren't listening, don't take their own notes then they are considered to "not know" that information and are required to make checks to gain it, as opposed to someone who listened or took notes and would not.

So, overall I'd say I still do most of the heavy lifting as DM, doing probably 75% of the world-building.

 

[MNblockhead]

In my current DnD 5e campaign, I run it fairly traditionally, but I also enjoys games like Inspectres, which is highly collaborative in terms of building the story. Counterintuitively, I like these kinds of games more as one shot.

Players lose the fun of exploration and discovery, and also much of problem and puzzle solving, if they are helping to build the world.


Sent from my iPhone using EN World

 

[Celebrim]

Counterintuitively, I like these kinds of games more as one shot.

I don't find that counterintuitive at all. In fact, I'd say this is precisely what those sorts of game excel at, and really, just about the only sort of thing I'd use them for. Some of the ones that most intrigue me - Fiasco, My Life with Master, Dread - seem to embrace that role with built in short story arcs and no attempt at claiming to build the equivalent of experiencing an epic novel from the inside.