A New Kind of Campaign (Feedback Wanted)

[MojoGM]

I think this is an excellent idea, the reason being that this is EXACTLY how I plan to run my upcoming Ptolus game (probably starting end of the year/early 2007).

Yes, it is ambitious, and yes, it will be a lot of work, but I think I'm ready for it.

I think organization is the key, and keep it fresh. With a constantly changing cast of characters, it will be hard to keep track of subplots and so forth. A group website is a must.

I also had thought of the possibility of doing side sessions, though I'm not sure how much this will be utilized. I plan on putting it out there though. And hopefully some interaction will take place on the group website, possibly YAHOO GROUPS, which we use for some other games (unless someone has a better suggestion )

The way I plan to do it (at least at first) is to have all the characters be members of the City Watch, working out of the same station (Ptolus has stations in each district). This way it makes sense that they all know each other and not all are on patrol all the time.

I hope the game will expand past this, and plan on letting the characters take any path they choose, but this is a good hook.

We'll see if this experiment rockets to the sky or crashes and burns

Good luck on your attempt as well!

 

[gizmo33]

I don't get how this is different from normal or why this is "old school". Sounds like normal campaign management to me - at least the parts about keeping track of time. People don't track time continuously? Do people just have campaign worlds and people go adventuring in them and there's no tracking of events? Nobody knows when the BBEG was killed? Several different groups can all kill him at different times? Nobody's PCs ever get older? Do NPCs?

The only thing is that depending on the situation it might not make sense to rigidly enforce the progression of the timeline. If I understand what you wrote, you're going to progress time according to a rigid fixed point. The problem, for example, could be that my character is camped out on a mini-quest outside of some BBEG's castle, and then you're DMing another adventure group who progresses the timeline two weeks ahead. To go back to my mini campaign and assume that my character sat there outside of the fortress for 2 weeks entertaining peasants with his banjo is stretching it.

 

[MojoGM]

I think what makes it different (and more difficult) is managing time exactly when you have different characters coming and going.

Week one has PCs A, B, C, D, E, and F

Week two has PCs - A, C, and E and F

Then in between sessions pcs B and D get together for a mini session

Next session has PCs - A, B, C and E

Is this session taking place at the same time that B and D are doing there mini session? How could B be involved with both?

That's what I think he means. I'm still pondering how to best keep track of who is when where (as I'm a stickler for that sort of thing)

 

[GQuail]

I don't get how this is different from normal or why this is "old school". Sounds like normal campaign management to me - at least the parts about keeping track of time. People don't track time continuously? Do people just have campaign worlds and people go adventuring in them and there's no tracking of events? Nobody knows when the BBEG was killed? Several different groups can all kill him at different times? Nobody's PCs ever get older? Do NPCs?

Well, every game I've played has always been a "one group" thing: so time is tracked, but it's impossible to kill the BBEG at different times because everyone is together. Alternate PCs are an oddity reserved for high-fatality games or people who had to retire PCs for misc reasons but get them back.

The idea of a game with one major dungeon but multiple groups exploring it and the area around it (some different players, some alternate characters of other players) is one that was common in Greyhawk and the older editions of D&D, but definatly feel out of favour a bit in recent times. If you still do it, then hey, go you: but I don't think it's anywhere near as common as it used to be, and since it's the way Gygax used to do it, "old school" seems justified. (It is, however, an idea this thread is making me reconsider for future campaigns to make player absences less of a factor: though as the OP notes, it only really works with more episodic campaigns)

Unless you're misunderstanding his "tracking of time" idea just to mean "observing the flow of time in the game world": because, yes, I consider my in-game calendar quite important, and often joke about how in 6 months real time they've only gone through three weeks game time or what have you. ;-)

The only thing is that depending on the situation it might not make sense to rigidly enforce the progression of the timeline. If I understand what you wrote, you're going to progress time according to a rigid fixed point. The problem, for example, could be that my character is camped out on a mini-quest outside of some BBEG's castle, and then you're DMing another adventure group who progresses the timeline two weeks ahead. To go back to my mini campaign and assume that my character sat there outside of the fortress for 2 weeks entertaining peasants with his banjo is stretching it.

Yeah, you've got to be careful with it. If you have a sidequest they have to be "out of time" to an extent until they finish, and then catchy up: so they get to finish the quest, but on return they find themselves hanging about for two weeks before returning to the dungeon.

Alternatievly, they finish the side quest, come back and go dungeon crawling in some limited capacity, but can't do anything in a certain area because that's where "the other party" did something in the fortnight that passed: but it would take quite metagamey assumptions to make that work and avoid the "Killing people twice" thing.

The 1E DMG discusses time units and how to keep multiple parties matched up in the same world, does it not?

Heh, I am reminded of my own game in which an absent PC was left behind at a boat and the rest of the group ended a session pinned down under enemy fire: they tried to peek out and signal for help with a mirror, but it got shot. THe next session that absent PC was back and he played his characetr hearing trouble, running to help, trying to take a shot at the villains..... but he critically missed and ended up shooting past the villains and hitting a mirror one of his pinned down colleagues was waving. That confused people for the whole session. ;-)

 

[gizmo33]

B can't be involved in both. The way I keep track of who is doing what where is to keep an adventure log. Not only does this help with multiple players, multiple groups, and multiple characters (which often all overlap IMC), but it also lends some realism to the situation. Was the BBEG killed last week or last year? This certainly helps with roleplaying, because an NPC would reference the season, or the date, or even just relative order of events. If a DM is not keeping track of time, I'm not really sure how he's managing all of this. My campaign world has run for about 60 years of fantasy time. In that time NPCs and PCs have aged and died. Is this "old school" now? Without time management, it would stretch believablility to think that a given PC has walked around the world 7800 times and not aged a day. Or have no idea when BBEG2 was killed relative to BBEG1.

Adventure logs take hardly any time to set up compared to the hours spent gaming. Session #, characters participating, starting date, and then entries.
Entries in my log look something like:

Time: 2 weeks - walking to Bree
met Strider
Time: 1 week to Weather Top
fought wraiths - Frodo wounded - morgul knife

I use the "Time:" notation on the left so that my eye can pick out the time entries. I go down the list of entries and total up the time that has passed, then figure out the current date. So if another character (say Arwen) wants to join the campaign, I compare the current dates of the two campaigns - whatever kinds of time needs to pass in order to synchronize the two campaigns is then assumed to have passed unless it would make no sense (ie. Arwen is in the middle of a fight with wraiths at the time we stopped that campaign thread) When things make no sense, the player then either sits out the session or we find another character that can be played.

I tend to be lazy about totalling up the time if there's no interaction between different groups. If player C misses a few sessions, and he wants to know how much time character C has to make magic items, it's easy enough to take a few minutes to compute the current date and let him know. Otherwise, I tend to let it go until I feel the season has changed.

Really frequent and important interaction between different groups is probably not feasible, not because of keeping track of what/when but because of play issues. If group A and group B are both exploring different parts of the same BBEG's castle, and group A wants to go off and buy some magic items for two weeks, you can't just progress B's timeline for two weeks with no explanation while they're standing in the dungeon. And you can't let A return and kill the BBEG with their new magic items before group B has had a chance (because otherwise what was B doing for two weeks?)

Again, it's not really hard to log events so that you know when this is going to happen. The tough thing is to figure out what to do about it. It's hard to avoid stopping the game, saying

"We have to stop playing here now because group B has been in the dungeon potentially for the last two weeks while you guys were buying magic items, and they could have killed BBEG by now. I need to play that out with group B before you guys (group A) continue."

or doing things like that. But there are some common sense rules that my different gaming groups follow. I also avoid the "two groups vs. one BBEG" type situations for this reason though, groups tend to be seperated by enough distance that they rarely affect each other.

What I find extremely difficult to do is log round-by-round, minute-by-minute time passing in a dungeon. That's obnoxious because there's so much stuff going on. I tend to just handwave the time (oh, you've been in the dungeon 2 hours). I don't know if I could do better with a table top RPG without really slowing the game down.

 

[GQuail]

I think what makes it different (and more difficult) is managing time exactly when you have different characters coming and going.

Week one has PCs A, B, C, D, E, and F

Week two has PCs - A, C, and E and F

Then in between sessions pcs B and D get together for a mini session

Next session has PCs - A, B, C and E

Is this session taking place at the same time that B and D are doing there mini session? How could B be involved with both?

That's what I think he means. I'm still pondering how to best keep track of who is when where (as I'm a stickler for that sort of thing)

Ignoring calender nicities for a moment: assuming a campaign start date of Day 1, each delve is presumed to take place on a day. Players spend time points to have those adventures: so at the end of the first session, everyone who took part has to spend a point, and comes up to Day 2.

Next session, people who were in the first one may want to spend days to heal: after all thats done, the adventure takes place on the appropriate day (let's say day 4) and the rest of the party have to advance to that day. So even though a player hasn't played yet and has "spare days", if he's aprt of this delve he must logically take part on this day.

Session 3 has B in it, but he did a side quest instead of session 2? Then his side quest has to fit the timeline: if his sidequest took him 3 days, then he might be sitting on a day 5 or 6 point, and that's the first time he becomes available.

The problem is players trying to play the main dungeon and sidequests at the same time: if they have a sidequest which carries on over several session, the DM may need to pre-determine a rough "time of return" for him, or instead ban the PC from participating until he returns.

(Of course, if player A was unwilling to tak epart in session 3 because it meant "wasting a day" waiting for player B to return.... this is all something they should be sorting out beforehand on their hand website, as mentioned previously. ;-) )

 

[gizmo33]

The 1E DMG discusses time units and how to keep multiple parties matched up in the same world, does it not?

You're right. It didn't occur to me that the 3E rules don't discuss this. I'm not trying to say "you're playing DnD wrong" if all people are doing is stringing together modules for groups and not really keeping track of what's going on in the world. But I, as a DM, enjoy developing a campaign world (in addition to running adventures), and I can't imagine doing that without keeping track of when and where things happened.

Mega-dungeon crawls might be old-fashioned, but time-line issues arise outside of dungeons as well. I didn't think it was old school to think that two characters from two different groups might meet in town somewhere. I'm not trying to judge, and I don't take offense to the "old school" label, it's just that until now I though everyone with multiple goups of players and characters played that way.

I don't consider this "old school" as much as "campaign style adventuring". For example - Frodo is trying to destroy the Ring while Aragorn is fighting the armies of Mordor. If you're not keeping track of time in your campaign, how the heck does a person know what's going on?

 

[airwalkrr]

I think what makes it different (and more difficult) is managing time exactly when you have different characters coming and going.

Week one has PCs A, B, C, D, E, and F

Week two has PCs - A, C, and E and F

Then in between sessions pcs B and D get together for a mini session

Next session has PCs - A, B, C and E

Is this session taking place at the same time that B and D are doing there mini session? How could B be involved with both?

That's what I think he means. I'm still pondering how to best keep track of who is when where (as I'm a stickler for that sort of thing)

Let's say the events of Week one take place during the week of Coldeven 1-7, the events of Week two take place during the week of Coldeven 8-14, the mini mission takes place during the weeks of Coldeven 15-21, as does the session for Week three. Consequently, player B would have to forfeit his chance to play during Week three to play the mini session, unless I decided that the mini session took only a small part of the week of Coldeven 15-21.

 

[Janx]

I think the OP is trying to solve multiple problems at once. It kinda muddies up what might be the core of his idea.

You got some ideas on making the game session run faster. Basically streamlining mapping, skills, fighting, etc. Whether the ideas are good or not, they're not immediately relevant. There may be other ways to make your games have a controllable length.

You got some ideas on character creation. They assume a problem, where depending on the DM/players, one might not exist. Again, they're actually external to what I think is the core idea.

You got some ideas on regulating upkeep costs, as an active variable in the game. I think this is connected to your core idea. Mainly, it seems that you want time to pass in the game, and you want players who don't adventure to have to pay costs when they don't play.

I think the core nugget of your campaign idea, is you want a dungeon, next to a city. For whatever group of players show up at the table for that game, you want them to be able to go into the dungeon, kill monsters, take their stuff, go back to the city. And then you'll measure how much time passed, and apply time for healing/upkeep costs to the players at the next session.

The core piece is that all PCs return to the city at the end of the session, allowing you to regroup the party at the next session. No cliff-hangers, or long termed plots. The game session is about going into the dungeon, and coming back.

The biggest challenge I see, if getting the party to go back to the city. What's to stop the party (besides the DM) from stocking up on supplies, and staying down there until they hit 20th level? You might have level training requirements to help encourage them to go back to the surface to level up.

Like a lot of TV shows, you need the party to reset to the status quo at the end of the adventure (everybody is in town, at the inn).

The core idea might make for a fun campaign. It wouldn't be high role-playing or story driven. But it could be fun.

 

[MojoGM]

The time management aspect is certainly doable, it will just take a little more work and calculation...

I'm looking forward to trying a more "living" game...we'll see how it goes...