A New Kind of Campaign (Feedback Wanted)

[GQuail]

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?

If you don't think it's old school, then I humbly suggest you've never played anythign new school. ;-)

It's not unheard of to see groups still playing this way, but in my experience two different groups playing in the same world at the same time is pretty rare: certainly, my RPGing circle doesn't contain anyone doing that, and my attempts to include a "crossover" adventure between two groups were considered odd and unusual by most of them.

I don't think I can pick a specific time people stopped doing it, but certainly the growth in story-based games and adventures that aren't site-based and have long-term effects makes this kind of gameplay harder: it's no coincidence this talk of a rotating group goes hand in hand with talk of a Greyhawk-esque mega dungeon.

So, to use your Lord of the Rings analogy: if my group were the Fellowship, it's unlikely they would break up for any real length of time, and if they did they would expect that the characters who departed would need to be retired and new ones rolled up to join the main quest. If that meant Aragorn became an NPC and instead they had to play Gollum or Faramir, then that's wht would happen: and to be honest, it would partly be my problem for investing the Frodo player with so much power over where the adventure went anyway. ;-)

GMs with more than one operation group in a campaign world are rare, or at least nowhere near as common as older editions: that's why this post is here, because the OP clearly wants advise on how to do something he considers a change of pace. But since it's the only way you've ever done it, you're in a perfect position to help him!

 

[gizmo33]

If you don't think it's old school, then I humbly suggest you've never played anythign new school. ;-)

No need to be humble about it I guess I haven't played anything new school. I've run plenty of 3E adventures, but I guess modules don't really assume a certain campaign management style, so I wouldn't have been aware of this.

I don't think I can pick a specific time people stopped doing it, but certainly the growth in story-based games and adventures that aren't site-based and have long-term effects makes this kind of gameplay harder: it's no coincidence this talk of a rotating group goes hand in hand with talk of a Greyhawk-esque mega dungeon.

I would think that story-based games would increase the need for campaign time management. Since rather than just sit in a room and stare at a wall, a monster would actually remember having seen and done things, and the DM would have to place that within the time-context of the various PCs that interact with the monster. Maybe story-based here means "railroady"/scripted. In that case, I can see that knowing what's going to happen before hand would alleviate the need to calculate the passing of time and determine the order of events during/after the fact. The more interest I took in the story of my campaign world, the more I had to keep accurate time records IME.

So, to use your Lord of the Rings analogy: if my group were the Fellowship, it's unlikely they would break up for any real length of time,

This is true IMC as well. PCs tend to pool their resources, so they'd be likely to choose one quest or the other, but not both. However, during downtime it's not unusual for a subset of my players to follow a side-quest. Typically the non-adventuring players just rest or whatever. Two groups simultaneously adventuring in the same milieu is amost impossible to manage at some point. When I DM two groups of characters, they're usually in different regions, or their rest-schedules accomodate each other's activity. Plus there is plenty of out-of-game meta-gaming negotiation to make it all work. Still - knowing the time frame helps manage even an individual group - knowing the season, knowing how long it's been since PCs have last been to town, etc. I think I'd feel lost without it.

Imagine that somebody's character causes a huge explosion that's visible across the world at 4pm on Wednesday. Now you have a situation where every other timeline that's advanced beyond that one is anachronistic because on 4pm Wednesday on the other time-lines, no one observed the explosion. Old-school or not, there IMO are simply limits to the versimilitude of the game that you can accomplish.

And what sense does it make for a character to spend seeming years adventuring and never age? If the game is story-based, don't the characters have children? Don't they grow up? Even in rather hack-n-slash game, a demon-lord takes so many years to reform himself in the Abyss after having his material form destroyed. You don't know when that happens if you don't know what day it is. I'm really surprised (although I don't dispute, cause I wouldn't know) that most people aren't tracking time in their games. New school PCs don't have offspring? They don't own castles and pay taxes?

GMs with more than one operation group in a campaign world are rare, or at least nowhere near as common as older editions: that's why this post is here, because the OP clearly wants advise on how to do something he considers a change of pace. But since it's the only way you've ever done it, you're in a perfect position to help him!

I certainly could describe my campaign management in more detail if he had questions. But as another poster pointed out, there are actually many aspects to the OP besides time management. Above, I gave an outline of what my campaign log looked like. My basic advice would be to keep track of the time in all campaigns and see how it works out. I could give more details if I knew more about the characters involved and the expectations. If a certain level of accuracy is desired, then the OP might want to consider using software to track things - that's what I actually do but there are paper-based analogs to what I do too.

 

[GQuail]

I would think that story-based games would increase the need for campaign time management.

I meant specifically that the multi-group, one dungeon was made obsolete in groups who adopted more "narrative" styles: to whit, if your game is about the battle between your players and a cult who they chase around the continent, you can't always magically drag and drop that 3rd level PC they played three sessions and 140 miles ago, and if there's three or four adventures in a row about how a bounty on the PCs head has them being chased as a group out of a village, why are any of the other PCs electing to join this group between sessions?


I'm not saying that DMs of 3.x don't measure time: just that they're reason for doing so is because of the world, nto because of making multiple groups dungeon delves mesh together, and so the OP posts this thread specifically because he needs a slightly different system than he'll be used to, because it's dealing with such an odd idea.

Still - knowing the time frame helps manage even an individual group - knowing the season, knowing how long it's been since PCs have last been to town, etc. I think I'd feel lost without it.

Again, that's not unusual: I do it, and make a point mid-session of noting on my IC calendar when a day passes. The point of my post (and I'm sorry I didn't make this clear earlier) was your shock that a group wouldn't do this because it would lead to "BBEG gettnig killed twice" otherwise: and in my experience, there just aren't that many people playing that way anymore, so to a lot of people tracking time units of individual PCs to avoid that is a non-issue. The OP is in no confusion about this, hence the title of his thread: it's not the norm to him, or to most people on ENworld.

Imagine that somebody's character causes a huge explosion that's visible across the world at 4pm on Wednesday. Now you have a situation where every other timeline that's advanced beyond that one is anachronistic because on 4pm Wednesday on the other time-lines, no one observed the explosion. Old-school or not, there IMO are simply limits to the versimilitude of the game that you can accomplish.

Well, in my campaign, this type of situation wouldbn't come up: except in the short distance, short term context of "I caused an explosion down town while you were talking to the Mages guild twelve blocks away", which has indeed occured and does require DM arbitration as to how it all plugs together, but in that case I'm talking about things that happen in the course of one in-game day: things spaced out over a session, where you jump between different groups spread out over a small area. The idea that I'd be running more than one group apart for so long that the kind of problem you describe could emerge is alien to a lot of D&Ders: or at least, would be an odd campaign, not the norm you seem to think it is. That idea is "old school", and you'd be hard pushed to find someone unwilling to class it as such.

I'm really surprised (although I don't dispute, cause I wouldn't know) that most people aren't tracking time in their games. New school PCs don't have offspring? They don't own castles and pay taxes?

We track our offspring: we just don't play them as a seperate PC group at the same time. ;-)

I think we've muddled about a bit over some sentence phrasing here, and should probably quit whinging at each other and let airwalkrr have the stage again. I'm keen to hear about how his Castle Greyhawk's ruins are going to look. ;-)

 

[gizmo33]

I'm not saying that DMs of 3.x don't measure time: just that they're reason for doing so is because of the world, nto because of making multiple groups dungeon delves mesh together,

Oh! I actually thought that you said they didn't measure time. The OP was saying stuff like "if PCs don't go in the dungeon, then they rest, and pay upkeep." It was hard to tell exactly what was unconventional about that. The 3E DMG had rules for upkeep.

or at least, would be an odd campaign, not the norm you seem to think it is. That idea is "old school", and you'd be hard pushed to find someone unwilling to class it as such.

I agree - It's not the norm to have to deal with these issues. In fact, even the most precise time keeping is not going to remove a bunch of paradoxes and inconveniences that arise from multiple adventuring groups. I think you've misunderstood which things I said were normal and which weren't because I jumbled them together. In fact, based on what I'm hearing about what "normal" timekeeping is in 3E, I would think that it would be sufficient for the kind of game he wants to run. To be sure, he'll still have time-line problems, but more precision is not the problem, the problem is people showing up and playing when they need to. The problem is that no matter how precise the time records, IME you still have to stop the game in uncomfortable places.

We track our offspring: we just don't play them as a seperate PC group at the same time. ;-)

As I now understand your time keeping procedures, they are sufficient for all of the problems I think worth tracking in my own games (and I never meant to question that they were sufficient for your game.). I think I just misunderstood earlier and got the impression that there was no timekeeping or tracking of events in gaming sessions. That it was somehow a novel idea that if a PC were doing something on a given day, that he couldn't also be somewhere else doing something else.

I think we've muddled about a bit over some sentence phrasing here, and should probably quit whinging at each other and let airwalkrr have the stage again. I'm keen to hear about how his Castle Greyhawk's ruins are going to look. ;-)

I hope my posts aren't over-writing his. I've said a number of things that I think about the feasibility and options regarding tracking multiple groups of players in a game. My surprise was geniune and not hostile. I hope the OP can make use of the stuff I wrote - within our conversation are some pretty specific bits of advice and caveats. Oh well.