Should we build for our players?

[Wik]

So recently, I've been kind of playing around with running an African-based Campaign, once my Savage Tide game comes to and end (only 10 more adventures to go! ha ha). I wanted to base the game roughly off the area of Mali, with a bit of the Middle East and Egypt thrown in for good taste.

As I began to draw the map, and throw in the various cultures (Anthropology classes have ruined me, man), I began to think: will this appeal to my players?

A few months ago, there was a thread on the boards about a Polynesian campaign. While I thought the idea was sort of neat, I kept thinking "it's not a game I'd want to play in". A few weeks ago, during a talk with a fellow GM, he mentioned some of the campaigns he had been involved in, and I mentally would say "hey, that sounds like it would have been fun" or "not worth my time".

My question is, when the GM creates his world, how much thought should he be spending on the players in it? I know that, no matter what world I create, my group will play in it. We play for more reasons than just the silly game, and if I wanted to run a spelljammer campaign that was filled with every degree of silliness, my players would grumble and eventually play it. If I wanted to run a dark horror game, they'd clap their hands and play it. And if I wanted to play a campaign where they were all journalists in the Afghanistan war (I came close to doing it), they'd play it, even if they were a bit confused.

I guess the question boils down to this: when the GM creates a campaign, who should he try to please more, his players or himself?

 

[Piratecat]

Modeling an incredibly complex world that none of your players want to adventure in can be fun in its own right, but is really intellectual masturbation if your goal is to play D&D.

I think that a DM's world should please both players and DM, but I'd lean a little more towards the players. After all, they aren't the ones with the control. If a DM then wants to introduce a favorite culture or plot device, that's easy for him to do while giving PCs a change to avoid it -- but you need player trust and buy-in to really make your world sing. That's hard to get if they aren't interested in the initial setting.

 

[gizmo33]

I guess the question boils down to this: when the GM creates a campaign, who should he try to please more, his players or himself?

Both. You simply need both DM and players for the game.

IME people will play in any game that's well run and organized, regardless of the sub-genre of fantasy or whatever. This means that I err on the side of making things interesting for the DM because I can make a setting more interesting for players if I like it first. The elements that make for a good game are universal anyway IMO. If someone isn't going to have a good time because their character can't wear platemail in the tropics, that's pretty weird, and not the kind of player I tend to want in my game anyway.

 

[Brimshack]

I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to make unusual cultural sources more attractive to players, and I have ideas, but I don't know if I have a magic bullet at present. This is one of the reasons I tend to work with seagoing campaigns lately; it gives me an excuse to run characters from setting to setting. I think the interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds might be more interesting than any given odd setting would be in itself. With both Africa and Polynesia (as well as Native American settings) the notion of European style characters showing up on a boat is interesting to me, and it can be played from either end (you travel and meet these strange new people or strangers show up and turn your word upside down). But with Africa you could even use regular trade routes. For those players that might not be interested in purely African characters and setting, perhaps they are playing the lone Crusader who has ventured South along the trade routes into sub-saharan Africa.

One thing that interests me about all of those settings is the possibility of good fighting good. It could be for example that the travelers are not essentially cruel or evil, they might even mean well, but their mere presence in some of these settings is a tremendous danger to the local population. It could well be that after a period of interaction the locals decide that they absolutely MUST drive the visitors out, even those who might have redeeming value. To me the drama of two forces for good squaring off against each other is an interesting prospect (very Mahabharata); it involves a moral dilemma absent in much of the standard good versus evil bit. Some on the 2 sides might regret their course of action, they might have to kill someone they respect, perhaps even love), but they will do it anyway because their interests are just that diametrically opposed.

I guess one question I would ask is what do you mean by designing it for the players? Does this mean thinking about the sorts of things that players would enjoy? Or does it mean designing the world around a specific plot line for those characters? Do you need to decide what specifically the characters will be before beginning?

Some of my most successful campaigns were met with grumbles from the players, and in the end the oddness that they objected to at first became the most enjoyable feature. ...some didn't work though. To me, I guess the question would be if you can break down the things that players enjoy about a campaign into components they like, can you then reporduce it in your new setting. A player might not like the idea of playing in Africa, but if he really likes political intrigue, then the success of the campaign will most likely rest on your ability to generate that intrigue within the African setting.

 

[Wik]

Some of my most successful campaigns were met with grumbles from the players, and in the end the oddness that they objected to at first became the most enjoyable feature.

This has happened to me several times. Most recently, it happened about two years ago, when I really wanted to play Omega World d20 (From Polyhedron). One player really hated the idea of rolling up a random character; he thought the idea of a "hero with lobster claws" was just stupid. Eventually, after *much* nagging on my part (I eventually the group into it because it was my birthday, and I was GMing), we played... only to have that player roll up a character with lobster claws (a 1 in 100 chance!). Anyways, after a good six hour session, we were all so overjoyed (and laughing our butts off!) that post-apocalytpic gaming - serious or not - has become a regular side-trek for our group.

Which leads me to this:

IME people will play in any game that's well run and organized, regardless of the sub-genre of fantasy or whatever. This means that I err on the side of making things interesting for the DM because I can make a setting more interesting for players if I like it first. The elements that make for a good game are universal anyway IMO. If someone isn't going to have a good time because their character can't wear platemail in the tropics, that's pretty weird, and not the kind of player I tend to want in my game anyway.

This sums up my design philosophy,I think. I have made worlds that cater entirely to the players (my brief stint running Forgotten Realms springs to mind...) and it sort of imploded. I've also done that bit where the whole group works on a campaign setting together, with everyone suggesting what they'd like to see and the GM sort of gluing it all together, and while that worked for six months, no one really had any particular attachment to the setting. Most of my successful campaigns (not including Savage Tide) have happened when I went nuts designing the world.

I guess I already knew my answer to my own question, but I'm curious to see what other people think. It's sort of a "GM's responsibility" issue, and I'd like to hear more about how people see the topic.

 

[Umbran]

I guess the question boils down to this: when the GM creates a campaign, who should he try to please more, his players or himself?

As others have noted - the effort spent designing a world is wasted if the players don't like it. But, of course, the effort of designing a world is wasted if the GM doesn't like it either.

So, it must please both. Luckily, we don't require that every last detail be seen as riveting by all those involved all the time. We simply require that it be enjoyable to everyone overall, in the long average.

 

[jollyninja]

When creating a campaign world, the only thought i give players is, are there compelling enough character choices? organizations to join and oppose? Does it include the archetypes I know my players like to play? Is there enough detail that being from villiage X in nation Y actually means something different then being from villiage A in nation B? That's it, making enough detail that the players can create whatever background they want. I'm not nessisarily going to try to include every race or class that's out there but there will be plenty of options. After I've got that setled, it's all about me. of course, that kind of info is about half of what I do when world building so I guess it's a good mix of the two.

 

[takyris]

In the ideal-but-still-imperfect world, but DM will try to make a world that the players will like, and the players will give that world a chance even if it's not something that leaps out and grabs them with its coolness.

And after a few sessions, if anyone still hates it, they'll say so, and the group can try something else.

 

[GreatLemur]

Modeling an incredibly complex world that none of your players want to adventure in can be fun in its own right, but is really intellectual masturbation if your goal is to play D&D.

I think that a DM's world should please both players and DM, but I'd lean a little more towards the players. After all, they aren't the ones with the control. If a DM then wants to introduce a favorite culture or plot device, that's easy for him to do while giving PCs a change to avoid it -- but you need player trust and buy-in to really make your world sing. That's hard to get if they aren't interested in the initial setting.

That's pretty much my take, too. But I'd also add that, in order to please everybody effectively, you try to put the player-pleasing elements up front in order to achieve buy-in with as little resistance as possible. Deeper in the meat of the campaign--and I don't mean during the 12th session, or something, just after the initial pitch, possibly after character creation, if necessary--then you bring in the stuff that you think is cool, but thought might turn the players off. If you've already got them hooked on the whole idea of the campaign, there shouldn't be a problem (assuming it's not something completely jarring to the paradigm they thought they were playing in).

My own inclination is to come up with a few campaign ideas and present them to the players before I really get deep into the setting development. That might get even more complicated if there's strong disagreement among the players about which campaign concept they'd prefer, though.

Anyway, for the record, Wik: I would be all over a North African-influenced fantasy campaign. Play up the different cultures and they exotic mythological elements well enough, and that would be completely badass.

 

[Voadam]

I guess the question boils down to this: when the GM creates a campaign, who should he try to please more, his players or himself?

Himself first/more. It is important to design for players, but more important for the DM to be happy running the game. Its a hobby you play for your own fun, not primarily as a favor to your players.

If it came to running a game my players wanted to play but I didn't want to run, I wouldn't run it. I'm fine adjusting things for player's tastes but not over my own. I've passed when friends asked me to DM a game I wasn't interested in DMing.

DMing is a lot of work, it should be fun for the DM instead of just a way to facilitate others' fun.