Too Many Campaign ideas...

[HeavensThunderHammer]

I sat down last night and counted out the number of campaigns I either A.) Have the material to run and B.) Ideas I would like to run...

And between D&D 3.5, Exalted, SWSE, Scion and Ars Magica, I have 27 Campaign ideas. (15/16 D&D ideas alone)


How in my lifetime will I ever get ot try these? It's just depressing. My current game I run is Exalted, and I have no idea if my current group will ever try 3.5 again Or Scion. Or Ars Magica. The worst part is, most of these 27 ideas are easily equivelant to Lvl 1 to 20 2 year campaigns. I am way too creative and don't have nearly enough time in the rest of my life to run these. Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

 

[Corathon]

Write them up and publish them (either fo free, on the web, or for money if you can find a publisher). It will allow you to scratch your creative itch, and somebody will get to play in the campaign that you envisioned. The downside is that it's a lot of work.

 

[billd91]

Count your lucky stars that you have to many ideas.

Pick a few that seem most promising now and present them to the players to see what they want to play next. Get the winner of the discussion into production and move the runner-up into the back-up slot (if plans change). File the rest away as future ideas to be revisited.

It's too much stress to fuss over stuff you don't have time to play as long as you're playing other stuff you also want to play. Save the fuss for when you don't have a game going on and can't find enough players. Then a bit of frustration is OK. Until that day, just pat yourself on the back knowing that you have ready back-ups if the primary campaign stalls out.

Over the course of the next several years, work through as many as you can or as many as you feel like.

 

[gamerprinter]

I sat down last night and counted out the number of campaigns I either A.) Have the material to run and B.) Ideas I would like to run...

And between D&D 3.5, Exalted, SWSE, Scion and Ars Magica, I have 27 Campaign ideas. (15/16 D&D ideas alone)


How in my lifetime will I ever get ot try these? It's just depressing. My current game I run is Exalted, and I have no idea if my current group will ever try 3.5 again Or Scion. Or Ars Magica. The worst part is, most of these 27 ideas are easily equivelant to Lvl 1 to 20 2 year campaigns. I am way too creative and don't have nearly enough time in the rest of my life to run these. Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

It might be worth seeing how you can combine ideas, to knock those 27 ideas into six to ten campaigns. Perhaps ideas that don't seem to mix might mix very well, and create a complete unique setting.

Write them up and publish them (either fo free, on the web, or for money if you can find a publisher). It will allow you to scratch your creative itch, and somebody will get to play in the campaign that you envisioned. The downside is that it's a lot of work.

This is me! I am currently developing two different settings, both intended for publication, and both are exclusionary - they cannot go together.

1. Kaidan: a Japanese Ghost Story setting - a cross between early feudal Japan and Asian Horror.

2. Iron Age Celts - pre-Roman European like region with hundreds of Celtic clans...

Unfortunately, my players don't care for Japanese settings so aside from some play-testing of classes, I doubt they'll ever play that one, but its been a goal of mine for a long time to do this.

GP

 

[slwoyach]

I think every DM has that problem, I currently have 7 camnpaign pages on my Obsidian Portal account and I'm only running one as a pbp. I had a lot more that I deleted. If I sat down and started counting God knows how many campaign ideas that I never got around to there are.

Too bad we have to earn money for the roofs over our heads and the food in our stomachs, or we could gave 16 hours a day and get through all those ideas.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Send them to Hollywood. Those guys are desperate for ideas. And they pay $$$!

 

[meomwt]

I sat down last night and counted out the number of campaigns I either A.) Have the material to run and B.) Ideas I would like to run...

And between D&D 3.5, Exalted, SWSE, Scion and Ars Magica, I have 27 Campaign ideas. (15/16 D&D ideas alone)


How in my lifetime will I ever get ot try these? It's just depressing. My current game I run is Exalted, and I have no idea if my current group will ever try 3.5 again Or Scion. Or Ars Magica. The worst part is, most of these 27 ideas are easily equivelant to Lvl 1 to 20 2 year campaigns. I am way too creative and don't have nearly enough time in the rest of my life to run these. Any thoughts on how to deal with this?

I sympathise. There's a ton of stuff I want to run, including AoW, Castle Whiterock, Tomb of Abysthor and a couple of ideas of my own. Right now, we are rotating DM's, which means I get less time to run stuff, and my next assignment will be Shadowrun (fun, but not what I was planning).

 

[Desdichado]

Send them to Hollywood. Those guys are desperate for ideas. And they pay $$$!

Nah, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's the execution that they are desperate for.

Sometimes when I'm really jazzed to run something and it doesn't look like its in the cards for the foreseeable future, I'll round up a Pbp group. It's not really the same experience, but it's a fun exercise in its own right.

 

[HeavensThunderHammer]

Thanks for the helpful suggestion guys. Instead of writing to Hollywood, I think I actually just need to write some novels, that will blow of the steam in my brain I think.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I'm personally trying to rescue 4 from a dying Palm PDA- each campaign composed of 7 memos, typed via stylus.

And that doesnt count the ones I have written up in physical form or in few on my Mac. Or the ones I wrote up and posted here on ENWorld (mostly in the Campaign Ideas thread, linked to in my sig).

Which, BTW, is a good idea: get some of them out of your system somewhat by posting them in that thread. You'll help someone out by giving hem a good idea, and your creative side will be stoked by seeing your idea out there in the world.