NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herobizkit" data-source="post: 4585922" data-attributes="member: 36150">I enjoy campaigns with heavy NPC interaction; the 'story' can become part soap-opera, part reality-tv show at times!For DM's who are story-focused, keep in mind that you are running an interactive world for players to, well, interact with.  While is it oftentimes tempting to force them down your story path to a pre-set conclusion, it seldom works.You can alleviate this by creating plots over stories.  All a story is, really, is a series of connected plot devices.  When I DM, I try to run an episodic series of adventures instead of one grand overarching uber-plot.  In a way, I write my adventures as if they were stand-alone TV episodes.  In a TV series, you CAN have an overarching plot, but every one in a while there is a standalone episode that is run separately from the "main" plot that showcases a character or character's past, interaction with teammates, or just some random one-off something-to-do ("filler" episode).To this end, when creating stories, it's far more important to think in terms of 'plots' rather than try and wedge the players into doing exactly what you want to reach your story conclusion.  Like a TV show, each plot can be described in a sentence or two.  It is the actions taken by the players that decide whether or not the plot gets resolved (they beat the Big Bad, find the MacGuffing, or eat the Big Mac).  But what if the players don't do what you envision them doing in your story?  Here's my solution: create an NPC party that travels in parallel with the players, but isn't always on-camera.  Because you always control the NPC's, you can dictate how they do/did things, and you can share your vision with the other players in-game by way of PC-NPC interaction (with the actual "B" team, with other NPC villagers et al who have encountered the B-team, or actual evidence of the B-team's exploits)I have done this with my current solo campaign.  My player (and co) enter a dungeon, search it high and low, and leave victorious.  Meanwhile, I send the B-team in behind him and make them be more thorough than he was.  Sometimes, I'll send them ahead into the next level of dungeon and have them come back and report what they found.  Sometimes I'll have the player encounter the NPC group in the middle of an important  discovery.  It drives my player crazy because he is now competing with these NPC's to find more treasure, get further ahead, and be "better" than them.  It's all smoke and mirrors, but I advance my NPC B-team in levels and/or throw them when I feel that a dungeon is getting too stale or I feel that it's time for a "one-off" from the main plot.</blockquote>

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