Breakdown (and burnout) leads to breakthrough

[jester47]

An interesting thing has happened with my gaming group. All total there have been a total of 13 people go through my group since I started it last spring. Most of them are consistant and we have leveled off at 9 regular attendees. However nine people and a DM is a large number for a game that was intended for four and a DM. And I have to admit things have been pretty tough.

I started off with the default world of greyhawk. But as we played an interesting thing occured. I found myself cutting out more and more of the world. I kept changing the City of Greyhawk to fit the story that I was presenting. In fact the story I was presenting kept changeing. What I think I was doing was trying to start off with too much. Originally I had scetched out a backstory for the campaign with an overall goal. I was going to run a module. But my backstory clashed with the module and the campaign world. This was the first problem.

Then another problem presented itself. And I discovered this as time went by. My players did not know the rules! Furthermore, I realised that the reason that I kept changeing everything was that I could. My players did not know the world. They were wholely unfamiliar with it. I could have told them Mordenkeinan was the right hand man of Iuz and they would have gone with it!

And that was when I realised my mistake. I had made the assumption that everyone know how to play, and ignored the fact that people were coming from all sorts of gaming backgrounds and styles of play. I made the assumption that people knew the world enough to keep me from drifting and to have their characters have goals on thier own. Instead the characters had goals based on what I presented. They were feeding off of my creativity and nothing was coming back my way! Also, I took a count, and discovered that half of the players did not even own a PHB!

I was tempted to send those away that did not own the rulebooks. Instead I decided that the best way to handle this situation was to teach. So, I decided to start a think tank. I decided that people needed to learn about the world, and the most detailed world is the Forgotten Realms. I decided that everyone should have the ability to DM, not just me. So I ended my campaign.

Now what we do is a lot more rewarding. We research the realms, run clinics on how to DM better, clinics on how to use the compbat rules, we do character critiques, develop our own locations in the forgotten realms and everyone gets a DMs perspective of how to do things.

One of the things I look forward to is the Furious Fighter Fracas. Everyone makes a fighter and well we fight. There are also the Mad Mage Mayhem, Radical Rouge Romp and other things that are designed to get people used to using the rules and how they work. When we start running adventures again I think things will be better, because they no longer are based on me and what I know and present.

Does anyone do anything similar? I have found this to be the best way to handle large groups of gamers.

Aaron.

 

[ashockney]

Large groups of gamers is a very interesting challenge in third edition, because many of the new elements of the game assume a four person party. The synergy among characters goes up significantly when more than four characters are used, and the monsters' abilities don't seem to compensate commensurately. As a DM, you're left building encounters on a "play it by ear" basis, which if you're experienced from 1st and 2nd Ed comes fairly naturally.

For our first third edition campaign, we ran it with the impact of testing different elements of the new rules with each encounter/adventure. So one whole module may have been the "fighter" module, and I would add "fighter levels" to monsters, create "fighter" npc's, use multi-classing "fighter" dwarves, and otherwise test different "feat builds" using the fighters to see how they combined effectively (or ineffectively). The players learned, but quickly grew tired of the lack of story, and eventually felt "up to the task" and naturally started demanding, "MORE STORY!" I hope you find a natural transition as well in your campaign.

 

[Moe Ronalds]

what? No Crazy Cleric... uh... Caboom?

 

[Jeremy]

Nope it was a catastophic calamity.

 

[Destil]

Does anyone do anything similar? I have found this to be the best way to handle large groups of gamers.[/B]

My (smaller) group did some similar things back when 3e was new and shiney, all the regulars are quite good with the rules at this point, having three expierenced as DM's helps with things a lot, though, since we all need to know the rules well. The rest of the players tend to be new to D&D in general, too, so we've become quite good at explaining the rules, and after 2 years I was quite suprised and impressed by some of the new-blood's knowlage. (Me: Unless he's a rogue, of course... then you're in real troubble. Player: No problem, I just need concealment and he can't sneak attack. Me: Dumbfounded stare for a moment... Oh, my, god. You know the rules... now you're fighter is gonna be really scarry...)

There's more, relating to the MM comming out, but I can't really discuss it.
Rule 1: You do not talk about monster fight club.
Rule 2: You do not talk about monster fight club.