Campaign Ideas

[Zankafen]

OK, feel free to throw this comment in the trash, but I've seen versions of your plan in games I've played in. Usually it means your players will fight the guards, and it's basically starting the game saying "I'm going to railroad you guys into this, you have no decisions to make."

A better way is to sit down and say "OK, you guys are all in this neutral city, you're all associated with this guy (patron). You all know him somehow, and you all know each other. How do you know him - and how do you know each other? Make some strong relationships here - if something happened to him, or one of your other friends, you'd be out and doing something. So what's the story?" They'll come up with stuff. Maybe the undead is someone's reanimated brother. Maybe the orc and hte human were both left for dead on the same battlefield. And so on.

that's actually not a bad idea... i might use that. i was actually afraid that they would try to take on the guards. though i can assure them that they will lose.

 

[Ry]

that's actually not a bad idea... i might use that. i was actually afraid that they would try to take on the guards. though i can assure them that they will lose.

Think of it like this:

"Hey, can you guys head in direction A?"

vs.

"Hey, you guys can go wherever you want. Except if you do X, Y, Z, or basically anything besides A, I'm going to stop you. I assure you the forces keeping you from X, Y, Z, and any other letter you think of are powerful enough to do the job."

That's my experience.

 

[Ry]

Recipe for disaster:

1. players make characters without any relation to other player characters
2. players are told they should act according to their character
3. GM tries to make everyone a cohesive party

Best way to solve it is change 1. That way 2 means that the GM isn't the only one trying for 3.

 

[humble minion]

I generally agree with what everyone else is saying. Making character backgrounds so free-form and independant, and relying on a shared urgent threat (such as imprisonment) to weld wildly different PCs into a functional group, is asking for trouble.

May I suggest making it the players problem, rather than yours? Tell them something like 'Give me a character background and in it explain how your character knows at least one of the other PCs and why they would adventure with them - and this goes double for you, undead-guy.'

 

[Zankafen]

Guys and gals, i appreciate the interest in my opening scene. I really do, but i was wondering if anyone had ideas for a general campaign plot...

 

[pogre]

A method I have used is to have all the players privately give you two adventure plot hooks related to their PC. Warn them ahead of time they may not get exactly what they want. Throw all of the ideas out on a table and try to imagine a thread running through them all. A few ideas like this can really invigorate you to come up with a cool and covoluted plot.