Confession: I like Plot

[pawsplay]

That's a book, not a campaign. In a campaign at that point I'd have at least a year or two to learn the players and the character motivations and shape the campaign as it is needed. That's what DMs do, they don't enter the campaign at a specific late point with a specific sitution happening and then are expected to fix it.

In a book, the author can get Frodo and Gollum to do whatever he wants them to. In an RPG, the GM has to surrender some authorial privilege to the players. It is their characters, after all. Thus, there are no real guarantees.

I study psychology. One thing you hear over and over is that you can't change other people, only yourself.

Also, let's accept for a moment the premise that with the right motivators, the GM can get the players do do what he wants. How can the GM be sure of not making a mistake?

 

[Crothian]

In a book, the author can get Frodo and Gollum to do whatever he wants them to. In an RPG, the GM has to surrender some authorial privilege to the players. It is their characters, after all. Thus, there are no real guarantees.

I don't guarantee anything. But this is just a game, and a DM has many opportunities to influence what the players do if it is needed. If a campaign needs the players to go to a Volcano then the DM can state this at the beginning and allow the players to create characters that will at some point go to the volcano.

 

[pawsplay]

I don't guarantee anything. But this is just a game, and a DM has many opportunities to influence what the players do if it is needed. If a campaign needs the players to go to a Volcano then the DM can state this at the beginning and allow the players to create characters that will at some point go to the volcano.

But things change. Imagine, for a moment, that Frodo was a PC, and at a certain dramatic moment, the player decided to roleplay his moral failure.

Or what if the hobbits get a look at Morder, realized it is impregnable by any reasonable assessment, and decide to take the ring South, as far as it will go, to keep it out of Sauron's hands.

 

[Crothian]

But things change. Imagine, for a moment, that Frodo was a PC, and at a certain dramatic moment, the player decided to roleplay his moral failure.

Or what if the hobbits get a look at Morder, realized it is impregnable by any reasonable assessment, and decide to take the ring South, as far as it will go, to keep it out of Sauron's hands.

It then depends on the game. Now if everyone did decide ahead of time to go to the Volcano and then the players renege on that there could be issues between players and DM. It could turn out the players make their choices and it gets their characters killed or they fail at what they are trying to do. Or perhaps the DM alters the flow of the campaign to follow the players choices which could lead to victory or defeat. Heck, as long as the PCs are alive they still have the option to always go back to the volcano.

There are always lots of things that can happen and as I've said above it depends on the variables of the campaign, the DM, and the players.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Very interesting thread.

In my most recent campaign I had some vague plans at the start for its structure and who the BBEG would be which morphed, mutated and basically got thrown out by the end. The final confrontations were with bad guys who didn't exist until session 6 and 7 (of 20). It was a superhero game, so the players choice of action was fairly limited - when bad people are doing bad things, the PCs pretty much have to stop it. The morphing mostly took place as a result of which ideas seemed to work best, which I found most interesting. Sometimes an idea seems productive at first but turns out not to lead anywhere. A fair part of it was probably related to player interest but a large part was probably also due to my vapid, flibbertigibbet, easily-bored nature.

I think it is possible to do foreshadowing, in a sense, without having a fixed future, by re-using and developing upon characters and situations that occurred earlier in the campaign.

For example, in session 6, a group of metahumans, calling themselves Metaforce, approached the PCs warning them that the US government would send Executive Sanction, CIA super-assassins, to kill them, just as they had tried to kill Metaforce in the early 90s. In session 10, Metaforce go public, creating an artificial island in the Atlantic and declaring it an independent separatist metahuman nation. Over the next 10 sessions the PCs have various dealings with the inhabitants of this island, there is a lot of tension between the island and the world's governments. Finally in session 20, the PCs narrowly avert all out war between Metahuman Island and metahumans loyal to the US and Russia, including Executive Sanction, who the PCs only met for the first time in that final session. Then they kicked the crap out of the demon-god secretly responsible for stoking the conflict.

Looks like good foreshadowing huh? The thing is, it wasn't planned. Metaforce were just one group among many. I was constantly presenting new characters, situations and places (I wouldn't necessarily call them hooks, because usually they don't have a long-term plot attached when they first appear) in the course of the campaign. Some became important, some were never heard from again. And I had no real idea which were which at the time. It was only around session 16 or so that it had become clear to me that Metahuman Island vs humans would be a major campaign conflict, and even then it wasn't necessarily going to be the campaign's end point, I had two or three other ideas available.

As another example, an NPC superhero called America (a Captain America type) first appeared in session 3. I had absolutely nothing planned when she first showed up, I just liked the character concept. America turned out to be a 'stayer', making numerous appearances until the end of the game, almost always on the same side as the PCs but not always seeing eye-to-eye with them.

On the other hand at one point I introduced a team of superheroes called the Optimates, heroes-for-hire but more corporate, run by a Donald Trump type. I thought they would be an interesting idea but it turned out I couldn't think of a single thing to do with them. So they never showed up again until a brief mention in session 20.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Railroading is bad, (I'm in no way saying you must do A, then B, then C or else the bad guy wins, there are ALWAYS options) but keep in mind, this is what happens when something is just forgotten - consequences. I think the idea of "teleporting treasure" (as stated in another thread) that 4e purports (ie the treasure/monster/situation doesn't exist until its found by the party) stands in the way of consequences such as these. It isn't wrong, per se, just not necessarily very smart. What if the party doesn't go to "Old Montgomery's Farm" and find the sword of dragon slaying, but another party does? When the party can't deal with the threat of a later incursion of dragons in a village but another group of adventurers shows up and can, it makes for an interesting role play opportunity.

For me as a GM, everything is "teleporting treasure". Everything that's actually happened in the course of play is fixed ofc but all my secret plans can be changed if they turn out to be inferior to a new idea. So yeah, if I have created a magic item I think would be more interesting in the PCs hands than not, it can 'move'.

Tbh a lot of my ideas are pretty nebulous anyway. Lots of my characters are just names and some sort of a concept until they show up. Things crystallise more as play goes on. The death of my last campaign's Superman figure, Johnny Tomorrow, was a long standing unsolved mystery that the players never showed any interest in investigating. And the truth is, I had no real idea what caused his death, who, if anyone had killed him. I never needed to know, because the players never pursued it.

I don't see any drawbacks to this approach. The situation you mentioned where some other NPCs find an item and are able to solve a problem better than the PCs - there's no reason I can't have that happen if I want, even though the item didn't exist until this session.

 

[Ariosto]

As a referee, I aim to present an honest game -- not Three Card Monte. This is pretty basic to my understanding, perhaps in part because I got into D&D back when it came in a box (just like so many other games in which cheating is, well, cheating).

Player buy in is an ab-so-freak-in-lute necessity for the wannabe-novelist kind of "game". A bait and switch? Just don't go there.

So, let's assume the consenting adults are all on board for the ride: not just for the general theme of playing heroic types doing their best (which might not be enough) to fight the Dark Lord, but for a basic guarantee of getting some way down a plot line -- maybe even of ultimate triumph (all at real issue being the route between A and B).

First, a "generic" digression:

To me, we're pretty much in comicbook territory. It was Edgar Rice Burroughs country beforehand, but in RPGs I strongly associate it with "caped crusaders" games. As I think Doug McCrae observed, being reactive (and beating Evil in the end, even if only by accident ) is part of the superhero shtick. There's always the next installment, with yet another doomsday from which to save the world!

The sword-and-sorcery tales that so much inspired D&D tend to be about rogues and rebels who often meet bad ends. The protagonists of serials of course do not die before their appointed hours (the End of the World in the case of Elric). However, they pretty commonly see girl, gold and glory snatched away and start the next adventure as bums or fugitives.

Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings has always struck me as profoundly elegiac rather than triumphal (although not wearying in its downbeat like the misadventures of Donaldson's leper). The Hobbit perhaps best epitomizes a fictional antecedent to the successful traditional-D&D expedition (complete with complications in "taking the stuff" after Smaug's surprising demise).

Back to the matter at hand:

There ought to be really significant branches, player choices that are interesting because they are not easy to make even if (as should usually be the case with skilled play) well informed.

Tremendous energies these days are devoted to analyzing mechanical minutia for the sub-game of the "build". At the same time, scenarios seem to be sinking into trivial decisions at best.

The problem was evident way back in the Dragonlance modules. Instead of a risk-to-reward balance, they heavy-handedly punished deviation from one set path. If the most valuable reward is "story", then there needs to be more than one way to get it. Otherwise, what you have built is in practical terms a railway or gauntlet.

 

[Thasmodious]

Man, Ariosto, you can't get through a post without trying to pick an edition fight, can you? Not even one? We get it, you think the old way is vastly superior to the new way, even though you constantly misrepresent the new way. We get it, really. Just let your ideas stand on their own merit.

To put it more specifically, what are the specific issues you have with the idea of having a concrete, known goal for the campaign?

For my boys? Player buy in. I have ran campaigns that began with a stated goal, asking for player buy in. "You oppose the evil dragon queen who has ruled the valley for a century". The players nod, say ok, sounds cool, and then never really care about that, even while they know to make moves in that direction. Along the way, they will get very interested in little things that personally affect their characters. A thief cheats them at cards, he must pay. An evil wizard beats them to the Magic McGuffin they were after and takes it, they will not stop until he is destroyed. They buy in very directly to things that grow from gameplay and are much more neutral to caring about the things the DM tells them to.

As such, I tend to DM much like Rel describes. I have my ideas, plot hooks and threads lying about. I never know what they will actually get interested in, but i know the campaign will be vastly more rewarding by running with that than with some predetermined story I asked them to please buy into.

 

[Ariosto]

Pendragon comes to mind as a great example of a game with plot as a premise. Beyond the many published scenarios (which I find mostly pretty spiffy), there is the grand campaign structure.

It has the advantage of drawing upon an incredibly rich myth cycle laden with multiple variations and interpretations. There is a similar resource in classical mythology, as suggested for instance in the work of Robert Graves. (ICE's Mythic Greece supplement for Rolemaster and Hero System is a nifty RPG resource.) Starting with the same familiar framework, two campaigns can produce very memorably different epic sagas.

That Providence or the Fates so often foretell tragedy in those milieus may be significant. With the prominent examples of doomed heroes, it may be easier to accept failure as a non-deterministic possibility. Gravitas and game may be in greater harmony than game and "happily ever after" story-telling expectations.

 

[Ariosto]

Man, Ariosto, you can't get through a post without trying to pick an edition fight, can you?

Huh???

Maybe you've mistaken me for Diaglo.

Dragonlance was First Edition AD&D. (So were Ravenloft, the Desert of Desolation, and a bunch of modules designed for the linear needs of tournament and convention play -- some of which originated as OD&D scenarios.)

A railroad is a railroad, no matter the edition.