D&D General Do I Have To Have Players?

[grimslade]

I understand the feeling. Not the wrecking part per se, essentially a campaign is like a big dominoes setup; it is meant to be knocked down. The feeling I get before a campaign starts is more like the parent of a toddler, I am constantly checking and safety proofing everything that could go wrong, only to find the toddler has done something so unexpected, that I am left scratching my head and adding it to the prep for next time.
I love creating a story for the players to interact but they are different thinking people with their own quirks and predilections. The joy of DMing is when you have to improvise to keep the adventure going in reaction to the monkey wrench the players throw in the path. And like any good improv, all the preparation you put in creating scenarios and fleshed-out characters helps.

 

[jgsugden]

If there were one thing I wished the DM Guide did, it would be to provide guidance on DMs on how to address story. A role playing game is about the role characters play in the story - and the DMG fails - horribly - to help DMs understand the methods they can use to address story. We get a couple pages in Chapter three - when the majority of the book should be dedicated to it - and WotC should have a series of lessons available online to teach different approaches as well.

There is not 'one true way' to do it - but there are a lot of techniques that many DMs use and it would be good to give players visibility into ithem.

 

[haakon1]

The campaign world is mostly for me as DM, and players who chose to engage. The adventures within the world are for the players - and some world building.

 

[delericho]

Thanks all for the comments.

I will, of course, be running the campaign - I just thought it was amusing to finally feel well-prepared only to have a reluctance to use the thing.

 

[delericho]

If there were one thing I wished the DM Guide did, it would be to provide guidance on DMs on how to address story. A role playing game is about the role characters play in the story - and the DMG fails - horribly - to help DMs understand the methods they can use to address story.

I find the 5e DMG, like most of its predecessors, horribly lacking in general. It's as if they were conscious they needed something to fill that space, but didn't actually know what to put in there.

We get a couple pages in Chapter three - when the majority of the book should be dedicated to it - and WotC should have a series of lessons available online to teach different approaches as well.

I don't think I'd agree that the majority of the book should be dedicated to that one topic. But it is certainly lacking in its coverage!

 

[MNblockhead]

Not really, but there have been some adventures that I've bought and run that made it very hard to run when the players went off the rails. Now I generally avoid those. For my homebrew setting, I don't really have one main story arch. I enjoy creating settings and cultures, locations and history. I then create a number of broad story arches and a lot of plot hooks. Part of the enjoyment for me is seeing what stories arise from all this as the players explore and act upon the world.

In the last few years, I have not had time to keep up with prepping fully home brew campaign material, so I'm running published material. But I focus on very sandboxy settings and adventures.

When I let go of thoughts about what the party should do and how encounters should go, I find the interaction between the players and myself lead to much more interesting stories. I would rather facilitate the creation of a shared story instead of writing one myself. That's why I DM instead of write novels.

Or maybe I'm just a bad writer and that explains my preference for sandbox settings.

 

[Mistwell]

I'm in the process of kicking off a new campaign, and for once I've actually managed to get well-prepared for running it - there's a solid beginning and middle, and at least some notion of how it's going to end, lots of encounters that I think should be fun, groups to interact with, mysteries to explore... basically, I'm very happy with it.

There's just one problem: now that I've done all this work, I find that I don't want to run it, because those crazy players will obviously wade in and promptly wreck it - they'll dash off in some random direction that I haven't thought of, or resolve the central conflict in one session, or something like that.

This is, of course, a case of "my precious campaign", but it's the first time I've been struck by it so strongly. And I fully intend to ignore it and get on with running the thing. But I thought it was amusing enough to post about.

Any other DMs out there run into something like that?

We once completely ditched a newly prepared campaign on literally the first session of that campaign. Which in retrospect was a harsh move on the part of us players but none of us were thinking much about the ramifications in the DMs mind and were just having fun with an unexpected occurrence.

 

[Blue]

My method literally can't have this problem, because a lot of the campaign building is based on player interest. I at most have some ideas for a 2nd Act so I can start to foreshadow and lay foundations, but all of that is Schrodinger's Plot that isn't true until it hits the table.

I start with very broad strokes, view from 50K feet sort of thing. What I want is things made of plot hooks and awesome. I want players to hear about this without being overwhelmed, and be able to go "I want my character to be from there" or "I want to adventure there". Just enough of a framework for them to hang ideas on. Details are my enemy at this stage.

Then session 0 with the players. Where we discuss the world, what they are interested in, and make characters. I give my players a lot of narrative control around their characters and other things that don't impact the foundational ideas of the setting. But can add them - last campaign I had players ask if the Dwarves could have been genocided, if Drow and Halflings can be created races, and if the planet itself could be the body of a murdered god with the skull as a moon. None of these impacted other ideas I had so I said yes to all of them. Having engaged players is a blessing.

As part of that I'm thinking about what types of questions the uniqueness of this setting is good to answer, stories that fit better here then a generic world, especially giving the nature of our protagonists. This gives me big vision ideas about the direction the campaign can go. I make sure to tie in what the players suggest, as well as specific character arcs.

From there I start, and campaign direction is very much influenced by player interest and character actions. My last three completed campaigns were 4.5 years, 7 years, and 4 years. None of them ended anywhere I would have imagined when I started.

I'm not afraid to discard plans for better plans, to kill my darlings - discard plots, NPCs, scenes and the like that I envision but don't serve where we (the players and I) end up going. Again, nothing is true until it hits the table, but once it hits the table anything new I introduce needs to be consistent without retcon.

Different groups of players I've run for have had varying levels of comfort with "grabbing the reins" about what they want to do. The most common is the majority of the time picking among hooks I dangle before them, though often going about them in ways I never envisioned. I love getting surprised by players, it's one of my joys as DM.

Late game there's more that's already been set by play, so less room to adjust things while still avoiding any retcons. So the goals of the last act of play are usually firmer set by the time we get up to them, even if there are undefined at the start of play.