[EDITION WARZ] Selling Out D&D's Soul?

[Thurbane]

I think this is a misconception. You *can* plan out your campaign world months in advance. Or you can build it from the ground up as the players explore. All you NEED for one night of gaming is an enemy and a goal and some obstacles to throw in their way. Everything else can be invented as you go along (and, indeed, leads very strongly to the effect of the players creating the story along with the DM).

The idea that DMing requires months of preplanning is madness on the face of it. It can involve months of preplanning (if it's fun for you to create an intricate world), but it can be done in 15 minutes with no variation in quality.

I have to disagree again here - while quality is highly subjective, I can honestly say from my own firsthand experiences that I have had much more enjoyment as a payer when I can "feel" that the DM has put in signifcant preperation. And trust me, it is something players pick up on very quickly. If you ask a DM the name of the next closest town, or the name of the head of the mages guild, and he responds with "Um, err...Bob?" it ruins my suspension of disbelief and immersion.

Obviously this is totally subjective to the style of play you enjoy, but if we feel like a quick "out of the box" rumble with some baddies, I'd rather pull out my D&D minis game, or dust off my old Heroquest set.

And that's fine, but it is important to realize that the people who want to take months putting together a cohesive campaign world are very likely in a minority (not many people have that much fun inventing an imaginary world), and so for 3e to give advice and rules on things like random town generation helps more people to have more fun playing D&D.

Again, from my personal experience this is simply not true.

Sure, "on the fly" gaming is unavoidable sometimes, but within every group I've played with in some 20 years, the DM will usually take great pride and enjoyment in fleshing out a believable setting for people to adventure in.

I can't speak for the community, but in my experience DMs who enjoy investing significant amount of time into their campaign world are in the overwhelming majority.

I don't usually fret about that stuff. It's all about if people are having fun. If they're NOT, say, they're complaining that the combats seem pointless, then I take a look at one of the sources of the problem (say, the CR of the creatures their encountering), and fix it.

I can certainly agree on the first point - it is all about fun.

And for my own group, we have found fun in the middle ground between having the DM cater to every whim and fancy of the players, and the other extreme of a despotic DM with a "my way or the highway" approach to his campaign...

 

[I'm A Banana]

I have to disagree again here - while quality is highly subjective, I can honestly say from my own firsthand experiences that I have had much more enjoyment as a payer when I can "feel" that the DM has put in signifcant preperation. And trust me, it is something players pick up on very quickly. If you ask a DM the name of the next closest town, or the name of the head of the mages guild, and he responds with "Um, err...Bob?" it ruins my suspension of disbelief and immersion.

It depends upon how well the DM can do it. Putting in months of effort is one extreme and 15 minutes is the other. Most will do somewhere in between....the important thing is to do how much is fun for the players and the DM.

And a good ruleset can help make it easier. A simple list of fantasy names and jotting them down helps with the closest town and the head of the mage's guild. And it's easy to prepare even while people are generating characters....someone's making an elf, so she'll need a village to come from, and there's that Races of the Wild book with elven village maps and adventure ideas and then MM4 has some drow adversaries and you've got a locale and a conflict. Which could be how she meets Ed's dwarf wizard....in the time it takes people to generate characters, a DM can generate a good one-night plot, and use the time in between sessions to build upon it.

But that's not really the point. The point in this sub-topic is that people should be able to DM without it feeling like work, and 3e enables that better than any other edition of the game, which makes it, in my view, a much better game, because having fun should never be work.

Obviously this is totally subjective to the style of play you enjoy, but if we feel like a quick "out of the box" rumble with some baddies, I'd rather pull out my D&D minis game, or dust off my old Heroquest set.

Do What Thou Wilt.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

It depends upon how well the DM can do it. Putting in months of effort is one extreme and 15 minutes is the other. Most will do somewhere in between....the
important thing is to do how much is fun for the players and the DM.

And a good ruleset can help make it easier. A simple list of fantasy names and jotting them
down helps with the closest town and the head of the mage's guild. And it's easy to prepare
even while people are generating characters....someone's making an elf, so she'll need a
village to come from, and there's that Races of the Wild book with elven village maps and
adventure ideas and then MM4 has some drow adversaries and you've got a locale and a
conflict. Which could be how she meets Ed's dwarf wizard....in the time it takes people to
generate characters, a DM can generate a good one-night plot, and use the time in between sessions to build upon it.

This is completely alien to my experience.

Are you saying that your DM regularly creates fresh new campaigns out of whole cloth on the fly? And if so, why?

My experience is that if I've created a section of a game world and it's actually any good,
then I want to re-use it later. And my experience is also that players appreciate the added value they get from knowing the campaign world.

I've got a city called Salm, of about a million inhabitants, which is extensively mapped and populated with what I like to think are colourful NPCs. I invented the place about twenty years ago and I've been refining it since.

Nowadays, when my players go to the Cup and Blade on Cordwainer Street, they know where it is and what it looks like, and they know how unwise it is to be rude to the ladies of the night there, and when they overhear a conversation about an argument between two of the ruling Houses, they know which Houses are being talked about and some of the background.

And they know that if they leave Salm by the east road, it'll be thirty-five miles across the badlands and they're likely to meet bandits. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I don't need to "generate" a plot. Everything's there in Salm for them. If they want a dungeon adventure, then they know the route through the sewers to the Undercity. If they
want political intrigue, well, those Houses are all still stabbing each other in the backs at Court. The temples are still at loggerheads, so there's plenty for the clerics to do, and of course it's one of those places where the thieves are always busy, and the good-aligned types are still waging a war against the slave trade, and ... well, you get the idea. And that's just one city.

What's the benefit of ditching all this hard work and trying to make up a whole new world as I go along?

 

[Hussar]

As a (sometime) DM, I would have to say I prefer a game style that is middle ground between Raven and Kamikaze - I don't force the whole "This is my campaign style, like it or hit the road", but neither do I fret about whether my players minimum daily CR, XP and GP requirements are being met.

I play a style where I have a definite vision of my campaign world and what adventure path to nudge players along, but (for instance) if the players made it clear that they would prefer some political intrigue over a dungeon crawl, I will do my best to incorporate such into upcoming games. In short, I try to make sure the game is fun for myself and the players, without compomising my overall vision.

I also freely ignore WBL and CR rules ("OMG, what about balance !!!1!11!!"), but I never (rarely) throw a vastly superior foe at my players without some clear form of warning and/or an esacpe route.

Anyway, back ontopic to editions: does 3.X cater to awarding bonus XP outside of the CR system? For instance, in my own games, if I feel a player has done an exceptional job of roleplaying, made a clever suggestion that has greatly helped the party or somehow else contibuted to the game in a "above and beyond" type manner I award bonus XP, (I should point out I use a hybrid of 2E and 3E when awarding XP). This isn't a loaded question, just genuinely curious if 3.X caters to this sort of thing.

Surprisingly, I agree with Thurbane on this. Most DM's will fall in between the 15 minutes of on the fly and 25 years of preparation. For the game to cater to the later would be suicidal for the game.

 

[Hussar]

What's the benefit of ditching all this hard work and trying to make up a whole new world as I go along?

If I may ask, how long have you been gaming with the same people?

See, I change groups very frequently as I move a lot. Actually, my current group of two years is about the longest I've played with the same people since elementary school. So, anyone I play with is generally coming from all sorts of different backgrounds. By and large, they couldn't care less about the history of my homebrew world.

In addition, I enjoy creating worlds. The idea that I would stick with the same homebrew that I cooked up twenty years ago is alien to me. Good grief, the stuff I create NOW is barely up to scratch. The stuff I created when I was 10 wasn't worth the paper I wasted writing it up.

I've ALWAYS used a different world for every campaign. I might bring some stuff forward from time to time, but, by and large, it's always new. Why would my "alien invasion world" be used in my "Witchhunt" world? Or use my Scarred Lands material in my Savage Tide campaign?

I create new worlds at the drop of a hat. 99% of them never get much above the ground floor. And, to tell the truth, it's a pretty rare duck IME that actually have campaigns that last that long.

 

[Hussar]

Sorry for the third post, but another though occurs. P&P, don't you experiment with published settings? Given the rather large number of settings that have come out over the years, I'm surprised that you've stuck to a single one. That takes some sheer bloody minded dedication. Kudos.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

If I may ask, how long have you been gaming with the same people?

I started to DM in 1980 (player since 1978). The earliest member of my present gaming group joined in 1982; the most recent was 1987, when the lady who's now my wife joined us. (Err, there's also my son who's started to play, he was born in 1994, but that doesn't seem to count somehow).

We're now down to seven players plus me, although I used to DM for a dozen or so.

 

[PapersAndPaychecks]

Sorry for the third post, but another though occurs. P&P, don't you experiment with published settings?

Good Lord, no.

 

[Hussar]

See, P&P, that right there makes you WAY in the minority of gamers. You've been playing with the same people for twenty years or so. I would hazard a guess that only a very tiny minority of gamers are in the same boat as you. Not that that's a bad thing, I'd love to be able to have a group that lasted half as long. But, I'm thinking that the game has always catered far more to more fluid groups than that.

Even in 1e days we say a number of campaign settings published. 2e ballooned that number and 3e hasn't exactly seen a small number either. So, to answer your question of why DM's create new campaign settings whole cloth, I would say that there are a few answers:

1. People have fluid groups and members of each group have experience with a large range of settings and want to bring in bits from their favourites.
2. People start new campaigns fairly often (research says about every year or two) and want to use published settings.
3. There are such a huge range of choices out there that people want to give them a shot.

The idea of continuity in campaign settings is rather difficult. To be honest, I don't care what someone whom I have never met, did five years ago in a campaign setting I have never seen before. So, the idea of hearing stories about old PC's in campaigns I didn't play in doesn't really appeal to me.

Heck, I don't like canon in published settings and feel free to change it all the time. Following canon in a homebrew would not appeal to me at all.

 

[Raven Crowking]

And for my own group, we have found fun in the middle ground between having the DM cater to every whim and fancy of the players, and the other extreme of a despotic DM with a "my way or the highway" approach to his campaign...

All righty, then.

I, for one, think that you can say "My way or the highway" without being despotic. If your way is broadly based, fun for a lot of people, and takes those people into account, you will have players. If it doesn't, you won't.

With the cookie baking analogy, if you make anchovy cookies, good luck finding taste-testers.

With KM's pizza analogy, if everyone is chipping in equally, and the pizza comes in a box, then knock yourself out. When I ran WLD, I opened the floodgates. The players loved the idea at first. In the end, though, the players decided they liked the floodgates under control. Having an alternate universe Ghandi, some jedi, a time lord, and an animated Lego man sorcerer in the party just ruined suspension of disbelief for some of them.

BTW, the problem with "The DM must cater to the players" is that the examples given seem not to be "The DM must take the players into account" (which I wholeheartedly agree with), but rather "The DM must indulge or pander to the players" (which I wholeheartedly disagree with).

RC