P&P said:
Are you saying that your DM regularly creates fresh new campaigns out of whole cloth on the fly? And if so, why?
It's happened more than once, and it's actually one of my favorite methods to use. Sometimes I'll have a general world idea and tell the players that as they're creating characters ("Think: Mad Max + Fern Gully"), but I'm a huge fan of what comes out during improvisation.
The "fluid groups" idea is a good one, but for me it is the simple fact that no one's campaigns are special unique snowflakes, and an extended game of make-believe is not fun to waste my time on. I've found, in my dozen-or-so groups, that more people enjoy narrative-style play where they are the characters in a story that they can influence (I've just plunked groups down in a world before and they don't really pick up on any of the threads dangling around without significant goading). It's something like the improv game where you say a scentence, then pass the stick on to someone else who says a scentence, and so on, making the story up with different people as you go along.
I don't need the setting for any longer or in any more detail than it takes to tell the story. That's simply good writing -- there's no extraneous elements that don't have a reason to be there with regards to what the characters are doing. Once the characters resolve their main conflicts ("stop the empire from spreading," "collect the world-saving mcguffin," "defend the world from the incursion of dark gods," etc.) I can move onto a different world and a different story.
That's actually part of the fun of D&D -- there's so much stuff out there to try, from horror to d20 modern to Conan-style to classic LotR-style to pulp adventure to religious epic to steampunk or cyperpunk fantasy....why would I EVER bother limiting myself to a single campaign world and what it could hold for me? And if I'm not going to use every aspect of the world, what's the point in spending months trying to flesh it out? It doesn't need to be fleshed out, no one cares about the exact number of miles, the names of the taverns are only important if they're important to the characters, and the only NPC's I need to know about are those that will interact with the party.
It's really not worth the effort for me (or many of my DMs) to invest months working on a world that will only get used for a time and then tossed aside.
So it is reduced down to what is needed to have fun in a night. There's characters (being created alongside the campaign world), there's conflict (where do these characters come from? What are their aspirations? What kind of world produced them? What kind of villains do these archetypes fight?), there's theme (We're fighting the drow, so we're going to go with a strong darkness/light theme, here. Vision will be very important, and illumination may save your life, but you should beware of burning to brightly. Spot checks, Listen checks, Concealment, Darkness/Light, Fire and Smoke will all be key game elements.)....all that's left is to get stats for an encounter or four, think of an interesting way to string them together (the drow are planning to summon a dark fiend to blot out the sun; the PC's must either stop them or the sun will be blotted out), and to hook the characters once they're genearted (a half-dead dwarf stumbles out into the elven village with ill news of the world below...).
After this, the world can be fleshed out even more between sessions as you think about the next encounters and themes you want, building them over levels and over time until you reach a climax where a flock of fiends are flying into the sky, and your party, astride the back of a golden dragon (whom you helped out in a quest getting to this point), soars up to slay them before they can close the portal to the Plane of Radience that is your sun.
It's one of my favorite methods to use because it instantly forms an intimate link between the characters and the world when you see what the characters want to accomplish and build that into the world from the ground up. Because storylines are a dime-a-dozen, worlds are a penny-for-six, and Generic Fantasy Names And Titles are the least of your worries, you can tell the story. I don't need to worry about where, say, Gnolls fit in in my world. If none of the players want to be one and they don't occur from the five thousand or so monsters that are in print, I don't need to flesh out their position.
What's the benefit of ditching all this hard work and trying to make up a whole new world as I go along?
What's the benefit on richly detailing six cities if the game is never really going to leave that one? So you can use it later? What's the benefit in staying in the same world, discussing the same Houses, adventuring to the same locales year after year? Sure, it's probably fun for you. But in my decade of gaming with my dozen or so groups, it would have been wasted work for no purpose other than self-amusement, and I've got better things to do with my time than stat up make-believe village mayors that never come into play in the six months or so it takes me to tell a story.
That kind of sounded insulting, but let me state that it's obviously not wasted time for you. With more time invested in the world that your players are happy in anyway, you cut out other worlds in favor of going deeper into your own, which makes your players happy because they're familiar with the world and remember their own adventures in it.
But I've lived in three cities in the last decade. I've graduated high school and college and moved to the east coast. I've played with newbies, with experts, with people from high school, with girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, strangers, and crazies. I've come on and gone off hiatus about four times (short hiatuses...
). No one I'd game with now gives half a rat's tail about the plot of Laurasia to loot the shores of the Dragonlands. No one cares about the great Dwarf Wizard Feltgordin and his plot to splinter the elemental forces. No one remembers Serpontalis and the Thirteenth God which was summoned when one of my PC's accidentally sacrificed a room full of cowering commoners. No one remembers the leather-wearing biker-orcs. I can introduce them again, but, really why would I? I kind of want to do this drow-blotting-out-the-sun thing, now. After all, it suits my current group much better.
My world is not my baby, and my adventures are not precious snowflakes that need to be nurtured. They had their time, I'm done with them, they make good memories, and now I want to make new ones instead of reliving the old ones. I can, of course, poach from the old ones....Laurasia and the Dragonlands may come back into play at some point. But it won't be the exact same place anymore.
RC said:
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.
I wouldn't want such a pizza. Maybe I'm a bit traditionalist, but I'm going to say "Hey, guys, let's keep this pizza vaguely medieval because we're ordering it from D&D, after all. Save Alternate Universe Ghandi for our comic Superheroes game."
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).
No one likes to be indulged or pandered to. They want challenge, they want adventure, they want accomplishment, otherwise they probably wouldn't be playing D&D. But how you give that to them must be how they want it or you're a bad DM because you're not helping the other players of the game have fun. In your case, you state how they're going to get it, and if they like it they come on down. In mine, they state how they want it, and I build the game to hit those points (while at the same time hitting my own). We're both giving the players what they want, we're just doing it in different ways.
For me, because I've gamed with a lot of people who are in as fluid a position as me in life, there's not time to set up an open call for gaming or whatever. People move, school breaks come up, people start or end their education....people aren't going to come when I'm baking cookies if they've never had cookies before, either.
And, because D&D wants to "hook 'em young," and "get new folks playing," this is the position that is going to be addressed the most heavily in the game. The man with the 25 year campaign really doesn't need advice on generating adventures. The guy who can find gamers at the drop of the word "D&D" doesn't need to know what it takes to please a diverse group of newbies and folks-who-are-giving-up-their-drinking-night-to-pretend-to-be-an-elf. But the kid who's heard of the game mentioned and picks up a DMG for the first time and wants to start an afterschool campaign at his house before Christmas Break....*that's* who 3e is (in part) written for. And "Spend four months developing a campaign setting" and "those who want to play will find your game" aren't really good advice for that archetypal demographic.
