Gaming in an open enviroment

[schporto]

I've read all these posts and I'm still missing something, I guess on the definition of an open environment. Does that end up meaning there's no 'adventures' perse. I'm assuming running something like the Shackled City would be completely out. But what about an individual adventure or two? I mean by that do the DMs running this set up an adventure (such as one from Dragon), only to spend a few hours preparring it to have the players ignore it? Or can you even plan one of them, or does that violate the theory of 'openness'? I mean planning an adventure imposes certain 'outcomes' on the players without them making a choice. So if the DM were to run the Dragon Adventure with the Kadatch (huge beast with a city on it) that is bearing down on a town, the players can just ignore the issue. Then, umm, what? You have other adventures planned ahead of time? And what happens with the kadatch? Does it continue it's rampage and destroy towns? Hasn't the DM imposed his will on his players without their input.
I like the idea of the open campaign, I'm just confused how I could make it work. It seems like the idea of an distinct adventure would be somewhat shot. And that I'd have to prepare SO much for a game that I'd end up overwhelmed (I'm thinking that I'd need to prep maybe 5hours for each hour of play at that point compared to about 1 for 1 right now running RtToEE).
-cpd

 

[The Shaman]

I'll echo three suggestions that have already been offered:

1. Metaplots: Gotta have 'em. These are the events of the game-world going on in the background, and that may be brought into the foreground by the adventurers' choices. Some may be local, some may be regional, and one or two may be world-encompassing.

These metaplots get folded into the news of the land, rumors in taverns, chance meetings, and so on. For example, one metaplot could be a band of slavers establishing a fortress and raiding a stretch of coastline - unknown to anyone (except the chief of the slavers) they are working surreptitiously for the monarch of principality across the sea. This translates into a town crier reporting the sacking of a market town along the coast a fortnight ago, a grizzled man deep in his cups who's heard that the slavers are killing men and stealing women and children only, and a royal messenger carrying a missive to a frontier outpost regarding the slavers' activity.

Note that none of these are 'plot hooks' per se: no one's advertising for adventurers to battle the slavers, the grizzled man isn't hiring someone to track down his missing wife and son, and the messenger isn't looking for protection on his way to the outpost. It's merely information about what's going on in the game-world, and the characters can act on it or not as they please: they may decide to see if anyone is looking for adventurers for hire, decide to root out the slavers because it's "the right thing to do," or find the slavers and join up - or they may decide to go off and become pirates, or travel across a frozen waste in search of a mysterious wizard who may have a spell one of the party spellcasters seeks to add to her spellbook.

Each metaplot should have a rough timeline - keeping track of the passage time can be rather important as events take place with or without the players' characters' participation - and if you really want to get flashy, find ways for a couple of metaplots to interact with one another.

2. NPCs: Gotta be three-dimensional. In my games I spend more time on NPCs than I do just about anything else once the initial world-creation process is complete. I don't develop plots so much as I come up with non-player characters, their affiliations, and their goals - the 'plots' such as they are arise from the interaction of these characters. Usually the adventurers will develop a favorable relationship with one or more NPCs that can be the source of information and connections to others in the game-world - the players should be encouraged to exploit these resources.

3. Character Goals: Gotta be compatible. One adventurer looking to find his long-lost brother, another looking to become a barbarian warlord, and another who wants to be the richest second-story burglar in the largest metropolis of the land may find themselves competing to advance their individual plot lines. This is a metagame issue that needs to be resolved before the game begins - since there is no plot hook to draw together disparate characters behind a common goal, the adventurers must begin with a common goal, a reason to adventure together, right from the giddyup.

I hope this helps. As a player and GM, these sorts of games are my favorite. Good luck!

 

[barsoomcore]

(barsoomcore fails his Will save against pointless arguments)

I think the original poster received plenty of good advice in first half-page of this thread, at which point people kind of stopped making sense.

schporto: the fact is that you'll always have SOME IDEA as to what your players are going to do next, so you never need to prep for every conceivable possibility. Of course, at times you'll be surprised and have to improvise, but that's true no matter what style you're TRYING to run.

There's been a lot of discussion over what exactly an "open" campaign is, discussion that I have to say has ultimately been fruitless. I think it's more helpful to identify a pointer that is worth the consideration of any DM:

Your players won't always do what you expect.

The more you're able to manage what they do without resorting to measures that diminish the player's suspension of disbelief, the more fun your players will have. This means not offering plot hooks that cause them to shake their heads in mockery of your ham-handed tactics. This means not saying, "Uh, you can't go through that door because I don't know what's on the other side." This means not imposing drastic consequences on their character's stats (like, say, killing them) without providing them with some plausible in-game explanation.

Definitions of ham-handed, drastic and plausible will of course vary from one group to another.

It seems like the OP was using the term "open" to identify a campaign style where the players are offered a variety of opportunities and take the ones they find interesting. This is in contrast to what we might call a "closed" style where the DM offers only one opportunity and expects the players to take it. These aren't absolute differences of course -- clearly a campaign where the DM offers TWO alternatives is less "open" than one where the DM offers FOUR. So it's a scale of "openness", we might say.

And of course it's not always clear how many opportunities are being offered (I've been surprised when my players took "opportunities" I hadn't realised existed). And there's no reason why a campaign can't switch from one to another over its life: Barsoom certainly did. Some evenings I had only one possibility for my players and if they didn't go along with it I'd have to improvise wildly. Some evenings the whole point would be to bring up a half-dozen plot threads and see which ones (if any) they jumped at.

But given that your players won't always do what you expect, it seems sensible to me for any DM to be ready to improvise, regardless of what style of campaign they wish to run.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

schporto
I'm assuming running something like the Shackled City would be completely out. But what about an individual adventure or two?

Counterintuitively, the answer is no...you CAN run Shackled City in an open campaign. The trick is you bait the hook to SC with good bait.

If your players go for it, you're in business. If not, wait a while, and offer the hook again (dressed a little differently).

My current GM is running RttToEE in his open ended campaign...we took the bait, so we're in it. However, if we veer from the plot line, so be it- the temple will be waiting.

The real work of dropping in a pre-written adventure into an open ended campaign is what happens to the pre-written NPCs while the PCs are elsewhere, "off -track."

Most GM's have the pre-written stuff "freeze," so if the party goes back, they pick up more or less right where they left off. Obviously, bodies would get cleared away and reinforcements would arrive and be in place when the PCs returned.

The superior, and trickier, technique is to have the forces the PCs set in motion with their action stay in motion. This technique involves the GM thinking "What would the BBEG do?" and having those actions take place away from the action.

Example: PCs get 1/3rd of the way through "Storebought Adventure A1" from Generic Press, then retreat to lick their wounds. While recuperating, they get distracted by an NPC's sob story, and wind up saving the NPC's farm...then return to finish off A1. In the meantime, though, the BBEG of A1 has not been idle. He's not ony reinforced his position, but accellerated his other plans. Instead of waiting months for the Great Harvest Festival to kidnap the queen, he instead sends forth a lone assassin to poison her within the next few days.

Or some such.

 

[schporto]

(barsoomcore fails his Will save against pointless arguments)

Please don't feel it is pointless. You actually almost have me convinced to run a campaign this way next time, or when this chunk is done (running RtToEE). I have 2 concerns remaining.
1. The amount of time required to prepare for a session. We game every week for about 4 hours. I find myself putting in about 4-5 hours for each session. Putting in significatly more time will be difficult. By what folks are saying - I'll know more about where the people are going (which I have my doubts about - I NEVER know what the pleep they're gonna do). And there's a whole lot of winging it - which I'm not sure I'm good at.
2. Guts. I don't know if I've got the confidence to do it. The fear of sitting there with NOTHING to give folks is something that I'm just a bit nervous to do.
Shrug. Not guts, no dead ogres.
-cpd

 

[Crothian]

Knowing what the PCs want to do helps. We have a message board were inbetween session the players talk about what going on, take care of stuff we don't want to bog down the game with, and get a direction.

In another game that doesn't use a message board at the end of the night they have to tell me what they are doing next. They have no problem with that once I expalined the reasons for it and they see that the game is better for it.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Schporto...you misunderstand: You don't sit there with NOTHING for your players. You offer them a grocery store of ingredients and let them pick a meal!

Yes...the initial set-up time to plot out a few good adventure hooks, random encounters, etc. for the campaign start-up is big, but the rewards down the road, as players get more involved in the setting, talking about memorable NPCs or suspicious events will fuel the campaign.

In the long run, you'll actually spend less time preparing for adventures because you won't be fighting through writer's block coming up with the next challenge. Instead, you'll frequently be jumping directly into designing the adventures your players have suggested to you- without even knowing that they're doing it.

There is a downside, though...they'll start thinking they're reading your mind.

 

[shilsen]

Schporto...you misunderstand: You don't sit there with NOTHING for your players. You offer them a grocery store of ingredients and let them pick a meal!

Good point. I run this kind of game and most of the time, I don't start actually creating things (or only have a bare skeletal concept) until I know the PCs are going for it. In one of my campaigns, the PCs got twelve possible plot hooks (and knew they could find more if they wanted) in the second session. I didn't have any of the plot hooks fleshed out until they actually followed up on one. In fact, they managed to find a way to deal with two of them concurrently, so those two developed into full-blown adventures, while the others didn't. Some of the others were resolved by other NPCs (which my PCs later heard about), some didn't really develop but just faded away, and a couple are still waiting out there in case the PCs ever go after them.

There is a downside, though...they'll start thinking they're reading your mind.

I'm not sure about that. A couple of times I've been accused of reading theirs

 

[Torm]

And, I don't know that running an open game has ever meant more prep time for me. Usually less, really, and the more prep time I put in the worse the game session because I try to railroad the stuff I prepped into the game rather than going with the flow.

Seven points I think are important for running an open game (Hopefully some others will chime in with more, or even disagree - not everything works for everyone, obviously. ):

1. Can you quickly figure out what creatures belong in an area that you've just decided exists in the first place? Up to an including statting entirely new creatures to the CR you've suddenly decided they should be? Note: This doesn't necessarily mean the creature isn't something that would overwhelm the party - in an open game, they should feel more like they can run away without screwing up your prep. Instead, it should be something appropriate to where they are. If not, practice this skill a bit in thought experiments before trying to run open.

2. Sometimes players may, for example, decide to talk to an individual citizen in a town that I had nothing planned for. If this is no one important in my mind, I may not bother to give him a name, and if asked I may say, "he tells you his name, but it doesn't ring any bells" or something like that, since I'm not really good at making up names quickly. Would your players allow that and go on, or would they press you to flesh out this character that they really know at this point is unimportant? If the latter, they may not be ready to play in an open setting.

3. If you DO end up making up a name for him (or details like that for anything else), write it down and flesh him out a bit after this first encounter in case they seek him out again.

4. Run your game in a new campaign world. This gives you greater carte blanche to grab places and things and scenarios from your own memories of other games, books, and real places and historical things - and for once, you can trust your memory entirely, because you don't WANT to be so accurate that someone else recognises it.

5. Random encounters are very important in an open style. In my experience, you want to have at least one combat or group challenge for every three hours of play. YMMV, depending on your group, but most of the RPG players I've met like killing stuff and taking its loot as a BIG part of the game and feel cheated if they don't get to every once in a while.

6. Be careful with loot. Be a little stingy, because in an open environment some players are going to take advantage of the openness to farm for loot. ALWAYS be stingy with cash. You can get away with being a little generous with items you think the players will keep rather than sell, but remember to be equally generous to your made-up adversaries.

7. If you're like me, you will usually think you're really going to screw everything up because you don't have enough prepped .... right before your most successful sessions.

 

[Stormborn]

(Sometimes its amusing to sit back and watch people say "What the OP meant was..." especially when you are the Original Poster.)
Some of the advice in this thread is very good, and largely what I as thining. The metaplot point is well made - I should have some ready. And, knowing how I tend to do things, would have anyway. However, I think one of the tricks to the metaplots in an "open" enviroment is to not make them Apocolyptic Metaplots.

In my group that has been the problem, we have one DM who is all about letting the PCs do whatever they want - however he tends to run CoC style games in which the world gets overrun by eldritch horrors if we don't do what we are supposed to do.

In a sucesful open enviroment the metaplots, whether the PCs interact with them or not, should effect the PCs world, even if the PCs are unaware of it. They should not, however, so drastically alter the campaign enviroment that the nature of the game changes. This is even true with adventures, for example I would not use, as one poster above mentioned, a possibly plot hook in which the town would be destroyed if the PCs didn't get involved. Now, this may seem to dimish the PCs as world saving heros but I think the trick is making what the PCs do feel important to them and their world, even if on a personal level. If they don't stop the strange cult that has been kidnapping children in the poor part of town it might result in a demon god being one step closer to coming into this world, but if they do stop them suddenly they have the gratitude of an entire community of people, which might be very important if later on they are on the run and need a place to hide out.


Now, back to the questions at hand. Sevral posters have mentioned that PC background is important in an "open", or at least realtively so, campaign. To what degree should the DM help the PCs construct this back ground? And why are they all together anyway if they have created very diverse backgrounds?