How to start a new campaign?

[Janx]

There's a lot of good tips for a new GM. Here's some of my own:

Determine what style of game you want (good PCs, hackfest, etc.). Make sure your players agree.

Don't make more than you need.
If you have no clerics, paladins, rangers, Druids, skip going beyond naming the local deities.
Make a simple map of the area. Know where each of the races/nations typically comes from.
Make a detailed map of the place you want the game to start (the home village).
Don't make up any NPC stats until you need them.

Be concious of difficulty levels. The CR system works pretty well. A good balancing rule is to get the party's effective CR = total party level divided by 4. An encounter of equal CR will likely do 20% damage to the party's resources. Knowing all this, will tell you how many encounters to have and at one level.

The early adventures should be pretty simple plots (rescue princess, clean out dungeons).

Twist-the-fork (TM) often. As stuff happens, try to link it all together when writing subsequent adventures.

NEVER capture the party (if you can help it). The players will try to escape. That means, if their capture was ad-hoc (you hadn't planned it, but it was better than killing them) you'll have to plan their containment details. The party WILL try to escape. Using party capture as a plot-hook is often the most resented rail-roading technique in the book, so avoid it. Capturing may be used as a mercy to killing the character, but I'd pause the game and figure out the details.

NEVER railroad. It's OK to write an adventure that says, if the PCs go here, this happens. It is not OK to write an adventure to says Wizard X has his goons capture the party and places them in his Dungeon of Z, where they must escape.

Try to write plot hooks that the party (or at least one PC) is going to want to pursue. Paladins like to save princesses and should almost always volunteer for dangerous duty (barring a conflict with another mission).
Rangers and Druids like stopping deforestation and nasty monsters in the woods hurting grass.
Having hooks that the party should follow (for first adventures especially) makes it easier on both DM and players. You can't make a party follow a plot hook (remember no rail-roading). You can make a plot hook that is likely to be followed.

In my last campaign, I started the game with the party (seperated at the time) in the market square. A man called out after a young boy who had just stolen something from him. The party (being good) intervened. Turns out the boy had passed the pouch of "Something Important" to another person, but the boy knew where the hideout was. The man (a local friendly wizard) hired the party to retrieve the "Something Important" and the party went on their first quest, a dungeon delve into a 1 level base in a hill.

Pretty simple, but it opened up 2 new NPCs (the boy and the wizard) and gave the party something to do right away.

In my current campaign, all the PCs are in the navy, so I started the first game with them sleeping on deck. The ship was anchored just offshore (having not pulled in to port yet) and was snuck up upon by goblin bandits who crept on deck in the mist. The party wakes up as a fight ensues. The goblins kidnapped the ship's mage and so when the fight is over, the players have their first mission.

Those are just samples, feel free to re-use or try variants.
Good luck and welcome to gaming!
Janx

 

[MarauderX]

I like to start off new groups with some episodes of combat. It lets those that don't know the rules to get comfortable with them so that everyone is on the same page as far as how the game mechanics work. After that, you slip in the intrigue and 'why are we chasing the baddies?' with some twists that hopefully work toward the goal you had originally intended as a DM.

The easiest, of course, is the PCs are at the wrong place, at the wrong time - and get jumped by nasties. Good, bad, the PCs will have to work together to stay alive against critters that just want the defenders dead.
Another easy one is the hired hand, where they are recruited to do something and have to battle their way to get it. Easy, fun, quick hack-n-slash for reward; add in the intrigue of what the guy wanted the skull of his dead relative later.

 

[Ssyleia]

Maybe you think I'm crazy but I tend to develop future campaing plot lines well ahead of time. When I have a good idea, I elaborate on it - making a few pages of notes and stuff.

When it comes to choosing a new campaign I present my gaming group with a choice of these ideas I have elaborated (without revealing too much, of course)

After presenting those Ideas, Majority vote wins...

Oftentimes I put the events of campaigns that didn't make it into the concurrent storyline, so characters might even meet the protagonists of the story ideas they rejected and interact with them.

 

[heimdall]

I start with a concept or idea. I begin to put words around that concept or idea. That generates more concepts and ideas beginning a spiderweb. Most of these I leave open-ended. I know the group can go any number of directions so I try to ensure I have a lot of flexibility initially. I have two or three major plot lines I will introduce and see which one gets the most bites.

As soon as I get a good grasp of what the players are playing towards (usually 2 or 3 sessions, max), I start building up one central plot line. As the game progresses, I do a post-mortem on every session a day or two later (never more). I look at what was uncovered, what was glossed over, and what was focused on. That usually spurs the spiderweb all over again. I'll check for conflicts, and either reconcile them or eliminate new ideas that just don't work with what's been laid out.

This is how I keep the game dynamic. It also tends to keep my players on their toes. While I will ensure the central plot line moves on, I keep the side plots open as well. You never know when a side plot will be moved into the central one because this provides the most enjoyment for everyone.

 

[Uller]

Everyone gives you the "dos" of starting a campaign. Here are some don'ts:

1) Don't outline the entire plot of your campaign from the beginning.
2) Don't come up with more than 3 or four ideas for adventures/story-lines
2a) Don't come up with only one idea for an adventure or story line.
3) Don't include any powerful NPCs that hang out with the party and steal the show. DMs tend to see running a campaign as an opportunity to showcase their imaginations to their players. While that is perfectly natural, you have to remember that the players have imaginations too...if you let them, they'll make the story themselves.

So here is what I do to start a campaign: I write a 1-2 page "flavor" document to describe very briefly the flavor of the area where the PCs will be at the start of the document. This includes a description of the local geography, important groups and individuals in the PCs lives, politics, etc. Obviously this is all very short on details...that's on purpose.

Then I turn things over to the players. I ask them to each create a character within whatever parameters the group agrees to (classes, races, level, point-buy, wealth, and so-forth). Each player is also asked to write a 1 page description of his/her character. I throw them small rewards if they include useful things in their descriptions: Potential NPCs, groups, adventure/plot ideas or whatever.

Then I take all that and I write an opening encounter and detail the beginnings to 3 seperate adventures that these characters might be interested in participating in. The opening encounter (or events that happen shortly there after) provide the hooks to these three seperate encounters...

These are very simple adventures that have little or nothing to do with the main plot line for the campaign. Things like Escort the merchant through the wilderness, investigate the plague in the neighboring village or find out what has created the strange fog bank across the river...

The point is, you start very small without committing to a specific plot or story. This is based on my experience as a player. For instance, in the current campaign I am playing in, the DM came up with this awesome set of house rules for a low-magic campaign set in a world similar to ancient Greece. I created a character that was a street urchin who pretended to be a blind Seer (she was really just a Rogue). The other players came up with similar characters (A healer, an escpaed slave, and so forth). So the DM starts the campaign and what happens? We are pressed into service as mercenaries in an ARMY that fights in a war similar to the invasion of Greece by the Persians! I made the best of it and so did the other players. Don't get me wrong...it was a fun game because this DM is a good DM, but in this campaign he didn't seem to look at the PCs and work in the interests of the players. So I had to dump my character and create one more suitable to soldiering...

 

[Janx]

Uller raises a good point.

Decide what kind of game you want to run.
Either democratically by involving your players or just deciding.

Then make sure your players know what style, so they can build PCs appropriate to it.

Make sure your game and their characters fit each other.

If that means vetoing characters or having a list of allowed classes/races, so be it.

Figure it out ahead of time. Its best to have defined what your looking for ahead of time (like a casting call for a play). Saying no to somebody's PC is worse, as that comes off as a negative. I'd rather not waste my time rolling up PCs to have them rejected. Instead, I'd like to know what you're looking for, so I can build a PC that will fit the first time.

In my current game, it is a sailing game. The PCs are on a military ship. They are all human (no non-humans allowed) as the humans are just exploring the islands beyond their homeland. Kinda like StarTrek Enterprise, but different.

Those first sentences give the players a lot of info of what would likely work in my game. I actually made a list of what classes are allowed (no barbarians, rangers, Sorcerers) due to the style of my world. Everything is pseudo-17th century.

I have a 20 year time-line of major events. I know when certain key wars start and end. Stuff that happens to the PCs is unknown, as I make that up as I write each adventure, by tying the players into that history. Right now, we've played 5 games, and the humans are now at war with the elves. The PCs are on war ship that is guarding one area of human territory, and the war is coming to them. This works well, as it gave me time to level up the PCs for the bigger challenges. Before then, it was mostly pirate hunting (orcs, goblins, hobgobs, etc.).

In a military campaign, the advantage I have is that all PCs are in the hierarchy, so I can just issue them an order to go on a mission. Some of these missions gave the PCs a chance to drop out of the military (siding with a colonial revolt or not). In theory, the PCs can do whatever they want, but some choices aren't really choices. It's obvious that they'll kill the pirate king. It's not obvious if they'll decide the king's tax is too high and join the colonists.

A party of freelancers (traditional D&D party) is free to take on whatever jobs they want, so you have to come up with enticing hooks. Don't make too many, but don't make too few.

Janx