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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Uller" data-source="post: 1423733" data-attributes="member: 413">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-lines2a) 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...</blockquote>

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