Interactive World Building

[Negflar2099]

The DMG 2 (which I just picked up today) lists a ton of suggestions for giving players more control over your game. Among many seemingly great ideas it also includes ideas for running vignettes, or for asking players to pitch campaign ideas or create entire new elements for the campaign.

For instance it posits a fork in the road that your player's characters come to. It suggests you would then stop and pick two players, and each one would come up with information about what's down that fork, describing in some detail what they will find if they go that way.

I like this idea (I kind of sort of love it) but I'm also pretty skeptical. I have a hard time imagining how this would work and honestly I worry about my ability to catch and amend suggestions that might give the players game breaking advantage.

Has anyone tried any of this in their games? Did you have your players pitch campaign ideas? Did you let them describe elements of the campaign? If so how did doing this work for you?

 

[Umbran]

Has anyone tried any of this in their games? Did you have your players pitch campaign ideas? Did you let them describe elements of the campaign? If so how did doing this work for you?

I've done a bunch of this. Never for the thing that's just around the corner, though.

I often give players a lot of creative control over the cultures their characters come from. If only one player is playing a dwarf, they get to determine much about what life among the dwarves is like, and so on. I find it works very well, and gives me a lot of inspiration as well.

 

[Afrodyte]

Has anyone tried any of this in their games? Did you have your players pitch campaign ideas? Did you let them describe elements of the campaign? If so how did doing this work for you?

IMXP, cooperative worldbuilding does a lot to help players feel invested in the game. If you think about it, players already do that when they create backstories for their characters complete with NPCs, plot hooks, etc. The DMG2 just takes it to another level so that they're not passive consumers of the GM's story. Being co-creators of the world their characters inhabit gives the setting a new layer of meaning for them to grab on to.

As far as players using cooperative storytelling to "win" the game, IMXP, munchkins and powergamers will do what they do no matter how stringent or lenient the system. At the very least, the GM would have final veto power, so things don't get too out of hand.

Depending on your group, you could have a permission-based model for cooperative storytelling. Think of it as a game of Mother May I for grownups. After using this in a non-D&D context, once players understand the freedoms and limitations they have, they really enjoy this style of roleplaying.

 

[Glyfair]

Robin Laws blog has a lot of these bits periodically appear. Here is a good entry and here is another. There are, of course, other interesting gaming theory posts (this comes to mind), but many of them deal with giving some narrative spinning options to the player.