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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Monayuris" data-source="post: 7563217" data-attributes="member: 6859536">I run an open table game campaign.There are a lot of great resources online that provide tons of advice (I'll post some links below). For my specific campaign, I've foudn the following techniques have worked for me...1. My campaign is an exploration focused hex crawl / dungeon crawl. The game is usually focused on some goal that is either reachable in one session, or can be ongoing and chipped away out. These goals are decided by the players and take the form of cool adventuring site they want to check out. I'm explicit about what these sites are, where they are located, and what monsters and treasures they are 'likely' to have. This gives my players the knowledge to make informed choices about what to do (of course I do have plenty of hidden locations as well, and sometimes the players just want to go East and see what's out there). 2. I have very limited external pressure on the players. This has helped keep the game focused on what the players want to do, not on what I want to happen. There are some things that rely on time, but they are never so important that they demand the players' attention. For example, there is a stone henge circle in my campaign that will grant a blessing if occupied on a full moon ( have a calendar that tracks this).3. I make the time frame between sessions by default on the long side. I usually just do one day in real life between sessions is one day in game. This helps with 'quantum adventuring party collision' and keeps things a little more organized.Its not so important to dungeon adventuring, since that only takes a couple hours, but matters more for wilderness travel. A week to a month between sessions, in game time, helps with making sure characters are back in town and available.  It also helps because I can sync my game calendar and the weather with real world dates. 4. Allow players to have multiple PCs. If Connie's fighter is on a month long wilderness trek and stuck in the Dearthwood, but she wants to play tomorrow, she can run her wizard instead. These characters may level up at different rates based on usage, which allows for more varied parties. In my campaign my players who are running 7th level characters rolled up some level 1's for when I had a couple new players join in. Maybe when some of the new players' characters level up high enough they can join in with the higher ups.5. Accept that you may have a wider range of character levels adventuring together. Let the players make those kinds of decisions. If a player with a new level 1 cleric wants to play with a group of level 6's, let them. If they survive they'll get a ton of XP out of it.6. I use XP for gold recovered from the dungeon / wilderness. I found that having an objective measure of XP that's not reliant on milestones or the whims of the DM to be beneficial. I've also found that decoupling XP from monsters helps with lower level character survival and mixed level groupings. There is less pressure to hunt out and fight tougher monsters that will splat lower level characters, because you don't need them for XP.7. In the end, I've come to realize its more important that people have fun. As much as I wanted a very strict campaign where time passes and things like travel and distance matter, sometimes you just have to accept that a PC is going to somehow teleport back to town, or that those two clerics you were adventuring with in the jungle just disappeared somehow and have been replaced by some freaky warlock type. So, sometimes you got to let it slide a little.A couple blog posts have inspired me towards this style of play:<a href="https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38643/roleplaying-games/open-table-manifesto" target="_blank">https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38643/roleplaying-games/open-table-manifesto</a><a href="http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/" target="_blank">http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/78/grand-experiments-west-marches/</a><a href="https://smolderingwizard.com/2014/03/02/the-rythlondar-chronicles-original-dd-at-its-finest/" target="_blank">https://smolderingwizard.com/2014/03/02/the-rythlondar-chronicles-original-dd-at-its-finest/</a></blockquote>

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