Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories

[hawkeyefan]

The problem with the players being given a series of immediate task by a superior authority is that it again limits the impact that player decisions to short term situations. They still go from point to point as they are being directed to by the GM as servants of NPCs who make the actual decisions where the story is meant to go.
It's certainly an improvement over an all railroad campaign, but still far off from the goal.

I don't think that having an initial goal makes the game a railroad. Nor do I think it must be far off from your stated goal.

I ran a campaign of Spire: The City Must Fall where I did this. The game expects that the characters are all members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, a clandestine drow group devoted to resisting high elf rule in the city of Spire. So the PCs are members of this group. I decided that to get the campaign going, I'd have their Magister (kind of their handler) give them a specific goal to achieve, followed by a broad task.

After the players had selected their classes and made their characters, we chose the district of Red Row to be the main focus of our game. It's a district riddled with crime, where three dominant criminal factions struggle for control. I decided that the Ministry's previous cell in Red Row was discovered and destroyed by high elf Paladins, the military group devoted to hunting down the Ministry. The cell's Magister was severely wounded and taken captive. When he wakes, he will be interrogated and may spill secrets. So the first task is to make sure he doesn't talk.

The second task was to then discover what led to the previous cell's destruction and what they were up to, and see if it could be used to hurt high elf rule in some way. So the players had an immediate task to deal with, and then an open ended situation to kind of explore however they wanted. This wasn't a railroad in any way. It was up to them to decide how to deal with the captured Magister and once that was dealt with, it was up to them how they engaged with the ongoing events in Red Row. Things quickly moved beyond the initial scenario and they became embroiled in all manner of things in the district, dealing with the three major crime factions as well as several other groups.

A big part of what made this work so well is that this is largely how Spire is designed to work. I don't think that can be understated. The classes all have elements that directly connect the characters to the world. They all have abilities that allow them to declare truths about the world. These factors make it so that the GM can't decide everything ahead of time. They allow the players to directly influence the events of play through their characters in a significant way, beyond just deciding what their characters do.

That default assumption permeates the game's design, so the mechanics and procedures of the game are not fighting against the players directing things.

 

[Umbran]

Written adventures have already laid out what will happen, in what places, in what order.

Well, yes. A written adventure is, by definition, written, meaning it is static. It cannot be responsive to change.

What these types of campaign do is to put players in the position of an audience that is being told a story.

While this is a common enough assertion, I disagree with it.

I don't disagree that it may feel this way, to you, but it implicitly uses some assumptions about what constitutes "the story" that are incomplete. Now, they may be the bits of "the story" that you care most about, which is important to you. However, it does keep the point from being general.

I think the platonic ideal of a great RPG campaign is...

The words "I think" and "Platonic ideal" don't go together well. Platonic ideals are, as far as Plato is concerned, truths whether you accept them or not.

There is no one Platonic ideal of RPGs, any more than there is a Platonic ideal of a novel, or a movie. It is an entertainment, that varies as do our desires in all entertainments. There is no one Truth behind all of them.

...one that takes place on a grand stage...

Why does the stage have to be grand? Small, personal stages aren't "ideal"?

I pretty much dropped the idea of planning story for campaigns when I made the turn towards sandbox campaigns, and I think before that I barely had any clue what I was doing as a noob GM who only knew D&D 3rd ed. and Pathfinder. So I'm still facing this with a pretty much empty toolbox of my own yet. What's been happening out there in the world of player-driven narrative games?

So, when people talk about planning story, they do so as if the story will work out exactly as laid out in the plan. It makes me wonder if these folks are the most educated in how to best use plans.

"No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." - Prussian Field Marshall Moltke the Elder.

"No plan survives contact with the enemy." - Modern restatement of Moltke

The problem with this is that it is cut off, incomplete. Most folks take this to mean that a plan, once made, is ruined and gets tossed away, which is not how the wise use plans. There's a step after the plan is found to be flawed or inapplicable.

"In preparing for battle, I find that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." - Dwight David Eisenhower.

Eisenhower tells us that the plan is not the valuable bit - the value is in the act of planning. It is during the act of planning that we take the time to review as much information as possible, and come to understanding of what the moving pieces are.

"Follow the Process, not the Plan." - Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame.

The resulting plan is merely a reference to the understanding created during planning.

The plan is an artifact we use as a basis for consideration so that, as we learn and as situations change, we can respond in a cogent manner that doesn't throw away all the resources arranged previously. The plan is our reference for context, so we do not forget all the things in motion.

The process really ought to include periodic re-planning, so that changes in the situation can be addressed. The process is then not a fixed direct line from start to end, but an iterative process that may well end someplace our original plan did not include.

 

[Committed Hero]

I flip the grand story dynamic on its head. For example, the Traveller Pirates of Drinax sandbox campaign starts with the PCs getting a ship and a grand empire building goal placed before them. Something so task driven and time consuming to achieve, that there is no way to easily do it in a handful of adventures. Also, the dynamic of the setting will change where the unknown PCs will gain allies, rivals, and enemies... The stakes will continue to rise until there is a final grand conclusion. Just like the villain/faction of a typical written adventure.

It's no coincidence that Hanrahan has a hand in some of the best campaigns of the last decade plus.

The Zalozhny Quartet has four episodes that can be run in any order, along with notes about making the last one used in the campaign a "capstone" (deliberately done to emulate Masks of Nyarlathotep). Likewise, The Dracula Dossier is a sandbox but offers four endgames he might be using to bring the game to a climax.

 

[payn]

The words "I think" and "Platonic ideal" don't go together well. Platonic ideals are, as far as Plato is concerned, truths whether you accept them or not.

There is no one Platonic ideal of RPGs, any more than there is a Platonic ideal of a novel, or a movie. It is an entertainment, that varies as do our desires in all entertainments. There is no one Truth behind all of them.

QFT

 

[Committed Hero]

The problem with the players being given a series of immediate task by a superior authority is that it again limits the impact that player decisions to short term situations. They still go from point to point as they are being directed to by the GM as servants of NPCs who make the actual decisions where the story is meant to go.
It's certainly an improvement over an all railroad campaign, but still far off from the goal.

IMHO it's only a railroad if the PCs decide to deviate from their tasks and the GM tries to resist that diversion.

 

[bloodtide]

The thing is, all RPG adventures are the same. It's just the limitations of reality.

The players pick something to do, or the GM picks something to do. That's it, it's a binary choice.
The GM prepares ahead of time or the GM just improvs on the fly. That's it, another binary choice.

The sandbox is just an illusion. And plenty of people thing it's fun, so if it's fun for you that's fine. Sure you can play a whole game, for years and years, in a sandbox just doing random short term simple things. That is all a sandbox can give you. As soon as you add any structure at all, it's not a 'pure' sand box anymore. As soon as you add even a single stone wall, the sandbox is not pure: that lone wall blocks the sand and forces the sand to flow around or over it.

The players leave the sandbox by picking something to do. They pick rob a bank. So the GM at this point needs to make the bank and the vault. The players can't even start to plan a heist without (literary) solid information. If the GM makes the vault guarded by a ghost dragon the players must find a way to deal with that. The players can't do the (sandboxy) thing that just say "oh we have our characters go dance in the Land of the Pink Elephants" , and then ask if they looted the vault. The only option is for them to somehow deal with or get around that ghost dragon.

And the more detail and the more complexity the game setting has, the less "choices" the players have: This is true. But this is a Feature, but a Bug.

 

[pointofyou]

My suggestion would be that, if one has the goals set out in the OP, the idea of the GM's world needs to be dropped. It's the group's world - as per my post upthread, either the participants all agree on a world (eg this the HeroWars approach), or the setting is built up together as part of the process of set-up, and then play (eg this is the Apocalypse World approach).

It seems as though a table at which it's the GM's responsibility to bring at least most of a world suitable to play in might qualify as the participants agreeing on the world. This is the way the tables I've been at recently have done it and there's been no shortage of player contributions to the world or character-driven play.

 

[aco175]

I find that if I want to stick away from a railroad or linear adventure, I would make my own campaign and not use a published one. Say you are running a 5e campaign and the group wants to run through Tyranny of Dragons or Princes of the Apocalypse. Everyone should know that this is a whole campaign based on dragons or elemental cults and that there is not much of the campaign book that is not focused on that. The players may have choices, but they are more limited and defined from the book.

I can make my own campaign to give more freedom to the players and still have some sort of campaign plot or structure. This may require a lot more work for the DM and I may not have the time or ambition, or skills for some, to make it work. One of the solutions is to play smaller modules that are more site based or only limited to a level or two over a campaign book. A few smaller modules can be strung together and leave places for the players to make choices. I would have an easier time if the PCs just finished the Phandelvar box and chose between going to a pirate adventure or an evil cult of demons adventure. I might have the two small modules and can bait hooks to go to either in a way that I cannot in a level 1-20 campaign book.

 

[John Dallman]

The problem with the players being given a series of immediate task by a superior authority is that it again limits the impact that player decisions to short term situations. They still go from point to point as they are being directed to by the GM as servants of NPCs who make the actual decisions where the story is meant to go.
It's certainly an improvement over an all railroad campaign, but still far off from the goal.

That depends entirely on how much direction the characters are given by their organisation. The three-session scenario that's just finished in my occult WWII campaign started as "Take the statue stolen by the Nazis back to Lhasa, in Tibet. While you're there, see if you can get the Tibetan government to agree to an airfield being set up. That's so that the elderly representative we need to send to the enthronement of the new Dalai Lama can fly in, rather than doing a long trek through the Himalayas in January. There's a party of airmen to survey the route to go with you."

That's "what" with some "why", but nothing about "how" except for delegating some technical things to experts, nor any "who." They did the mission, with no injuries or damage (apart from one NPC who fell off his yak), improved the Tibetan opinion of their organisation considerably, got to develop their characters, and did most of it in different ways to my expectations. You can't run this kind of thing with six random people at the game store, but with the right players it works fine.

 

[Yora]

That sounds to me like a campaign hook. The players are given their sendoff by an NPC, or just as the opening narration, and then they are on their own. Being part of an organization is their background, but they are not being managed by an NPC.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It seems as though a table at which it's the GM's responsibility to bring at least most of a world suitable to play in might qualify as the participants agreeing on the world. This is the way the tables I've been at recently have done it and there's been no shortage of player contributions to the world or character-driven play.

I think this all depends on how the setting is approached.

In most of my recent games, as both a GM and player, the setting of the game pre-exists to a large degree. It's not one of the GM's own making. As such, the players have access to information beyond just what the GM shares with them. I think in such cases, it's much easier to not think of the world as "the GM's world". In these games, the GM likely still has a lot of input on how the game world takes shape, but the players also have a lot of input as well. Most of these games have involved a significant session zero type beginning where we collaborate on a lot of the elements of play. Blades in the Dark, Spire, Stonetop, Galaxies in Peril... all those games involve collaboration at the start of play, and continually throughout play.

I think that tends to not always be the case when the setting is one of the GM's own design. Often when that's the case, there's a default feeling that the world belongs to the GM. A lot of times, and I say this from experience, the setting is something the GM is creating entirely on their own... not during play, but on their own time in preparation for play. I did this for years. And while there's nothing wrong with that approach in and of itself, it doesn't easily lend itself to player directed play. The GM is doing the vast amount of work on their own!

There also tends to be a lack of knowledge of all the ins and outs of the world and its people and institutions and the like that may, in my experience, lead to players feeling like strangers in a world that their characters are supposed to inhabit. I think that lack of knowledge and how it's handled is the primary concern. If I can only know what the GM tells me, then how proactive can I be as a player? The GM either needs to offload a significant amount of information ahead of play, and I have to actually absorb it, or else there needs to be some other means of allowing me to not feel like an alien exploring an unknown land.

There are different ways these things can be addressed. I tend to agree with @pemerton though, that a good default approach is to think of the world not as the GM's but as the group's. It seems like a solid first step toward the kind of play that @Yora is looking for in the OP.

 

[pointofyou]

I think this all depends on how the setting is approached.

In most of my recent games, as both a GM and player, the setting of the game pre-exists to a large degree. It's not one of the GM's own making. As such, the players have access to information beyond just what the GM shares with them. I think in such cases, it's much easier to not think of the world as "the GM's world". In these games, the GM likely still has a lot of input on how the game world takes shape, but the players also have a lot of input as well. Most of these games have involved a significant session zero type beginning where we collaborate on a lot of the elements of play. Blades in the Dark, Spire, Stonetop, Galaxies in Peril... all those games involve collaboration at the start of play, and continually throughout play.

I think that tends to not always be the case when the setting is one of the GM's own design. Often when that's the case, there's a default feeling that the world belongs to the GM. A lot of times, and I say this from experience, the setting is something the GM is creating entirely on their own... not during play, but on their own time in preparation for play. I did this for years. And while there's nothing wrong with that approach in and of itself, it doesn't easily lend itself to player directed play. The GM is doing the vast amount of work on their own!

There also tends to be a lack of knowledge of all the ins and outs of the world and its people and institutions and the like that may, in my experience, lead to players feeling like strangers in a world that their characters are supposed to inhabit. I think that lack of knowledge and how it's handled is the primary concern. If I can only know what the GM tells me, then how proactive can I be as a player? The GM either needs to offload a significant amount of information ahead of play, and I have to actually absorb it, or else there needs to be some other means of allowing me to not feel like an alien exploring an unknown land.

There are different ways these things can be addressed. I tend to agree with @pemerton though, that a good default approach is to think of the world not as the GM's but as the group's. It seems like a solid first step toward the kind of play that @Yora is looking for in the OP.

My point was mostly that if the people at the table agree that bringing the world to the game is primarily the GM's responsibility, that's not fundamentally different from the people at the table agreeing to play in Greyhawk or Duskvol. I don't see anything about that sort of arrangement that actively specifically prevents proactive play. The recent tables I've been at where the GM was mostly responsible for the world have all had highly player-driven play and I've noticed a distinct lack of Michael Valentine Smith types at those tables.

 

[pemerton]

I tend to agree with @pemerton though, that a good default approach is to think of the world not as the GM's but as the group's. It seems like a solid first step toward the kind of play that @Yora is looking for in the OP.

This post is prompted by yours. It contains some reiteration, and some responses to other things posted in the thread.

The OP sets out a particular goal for RPGing, based on a particular sort of critique of some "mainstream" approaches. The goal is to avoid RPG adventures and campaigns that overwhelmingly take the form of a more or less complete script being written that covers all the relevant plot points and sequence of scenes before the players even enter the picture, to avoid the PCs being pawns for other NPCs, while also avoiding stories that are short and not very much interlinked with each other such as sandbox-y dungeon crawling to hunt for treasures or explore the magical wonders of old ruins. The OP wants ongoing conflicts with regular antagonists that takes place on a grand stage and revolves around the PCs struggling in an ongoing conflict against groups of NPCs, and also wants the players' ideas, plans, and decisions determining what path the story will ultimately take.

So suggesting dungeon-of-the-week sandbox play is not helping the OP get what they want. Nor is suggesting a GM-authored world or timeline, in which the players', in play, acquire information about the world and/or the goals of the antagonists that drive the timeline and thus potentially alter the timeline. I think the reasons for both these assertions are obvious: the former is a version of the stories that are short and not very much interlinked with each other which the OP wishes to avoid; the latter is not a game in which the players' ideas, plans and decisions determine what path the story will ultimately take because the GM's ideas about the world and antagonist timelines play a huge role in that respect.

The OP asks "What's been happening out there in the world of player-driven narrative games?" and the answer is the techniques for achieving precisely the goals that the OP asks for were developed around 20 to 25 years ago, and are readily available in a variety of published RPGs. The systems I think of are HeroWars, Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World and MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. Torchbearer might also do the job, although it's not quite as obviously suited to the "grand stage". I'm pretty sure Dungeon World could do the job, though I'm not as familiar with it. I don't know exactly what direction Cortex Prime takes that system in, but it's probably suitable too. Fate can also probably do what the OP wants it to. You (@hawkeyefan) have pointed to other systems that I'm even less familiar with - eg Spire - that are suitable. No doubt there are dozens, even hundreds, of others, which apply various versions of the techniques that (as I've noted) are now a couple of decades old.

TL;DR: The OP asks a definite question, and there is a definite answer available. The answer is not relative to "playstyle preference" or "here's how I do it". It's a perfectly straightforward matter of fact.

 

[pemerton]

My point was mostly that if the people at the table agree that bringing the world to the game is primarily the GM's responsibility, that's not fundamentally different from the people at the table agreeing to play in Greyhawk or Duskvol. I don't see anything about that sort of arrangement that actively specifically prevents proactive play. The recent tables I've been at where the GM was mostly responsible for the world have all had highly player-driven play and I've noticed a distinct lack of Michael Valentine Smith types at those tables.

I can't comment on Duskvol.

I use the World of Greyhawk a lot as a backdrop for play. When I do so, the maps are public, the backstory is public, etc. So - to give an example from actual play - when a PC is stuck in the Bright Desert, the player of that PC can confidently state "Everyone knows that Suel Nomads are as thick as thieves in the Bright Desert!" and make a Circles check to try and meet some.

This is consistent with the OP's goal of having the players' ideas, plans and decisions determine what path the story will ultimately take. On the other hand, every time the GM refers to some pre-authored detail of a world or setting to explain why some player-suggested course of action is not feasible or can't unfold as the player suggests, it is the GM who is determining what path the story will ultimately take.

Whether any of the above is good or bad is a matter of taste. But how these things stand in relation to the goals set out in the OP is a matter of fact.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have a campaign that's been running (via play by post) since 2006, with off-shot campaigns and live games as well.

I started in a sandbox fashion, with a player-facing wiki, and created a hometown with some problems, sitting at what looks like a pivotal moment in its history, and sprinkled about six to eight interesting locales around town, some of them ruins, some actively inhabited areas, some big question marks. I knew what each of them had going on, in broad strokes, and let the players go.

They bit on the simplest hook I put in front of them and then, in the second adventure, stumbled across a hook for another area, which they bit on and things immediately snowballed, forming a coherent campaign arc that ran for many levels. Once things snowballed, there was a very clear story arc laid out for everyone, even if the stops along the way were surprises to all of us.

They're now on the other side of the continent, following up remaining threads from the first arc and the original mystery I put in front of them, but I have at least one player who still wonders about a question mark area outside their home town. At some point, I expect some of the PCs to return to check it out, or next generation characters to follow up on it in a subsequent campaign.

So, I'm not sure I could replicate this success again, but it worked very well the first time, and is probably the model I'd use if I was starting from scratch again.

 

[bloodtide]

I think this all depends on how the setting is approached.

There are a small number of hard core player gamers that want to side table DM and run and create the game world. And such player have a grand fun time making a pile of creation.

However, that is not all players. At least half of all players want to put zero work into a game. Wrok, effort, is not fun, as the players would say, so why would they want to do it.

Even most of the players that do want to add stuff to the game, don't really want to create stuff. They just want the power to handwave that it's there. "Wow...I say there are ninja drow dragon riders!". Of course even suggest that the player might write up a history, backstory, lore and game stats for their ninja drow dragon riders...and they will flat out refuse. That would be work and takes effort. Sure, sometimes they might scribble down something like "history-um, a year ago the drow and dragons joined forces. The end." Suggest a player write some 50,000 words and they will refuse to even consider it.

 

[pemerton]

There are a small number of hard core player gamers that want to side table DM and run and create the game world. And such player have a grand fun time making a pile of creation.

However, that is not all players. At least half of all players want to put zero work into a game. Wrok, effort, is not fun, as the players would say, so why would they want to do it.

Even most of the players that do want to add stuff to the game, don't really want to create stuff. They just want the power to handwave that it's there.

Suppose these claims are all true. So what? How are they relevant to the goal stated, and the question asked, in the OP?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Suggest a player write some 50,000 words and they will refuse to even consider it.

If a player came to me with 50,000 words of suggested background they had written up, I would fake my own death.

 

[hawkeyefan]

My point was mostly that if the people at the table agree that bringing the world to the game is primarily the GM's responsibility, that's not fundamentally different from the people at the table agreeing to play in Greyhawk or Duskvol. I don't see anything about that sort of arrangement that actively specifically prevents proactive play. The recent tables I've been at where the GM was mostly responsible for the world have all had highly player-driven play and I've noticed a distinct lack of Michael Valentine Smith types at those tables.

It is different, though, that was my point. I can read about Greyhawk or Duskvol. I likely already have. I know things about those worlds that don't require the GM to tell me... I can and should have expectations about what will be present in the setting. Much like my character would have such knowledge. I don't need the GM to be a cypher for everything about the setting.

With a GM's world... where the creation of the world has been deemed their responsibility... that's far less true. Yes, they can provide some kind of primer or something. But there are simply going to be gaps. There's also likely to be reluctance to allow things to play out as a result of play. I know I've done my fair share of villain-protecting hijinks because the bad guy didn't live up to be the threat I saw them to be. There can be an impulse to protect the things we've created. As I said, I know I've done this and I expect I am not unique in that way.

Agreement is needed for functional play. But I think getting to something that's more player driven as described in the OP takes more than just agreement.

 

[pointofyou]

I can't comment on Duskvol.

I use the World of Greyhawk a lot as a backdrop for play. When I do so, the maps are public, the backstory is public, etc. So - to give an example from actual play - when a PC is stuck in the Bright Desert, the player of that PC can confidently state "Everyone knows that Suel Nomads are as thick as thieves in the Bright Desert!" and make a Circles check to try and meet some.

This is consistent with the OP's goal of having the players' ideas, plans and decisions determine what path the story will ultimately take. On the other hand, every time the GM refers to some pre-authored detail of a world or setting to explain why some player-suggested course of action is not feasible or can't unfold as the player suggests, it is the GM who is determining what path the story will ultimately take.

Whether any of the above is good or bad is a matter of taste. But how these things stand in relation to the goals set out in the OP is a matter of fact.

Sure. I haven't prepped what will happen in nearly twenty years. I played in AD&D 1e games where the DM didn't do so. It's not something outre by any means.