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Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8973120" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>You ought to avoid creating a rowboat world. There has to be sign posts that say "Adventure here". There always has to be something to do no matter what road the PC's travel in, though the risk in a sparce sandbox is that you'll unconsciously rely on illusionism so much that you'll actually be building a railroad while everyone pretends the PC's are making choices.</p><p></p><p>There is a real difficult decision that you need to make at the beginning of the campaign. It isn't a right or wrong decision, but it will shape the campaign. If you want to have a big grand story from the get-go, that's fine but in my experience, it interferes with players driving the story. There is a bit of a conundrum here that there is no solution to. If you want a cinematic story driven experience, you need to begin with a Bang. That is, you need to begin with something exciting and engaging that sets up the situation. You don't begin with small options like "You can go kill rats in the basement" or "You can go kill the kobold raiders" or "You can search for a lost family necklace".</p><p></p><p>The problem becomes if you do begin with a bang that the players are driven by events and not their characters or the implied themes of their backstory. And opportunities to explore those things are limited, because "Saving the world" (however big the world is) is always a pressing point that overrides consideration whatever story the players could engage in. Investigate the disappearance of my mother, or go save the world? Figure out the secret of my heritage, or go save the world? And by "Save the world" I don't mean that literally necessarily, but I do mean that there is some big obviously important thing that needs to be done. </p><p></p><p>But if you have a sandbox and you focus on small episodic adventures, then you are strongly risking that you never get a big story out of the campaign because the players don't ever engage with anything deeply. </p><p></p><p>Which one you make probably should depend on just how much energy players put into backstory and how much they signal that they want to drive the story forward. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>I mean, because they are not. Compare with what well designed RPGs like 'Skyrim' and 'Mass Effect' do with these big establishing scenes. Bangs are so much better than hooks. Hook design is fine, but it's creates so much more emotional impact when you that distant glimpse of a Reaper or have the PC's escaping their own execution because a dragon attacked. It's just the trade off there is the PC's are probably going to emotionally invest in the story you are offering. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>You can walk away from "We're rat catchers in the sewers." It's much harder to walk away from, "The Dark Lord is conquering the world." But then again, what story do you really want to be plunged into? And if the Dark Lord isn't conquering the world, what are you going to do that is equivalently exciting? You can dangle "The Dark Lord is conquering the world" as a hook sometime after killing rats in the sewers, but then one the players bite you're basically into a campaign that started with a "bang" without the bang. There are real dangers in slow boil campaigns where you are waiting around for the players to decide what the story is. And maybe the biggest danger is that you have six players who can't agree on what to do and are suffering from choice paralysis, spending 3 hours discussing what they could do without ever doing anything.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8973120, member: 4937"] You ought to avoid creating a rowboat world. There has to be sign posts that say "Adventure here". There always has to be something to do no matter what road the PC's travel in, though the risk in a sparce sandbox is that you'll unconsciously rely on illusionism so much that you'll actually be building a railroad while everyone pretends the PC's are making choices. There is a real difficult decision that you need to make at the beginning of the campaign. It isn't a right or wrong decision, but it will shape the campaign. If you want to have a big grand story from the get-go, that's fine but in my experience, it interferes with players driving the story. There is a bit of a conundrum here that there is no solution to. If you want a cinematic story driven experience, you need to begin with a Bang. That is, you need to begin with something exciting and engaging that sets up the situation. You don't begin with small options like "You can go kill rats in the basement" or "You can go kill the kobold raiders" or "You can search for a lost family necklace". The problem becomes if you do begin with a bang that the players are driven by events and not their characters or the implied themes of their backstory. And opportunities to explore those things are limited, because "Saving the world" (however big the world is) is always a pressing point that overrides consideration whatever story the players could engage in. Investigate the disappearance of my mother, or go save the world? Figure out the secret of my heritage, or go save the world? And by "Save the world" I don't mean that literally necessarily, but I do mean that there is some big obviously important thing that needs to be done. But if you have a sandbox and you focus on small episodic adventures, then you are strongly risking that you never get a big story out of the campaign because the players don't ever engage with anything deeply. Which one you make probably should depend on just how much energy players put into backstory and how much they signal that they want to drive the story forward. I mean, because they are not. Compare with what well designed RPGs like 'Skyrim' and 'Mass Effect' do with these big establishing scenes. Bangs are so much better than hooks. Hook design is fine, but it's creates so much more emotional impact when you that distant glimpse of a Reaper or have the PC's escaping their own execution because a dragon attacked. It's just the trade off there is the PC's are probably going to emotionally invest in the story you are offering. You can walk away from "We're rat catchers in the sewers." It's much harder to walk away from, "The Dark Lord is conquering the world." But then again, what story do you really want to be plunged into? And if the Dark Lord isn't conquering the world, what are you going to do that is equivalently exciting? You can dangle "The Dark Lord is conquering the world" as a hook sometime after killing rats in the sewers, but then one the players bite you're basically into a campaign that started with a "bang" without the bang. There are real dangers in slow boil campaigns where you are waiting around for the players to decide what the story is. And maybe the biggest danger is that you have six players who can't agree on what to do and are suffering from choice paralysis, spending 3 hours discussing what they could do without ever doing anything. [/QUOTE]
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