Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="BookTenTiger" data-source="post: 9415866" data-attributes="member: 6685541">Personally I find player-generated fiction not just fun, but creatively refreshing as a DM. I can sit by myself and create an interesting campaign world, but it's limited by my own creativity. When I invite the players into the world-building process, they come up with ideas I never would have, and it inevitably makes the world a more interesting and fun place. In my experience it also highly increases player involvement. The characters don't just have a connection to the campaign world, the players do too! And when a Big Bad Villain threatens the things they created... oh boy, talk about engagement!I'll give two good examples:I started a game during the pandemic that was a riff on Curse of Strahd. I came up with a general layout and themes for the settlements in my version of Barovia, but I didn't establish any species until the players made their characters. I then populated the land mostly with their choice of species. There were tiefling nobles, oppressed turtles, cabals of kenku who acted as spies for vampires, and abbeys with aasimar priests. It was a lot of fun, and not necessarily what I would have picked for the campaign world if it was just up to me!As the campaign went on, I would ask the players to come up with ideas for organizations, NPCs, or even enemies or challenges. For example, one player had come up with a mentor who was a vampire-hunting knight. I asked that player to describe an organization their mentor had founded. They came up with so many rich details, and it was so fun to have that resources when the characters finally found their secret fortress! Another character was a priest of a god of death. I asked him to come up with some rituals and descriptions of other priests, and he decided priests of this god were mostly silent. Boy that changed my plans for some upcoming NPCs, and I loved that creative challenge!Here's example two:Last year I started a campaign with entirely new players. After a few sessions of one-shots, we all sat down and created a campaign world together. I designed a questionnaire and we went through and had a big discussion. I took notes and revoiced their ideas. The players decided on the themes, setting, how the world looked, who lived there, what common and uncommon threats there were, the nature of divine, primal, and arcane magic... They even decided on the location and hook of their first adventure, came up with a starting town, and a friendly NPC!When we started the first adventure, each player came with such an amazing backstory for their character, tied completely to the world we'd created. Everyone was so invested in the campaign world. It's so funny, they chose a really hard start for the campaign, they wanted to be prisoners sent on a suicide mission! And then when they rescued a mysterious figure from a giant spider and it turned out to be the suave resistance fighter NPC they'd created... everyone cheered!I know player-generated narratives don't work for every player and DM, but for me they are consistently what bring my own games to the next level and make them memorable, fun experiences.</blockquote>

Verification