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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8366198" data-attributes="member: 6670763">A PROPOSAL FOR TERMINOLOGY:In my own notes I have started using the following terms with specific meanings, which I think might be useful to adapt for this discussion:Party: A party is a temporary group of Player Characters. This is to have a distinction to the groups of players playing in a game.Adventure: An Adventure starts when characters form a Party and sets out from a Safe Town. The Adventure ends when the Party has returned to a Safe Town and disbands. Typically when treasure is divided and XP are awarded.Safe Town: A Safe Town is any kind of settlement that is considered secured enough and close to civilization to be suitable as the starting point and ending point of an Adventure. Not every settlement means that the PCs are out of danger. A Safe Town means that the PCs are in a place where they can spend the next weeks and months idle with no risks coming to them.Site: An (Adventure) Site is the destination of an Adventure. It can be a dungeon, a ruin, a cave, a castle, a lair, a camp, or anything.I did notice that myself. For a campaign that can be entirely run by just one GM, the preparation work for such a campaign seems really low, as you really can make up everything as you go. Outlining a general layout for the world is enough, and the basic ideas for towns and dungeons can be specified whenever players plan to get there.Most of worldbuilding material I am currently writing is primarily to future proof the campaign for potential additional GMs. Though this isn't even a regular requirement. I just happen to want to run the campaign in a rather non-standard setting, in which players have the clues to piece together the general history of the area. I want those GMs to be able to have a good understanding of the world, and consistency in the presentation of towns that players might come through several times with different GMs, and I don't want to micromanage them through the entire process of preparing each adventure, by telling them which ideas they can use and what things need to be changed to fit the setting. By having a 10 page or so campaign setting documentation, everyone is much more free in creating their own material within the established boundaries.In a campaign that is set in generic D&D land with no overall unifying concept, all GMs can just make up their own material from scratch without causing issues.And here we're already getting into how the basic concept can be applied to a broad range of different campaign and gamemastering styles.This idea here certainly is an option. An option that I absolutely would not want to use in my own campaign, but there's nothing about it that says it wouldn't work if you do.Submitting characters in advance and having to go through an approval process takes the game in a direction that goes right against what I want to get with my own campaign. I think the ability for new players to just show up for a game without any prior knowledge or homework is a big selling point of the campaign. I will be running the campaign in Worlds Without Number, which is a system most people know practically nothing about, but might have heard the name being mentioned with high praise. To get such a campaign off the ground, I think the barrier of entry needs to be as low as possible. Show up, hang out for three or four hours, and if you don't like it there's nothing lost but those three or four hours. I find the proposal to check out a campaign in an unknown system with zero commitment very attractive. If you have an approval process in advance, you already have to get invested in the campaign several days before play even starts.But I can see how this looks very different if you run the campaign in D&D 5th edition for example. In that case you'll have plenty of people who already know for sure that they want to play D&D 5th edition for a long time. In that context, it becomes much less of an entry barrier.I still agree with this, though. Even within 5th edition, making things as simple as possible is certainly desirable. If it's just pick your attributes, pick your race, pick your class, pick your background, pick your gear pack, (pick your spells), then character creation can absolutely be done even in the 5 minutes before play starts.I had a discussion about this with several GMs a week or so ago, and we all were pretty much in agreement that this didn't seem to any of us as something to bother with.Yes, you could have players handing over magic items to each other based on whoever happens to be going on an adventure right now. But why would that be a bad thing? There's always a real risk that you're not going to get it back, at least in a campaign where PCs have a real risk of dying. If the character with the item dies, it can end up in the hands of a different PC who has no intention to keep passing it around.If you have a campaign that is strictly "every adventure has to be completed in a single sitting", then there is indeed the possibility of there being a big communal gear locker from which each party picks whatever they might expect to need for the adventure of the day. But see my other point further below.I was thinking of that. Does anyone know of good tools for managing this? Ideally, it should be something where all players can see the whole schedule at any time, and not just the GMs with admin access.I am thinking a bit bigger than this for my own campaign. Going with the old Gygax meme of "YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." (all caps), you can have parties be out on adventures for several weeks, spread out over several games. This is where players having multiple characters becomes relevant. When a party sets out on an adventure, that group of characters is tied up and unavailable for anything else until that adventure is completed. That adventure can only progress when all the players and the GM manage to set a date to continue it. Which might be only once every two weeks or every month. If some of the players playing in that adventure have the time and desire to play more often, they can do so by making a new character. In that case, not only are the characters committed to and tied up in the ongoing adventure, but all their magic items are as well. That way you automatically end up with each adventuring party having different sets of magic items available to them. Giving out mostly items with limited uses can also add to more variety if that's desired.I currently have the following rules written down in my notes for scheduling these things so you don't end up with time paradoxes.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">When a party sets out on an adventure, the starting date has to be on a day that is after all the characters in the party have completed their previous adventure. And in systems with slower recovery mechanics like WWN, probably also after they all had time to return to full strength.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If a party sets out to a site that has already be visited by another group of PCs, the new adventure can only start on a date that ensures they will reach the site on a date after the previous group has left it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ideally, all adventures to a site that has previously been visited by players, should be run by the same GM, if the campaign has multiple GMs.</li> </ul>Keeping the strict time records should be pretty easy with a simple spreadsheet. And I am quite certain that there are ways to have a single file that is accessible and can be edited by multiple users. All you need is a column showing the date for each day in the campaign, and a column for every PC in the campaign. At the end of each game, the GM of the group marks the days on which the game took place in the columns of all the PCs participating in the adventure, and maybe types in relevant information like the character's current XP and health condition (if you want to bother with characters taking time off for recovery).Then you have a second sheet with a column for each site, and mark on which days a party was at that site.</blockquote>

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