So, whos game is it anyway?

[hunter1828]

The game belongs to everyone. As DM I run a game that I know that I'm going to enjoy, but at the same time I make sure that each player has an important role in the game. I take what that characters desires, dreams, and capabilities are and go from there to weave personal stories into the overall story. No one in my campaign right now is just tagging along as at least one of each player's characters (I have three players, each plays two characters) has a "side" story that may only be tangentially connected to the overall story.

hunter1828

 

[takyris]

In the campaign I run, the party has just returned to what they believe is the lost island of Atlantis. They were exploring buildings and trying to avoid these A.I. guards that currently can outfight them (d20 Modern, 2nd-level characters, Strong1/Tough1 ordinary guards with spears and armor).

Here was my plan:
- Party gets into building
- Party sees large dining hall
- Pary uncovers matter replicator that can make food and dining equipment
- Party probably messes with it, causing it to break and start making things over and over
- Party realizes that machine will overload and blow up in big way if not stopped
- While party tries to stop it, A.I. guards show up to cause trouble
- In the end, party has to destroy device, but gets to keep the produced items, which may prove valuable -- a classic "half-a-loaf" plot

Okay, here was what happened:
- Party gets into building
- Party sees large dining hall
- Party never even searches dining hall, but instead spends ten minutes talking about the chairs, which I described as trapezoidal, made of an unknown polymer, and amazingly comfortable
- Party splits up, one group going into individual rooms, while other group tries to get lights working
- Party uncovers wallscreen with alien tech on it (at this point, I'm utterly making stuff up) in vidscreen format
- Party manages to break something, which I decide summons the A.I. guards
- Party gets two people nearly killed, and another person injured, before guards are taken care of
- Party says, "Dude, that sucked", and flees the island, taking with them vidcaps of the images from the wallscreen, and one very comfortable chair

Not at all what I'd intended, but the players still had fun. Which is probably a good thing.

 

[Psion]

The trick? Plan in detail what the bad guys do, and NOT what the good guys do. Then let the PCs thwart your bad guys, who change their plans to adapt.

Truth.

If there are any events or plot point you want to happen, sort of design them sort of free-floating, and adapt it to fit the evolving situation.

 

[DragonLancer]

Not at all what I'd intended, but the players still had fun. Which is probably a good thing.

Then have the island explode or whatever you thought would happen. Let them hear about it and wonder.

 

[Rel]

- Party says, "Dude, that sucked", and flees the island, taking with them vidcaps of the images from the wallscreen, and one very comfortable chair

Not at all what I'd intended, but the players still had fun. Which is probably a good thing.

Indeed it is a good thing. The group I'm running would probably sell their mothers for a "very comfortable chair" right now.

 

[Teflon Billy]

Here's what I do -- I plan out some cool locations, some cool NPCs, and then I give those NPCs motivations and agendas. I might even go so far as to briefly outline what will happen if there were no PCs. Then I throw the PCs into the mix and see what happens.

Bingo! Joshua Dyal speaks the truth.

This is exactly how map out the "Big Stories" when necessary.

• Who are the important NPC's? Write them down (thumbnail sketches are fine until the PC's start interacting with them), decide on their personalities and mindset (Give them an alignment, yes; but also list three personality traits. Two positive, one negative. (You get to decide what a "positive" trait is for each character).
  
  
• What are the important locations? If a city is important to your story, make sure there is a reason why. If it's a trade nexus, make sure you know where the trade is coming from (Caravan? riverboats? whatever). It's not enough to say "it's the highest mountain in the world" and expect people to care. "It's the highest mountain in the world, and the God of Metalwork live in a cave atop it" might give someone a reason to go there.
  
  In short, make sure there is a reason places are "important"
  
  
• Keep a log. Seriously. after every game session, sit down with your list of Important NPC's and ask yourself if their outlook/actions regarding the "Big Story" have changed at all due to PC behaviour. Use their alignemnt and personality traits to decide what they now think.

And that's basically it. It allows your group to just take off in any direction and do whatever they feel is necessary, and at the end of each session you touch-up all the scratches they put in your story

The drawback is that you must be able to improvise. If they take off in an opposite direction from where you expected based on last weeks action, you have an entire game session to fill up.

So keep some modular stuff on hand. "Bandit Camp" and "Humanoid Cave Complex" can basically be dropped in anywhere. Also keep in mind that if everyting they do affects the "Big Story" in some way, that they will likely twig to that after awhile and begin to feel railroaded. Every so often just let them rescue a merchant daughter or kill a rival or whatver it is that they will both enjoy and that will allow them a break from your story.

It's OK to have some plans to the campaign; in fact, a really good campaign probably has to have them. However, that does not mean you have to have pet NPCs or single track options.

I culdn;'t get by without pet NPC's but it is important to insure that they can't fill the PC's slot in the story for whatever reasons. Joshu and I are of a mind on Single-Track options, though. They are the devil.

Let the PCs be creative and if they have a good idea, let them run with it. Never make the mental equivalent of saying "That doesn't work because the module says you have to solve this this way."

If you take away nothing else from this thread, take the above quote.

 

[ColonelHardisson]

After reading the thread, I figured I'd simply post what I like to do, rather than reply to posts in detail. I may repeat some of what has been said, but here's what I like to do as a DM:

* create a world, and make the part where the PCs will start out fairly detailed.
* create a number of important NPCs, the movers and shakers in the world.
* create a rough timeline or sequence of events, which will take place unless someone - the PCs - alter them.

Simple enough. Now, if the PCs don't make an effort to alter the world on a large scale, events will unfold as I mapped them out. If the PCs don't like what entails, they are free to try to change things. If they never feel so motivated, that's OK also. In my timeline, I generally plan on having at least one huge, world-altering event happen, generally something in which evil gains a decisive upper hand. If the PCs don't try to prevent it from happening, it'll happen (an analogy is that Sauron would conquer Middle-earth). If the PCs do end up letting it happen, they are free to try to rectify things.

Now, I like the idea of having a single, huge event where the world could end. It gives a sense of urgency to the game. As a DM, this provides great motivation for my players. As a player, I like the idea that my PC has the opportunity to make such an impact. If the PC fails, well, he fails, and the world ends (so to speak). As a DM, this just means I need to either create another campaign world, or figure out a way to let the players fix things in a way that doesn't seem like the world was never in any real danger, or damage was never done. As a player, even if the world ends, there is an odd sense of satisfaction - "well, at least my PC tried. He had the chance" - plus, it lets me know the DM isn't railroading things to keep his world intact.

 

[Psion]

Some of my best games came about when the party does things I wasn't expecting. For example, in one campaign, the party basically had two options, find out where the immortal queen went, and rescue the prince. I expected them, for campaign reasons, go for the immortal queen first, so that's what I prepared all of the NPCs and other challenges around.

And what happens? You guessed it. They went after the prince.

Fortunately, I had the kernels of a few ideas of where he was and what sort of challenges they would have to face to find him and extract him. To that I grabbed some stock NPCs, some new monsters I was considering using, some maps from Darkfuries' floorplans, threw in some half baked ideas about a rebellion lead by one character's ghostwalker father and voila! I was ready to rumble. It took a little improvosation, but having a general idea of where I wanted to go and riffing off of the player's actions, it all worked out. As the party snuck into the castle where he was being held, I threw in some comedic interludes where the party catches a guard sneaking into a back room with the noble's daughter.

 

[Henry]

For example, in one campaign, the party basically had two options, find out where the immortal queen went, and rescue the prince. I expected them, for campaign reasons, go for the immortal queen first, so that's what I prepared all of the NPCs and other challenges around.

And what happens? You guessed it. They went after the prince.

Likewise, in my FR game, I still have a highly-detailed and ready-to-roll Myth Drannor romp that was never used - 3 weeks ago, the players suddenly decided that they wanted to go to Impiltur instead - halfway across the world!

As was said, even if you DO have motivated players, they'll still pull some surprises out of their hats. It would have been far worse had I decided to advance the main plot yet, instead of letting it stew.

 

[ThoughtBubble]

Wow. Thanks for the adivice

First, thanks to everyone who posted. There was a lot of good insight and advice in there. Even if I don't respond to it later, I've read each post in here at least three times. I also talked some to some of the pepole around here about it. After everything had a chance to sit a while, I decided that I'm going to go ahead and try to run the game. The ideas are ones that, had I not gotten around to making into a campaign, would have found themselves in my notebook, and doubtlessly been pulled out later when I needed a good situation, a good villian, or both.

Now, normally I tend to work in a very specific manner. I usually find the starting set of events, leaving plenty of openings. From there, I start to decide the reasons that those events began to happen, and the orginizations and individuals behind them. Typically, I can find out what the NPC's plans are, and how those will affect the party.

I don't want to take the choices away from the players. I don't want to load them down in a world where their actions don't matter. On the other hand, I will work in visiting the aincient mountian palace, the posoned chalice of life, and the path beset by death into the game. Now, hopefully, they'd be willing to make the journey when they find out that's the way to awaken the power needed to defeat the sleeper, but if not, It's a neat place, and can make a comeback elsewhere.

The responsibility for cooperation and compromise in creating a fun campaign goes both ways, by the way. Players have just as much obligation to work with the DM and generally follow the campaign outline set up by the DM, and not deliberately torpedo all of his hard work by running off in a direction they know that he is completely unprepared for. Too many players forget that the DM also deserves a share in the fun and campaign direction that is at least equal to their own.

Thanks for the encouragement. I think I need to explain this to my players a little more.

I agree; you only want to push your characters when they are directionless. For some players, this is always. They don't want to think too hard about the game, they just want to show up and have a good time. These types of players rarely take initiative, or develop plots tailored to their characters and push them back to you as the DM. If you read up on all the DMing theory, get your expectations askew and then happen to have these kinds of players, you'll be sorely disappointed.

That aptly describes the situation unfortunately. The dynamics within the group aren't very dynamic. I could go on and on asking questions on how to deal with it. But straight to say, most everyone I've talked to states that it was a bad group to begin with. And boy, I could complain about that for hours. So the first step is to locate people that will have fun with the game that I'm proposing.

The game belongs to everyone. As DM I run a game that I know that I'm going to enjoy, but at the same time I make sure that each player has an important role in the game. I take what that characters desires, dreams, and capabilities are and go from there to weave personal stories into the overall story. No one in my campaign right now is just tagging along as at least one of each player's characters (I have three players, each plays two characters) has a "side" story that may only be tangentially connected to the overall story.

The trick? Plan in detail what the bad guys do, and NOT what the good guys do. Then let the PCs thwart your bad guys, who change their plans to adapt.

If you try to script the actions and plans of the heroes, you might as well not even bother.

I tried that repeatedly.
"Thwart evil? Coudln't I just sit in a tavern forever? Evil should come to me."
For me, the rub is when I ask for specific aspects of what the good guys are like, or will do, and the "yeah, sure" is just a "yeah, sure" until the situation comes up. I don't know how to engage them in the game. I only was able to coax histories out of two of the characters. One was an orphan with no friends or family. The other had a personal history of "Farming sucks, so I joined the army." And unfortunately, that's fairly normal for this group.

Now, this runs the possibility that players won't want to play, because they have a different type of game in mind that I'm not interested in. They want to play an all-evil character game? Forget it. All wizards who want to pillage dungeons? Go away. Anthropomorphic races? Not on my watch. Etc. A possible result? No game at all for me.

And you know what? I'm okay with that. I play this game to have fun, and if I'm not having fun, then there's obviously no point in playing.

So, what do you do when, after clearly stating what sort of game is being run, you have players who aren't cooperative?
And as far as not playing if it's not fun, well that's why I'm not playing anymore.

The drawback is that you must be able to improvise. If they take off in an opposite direction from where you expected based on last weeks action, you have an entire game session to fill up.

I've slowly began to learn how to improvise. That started up right around the time the river nearly TPKed my players. Fortunately, I knew abou what the villians were planning. So when their unconcious bodies washed up ashore, they were found by the disgused villian in the town, who ransomed them off to an enemy of the party. They woke up, bound in a basement, as their enemies came for them. That wound up being an awesome session. Fear the chair leg of justice!


As far as the specific game goes, I talked to my favorite player out of the other group, and he seemed up for the idea. In fact, he seemed to like the idea of a more focused game.