D&D General Style of gaming

[Mhouse1723]

Hi all my name is Milhouse1723. I came up with a unique D&D game play for a long campaign. Usually there I one DM and party from there POV. But what if you had others in the same campaign but from a different POV. So one POV is the heros, then you have a party from the villains. I came up with campaign that has 3 POVs. Which added anti- heros. So friends of mine think it is a cool idea but might be hard. 2-3 DMs and parties for people that have alot of people that want to play. Each DM uses the motivation of the party ie. Heros fining and stop evil, villains causing havoc and completing thier task. The cool thing is the parties can run into each other without knowing who they are or what they are doing at one point but later may recognize those individuals later and could cause an encounter. Tell what you think of my idea please be respectful. Thanks

 

[Charlaquin]

Hey, welcome to the forums! I think a campaign like this could be a lot of fun, though difficult to pull off for a lot of reasons. But if you have enough people who are interested, I would definitely encourage you to give it a try.

As an alternative to having the different parties be pitted against each other, you might consider having them working together in parallel. If you’ve heard of the book Tales From the Yawning Portal, one of the dungeons in it was originally designed for this type of play. In the book they modified the dungeon to be doable with one group and one DM, but the dungeon was originally designed for convention play, where four different groups were all playing through different sections of the dungeon, collecting key fragments scattered throughout the dungeon, that they would need to get to the center for an epic boss battle all together. If that sounds fun, I recommend looking up the original version, which is called Dead in Thay.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It's an ambitious idea, but I agree with @Charlaquin that it might be safer to have them working together instead of against each other. In my experience, PvP can lead to emotional bleed and open conflict really quickly, faster than the DM can react to and head it off. I would be hesitant of any campaign premise that deliberately sets it up. Even if you vet it with your players ahead of time, it's one thing to say you're okay with PvP and another thing when your beloved character is dead after another PC hit you with a coup de grace when you were making death saves.

Hi all my name is Milhouse1723. I came up with a unique D&D game play for a long campaign. Usually there I one DM and party from there POV. But what if you had others in the same campaign but from a different POV. So one POV is the heros, then you have a party from the villains. I came up with campaign that has 3 POVs. Which added anti- heros. So friends of mine think it is a cool idea but might be hard. 2-3 DMs and parties for people that have alot of people that want to play. Each DM uses the motivation of the party ie. Heros fining and stop evil, villains causing havoc and completing thier task. The cool thing is the parties can run into each other without knowing who they are or what they are doing at one point but later may recognize those individuals later and could cause an encounter. Tell what you think of my idea please be respectful. Thanks

 

[Fanaelialae]

I've seen this sort of thing pulled off, and it was fun.

However, I would warn against PvP. That's just not likely to end well. Regardless of which team loses, the players lose. An especially unlucky player might lose both characters. It's a lose-lose scenario.

Frankly, if you want to save yourself headaches, I'd set the campaign up to have as little contact between the parties as possible. This is in no small part because, otherwise, you'll need to keep exacting records of who did what when. Also, assuming that these groups adventure in parallel to one another, what happens if there's a paradox?

For example, two parties (A & B) start the game on January 1st. Party A plays first, and they get into a fun adventure which concludes in them getting lost. Exhausted, they find their way to a ferry on the 14th of January. He gets them across the river and they return to town triumphant. End of session.

Then party B plays. They decide to try their hand at banditry, and on the 5th of January, they rob and murder the ferryman, and burn the ferry to the ground.

Only, hang on a second. That's a paradox. How did party A get back to town with the ferryman's help if he'd been dead for 9 days, and the ferry was burned down?

In the campaigns where I've seen this most successfully executed there was always something preventing this from happening.

In one campaign, we were playing the heroes in the real world, and the villains in another dimension (kind of like the Upside Down from Stranger Things).

In another, we had been on an important adventure to restore the world after it ended. Our characters decided to recruit a second party that they would alternate adventures with, so that if one party fell there would still be someone left. (Actually it was just because we were leveling up a lot faster than the DM expected.) In that campaign there was occasional cross-over, but it was always intentional. One time when one of the parties TPK'd and the other party went in to find out what happened to them (and recover their corpses). The other was when both parties teamed up to slay an extremely dangerous pseudo-deity.

That campaign also introduced a third party on the surface of the planet (the other two parties were at the heart of the planet). This party didn't even meet the other party until the final epic battle, where they showed up as reinforcements, albeit a little too late to contribute meaningfully.

My point isn't to dissuade you from proceeding, but rather to urge you to carefully consider how to handle these issues.