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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 1790596" data-attributes="member: 63">You know how people talk about newbie DMs who run games with dragons and space marines and Dracula and Luke Skywalker fighting Neo and the Hulk?  How can one run a game like that, and yet have it be serious?  Because I find myself having too many ideas, and I just want to use them all at once, instead of working on a campaign with a specific feel.  I want to run the Everything Campaign.I came to this conclusion this weekend.  My latest campaign, which was going to be fun and new because it mixed steamtech and magic, fell apart.  The characters just weren't appropriate for any sort of heroic action, and I didn't feel like running a game where the PCs just went around pillaging.  But specifically I was disappointed because I'd been planning a crossover of sorts, between this steamtech world and the fantasy setting I normally run.  Basically, while planning the steamtech game, I realized that there was enough in common with my old setting, and that the plot had enough holes that would be filled by connecting them, that I basically began brainstorming the campaign as having three stages -- Tech, Magic, and then Magitech.  I was looking forward to using characters I liked from previous games, and to playing with different genres of fantasy with the same plot.  But as I said, the game collapsed.I feel that it might not be healthy to want to reuse old characters and places.  It seems a little fanboyish, which is especially unhealthy since I'm being a fan of my own work.  But dang if I didn't think it'd be fun to connect the 'resurrecting the eternal spirit of elemental air' from the old game with the steamtech 'doomsday golem whose mind has been hidden away' plot of the new game.So, while trying to brainstorm a new game -- an idea the players are quite interested in, because even they admit they weren't really sure how to make an ongoing story out of their characters -- I thought that I should just let all my weird urges fit together in a game.  I'm afraid it'll suck without some form of structure, though, so I'm asking you if you think it's possible or even a good idea.My first idea is to make it meta-roleplaying.  The characters start in a fantasy world and slowly run across things that are more and more atypical, slowly accumulating clues to what is going on as they try to stop various villains.  Eventually the characters discover that, whoa, they're characters in some sort of story.  And there'd be some sort of meta-fictive plot where they have to fight for what they value, despite realizing that their existence is just imagined.The second idea I had was to play with plane-hopping.  I prefer a fantasy game usually, and the idea of just having a setting that tries to logically combine sci-fi and fantasy and everything in between kinda doesn't click with my mind.  But with the first idea I feel that it might work, since the existence of the sci-fi is fantastical, because the sci-fi itself is a dream, just like the fantasy.The third idea is to ground it all in dreams.  I'd have to cut away the sci-fi aspects, but if the game ends up drifting into a dream world the party has to find their way out of, then I can just have different dream realities manifest whenever I feel like doing something different.Can such a game work?  Is it too weird?  Should I just ask the group if they want to keep going with the old game.  Ah, my mind is going too many directions at once.Thus my problem.</blockquote>

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