The Narrative Campaign, Utopia or Doable?

[hawkeyefan]

I just have to say that this is way cool!

Thanks! I had to kind of go back over everything and establish a “cliff notes” version of each of those campaigns, and it involved aome minor retcons, but nothing significant. It was actually kind of amazing how much it all slotted together. And then the players with their choices for 5E characters...they also lent themselves to a lot of the themes that were in play.

You know, that's a very good analogy.

There's the "monster-of-the-week" episodes which equate to side quests and standalone adventures that may or may not ever have much to do with the main story/ies; and then there's the episodes which (try to) advance the main story/ies whether obviously or subtly, which equate to the more story-based adventures within the campaign.

Lanefan

Yeah, I think that’s an easy way to do it. It has a very give and take aspect to it. A lot of the narrative based campaign, as others have mentioned above, really depends on player buy in, and if you can add in sidetreks that are focused on their characters and allow them to examine what they’d like to with the character, I think the buy in is more likely. Even better if you can connect the player story to the “main” story.

When I orogonally started this campaign years ago, I sat down with eaxh of my players and asked them what character they wanted to play and what their back story was. And they all had a common element...some enemy had done them wrong in some way. The wizard’s master was killed by his fellow apprentice, the cavalier’s country was taken by enemy forces, the half elf ranger was torn by conflict between his two people....all of them had that kind of thing going on. So I simply connected them all by making the culprit in each of their stories the same.

I had to adapt some of my material to fit the backstories the players had come up with, but for the most part, that was fine. Nothing I changed was so precious to me, or muh better than what the players had come up with. And it was certainly worth it to have the characters so strongly hooked into the story I wanted to tell.

So for me that worked out, and I thibk it’s key. Give the players as much ability to author stuff when you start and then use what they create. Very often I’d find elements that the players came up with would inspire me even more, or that their ideas when combined with my own would really turn into somehing interesting.