The world outside the dungeon

[MerricB]

I came across some advice by Gary Gygax in the AD&D DMG that I'd managed to breeze right through on my many, many read throughs the book. The reason I'd missed it before is because it's almost a passing thought before he gets into a longer description of something more important: converting AD&D characters to Gamma World and Boot Hill and vice versa.

To give the quote a little more context, the original D&D books and the core three AD&D books were primarily interested in describing the dungeon experience - that is, the game that most people would begin with in D&D. The DM creates a dungeon, the adventurers go into it, overcome its challenges, become rich (or dead, or both), and go home.

It was the adventure modules that showed a lot more possibilities as to how could be played: the sweeping story arcs of the Giant/Drow series and the Slavers modules, the old legends and deathtraps of White Plume Mountain and the Tomb of Horrors.

You could probably see the clearest reflection of this advice in Gary's "Gord the Rogue" books; from Gord's beginnings with adventures that seem to have little relevance besides being "good adventures", on to his later importance to the entire world of Greyhawk.

So, here's the advice:

Gary Gygax, Advanced D&D Dungeon Master's Guide (page 119)
While it might seem high unlikely to those who have not been involved in fantasy adventure gaming for an extended period of time, after the flush of excitement wears off - perhaps a few months or a year, depending on the intensity of play - some participants will become bored and move to other gaming forms, returning to your campaign only occasionally. Shortly thereafter even your most dedicated players will occasionally find that dungeon levels and wilderness castles grow stale, regardless of subtle differences and unusual challenges. It is possible, however, for you to devise a campaign which will have a very minimal amount of participant attrition and enthusast ennui, andit is not particularly difficult to do so.

As has been mentioned already, the game must be neither too difficult to survive nor so easy as to offer little excitement or challenge. There must be always something desirable to gain, something important to lose, and the chance of having either happen. Furthermore there must be some purpose to it all. There must be some backdrop against which adventures are carried out, and no matter how tenuous the strands, some web which connects the evil and good, the opposing powers, the rival states and various peoples. This need not be evident at first, but as play continues, hints should be given to players, and their characters should become involved in the interaction and struggle between these vaster entities. Thus, characters begin as less than pawns, but as they progress in expertise, each eventually realizes that he or she is a meaningful, if lowly, piece in the cosmic game being conducted. When this occurs, players then have a dual purpose to their play, for not only will their player characters and henchmen gain levels of experience, but their actions have meaning above and beyond that of personal aggrandizement.

 

[MerricB]

Of course, Gary then went on to discuss having less serious areas in the campaign - the Alice in Wonderland area, for instance - and then moves on to Sixguns & Sorcery and Mutants & Magic... when I first read this section, almost thirty years ago, those were the areas I looked at, not his advice as to the greater shape of the campaign.

Later on, this section didn't register; to be fair, I wasn't often looking at the DMG for advice of this nature - looking back on my games, many of them have followed the advice (unwittingly?) in any case. Considering the world of published adventures, how many of the Adventure Paths follow that path?

Cheers!

 

[Mark]

It's great advice. Build a world where the player characters can strive to become involved and have their actions eventually mean something in the grand scheme of things if they so desire. It's important that the evil and good already be interconnected so that things have consequence outside the sphere of the PCs, making those things worthy of PC attention and worthwhile for their involvement. Straw dogs rarely capture the imgination for long and lead to player attrition.

 

[MerricB]

So, context is important. The world the adventures take place in is important. If a group of adventurers go on an adventure, if parts of the world react to what took place on the adventure, and the players can see those reactions taking place, it reinforces for the players that what they're doing isn't just trivial.

Perhaps great DMs do this instinctively. Perhaps there are a lot of DMs out there who pay more attention to advice than I do. (This is quite likely). Formulating these thoughts is allowing me to work through issues with my own campaigns, so they're helpful even if no-one reads them. (If you are reading them, I hope they're useful).

The death of an involving campaign is a perpetual return to the status quo. I've seen this in many a TV series. Cartoons for children are often great offenders in this regard. (This is not to say that some cartoons can't tell an ongoing story, they certainly can, but not all do. Last week's episode doesn't reflect on this week's episode. This might work for the Simpsons, but does it work for a D&D campaign?) One way of getting caught in this trap comes from using a published setting. There is a tendency to want to preserve the world as it is written, so you can always go back to the books and use them. Big changes only come from without (that is, the publisher). Why shouldn't the players get a chance to change the world? When you use a published setting, it becomes your world. You can use it as you see fit: bend, spindle and mutilate it for your campaign and your players. Go have fun - it's what it's there for!

By now, my version of Greyhawk must have only a passing resemblance to the world Gary created. (Indeed, does any Greyhawk campaign really resemble Gary's Greyhawk?) The work of other writers has changed my world, but it's something that, eventually, the players have touched and made different. My great triumph with twenty years of campaigning is to have this world that it very definitely something unique to my group.

Leaving aside the greater picture for the moment, how can we acknowledge the adventures that the PCs have gone on within the world? Certainly, they've gained experience and treasure, but there needs to be something more than that for the greater world to make itself known to them. That something comes through the reaction of NPCs to them. "You're the people who saved us from the orcs!" is the immediate reaction. The next step - which is the one that I can have trouble with - is people in a different town saying "You're the ones who saved the Keep from the orcs!"

That's part of the world letting the players know that its paying attention. Then there's the adventures that are thrust upon them: "I'm coming to get you because you killed my brother, the Orc King!" or even, "Only those who killed the Orc King can save us from this threat!"

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

It's great advice. Build a world where the player characters can strive to become involved and have their actions eventually mean something in the grand scheme of things if they so desire. It's important that the evil and good already be interconnected so that things have consequence outside the sphere of the PCs, making those things worthy of PC attention and worthwhile for their involvement. Straw dogs rarely capture the imgination for long and lead to player attrition.

Straw dogs?

It's really a pity that Gary didn't devote more paragraphs - and pages - to the topic in the DMG.

Cheers!

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

looking back on my games, many of them have followed the advice (unwittingly?) in any case.

I love the passages from the early days where Gygax, Arneson, Bledsaw, Hargreaves, et al. seem to be speaking from experience: we've been playing for a bunch of years and here's what we've observed taking place. By 1979 when he wrote that, Gygax had been running the Greyhawk campaign (and playing in it and Kalibruhn) with Rob Kuntz for seven years or so. That's certainly enough to observe some universal truths (especially given how frequently he seems to have played), but it's probably just a fraction of your total D&D history by now, Merric. So yeah, I don't doubt that your campaigns have seen some of the same evolution & independently reached the same solutions several times over!

(I won't claim that this evolution is inevitable - even among people who've been playing nonstop you can see a range from those who've run one campaign that whole time and those who are always starting something new - but I do think that some similarities in the starting assumptions D&D creates and the mutuality of the things we want out of it mean some pathways are going to become well-worn channels.)

 

[Hussar]

To be honest, I tend not to reuse settings, so, this kind of thing doesn't resonate with me quite so well. I have changed groups so many times over my gaming days, that reusing a setting wouldn't have any context to anyone other than me. And, there is always the bugaboo of bringing in a DMPC from an earlier campaign that has led me to shy away from doing so.

I think this is great advice. It really is, but, there are some assumptions there that should be addressed. The lifespan of your group being the primary one, as I said above. Also, the lifespan of your DMing. Some groups I've played in rotate DM's as often as every adventure, although those tend to have shared PC's and world. But, in my current group, we've had two DM's so far, and a third one is about to start tomorrow. With three different systems to boot.

Creating a shared context is pretty difficult in that situation.

I think EGG's advice is fantastic if you have a very stable group, where one person (mostly) GM's and everyone else is a player. If your group is less stable, or you hop systems and GM's frequently, then this advice becomes less important, although, certainly not useless.

Having a context to adventures is most certainly a good thing.

 

[Rel]

To be honest, I tend not to reuse settings, so, this kind of thing doesn't resonate with me quite so well.

I don't tend to reuse settings much either but I still find it to be useful advice.

Our campaigns tend to last between 6 months and a year. We rotate GMs and when it gets back around to me then I've typically come across some new system or setting that I want to try out. I'm always flabbergasted when I hear Piratecat talking about the "short", five year 4e game he's got planned. Our attention span as a group just doesn't match that.

It doesn't mean that our games aren't engaging and fun though. And part of what makes them engaging and fun is that most of the group is interested in the sorts of games that I try to deliver: Ones where the accumulation of abilities and stuff is fairly secondary to the resolution of problems that exist in the world. And these problems usually tie into events of importance unfolding in the world. As the PC's rise in level then their impact on these events tends to be greater and greater.

That said, I don't really plot out this web of relationships very clearly at the outset of the campaign. That's for two reasons: 1) I'm very lazy and 2) I have no idea what the players will really sink their teeth into. I mean I enjoy a certain amount of worldbuilding just for its own sake. But once I craft something then I'm eager to see it get used because I probably think it's cool and I think the players will think it's cool. But you don't want to force it, right?

So I tend to plan no more than a couple sessions ahead of the group for the first half of a campaign. Whatever they appear interested in exploring or dealing with is what I make the game be about, and I focus my creative energies on making whatever that is be as cool as possible. Much of that is devoted to hurling tons of plot hooks at them, most of which I have only the vaguest idea as to what they would ultimately mean.

Eventually they navigate their way among this web of plot hooks to the point that it all starts to take some shape. That is the tipping point of the campaign where I start to tie stuff back together into something more cohesive and begin planning the ending of the campaign. The key here is that I'm not starting the game saying, "And at the end, the PC's will fight the BBENecromancer." What I'm doing is listening to the players when they say, "Whatever else happens, we've got to destroy that BBENecromancer." And so that's what I make the endgame of the campaign be about.

I've had good success with this method in terms of player involvement. I think it's because they are determining their own goals and choosing adventures that will bring them closer to those goals. It tends to make the final sessions of a campaign feel like a climax rather than a petering out. (And I'll thank you to keep your "petering out" jokes to yourself! )

 

[ExploderWizard]

The advice is generally sound but Hussar had some good points about its implementation within certain group dynamics.

First and foremost has to be what the players are interested in. If there isn't anyone at the table who cares what world the adventure is in or about any events that might be important in it the DM creating it all is doing needless unappreciated work.

A disconnect between the DM and players about this kind of thing can lead to more frustration than just about anything else.

There isn't anything inherently wrong with a lighthearted slaughter, pillage, level up, repeat type of game. We played a lot of those type of games (and still do at times). I can't help but see those kinds of games as more adversarial than a typical campaign though.

Here is the reason IMHO: The worldless, plotless game gives the DM less creative substance to chew on. The players each have a character to build and develop through play. For the DM, this "character" consists of the campaign world and the events within it. Without a world context of some sort the DM is merely judging a series of generic challenges for the players. This is why that type of game seems more adversarial to me. In effect since the DM doesn't have a character (world) to portray the game becomes largely a direct confrontation between the DM and the players.
To reverse things a bit it would be like having the players play different characters every session. There would be no continuity,lasting sense of accomplishment, or feeling of progress being made.

The evolution of tighter, more precise rulesets seem very connected to this style of play. I wonder how many groups play worldless generic adventures and rotate the GM spot so often because its an unwanted role?

The idea of a complex rule system combined with strict guidelines on what is "fair" seem to support a "us vs them" more readily than a looser lighter set of rules more open to interpretation and subject to more human judgement.

Overall the players and the DM need to be at least within a few pages of each other in the book when it comes to the game world and its importance to the game. I wouldn't have much interest in running a sustained campaign for a group of players uninterested in anything outside the dungeon. The campaign environment is my character that gets to develop and grow along with the players' characters. It is what keeps me wanting to continue running campaigns.

 

[Jack7]

I've always agreed with Gygax in this respect.