Weaving the plot around the characters

[BigRedRod]

It seems to me that the best type of gaming is that which revolves around the players, and yet it seems the rarest.

Published modules don't take this in to account for the most part (usually just giving a little "perhaps a player recieves a message from his uncle about blah blah" in one of the possible hook lines). I'm not criticising published modules, I understand that they can't really do any better at weaving the player characters in tot he plot (each party is made up of a differrent collection of individuals)

But it seems to have set a trend for DMs who write their own adventures to simply craft it regardless of who the players are. And this in turn seems to have given rise to leagions of poor players who don't/can't/won't make an interesting character which has possibilities for the DM to exploit in character weaving should he wish to do so

Only in one of the games in which I play has any weaving taken place. And to do this I had to bug the DM for long periods. At first he simply didn't seem to understand and thought I was just attention seeking and/or being lazy, with wanting him to fill in some blanks with my character's past (the concept is hardly original on my part, but a character with partial amnesia and false memories appealed to me). However eventually he grasped that this could allow him to make the game more personal and immersive

Now as a DM I realise I've done little to tailor my games directly to my players. I Was wondering to what extent you people do it? Or if anyone had any nice examples? I feel I can really make my games more fun if only I could actually somehow connect the players to the plots they are currently chasing

 

[Khairn]

I have never found a module or setting sourcebook that didn't require some "tweaking" to make it fit in my campaign and work with my players backgrounds.

Oftentimes I have had to completely re-work the premise of an adventure or most likely "cut and paste" sections from different modules to make the over-all story a better fit. So to answer one of your questions, I weave the characters into the story all the time. But I also require that all my players have a background set out before they play, so it gives me plenty of idea's and plot hooks to keep them involved.

As for examples ... let me ask first, what are you working on now? Oftentimes just writing out some of the major plot points and general info on thecharacters is enough to get the weaving started.

 

[BigRedRod]

Well I'll just talk about one of my games. The newest one as I'm quite sure that none of my players from there read this forum

The premise of the game is that after you die your soul lives on. Spirits linger until the Red Moon comes, the Red Moon appears when the Netherworld opens to the dead. The Red Moon hasn't be seen in a year or so and people are starting to get worried mainly as some of the wandering spirits still try to cling to life or simply hate it

Gnomes and Halflings do not exist. And elves and Dwarves are in decline, they are also powerful (each being a +1ECL race)

The four players are :
A pair of Brothers from the harsh northern island. The elder Brother served under the Czar and was dispatched to the mainland to find why the mon hadn't risen in so long (the northerners generally blame the mainland for the lack of a Red Moon). His younger brother never showed any of the traits which brought honour to his family as such he is being removed to the mainland in order to remove the embarassment he causes his family and to possibly teach him to be a man. They are a fighter and a Rogue/Sorceror

The next character is a drunkard dwarvern cleric of Pelor. Not officially exiled, but he considers himself so as he feels guilty about the death of a friend. The two of them ventured in to dangerous tunnels and only one of them returned

Lastly is a wizard from a tiny island which has a wizard college built upon it. The college specialises in Necromancy (as many regard it as evil those who wished to study it all grouped together for mutal protection and furthering their magic). During his education he had a rival. Rivalry was taken to extremes when a prank went wrong and he killed his classmate. He was quickly apprehended and imprisoned on the isle but eventually he was released to seek redemption. Thus he fled to the mainland

So far the group stumbled across one another at the same time as a building caught fire and a kidnapping took place.
The immediate future is that a group of moon cultists kidnapped a girl as they ordered to. The girl is from the Netherworld and came to this world as without a flow of souls her world will die.. However the transition between planes which is not normally possible cost her her memory.
The cultists believe she is a demon and her kind are the ones with are preventing the Red Moon's arrival

The cult cell leader was ordered to kidnap her by a higher power in the cult. As the cult is cellular they know little of the overall acitivites of one another, most don't think there is any communicate between groups of cultists. The core of the cult is in fact a group seeking to unite the collection of city states that make up the area under the banner of a single country. The cults are one of their tools providing fear to drive the people to seek better protection and therefore seek revolution.

Of course this group is not entirely unified in its ideals. One of the members is, unknown to threst, also a creature of the Netherworld. A force of entropy (or absolute law dpeending on who is looking) who was imprisoned there and managed to escape (at a cost of a good deal of his power) and who has slowly been working to throw the worlds into chaos that will destroy them both, returning the world to a perfect void.

That is a sketchy quick outline of my plot ideas. But I'm happy to warp it to incorporate the PCs themselves. I had an idea about the wizard possibly being innocent, but I'm not entirely sure why or who would have benefitted from framing a young wizard

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Character weaving requires DM and Player cooperation. The players need to give the DM a history, a personality or some goals that can be used as part of an adventure. If your PCs only have the goal of getting rich then you better have an interesting history or the DM won't be able to weave anything.

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Sometimes it's called railroading, unfortunately.

IME when you start a campaign you don't know character very well, so it's difficult for a DM to start character weaving. You need a game that's been going on for some time.

 

[Gilladian]

In the campaign which I just finished running, I did a LOT of character weaving, but wanted to do more.

One character was a rich merchant's daughter, Maxima. She's a sorceress in an area where magic is feared and reviled. So there was a lot of built-in plot. Her mother Julia was secretly descended from (evil) sorcerers who once ruled the kingdom, and was grooming her son and daughter to lead an uprising to re-establish the old rule.

The sorceress had a bodyguard, the party fighter, Lygiea. She was a member of a secret women's rights organization. They frequently helped women to deal with unhealthy or abusive situations. So one adventure consisted of planting magic on an abusive husband so that the wife could then blackmail him into leaving her alone. Another whole thread involved Lygiea' desire to buy her family out of slavery into freedom.

The rogue in the party was the son of a man who had once been head of the local theives' guild. Harry was intent on getting revenge on his father's murder. To that end he eventually had his henchman settle in town and set up a connection to the guild. He planned to use John as a tool to spy on the guild and destroy it or find others who would help him with his revenge.

Unfortunately, the party was forced to break Julia out of prison after she was caught practicing magic and flee south with her. They kidnapped Maxima's father on the way, but had to leave John behind.

Only the party druid never had much background that came into play. But he seemed to want it that way, as every time I started to work in that direction he shied off it. Oh, well.

Gilladian

 

[Voadam]

It seems to me there are two types of weaving, one based on the PC's past and one based on the PC's current choices.

For example I ran a ravenloft campaign where the PCs came from a world with a greek pantheon. The party paladin was one of Athena so she sent a servitor arachnid to the plane so he could recieve some advice, since she couldn't go or reach there directly without being trapped on the plane herself. The spider was a connection to his Athena order past and the stories he knew of Athena and Arachne. When the paladin felt he was falling and needed to quest for absolution, the spider advised him of possible quests he could perform to regain his paladin status.

I had three modules that would each be appropriate for him to quest on and let him know through the spider what the types of challenges were (undead, mass murder, and I now forget the third one, either evil disease or monstrous aberrations). He instantly chose the undead option and convinced the party that was what he had to do, so they went with him. This was campaign plotting based on PC choices, I would have been fine with them doing any of the options, or him choosing to not quest.

 

[The Amazing Dingo]

Weaving plot elements and even whole plots around characters is great. I truly do think its the only way to go. I was once in a campaign where the DM actually wove the campaign plot solely around the PC's. He had an idea for a setting and a flavor, informed the PCs, and they wrote up some backgrounds. Of course, we had all gamed before for several years in another campaign, so he knew our styles and some ideas we had for PC's, etc. It worked out great.

Now I"m doing a solo campaign for that former DM and not quite half the time the PC is taking care of more personal things then the "Save the World" plot that is also running. He enjoys it and so do I.

 

[DungeonmasterCal]

I do my best to do this sort of thing. I have a framework for story ideas, and then build off the players' character concepts and goals. I like my players to write up detailed background descriptions for their PC's. Occasionally something in those background will jump out at me, and I can weave that into the adventures.

The best example of this from my DM'ing experience was for a 2e Ranger named Diana. Her player (a dear friend who no longer lives close enough to play) had written that she left a Ranger corps because she was fleeing an controlling and abusive lover (another Ranger). Nearly 5 years into the campaign, her lover shows up claiming he'd never stopped loving her and begging her to return home. She of course, refuses, and after several great roleplaying sessions where they argue and try to explain their reasons for everything, he assaults her and tries to rape her. She got away after severely beating him down, and leaves him in a puddle of his own blood.

Jump ahead several weeks (in game time and real time), and the party is exploring the sewers in some ancient ruins. Kevin (the name of the ex-lover) shows up, and in a fight with a horde of undead, Kevin sacrifices himself so Diana and her friends can escape.

Jump ahead again several months, both in real time and game time, and during a desperate fight against several ghouls, a wight enters the fray. It's Kevin, risen as an undead and still obsessed with Diana. He tells her that if she won't be with him in life, then she'll spend eternity with him in unlife. She is forced to kill her own ex-lover. My player later told me that one of the most intense emotional rides she'd ever been on, even though she knew it was all fiction. But just trying to imagine all Diana went through was really mind-boggling.

I was glad to be of service...

 

[exile]

I ran the first arc of what will hopefully be a recurring campaign for my group during the first four weeks of August. I went out of my way to get the players to work with me to create backgrounds for their characters; I was more successful with some than with others.

The game was set in a lower magic version of the Forgotten Realms with a healthy injection of pulp action and Lovecraftian horror.

The party consisted of...

a dwarven necromancer (who also happened to be a spellfire wielder and serial killer)

an elven thief (who happened to be hideously deformed from a magical explosion on a ship)

a human druid (who wanted desparately to be a wild elf)

a wild elf cleric (who didn't give me much background to work with)

a half-elf ranger (who similarly lacked backstory)

a human cleric of Tempus (who had fled north following an illegal tryst with a merchant's underage daughter)

a human sorcerer (who happened to tap the shadow weave for his magical abilities)

a drow fighter (who was light on backstory)

a half-orc fighter spawned of a loving marriage (who happened to know some local caravaneers)

a dwarven barbarian (who was only present for the final session of the story arc and lacked backstory)

The principle plot of the campaign revolved around the PCs investigating the delay of a caravan that was due to arrive in Sundabar a day prior to teh start of the campaign (in time for Midsummer). Each of the PCs was assigned a different reason for investigating the delay. Thus each had different information about the caravan and the nature of its cargo (which happened to be a library stolen from an evil wizard's tower by adventurers who owned the caravan).

The necromancer sought to investigate the caravan because he knew the books had previously belonged to his master (the evil wizard they had been stolen from). The cleric of Tempus investigated teh caravan's delay as civic duty. The sorcerer was tipped off by a "shadowy figure" that the caravan carried arcane texts which would serve him well. The half-orc went as a favor to hsi father (who had previously been a member of teh adventuring party that stole the books and was transporting them). Basically each had their own reasons for investigating the caravan's delay or seeking to recover the books it carried.

When they came upon the wreck of the caravan, they could tell by Tracking that it had been raided by both a group of goblins and a group of orcs. They went separate directions, the orcs taking the books, the goblins taking human prisoners. Because they each had different reasons for investigating the caravan, much dispute as to which way to go followed.

Ultimately, it was decided to pursue the goblins first. Outside the goblin lair, the PCs met a wizard who the sorcerer happened to know (they had had a common mentor in dealings with the shadow weave); the wizard explained that he had come to the lair hunting a witch who had taken up with goblins. The truth being that the witch was really a frightened young girl who had seen her mother lynched by this wizard and his cronies. Of course the party's sorcerer struck a deal to help the wizard capture the girl if he would lend his assistance against the goblins. When the party finally encountered the witch, the party's druid realized that said witch was the daughter of one of her friends. Again, much debate ensued.

Here I also introduced another subplot. The underage girl (who was now barely of age) whose father had run the cleric of Tempus out of Amn happened to be a captive of the goblins. After she was freed, she slapped him angrily and chided him for leaving her "after all, I could have been pregnant", which the cleric interpreted as "I am pregnant".

Yet another use of character backstory occured when the party found the first of the lost books. After reading a message scrawled in the front cover, the dwarven necromancer discovered that his master was actually the pupil of a lich which had destroyed the dwarf's ancestral home. Ah, the drama.

Enough for now. Time for Indian buffet. Mmm, good.

Chad