What I want is so precious little!

[painandgreed]

I want something even more radical than "GM tells players what campaign will be about, they make that party." I've run that before, with great success (you are part of a small knightly order, you are young men in the same tribe on the steppe) - but I think something in party creation could be used to address the "I'm responsible for everyone's fun" thing. Like, the party creation also involves some kind of... reason to adventure. That way I can play to that instead of having to get everyone to play to my idea.

Sounds like what I strive for so I'll offer some thoughts. First, is my rant that players have been trained not to think for themsevles. Set them in an inn and they'll sit there waiting for some wizard to come in and offer them a job till they run out of money and starve even if you tell them that working for somebody else is a fool's job and they can do whatever they want. Of course, it's hard to play a character in a fictional world because you don't know all the rumors and environments like one knows the real world. They do need to either be fed stuff or worked with a great deal.

The first thing I tried was to have each character provide goals, two minor and one major. An example for a low level dwarven cleric might be to create his own masterwork hammer, enchant it and then use it to kill the druegar that killed his father. With each personal goal they get some XP bonus and the major goals can direct the campaign or offer side quests. Other than that, run a D&D game as normal and provide them adventures working their goals in as they wish. Some may have trouble even doing this or at least caring. Usually, there is at least one person in a group who cares and that persons long term goals will drive the party and most people will be more than happy to go along.

After that, I try to run a more "sandbox" campaign. I have the world designed and planned out. My goal as the DM is to figure out what NPCs are up to, determine normal events, and how PC actions will change them. What the PCs do is up to them. Once again, you can't usually just dump them into the world and expect them to start running. You have to at least offer them some adventures and then let them choose what they want to do. Typically, besides whatever metaplot events are going on, I provide at least three possible adventures, one easy, one at their CR, and one hard and let them choose. These come in the form of rumors and gathered information and they typically know the realative danger levels. In addtition to that there are the typical metaplot events such as the evil king over here, the dragon there, and the good knight working there for them to interact with.

Now, are you sure you want to play to their specifications? If you offer it to them, you're going to have to give it to them or face player disatisfaction. Are you willing to let them take on easier than normal targets if they want? If they decide they want to make some quick easy money and go after that 3rd level adventure when 6th level, are you prepared to let them? Few things will dissatisfy a player more than saying you want to do what they want to do and preforming bait and switch. For example, in one campaign our party had just escaped from prison without any equipment and the DM asked what we wanted to do. We agreed we wanted to find some suitable targets equivilant to a thrid level party, kill them and take their stuff. Dm said ok, we gathered information, found what we thought were targets only to have to fight tooth and nail and almost loose because the DM decided what we planned would be too easy and gave us a "level appropriate" encounter. All illusions that what we had any control over our actions was pretty much gone for the rest of the campaign. Let PCs choose what they want to do and at some point they'll opt for the easy way.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

There's an Indy RPG called The Burning Wheel which deals with that using a mechanics called beliefs. Everyone gets three, and it's something the characters believe in that ties into a character goal. Every time one of them does something that ties into the belief, they get "artha" (something like Action Points, you could just give XP). If they resolve that belief (accomplish the goal implied by the belief), they get stronger "artha" (You could give them even more XP), and get to choose a new belief which reflects what happened to the character, how they've grown, or whatever. This way they will probably step out of the tavern the first chance they'll get and try and solve some of those beliefs.

Ah, just make sure that the beliefs all mesh together, and tell them it's OK if they make stuff up, like "I must bring Heironeous' faith to the infidels of the Society of the Boar", and you'll pick up on their cues when they fill in the blanks through their characters' actions. There's still some work left to you, but at least you shift some of that creative burden onto them.

If they still don't move, you can just tease them with all of the shiny XP they're not getting by not working towards those goals.

 

[Particle_Man]

A little more prosaic, but Unearthed Arcana has "players roll all the dice" rules so that you as DM don't have to sit down to roll the dice.

 

[MarkB]

I want something even more radical than "GM tells players what campaign will be about, they make that party." I've run that before, with great success (you are part of a small knightly order, you are young men in the same tribe on the steppe) - but I think something in party creation could be used to address the "I'm responsible for everyone's fun" thing. Like, the party creation also involves some kind of... reason to adventure. That way I can play to that instead of having to get everyone to play to my idea.

That can be tricky, because each player may have their own idea of a good reason to adventure, and even ideas that sound similar and compatible may not be so in practice.

The best way to do this would be to basically have your players come up with their own organisation - a guild, or company, etc. - that has shared goals, by mutual discussion and agreement, with all players involved. If everyone's good about e-mail it can be done that way over a few weeks, otherwise devote a session or two to it.

I can see this going badly for some groups, as sometimes one person's ideas will dominate, and sometimes a player or two will just sit back and not get involved properly, but if it works, the game should be stronger for it.

 

[Ry]

A little more prosaic, but Unearthed Arcana has "players roll all the dice" rules so that you as DM don't have to sit down to roll the dice.

That's a damn good idea... hmm... the only question is what should I do for damage? Heck, I can get them to roll that too, or I could just take average for damage and hit points.

 

[phindar]

Universalis is a pretty good system for letting the group build the game world, and players will likely have more of a buy-in in a game they helped create. I have a lot of trouble with the idea of "The GM builds the game world from the ground up and then presents it to the players" model. I don't think its the only way to do things, and I think its pretty labor-intensive for the GM. There are easier ways.

A lot of the indie games mess around with the traditional GM/Players roles. A game like Universalis doesn't have a GM (or everybody is a GM, if you choose to look at it that way), and Primetime Adventures has a GM (or a Producer), but the players are responsible for framing scenes and driving the story. There are character-driven, zero-prep games out there that throw a lot of bedrock gaming assumptions to the wind. When I started reading them, I had a feeling I that harkened back to the 6th Grade, when a friend of mine brought red box D&D into study hall. Oh yeah, we can do anything we want.

By way of example, a friend of mine got us together for a Universalis game a few weeks ago. We sat down with some blank sheets of paper and started with "What sort of game do we want to play?" Two hours later we had the setting, heroes, villains, plots, complications and a game world any of us would have loved to have made pc's and played in. (I think a lot of groups use Universalis to build the setting and then switch to a more conventional system for weekly gaming.)

 

[Ry]

The only thing I can't stand about universalis is I can't find a pdf of it anywhere.

 

[Andor]

I wouldn't have the players build the whole world, they'll get too distracted by the big picture. Buy-in and depth come from attention to detail. Instead have the first game session be the players designing the town the campaign will start in, and it's history for the past few years. A lot of their assumptions for how the world ought to work will come out in the town design, they'll set up their own villains and points of conflict. They can make characters at the next session.

You don't really need a system, just a notepad and a good bull session.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

There's an Indy RPG called The Burning Wheel which deals with that using a mechanics called beliefs. Everyone gets three, and it's something the characters believe in that ties into a character goal. Every time one of them does something that ties into the belief, they get "artha" (something like Action Points, you could just give XP). If they resolve that belief (accomplish the goal implied by the belief), they get stronger "artha" (You could give them even more XP), and get to choose a new belief which reflects what happened to the character, how they've grown, or whatever. This way they will probably step out of the tavern the first chance they'll get and try and solve some of those beliefs.

This would tie in well with Piratecat's action point XP system.