When Player Driven Adventures Don't Pan Out

[GrimCo]

Yes, and some of the players are those players, but not all. So i think there is a bit of friction in the party on that end. Plus, this is a weekly game we realistically get to play biweekly for 2.5 hours. I think some players just aren't interested in the "homework" part --which is fair.

I think this is core issue. One short session every two weeks is not really that good for player driven campaigns.

First, time between sessions. Two weeks between sessions makes players forget details, lose emotional investment, and default to reacting instead of initiating. It breaks momentum somewhat.

Second, session length. With only 2.5 hours, players hesitate because they fear wasting limited table time if they chose wrong option. It also makes spotlight hogging easy, so people tend to be cautious not to take too much game time for personal goals of their characters, which in a way kills proactivness.

 

[GMMichael]

So, what are your experiences with player driven campaigns? Do you find them to work, require extra effort, or never work? Do you prefer them in actual practice to more directed campaigns, or vis versa? Is your opinion different as a player vs as a GM?

Players gonna play. If you give them options, they won't choose any. If you "rollercoaster" them, they'll complain that they don't get options. The GM's job is much like that of a marine's: adapt and overcome. (Or is it improvise?)

Again, I don't want to make it sound dire. I put something directly in front of them and they bit. Awesome. Love it. But what I was hoping for was "Here's three things; pick one." and that has happened less than I would like.

Analysis paralysis, or apathy are my first reactions. Ideally, they're just PCs who prefer railroads.

 

[Truename]

So, what are your experiences with player driven campaigns? Do you find them to work, require extra effort, or never work? Do you prefer them in actual practice to more directed campaigns, or vis versa? Is your opinion different as a player vs as a GM?

I leaned hard into a player-driven approach for my last campaign. (5e 2014.) It worked okay, but not nearly as well as I hoped, and my experience was similar to yours: they stopped doing their homework and struggled with analysis paralysis. It ended up being too much work for me, so I brought the campaign to a close. Now I’m running a megadungeon that’s completely gonzo with no meaningful plot whatsoever and everyone’s having a great time.

It started out well, with strong agreement that, if I was going to run a homebrew, “total PC freedom” campaign, I was going to need their help. Everybody was responsible for bringing a list of NPC names to use during play, coming up with NPCs that their PC knew, etc. We co-created the campaign world using Microscope.

It all went great at first, but fairly quickly they stopped doing work outside the game. Part of that was my fault: I didn’t do a great job of keeping their NPCs and other inventions relevant as they moved away from their starting location. But mostly people just couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to the game away from the table, and we don’t have enough time at the table to do a lot of world-building. (About 2.5-3 hrs, ostensibly weekly, same as you.)

Then the silliness kicked in. “Okay, you enter the smithy and a tall human woman greets you. What’s her name?” “Smithy McSmith-face.” The lists of NPC names got left at home or forgotten.

In the end, it was just too much work for me to build everything myself. Indecision was a bit of a problem, too, but not to the degree it sounds like yours is. That may be because I found myself playing pretty strong hooks so I’d know what to prep next.

I still like the idea of a player-driven campaign. I think part of the issue was my skill as a DM: both not doing enough worldbuilding at the table during play, and trying to do much prep away from the table instead of being ready to improv.

I picked up Stonetop and it’s a brilliant set of advice for DMing a player-driven campaign. Its structure around player goals (building out the village) and external forces (threats) adds some of what I think my game lacked. Also, by having a central “home base,” I can make the players’ world-building long-lasting and impactful, which will hopefully help feel more motivated to take co-creation seriously.

The PbtA narrative-first gameplay should help, too, making it much easier for me to improvise. And the setting book which is full of idea seeds rather than a bunch of stuff to adhere to should help me with prep to support that improv. But I think you could apply the GM advice in Stonetop to other game systems and settings too.

All-in-all, I wasn’t super happy with my first attempt at a player-driven campaign, but I’m looking forward to trying again.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I don't see the conflict. "The world is big and full of things. What do you do?" That is unrelated to either asking the players to make up setting elements, or them needing rails presented for them.

I do see the conflict. The immediate, obvious question from me as a player is "What things?"

Until I know, I can't say what I do. That puts it back to the GM being in charge of world-building and offering options. But too often "the world is big and full of things" comes with an implied "and I want you players to help decide what those things are." In which case my response is "I signed up to be a player, here, not a co-GM."

 

[overgeeked]

I do see the conflict. The immediate, obvious question from me as a player is "What things?"

Until I know, I can't say what I do. That puts it back to the GM being in charge of world-building and offering options. But too often "the world is big and full of things" comes with an implied "and I want you players to help decide what those things are." In which case my response is "I signed up to be a player, here, not a co-GM."

I run sandbox games almost exclusively in “worlds that are big and full of things” and I don’t want players to help me world build. I’m not interested in players co-refereeing. If a player asked “what things” I’d tell them to ask around in character to find out, not tell me what things they want in the world.

Neither the conflict nor the implication you assume exist in my games. I’d go so far as to say they likely don’t exist in most sandbox games.

 

[GrimCo]

If a player asked “what things” I’d tell them to ask around in character to find out

That's fair. But, characters live in that world. When player asks "what things", it can also mean "what things are there that my character is aware of". And unless you play lv 1 Joe Nobody who never set foot outside of his village in bumfuck nowhere, your characters does have some knowledge about world.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I do see the conflict. The immediate, obvious question from me as a player is "What things?"

Until I know, I can't say what I do. That puts it back to the GM being in charge of world-building and offering options. But too often "the world is big and full of things" comes with an implied "and I want you players to help decide what those things are." In which case my response is "I signed up to be a player, here, not a co-GM."

To me, player-driven doesn't mean collaborative worldbuilding, it means the players decide what their PCs do in the game as they explore the setting created by the GM. They see what's out there (which they didn't create) and decide what to do with it and/or about it.

 

[Reynard]

I do see the conflict. The immediate, obvious question from me as a player is "What things?"

Until I know, I can't say what I do. That puts it back to the GM being in charge of world-building and offering options. But too often "the world is big and full of things" comes with an implied "and I want you players to help decide what those things are." In which case my response is "I signed up to be a player, here, not a co-GM."

I'm not sure why your base assumption would be that the GM is lying about the world being full of things. It seems like a bad place to start a conversation to assume that folks are talking about a playstyle you specifically dislike when there's no evidence for that.

But as others have noted, you may have to do some legwork in play to find out what and where those things are. Your character has motivations, right? Your character needs things and wants things, right? I mean, the presumption is your character is an adventurer. Go seek adventure.

 

[Blue]

I've done a lot of this, mostly running but also recently playing as a DM adopted

My standard for running is a hybrid, of making a lot of paths available and then following on player interest. I have no idea where my campaigns will end up when I start, including what the end will be. My last campaign started with exploring a newly discovered continent and ended with a frontal assault from the moon on the regent forced on the child-empress by the council of nobles. Yeah, nothing I expected. The campaign before that started with no plan at all in place from me, and ended up with foiling a decades-long plan by the queen of the elves to start a war to use the blood and deaths to summon a horror to destroy a floating city that she believed was the phylactery of the lich lord of the undead, with other things along the way such as helping the high druid sacrifice herself to grow a new world tree to balance out the three worlds. It was a far ranging campaign, and the plots that got put in place were all because of player interest and character actions.

When I say hybrid, "full" player driven is that the players are proactive and the world reacts but in my campaign both those reactions as well as things the PCs didn't deal with may come up with situations they want to react to.

I create a lot of hooks that I don't use, and I improv a lot as players decide to do something novel or even something I predicted but not as likely and didn't flesh out, which is pretty common. My prep is often broad strokes of different things they might do, unless they have locked themselves into something. An example of locking themselves in was when they infiltrated the Imperial Catacombs full of undead ancestors who took blood oaths to support the line, I could prep a few sessions of a dungeon.

I did have feedback from that at the beginning of the campaign they weren't sure what to do, because I had given them lots of freedom and too many things of interest to do so they couldn't come to a consensus or judge what they were more interested in persuing. From my perspective it was just information so they could chose what to do, from their perspective it was a bunch of hooks they were looking at traditionally and they had problems evaluating which to do. Once they got a clear idea what was important to their characters though they found it much easier to direct and a better experience.

One group that I play with the GM ran basing on The Gamemaster's Book of Proactive Roleplaying, which recommends all PCs have three goals of varying lengths. But the group was very inconsistant about giving him these. He worked in character arcs for all of us based on backstory to help fill that void, which to me is also player-guided even if not the method from that book. We also had a bunch of "filler" sessions, because a lot of the goals that were stated were diplomacy/intrigue/investigation based, but when he would meta-ask players what they were interested in at the end of a session so he could prep, we often had players requesting combat if we hadn't seen any in the session, so we'd often get pulled (PCs reacting, not proactive) into situations and sidequests of combat. In the end, I think it was poor group goal setting, goals that didn't weave together with other character goals, and player meta-interest in combat that the GM didn't weave into our goals except as speed bumps that caused issues. Also there were places were we didn't have enough information to choose a path to pursue a goal, nor a path on how to get that information.

From seeing that side of it, it gave me a lot of perspective for how to run my next campaign.

 

[overgeeked]

That's fair. But, characters live in that world. When player asks "what things", it can also mean "what things are there that my character is aware of".

If that’s what they mean, that’s what they should say, or ask. Two different questions.

And unless you play lv 1 Joe Nobody who never set foot outside of his village in bumfuck nowhere, your characters does have some knowledge about world.

Which is why it’s generally better to start with characters with that exact description. Trying to download the sum total of all knowledge an adult would have of the world at large into a player’s head is effectively impossible. The referee can’t possibly tell you everything. You have to work with them. Give them something. Collaborate.

This is also why players and their PCs having specific goals is a must. Gives everyone a good starting point. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

The few times this “impasse” has come up at the table it’s usually from a player who’s so used to being lead around by the nose they don’t understand how agency in RPGs works. The Alexandrian has a great blog post on it, appropriately titled abused gamer syndrome.