Campaign Planning

Triptych

Triptych

Hi All,

How far do you other dm/gm's plan ahead in your campaign?

Is it worth planning a whole campaign in short detail then adjusting the story arc based on the actions of your party?

Also how can use my story arc in the campaign without making the party feel like they're being rail-roaded?

Invictus

* Figure out what kind of the game you want to run.

* Then ask what kind of game your players expect.

* Start a bit of prep work by designing the events that will occur that you want to see happen

* See what kind of characters your players make and they’re Goals (these are primary)

* Begin to prepare events you can revolve around the characters and their goals. These events should take the forefront and you should try and tie your story into them.

At the end of the day your game will focus on what your players want to see happen and as they go about accomplishing their goals the story you want to tell will be subtly intertwined with them and will therefore be organically pursued by your players.

_a simple example with not much prep work_


* Your story is the classic slaying of a dragon.

* One of your players’ goals for their characters is to be king of his own kingdom.

* Another is to be fabulously wealthy

* But the third is to avenge their fathers killer, the killer is decidedly not a dragon.

So if your core is a dragon slaying then change the details round it, say the king is desperate for help and offering the crown to the one who can slay the beast. Make sure tale of its hoard are widely known.

In the case of avenging the pcs father then its up to the players to decide what comes first. Either they go out and deal with that and your story waits or they decide to go and kill the dragon and then use the power and wealth they achieve afterwards to track down the murderer.

The most important aspect of this strategy is to sit down with your players and be upfront with what you want

“i got a cool story in mind you guys will like it is X”

“we got these characters and they have Y goals”

“alright, why would your characters be pursuing my story hook of X?”

And then everyone works at it together.

FemmeLegion

The one piece of advice I've got, given my utter lack of experience in running a game, is to be as flexible as you can with your ideas. Which means a lot of asking yourself what your highest-level goals are, and trying to figure out if there are multiple ways of bringing it about.

Let's say you've got a big storyline that needs to kick off with the killing of a dragon...but you've got a bunch of players that are more into politics and intrigue. Dragons can take human form, and it's much safer and easier to rule over the countryside as a despot than to ravage it as a dragon - people, for whatever sad reason, are quite content to tolerate oppression from other people. So your players will happily come along, infiltrate the court, dig up some dirt on this guy...and then he realizes the PCs need to be disposed of and takes his true form to do it. Both of you got what you wanted, yes? =)

gnunn

In my campaign, I had the overall problem that I wanted solved which looms in the background of the characters' world. It is something that obviously needs to be dealt with.

However, while the characters have recognized this overall objective, I tend to do my specific planning only a couple sessions at a time. This allows me to be more flexible in case the group throws me for a loop. (e.g. I had planted a journal recording the exodus of a group of refugees from a blighted kingdom as a quest item, hoping the players would say, "let's retrace this path, because it leads to where we need to go." Instead, they chose to take an entirely different route to more or less the same location.)

So, having an overall direction is definitely important, but so is being flexible. One thing I find that helps, especially for session-level planning is to separate the encounters you want to happen from the locations. (This definitely does not work in all cases) If you intend to have your party get ambushed by orcs when they go into the woods, but they chose to go over the mountains instead, you can have the various settings prepared and the various encounters you want to happen and then you just plug them in when your party makes their decision.

outrider

I start with a general idea but nothing specific. I have the setting in place and tell the players whats going on. I work with them on their backgrounds to help generate ideas and let them go. they usually pick a direction and go.