The Pain of Campaigning III: The Plot Thickens

So, assuming you’ve considered pre-campaign decisions and successfully started your game its now time to keep running a campaign. Not just treading water, but also have it be interesting, engaging, and fun. Maintaining interest, engagement, and enjoyment from all players and a DM can be incredibly difficult, but here are some of the most common problems that can interfere with these positive aspects.

Character Involvement in the Story

There is something going on in your campaign, whether it’s the first part of a 13 part epic or your PCs have cleared out a goblin warren or an orc encampment, but the question is how much do these events continue impacting PCs. Most players enjoy the feeling that their characters actions send out reverberations through the campaign world. So, even if your planned arch-nemesis twin brother is at least five adventures from even being alluded to, maybe that disgraced mayor that slunk away should become the righteous paladin’s rival for the time being. On the other side of the spectrum, maybe you just plan on running another module out of the Forgotten Realms, but a pesky goblin shaman actually rolled a stabilization check in the last encounter. Rather than just forgot about the little guy, even if the PCs groan when he makes himself an annoyance again, the continued co-evolution of the campaign world and the PCs makes the players interested in considering the repercussions of their actions and makes for a more engaging set of decisions. Ultimately, whether your story is fast, loose, and barely planned or methodical and plotted your campaign will benefit from having the PCs characters see consequences from their previous actions. [Read the rest of this article]

The Pain of Campaigning II: Starting the Game

So you have made some decisions about your game. You may have drawn yourself a pretty map, figured out that the King is actually a Beholder, and even made a cute little NPC to travel with the players. If you were really smart you considered the campaign’s primary conflict, means of conflict resolution, and a setting. However, now it’s time to consider where the rubber meets the road, and actually start the game of your dreams and tackle the problems that come with actually doing that.

Players in General: Like it or not, you’ll have to interact with people to run your game. Cranky, disagreeable, clever, devious players that either through malice or ignorance will almost immediately begin to deviate from the beautiful tapestry of role playing elegance you had mentally envisioned. The first thing to do is take a step back and really consider what players are in a game. If what you want to do is craft a meticulously planned and rigid tale, go write a novel. Seriously. However, if you want to tell an exciting story, a story that even you ARE NOT sure about how it’s going to end, than roleplaying games provide an excellent Petri dish for creative storytelling. First of all, good players make good characters, which are the cornerstone of any story. Sure, you may have envisioned the noble knight sacrificing himself to save the party and the kingdom from the evil army, but what if that same knight in the spirit of sacrifice and a cunning plan actually lives? As a game master, you should embrace that eventuality when it occurs. In short, treat players with respect as partners ready to make valuable contributions to the game, and not as pawns to manipulate in a tapestry completely unknowable to the players. [Read the rest of this article]

The Pain of Campaigning I: Story and Pre-Game Decisions

Perhaps the most important decisions in a campaign occurs before the first die is rolled, before there even is a campaign when the would-be Dungeon Master/ Game Master/ Storyteller decides the overall thrust of his story. No, not the nitty-gritty adventure hooks, or the villains, or the individual conflicts, but an overall idea of what this campaign will be about. This series of articles will examine these crucial choices. First up, the pre-game.

Primary Conflict: What is the big bad problem that the players are going to have to confront? Most of the time this does not even need to be revealed in the first part of the campaign, in fact it could be purposefully obscured in the beginning, but it should be on a good DM’s mind so that he can build on this from the ground up and that when the major story arc becomes apparent the players feel that this is an organic natural direction for the story. The alternative is to NOT have a primary conflict and instead plan on one or more smaller conflicts that scale with the PCs level and experience. The danger of having an overarching plotline is the tendency to be overly rigid and railroad your players in a direction that either they or (even better) their characters have no desire to take. On the other hand, having no overall story can leave PCs feeling rudderless and without direction. Characters and players alike like to feel important to the world. Sometimes going from town to town with progressively more difficult dungeons isn’t even enough. Even so, a kind of ‘monster of the week’ style campaign can easily progress to having a story with a reoccurring villain or some clever retroactive continuity explaining a link between the threats de jure. [Read the rest of this article]