Last time, we looked at the Ghosts of Campaigns Past,
reminders of your last campaign that can ruin the mood of your new one. It’s
like the hangover after a big night out, sure you had fun but it can kill your interest
in getting out of bed the next morning. This time I will discuss some of the
mistakes I have made that caused some of my sequel campaigns to fail harder
than Godfather 3.
High on your success from you last campaign, it can be very
tempting to throw your players straight into a fully evolved story even though you
have set your new campaign in a new area of your world or with a new set of
themes. It is often very easy based on
your previous success and intimate knowledge of the world to set up an
amazingly detailed and complex story, with double agents, hints of secrets at
every turn and events that have serious impact or world shaking consequences
but still don’t do it. Great stories
have simple beginnings, they need room to grow.
Ever see one of those poor cats raised inside a tiny bottle? Yeah that is the horrible fate you are
condemning your campaign to. It’s like
taking a friend to the gym after you have been working out for months and
expecting them to lift the same weights as you do, sure they might manage it
but the pain they will experience for the next 3 days means they are unlikely
to be keen to join you next time. Like
weight training, characters and stories need time to build up a good base
before you start targeting areas to tone or load on the big weights.
You see Timmy, as much
as you want to get hot and heavy with that cute girl on the first date, you
need to let her get to know you and like you before you bring out your sexy
clown costume and shiny silver duct tape.
Existing campaign worlds are great but they can come with an
over abundance of complex material that can be too much for a new campaign. It’s hard for a baby to learn to crawl if you
are putting bricks on its back. Its why
Wizards of the Coast wrote a campaign to scrub the Greyhawk world clean between
the second and third editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was no room left
for new players, no way they could invent and really add to Oerth. Equally so, even if your world has lots of
areas where characters can fill your world with their stories don’t
overcomplicate it, start with humble beginnings. It’s great to have a campaign setting with
rich history to use, but it should be a prop not a cage for your players.
Smack 1 started with only 2 keen and slightly deranged Game
Masters, a map and 3 warm bodies. As it was
a spur of the moment kind of thing and we hadn’t really done any preparation
nor had I played many game session with Yeti, my co-GM. In fact I had never co-GM’d before but Yeti was keen so I gave it a shot. I had no idea of the awesomely twisted trip
awaited us. So in the 2 minutes before
the game we worked out an incredibly simple plot; give the characters a big
heavy box wrapped ostentatiously in yellow silk with instructions no to open it
and to deliver it some faraway place for a hefty reward, then try to steal it
from them. We had recently watched the
first Pirates of the Caribbean and enjoyed it so piracy was in the mix a little
too. It turned out to be the best campaign I had ever run. Even the somewhat
random spur of the moment things we did in the beginning ended up having story
reasons that appeared as if by magic later on. It flowed because we let the
simple premise grow into a mighty story with the help of the players. It involved a lot of spur of the moment
adaption and playing but that can be a lot easier to do with 2 GMs.
Conversely, Smack 6 was difficult for a player point of
view, it was hard to run and burdened with too much pre-existing story
infrastructure, too many things I wanted to explore and do. While there were many other problems with
the game, one of the early ones was I introduced too much too soon, too many
concepts, too many factions and too much complexity. I had the characters caught in a large web
but hadn’t given them enough time to really get to know their characters, get
to love or hate the NPCs they had met, or really get to feel for the
world. It was like teaching someone to
play tennis and then hitting 20 balls at them simultaneously and expecting them
to suddenly turn into a Wimbledon Pro.
Luckily I had some seasoned players so they did alright and the game
didn’t immediately fall apart. It
certainly struggled to breathe though, and character growth was somewhat
stunted by the pace the themes, NPC’s and factions were introduced.
You see Timmy, true
romance can only be achieved between a torturer and his subjects by starting
simple , you have to start with something like thumbscrews before breaking out
the boiling water, rats and strawberry jam.
Another mistake I have made, and have seen in other games is
the predetermination problem. Based on
how great your last story went, and how many others it inspired in your mind,
you may plan out a full campaign. Not
only does this break the
first rule of dungeoncraft but it can be as fun to play as listening to the
thrilling account of that time your friend found $10 in the back pocket jeans
for the 30th time. Basically,
no matter how cool the story is for you, no matter how great it sounds in your
head, it’s generally not as fun to play for your players. No one likes being the warm body for someone
else’s character to ride around in. You
should at least respect your players enough to grace them with the illusion of
choice, chasing down your victims much more fun when they believe there is a
chance they might get away. Avoid stories where the characters may as well be
NPC’s. You might have directions you
might want their characters to go in or develop character traits that fit your
plan for the story, but avoid the temptation to railroad them down it.
You see Timmy it’s
much more fun if you let your victims might be able to escape as you chase them
through condemned carnival park before they experience the grizzly end that
awaits them.
Smack 3 was a campaign I started with grand ideas and a
grand story arch. The players were going
to go back in time to the formation and rebellion of the Imperial colonies and
establishment of the main monotheistic religion on the western continent that
the players in Smack 1 had spent a lot of time in. It was going to deal with some of the
background of lesser NPC’s from Smack 1 and tell their stories. Other than the obvious problem of tying in
characters from previous Smack campaigns, and a few other minor issues, the
story was too predetermined. I had a
plan for what had to happen, what I really wanted the characters to see and get
involved in; problem is despite my best efforts the players were playing a game
for which I had already completed the story in my head. There was too little room for them to
influence events in their own way. It
wasn’t fun, despite my players trying to make the best of it. They weren’t
playing their characters; they were playing mine, and playing my story rather
than our story. Good games and good
stories are a collaborative effort between players and GMs.
Now I could just say don’t run campaigns which are set as
part of the history of a campaign you have already run. But that wasn’t the issue, Smack 5 was set in
the era just before the Smack 1 was set and was based on the events that lead
to the story arch that I told in Smack 1. It was probably the second most successful
Smack game I had run. Running historical
games aren’t the problem. The problem
was that as a game master I had already determined what had to happen and then
invited the players to act out parts I had already written rather than let them
write their own parts in my story.
You see Timmy no
masterpiece was ever created using a paint by the numbers set.
Up next ‘the Ghost of Campaigns yet to come.’
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