Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Player-driven campaigns

I’m not a fan of sandbox campaigns – I think plot and links between sessions make a campaign more fun, I don’t like wandering monsters and random encounters, and my experience of players’ attempts to navigate even small detail-rich worlds is that they flounder without a lot of guidance. However, at the end of my recent campaign, one of my players proposed essentially the whole outline for a follow-up campaign:

  • We liquidate and then disguise ourselves (magically) as the inquisitors who are to be set on our tail.
  • Disguised so, we seemingly proceed with the Church’s mission,  gaining their  aid in entering hell to rescue Cantrus and also collecting the amulet.
  • On returning from hell, we sacrifice the Pope himself (ought to be worth a bob or two!) to the demon of knowledge for a ritual to magically fragment the amulet so we can all benefit and then reverse the area of effect on the amulet so instead of granting anyone wearing it immunity to us, it grants us immunity from everyone else ! This would leave us vulnerable only to each other’s attacks  (but we’re a team right – non of us would pick off the other to be left an invulnerable ruler of all he surveyed right ? Right ? 🙂
  • Cantrus for Pope !

This constitutes the entire plot of an ongoing campaign, set up by the players and very structured in its goals. All that remains for the DM to do is to fiddle around with the details of the challenges as set out above. In fact, I would argue that if the players told me they aimed to set out down this path, I would be very leery of changing the direction with ideas of my own unless I thought they were guaranteed to improve the players’ enjoyment of their own campaign. I’m not sure where this leaves the DM, who in this case has often complained about the hassle of creating a story for witless players but has never considered the possibility that the players would relegate him to the role of dice-roller and scene writer.

I’m not sure that many DMs have actually worked in this fashion that often – usually they’re the masters of their own world, after all. Such a campaign needs to be run in a way which maintains the challenge for the players but enables them to keep an eye on their own goals, and – if it offers different goals at all – offers new opportunities in a way which tests the players’ resolve without undermining their original scheme. I’m really eager to run such a campaign, but not so sure that it’s going to work out… we’ll see…

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3 responses to “Player-driven campaigns”

  1. Lanir Avatar
    Lanir

    Hiya. I’m new here, just followed a link from a comment at ChattyDM’s Keeping Up With the PCs post. I had a couple thoughts about a game of this style.

    First off, your PCs aren’t necessarily locked into the plan they’ve stated. If you can make some other outcome more interesting to them then they’ll gun for that instead. And secondly it’s perfectly fine to treat a plot plan like any other plan presented by the PCs. It’s kind of your job to make it look like the plan will encounter complications that make it not always clear whether it will fail or not. I don’t know if either of those helps you with the situations presented but I’d certainly be trying to use both effects (and some complications can double as one or the other depending on how the PCs handle them and how enthused the players are over them) were I to run a campaign of this nature.

    One last comment, don’t forget to scan through and make sure the PCs have an equal share in this plan. It’s one of those things some players are great at and others need to be clubbed with a 2×4 to consider. 🙂

  2. faustusnotes Avatar
    faustusnotes

    thanks for the comment! I agree with you, and I think it’s harder to carry off than some other styles of DMing. As for the PCs having an equal share in the plan – that’s a bit much to hope for, in my experience!!!

  3. Paul Avatar
    Paul

    I think Lanir is right, the DM would need to get his kicks by offering the players alternatives to their plan. The bright side is you’d get to act as the story-Devil: tempting the players into accepting faustian storyline deals, and I know how much you’d enjoy anything that can be compared to the Deceiver.

    On a different note, I think you are unfairly negative towards sandbox games, which also seems to come across in your stouches with the old school gamers in other posts here. I can see how setting someone down in a pub with nothing to do is a problem story-wise, but the image I get when imagining a sandbox game is more akin to setting players in a town with a couple of easily discoverable leads to adventure (i.e. mysterious body killed by local sewer dwellers, nearby abandoned castle, merchants after caravan guards to the Elven settlement) then follow up by letting each of these form a series of small adventures.

    This also has the advantage that if you have a setup where there are 3 or 4 bad guys all plotting to rule the world then when the player finish the first guy off the second guy has naturally levelled up to meet their increased power because his own plans will have succeeded absent player involvement.

    Maybe if you rethought of sandbox worlds as just multiple storys all colliding then you’d be happier about it. It should also increase the chance of players de-railing you by using bits of your plots against each other.

    And from a DMing perspective its not like you need to have written them all up… (especially if your players flag which leads they’ll be following)

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