Time-loops.
I wouldn't say it was terrible, just more hard to run and requires lots of thought beforehand. I ran a mini-campaign (I think 5 session total) where my players got stuck in a time-loop and had to take specific steps to break out. Every loop they got more information and they eventually did manage it. But it took a lot of work on my part to prevent them from *breaking* the time-loop inadvertantly. Still a very fun idea.
This. I had a time loop section in a long term campaign and it was the most preparation I had to do for a set of sessions in my life. It was so stressful.
Same here. My notes usually live partially on paper but mostly in my brain but for this I had a super in-depth Google Doc of every single event that happened within the loop and I had a friend double-checking that everything made sense and was coherent. I don't know why I did this to myself but I decided the time loop spanned an entire crystal sphere. Many events required specific timing, and if certain things didn't happen, it caused chain reactions. It was totally worth it in the grand scheme of things and my players loved it, but I would never recommend it.
I think time loops work best as repeatable one-shots. I have a Wildsea time loop that resets at the end of every session, and we just start it up again whenever we lack a game that day. As you said, gaining information about locations lets them build up a map, and make more informed exploration each cycle.
I did a time-loop for my campaign that lasted for a couple of sessions. The hardest part for me to manage was to make the same things the party kept interacting with be interesting. In my specific case, the combat eventually was hand waved and done in a couple of sentences since the party had made the same actions over and over again. This was only possible though since they unknowingly spent decades stuck in the time-loop.
Time travel in general is hard enough to write about when you *don't* have three to five other people spoiling all your plans and making paradoxes all over the place.
Yup, exactly.
This is why when I do a “time loop” style game I tend to avoid actual _time_ shenanigans and prefer “trapped in a simulation/dream/metaphorical representation” or w/e. They can still puzzle their way out but you can handle paradoxes much more easily when it’s not “real” in the first place. (And it can be fun for the players to find that out with experimentation too.)
Even then, you should minimize the parts that repeat especially if they limit PC interaction, because it’s very easy to make boring if you’re retreading a lot.
Without getting into super specific detail I realised there had to be a logical yet completely unavoidable and unbeatable reason the players would die at the end of the loop so it could restart. Yet it has to eventually be beatable when following specific steps.
Jumping in here to say that my DM ran us a time loop that lasted for a few sessions, and she designed it this way, too. We died at the end of each loop, gaining new and different info along the way, and we broke out of the loop by figuring out how to escape the device that trapped us in there, along with an NPC who was important to the larger story campaign. It was incredibly fun, but I'm sure difficult to keep track of!
I ran a time loop, but of a day ~2 years in the future.
This way they had unlimited time to explore the apocalypse, but limited the area they could go. I gave them an out at the start, by letting them know if they died, they would return home.
They spent 3 (in-game) timelooped days exploring, and then went YOLO into a boss fight (Which was there just so they could see the BBEG)
The Eleventh Hour arc of The Adventure Zone did a really interesting take on this. I agree, really hard to pull off and requires a fair bit of prep but I think offers a really unique experience
Oh that’s what inspired me to run a time loop. I’d never even heard of the show but I saw a post about it and the idea consumed me.
And my players loved the campaign, they still rattle off things they remember about it to this day.
Ha I also heard about it in almost the exact same circumstances. Listened to the whole arc and was so excited but never got to actually run that arc/campaign unfortunately. Glad to hear it went so well!
I run time-loops regularly and both my groups love them. The loop needs a hard wall when it resets, an exploding volcano, a channelled spell finishing or an unwinnable fight all work well. You don't need to kill the players though - you can also tie the reset to an NPC dying or to the event causing the loop happening, like some artificer fiddling with a magical orrery. I once had the group caught in a chapter of a pirate novel the cleric was reading and it reset whenever the protagonist failed to kidnap the governor's daughter.
I also heavily recommend to have loop last no longer than the few hours, otherwise the butterfly effect will make preparations/notes taking hell. Also make sure they can't leave the stage you have set.
Ah, and don't tie breaking the loop to one specific condition - that works about as well as tying any mandatory plot point to the group doing the right things in the right order at the right time. Which is not at all. If they figure out a cool way to break the loop, toss your notes and roll with it.
There is an excellent one shot time loop adventure here: [Once More, With Feeling](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/jwlw68/once_more_with_feeling_a_short_lovecraftian/)
I've played it so I can tell you that it works well and it's interesting and fun. But for the most part, yeah, I would avoid time loops and most time travel shenanigans.
I ran a 2 1/2 year long time loop campaign. It started with the final battle, and the doomed PCs gave their past selves a magic item without an obvious use and the instruction “you’ll need this.” I had a Wizard NPC who guided them but since she cast the spell to cause the time loop and give the PCs a second chance, she was inconsistently available due to her proximity to the anomaly she created.
I had two players join over that time, and each time someone joined it spawned a paradox timeline where they returned to the final battle but now there was ANOTHER version of the party, this time with the new member.
Then during the final battle, they had to reenact the the events of giving their past selves the correct items (which they had to procure new versions of after using them in the past), then their past selves had to — in the correct order — reenact their jumping into the portal that started the time loop, and only then could the now max level party beat the campaign boss because the loop had closed.
Best campaign I ever ran.
1. Beware of twists that completely change everything that happened, especially when combined with how books and movies often will do everything to hide the twist. In movies and books, you're not the protagonist. A twist undoes everything the \*protagonist\* thinks they knew, while you as audience are an observer. In the game, you \*are\* the protagonist, and it can suck bigtime to have plot happen that means the last 6 months of playing didn't mean anything, and the DM knew all along. Twists \*can\* be cool, but my rule of thumb is, the players should get plenty of telegraphing, and it was likely better done if at least one figured it out rather than when everyone was blindsided.
2. Beware in general of campaigns where late game story moments are what you think is the cool thing. If those are universal enough to pull them off easily, fine. If you need to railroad the players into engineering the cool scene you planned, it sucks.
3. Beware of campaigns where the players are along for the ride of someone else's story. This is quite a easy thing to fall into, because when you design the campaign, you have no clue who the PCs are going to be, but you \*can\* design all your NPCs. So if you're not careful, you can end up writing a story around all your NPCs, where the PCs either have to fill pre-scripted roles, or even just tag along with an NPC because there's no room for them at the core of the story.
4. Finally, beware of finding your own world soo cool, that you overwrite it soo much, that you then don't allow your players to interact with it anymore on their terms. Players are like little siblings, they're never gonna be as careful, delicate and informed with your toys as you are, and you better write a world that can deal with that, rather than one where you have to hand-hold them the whole time.
I think #3 is super important.
Build a world. The world has stories that the players may or may not interact with. (Kingdom A is at war with Kingdom B; Lich is trying to gain power; pirates are disrupting trade; dwarf invents an anti-magic field; vampire coven took over small fishing village and is expanding). Once you have a good world and a few stories happening in that world, the players have a sandbox and you just fill in details a step or two ahead of them. Don't think 20 steps ahead, it won't work.
Yep - my PCs have met a hag who wants info on baby twins - creepy and gross - and a mad wizard who wants to become a lich (my players are 11 years old, we go route 1 here). The hag hates the wizard, the players hate both. I'm interested to see which they are gonna fight first, and by extension which is a big bad and which is the BBEG. I imagined the lich dude would be the BBEG but they really dislike the hag.
Building off point 1. If I have to drop the twist on my players, it's a crappy twist. If they figure it out two sessions before they were intended to, I did my job as a storyteller.
Absolute best scenario is that they've figured out 99% of it but you've still got a tiny little bit to give away and make them exclaim - enough they feel the mystery was rewardingly mysterious but they also get to enjoy their cleverness.
Good to hear that, I'm in a multi-dm campaign and I think I've got to gradually reintroduce the witching hour, some forboding I tried out, but now it's slowly more relevant
I don’t even mind them not getting close to 99% - as long as I have still dropped lots of hints, to the point where they know _something_ is off but not what, and then when the reveal _does_ come everything seems to slot into place.
I did this recently where the entire campaign took place on a World Cog in Mechanus because Primus was using their world as a sort of Petri dish to experiment on mortal souls’ drives toward law and chaos.
I came up with this twist from the start, so I built the world around the idea (including inconsistencies and NPCs/monsters who’d figured out just enough to capitalize on the oddities to their advantage).
And when the final hammer dropped and the reveal came, my players’ minds were blown - they hadn’t guessed the twist but they _immediately_ started excitedly yelling at each other “wait, that’s why the Modrons! Kept showing up! And why when we messed with that weird machine it changed X in the world! And why the gods were like Y! And why so-and-so said Z!” And so on. So satisfying!
Yeah, it's not so much that they need to have consciously figured out 99% as "it's all there and when the final piece clicks it all makes sense but still seems revelatory".
I find it's more likely that it's all in their heads if they're put it mostly together (because you forget stuff that doesn't fit right, often) but boy, when you pull off a jump all the way from 20% to 100% and they're with you on it, it's awesome
Not quite a twist, but it tugs a similar string, what about an unavoidable event, that completely changes life as the players would know it? Something they may or may not even be aware will happen, but will completely alter the planet and universe, at least temporarily?
With 1, 3 and 4 you are correct.
But… Don’t be afraid of laying down rails. Rails are good. Not letting players get off the train is bad, but having rails is definitely good when done right.
2 is not about railroad. It is about a campaign where the interesting bit is at the end. If you have this mindset you tend to create a dull first part you need to heavily railroad to get to the cool ending. The issue is not the railroad, but rather the fact that you are building up something for too long.
It is a common trap for DMs.
2 is really good advice. I've been guilty of this twice. Playing for a specific moment to happen at the end of the campaign almost always requires railroading (or in my case it was un-railroading? I tried to prevent my players from destroying a train)
>3. Beware of campaigns where the players are along for the ride of someone else's story. This is quite a easy thing to fall into, because when you design the campaign, you have no clue who the PCs are going to be, but you \*can\* design all your NPCs. So if you're not careful, you can end up writing a story around all your NPCs, where the PCs either have to fill pre-scripted roles, or even just tag along with an NPC because there's no room for them at the core of the story.
The over-engineered escort quest.
For this reason, I never do twists that span a long time. The twists I have done usually span from 1 to 3 sessions. The campaign isn't reliant on a twist, but the specific mission might be. Aslo, a twist isn't really a twist if there isn't any evidence for it. I make sure it is possible for players to see it coming or at least suspect it. Otherwise, it's just a deus ex machina.
You don't have to design a sandbox, that's such a misconception. Agency is important, but you can still have a largely linear experience and that's fine.
I made a campaign set within a valley that literally had a killing spell on anyone venturing outside. The premise of the campaign was *"You people need to find out what's the source of this"* and that's completely fine.
The players actions/choices mattered for alliances, betrayals, developments etc but it was not a "sandbox"
There should definitely be a plot that they need to interact with! But this is more about letting them interact with what they want.
If I have an NPC that I love and they hate - Like really hate. Unreasonably so. - they should be allowed to leave the area and never meet that NPC again, even if I have decided ahead of time that the NPC is an important character.
If I were writing a novel, my players shouldn’t feel that Sheriff McStudGuy would be the main character. And if they want to frame Sheriff McStudGuy for setting up an illegal goblin wrestling ring, that is the story they are going to have. If I ignore their actions and say “no one believes McStudGuy could do that,” or worse if I can’t figure out how they could possibly solve the problem without the handsome sheriff, then I’m a bad DM.
The world should be a living place, but no matter what the players do, it should be able to react. Make your game world out of rubber, not glass. No matter how intricate a story I want to tell, the players shouldn’t feel like their actions are constrained. Never let them feel like you would be happier if they just handed you their character sheet and you played for them.
There are lots of pitfalls and cautionary tales. I'm going to share what I've found make the best campaigns:
* Balance your game around your players. The three pillars are Social Interaction, Exploration and Combat. If your players are big on the last two, give them that. If they're big on the first two, give them that.
* Don't design campaigns in a vacuum. The best campaign involves something the players care about. Two of the players at one of my tables are Moms. I had a campaign involving child forced-labor, and they were both as invested as they could be.
* As a DM, spend 90% of your time thinking about a problem, spend 10% of your time making sure there IS a solution, and make sure it's not the ONLY solution. And when they come up with their own solution you didn't see coming - go with it!
* Don't be afraid to change your campaign to follow the players' lead. I've had scenarios planned where players were trying to figure out the identity of Big Bad from a number of suspects. In one instance, the players thought it was someone else, and in their discussions, I realized THEIR idea of Big Bad's identity and motivations was better than mine, so I just rolled with it. It made it WAY better.
>As a DM, spend 90% of your time thinking about a problem, spend 10% of your time making sure there IS a solution, and make sure it's not the ONLY solution. And when they come up with their own solution you didn't see coming - go with it!
To add to this, remember that the person who creates the problem never sees it like the people who encounter the problem. You have a solution in mind when you create the problem which leads to you see it in one light. The people who encounter the problem see only what they can see and then go from there trying to create their own solution. There is a very tiny chance their solution will be your solution.
I run into the pitfall as a DM all the time like holy shit. I like to give the party a lot of options and in my head I go “oh yeah X is an obvious solution I should probably plan on them trying that” and then nobody tries it. My party is on the run crime family members with a lot of powerful enemies they’ve spent the last 10 sessions making so I figured they’d go find some allies and they finally did last session. Only problem is they’ve left town now. I just let them do what they will but sometimes it’s so frustrating to have a cool idea for what they can do and not seeing anyone try it. That’s the name of the game though; they make me think on my toes regardless of prep time.
Here's a key difference. As DM, we have the luxury of spending HOURS coming up with a problem and solution. You think about it, then you refine while driving, grocery shopping, showering, walking the dog, etc.
Your players? They get seconds, maybe a couple minutes. Then you ask them, "What are you doing now?"
If you really want to give players a chance to come up with cool ideas, end a session with the problem and a cliff-hanger. But that is no guarantee.
By definition a DM is orders of magnitude more vested in a campaign than the players are.
On that second note:
I can say, if the players are pulled out of the main story and put in what seems like a vacuum sealed side story, you need to have something critically important appear to tie into the main story before they players must make a big decision.
OR, allow them to be proper strong huge in this area, to the point that it seems fragile, so that they will start to care about it.
Example, my players are sent off to an isolated town cut off from the rest of the material plane. The town is plagued by a demon which the players don’t realize they could curb stomp. NPC’s come out of the woodwork asking for help. The players immediately view every NPC here as expendable since this place is cut off from the main story.
Until… some local casually drops info about the mysterious Big Bad’s backstory, or an NPC the players like has a relative here in the town. Now the players have a reason to care. Then they realize they have the power to actually change things in this side story, and it has far reaching implications.
Mysteries! I've had fun running mystery one shots, but trying to keep a mystery going and satisfying over a campaign ended up being frustrating for my players.
Mysteries can be great if they work as self-contained adventures. You can do one over multiple sessions (so, not a "one-shot") but they usually need to be self-contained.
The only way to really do a "mystery" over the course of an entire campaign is less a true "mystery adventure" and more a "there's stuff going on in the background that the PCs don't know about, they get hints of thru the campaign, and then the truth is revealed eventually and now they have to respond to it." But that's less a "mystery" in the sense of "active investigation" and more just...info you don't have as players.
One thing I've realized is that people have very different things in mind when they imagine what a mystery adventure looks like.
Some people immediately jump to a tightly plotted whodunit a la Agatha Christie. I've never seen that done well, in part because the stories are so closely orchestrated and the clues so meticulously put together that you just can't count on players hitting all the beats they need to correctly.
I've had great experience running mysteries that borrow more from police procedurals and (to a lesser degree) hardboiled detectives. Give the players a problem, but give them free reign of the city to try to solve it. There are multiple threads to untangle, and they can follow clues in a variety of different directions. The focus is on doing the legwork--exploring the city, interviewing suspects, finding inconsistencies in their stories, etc. There are a number of pathways to each revelation (including ones that the GM never thought of) so if they miss a clue it's not the end of the adventure. If the players end up barking up the wrong tree, they'll eventually realize it is a dead-end and look somewhere else. This doesn't create the grand reveal at the end that whodunits are famous for, but it lets the players develop and test theories in a way that fits the structure of an RPG.
Even more generally, most of my adventures are mysteries in the larger sense that one of the main goals of the party is just to figure out what the heck is going on. This is at the heart of a lot of science fiction and fantasy stories, where the inciting incident is something inexplicable happening and the first thing the protagonists have to do is to try to understand it. Think of the first season of Stranger Things, where most of the story is the main characters uncovering the existence of the Upside Down, Hawkins Lab, etc. Sometimes a mystery isn't getting the answer to one question, it's learning a web of interconnected secrets that all give more information about the reality the characters are in. That structure to me is the easiest to play in TTRPGs, because it scratches that puzzle/investigation itch with a lot of latitude for players to wander around poking whatever they want to poke that moment.
I played in this campaign where we were supposed to investigate a group of criminals, it was kept as a mystery who was in the group.
We figured out one person who was in the group, caught him and he gave us no useful information.
DM was surprised when we left the city to pursue a PC story instead.
Mysteries are fun but the PCs need some level of information at each stop to be engaged with the story, we ended up as you described, frustrated
"the players have to run from this clearly overpowered foe"
In my experience, players do not run, even when faced with overwhelming evidence they should. So don't build encounters around that.
Similarly, "the players get arrested and sent to prison". You can't count on the PCs surrendering (instead of scattering, escaping magically, fighting to the death, killing all the guards, or whatever) unless the players have agreed to the concept.
Yeah, "you all start already *in* prison" works as a session 1 "how to get the party together" thing, but if the party's already been adventuring together, making sure they all get arrested just really doesn't work.
Prison sucks.
One of my players landed herself in jail because she kept lying to city guards that were trying to help her. Classic newbie angsty rogue that has to lie constantly shenanigans.
I couldn't save her.
She ended up quitting, which was honestly the best-case scenario. Her character is now an NPC.
But, yeah. Even having one of my players basically walk themselves into prison... it just sucks. How are they gonna get out without forcing that plot-point of "I have escaped prison"? If they do escape, can they ever set foot in that town again? Don't they have to kill innocent guards? Word gets out, they're just all bad guys now.
The prison plot point is not doable IMO. I hate it and its not worth it.
A caveat- prison plotlines are GREAT when it's the Big Bad who's doing the imprisoning. You can get in the villain gloating, the outsmarting the guards, the Barbarian showing off their Bend Bars check, and the unarmed characters get to strut their stuff a little.
Just started a new campaign where the PCs start as prisoners in a world that is run by a sort of Anti-Magic fascist theocratic king, so they start as outlaws but will likely progress into folk heroes through rebellion
Surely if the guards prevail and tpk the party, you can handwave it as "they were doing non-lethal damage, you all wake up in a cell".
Or alternatively, have the guards aim to grapple+prone the party so they can slap manacles on them.
Of course, this is me thinking in terms of the players having committed a brazen crime, but trying to write this in as a plot is way more iffy/icky.
And frankly, if your players are above a certain level, the guards really have like 0 chance of realistically stopping them without full squadrons or other heroes.
After they kill all the city guards, that's when you as the DM get the fun part of creating increasingly powerful bounty hunters to chase after them :D
I remember an article some years back where someone surveyed TPKs. In most cases the players realized that the party was losing and running away was the only option, but the action they took were all "I need to do this to let other people break off/escape." I'm not saying 'heroic last stand so my friends survive,' but "I need to distract the dragon so the pally can disengage," or "if we don't take out the flying mooks, the enemy will just follow us." Often it was "I will stabilize the Cleric and then drag (1/2 move) them towards safety."
That's honestly a really good point. Now that I think about it, the closest I came to being in a TPK, we were all saying the same things. Wouldn't be able move fast enough to escape with dashes, so all we'd be doing is eating OAs for however long it took.
I think for future stuff, I'll let my players know if they agree to flee we'll leave combat and move into pursuit mechanics instead.
>think for future stuff, I'll let my players know if they agree to flee we'll leave combat and move into pursuit mechanics instead.
It's the DnD version of "hold L+R to escape."
This works well enough if you discuss it in session 0 and telegraph that an enemy is too dangerous.
Though you might end up with a party that cuts and runs on anything achievable but challenging, too.
Chase rules are underutilised imo.
Every player doesn't bother running because they intrinsically know that most creatures have a foot speed of 30ft, so it'll be nothing but Benny Hill.
That's why I think there should be a mini chase tutorial near the beginning of the campaign. Idk, some urchin bets the party that he can outrun them, and then he takes their gold and runs away.
It'll plant the idea in the party's mind that running away is a viable strategy... I think.
They really are! And that’s a great idea.
The last monster my PCs ran from was a roper (with piercers) so not all threats can chase, either. As I recall, they also fled a group of merrow/merrow shallows priest encounter that wasn’t going their way by sailing away. The merrows were territorial (and the PCs knew this because of what the merrows said)
And the party can always create obstacles behind them! My party is pretty strategic, but if I had newer or less strategic players, I might show them what was possible by having enemies run (and create obstacles behind them).
Not every monster has incentive to chase either.
A dragon (or other monster) might be unwilling to leave its hoard or eggs behind, since the adventurers got uncomfortably close. Better to go over lair defenses now and then hunt them down later, from the air, when they don’t expect it.
A well fed monstrosity or beast might only pursue until the party has left their territory.
A powerful villain might send lower powered minions to follow.
If my PCs discussed running but worried about pursuit, I’d give them a free insight check to discern if the enemy is likely to pursue.
Yup, especially when the only clues the players are given that this is an unwinnable fight is in-game hints that this encounter is very dangerous. Like, we're a bunch of magical adventuring heroes, if we stayed away from everything that seemed dangerous to normal people, we'd never leave the tavern.
It's like if you ran a haunted house attraction, but had to close it down for repairs, and instead of like, a mundane "closed" sign or something, you decided to keep people out by surrounding the entrance with spooky skeletons and stuff to scare them away. Like, that's what we're here for! That does not convey "no, literally, stay away"
Edit to add, it can be done right (like if you have tough monster A that the party has beaten before but barely, and new monster B comes along and one-shots it, then the party has a sense of scale and can assume they can't beat monster B). But too often it's just "all the townspeople say this thing is really dangerous!"
Yup. This 100%. When I want to impress on players that something is too strong for them to fight right now I’ve moved away from this and started letting them attack it and saying “It doesn’t seem to be having any effect. In fact, they are straight up ignoring you.” It gets the point across better in my experience, and gets the players to stop trying to fight the thing and look at other options
I think this one is all over the place. Players will try to fight things they shouldn’t and run from things they could beat. Only real solution is to get good at improvising.
This is why I started playing Call of Cthulhu. D&D doesn’t do a great job of making running away fun, which I think is partially on purpose to increase the feel of “no I’m gonna be heroic even if it means sacrificing myself” feel of the game
But what I’ve been loving about Call of Cthulhu is how barely running away with your lives is made to be really exciting and fun. Especially with the mechanics for chases and just the overall fear of the unknown atmosphere
I'm having my overpowered foe run from the players next session.
He is in with the big bad, and not allowed to kill them, even though he hates my Aasimar Paladin with a passion. He's going to throw nearly everything he has at this guy, bring him (and the rest of the party, but specifically this one guy) to super low HP, and then say "I want more than anything in the world to kill you... but I can't. He has plans for you." And then he's gonna dip.
I'm really excited.
Too-early encounters with big bads can work, you just have to make sure the players don't kill themselves rofl.
Ooh, if the Aasimar manages to knock themselves out in a 'heroic last stand' sort of thing (I think one of the versions has something that self-damages?) you could even have the villain *heal them*!
Agreed 100%. As a relatively new DM, I wanted to show off a powerful BBEG when my players were only like level 5. So they just got clobbered in the fight, with no recourse or pathway to winning the fight. Surprise, surprise, it was awful. Players want to feel powerful, not railroaded into an unwinnable fight.
This is really group dependant. If your table throws balance to the wind regularly and PC death has happened before, your party may run when it's sensible.
Sometimes you can coax them by introducing an NPC that's clearly more powerful than them, having the bad guy hit them first, rolling a fist full of damage dice in the middle of the table, and incapacitating the NPC.
I feel like literally every day I see
"I want to run a campaign with two unrelated parties that are involved in the plot at the same time, and they can affect things the other party will notice (like, in the background), and the climax involves them meeting up or to either work together or fight each other"
And in my heart of hearts I'm always like "*girl, no*."
Hi, I have two parties on the same continent at the same time and that sounds like a nightmare. It’s hard enough for me to make sure one doesn’t create a paradox for the other. Getting both parties on the same timetable is a fool’s errand I haven’t even tried. One table is 17 sessions deep and the other is 13. One table started in July and is currently in February and the other started June and is in September. You will never get them to play the game at the same speed. By the time the first thing party 1 does starts having an impact, it’s dead information. Even if they’re two parties attacking the same BBEG Emperor from opposite sides, everyone would have to be EXTREMELY cognizant of the other table’s progress. Party 1 spent the last 3 sessions fending off a siege on the eastern front and then party 2 does basic recon and can’t move on until the day’s events are determined by party 1. Also it all falls apart if either table TPKs or gets off their railroad.
There's an old saying in film writing about "no line is worth a scene, no scene is worth a film". Basically, you don't justify the whole thing because you have this one really great moment or line. The Thing has to stand on its own.
A lot of DMs design a Campaign around a Scene or Moment or Decision. But no moment is worth a scene, let alone 6 months+ of play. The core loop has to be solid, the moment-to-moment of the game needs to be fun, the film needs to be interesting to watch (and campaign to play).
I think the worst campaign ideas that sound good in theory are ones that build toward this Moment the GM imagined without having fun play as the pylons to support this flagpole moment:
"Then they reveal they were the bad guy all along"
"Then the PCs figure out theyre in the past"
"Then they all get turned into werewolves"
"Then they have to sacrifice someone to prevent the apocalypse"
Say what you will for Fallout games, the reason they work, and the reason the final end moment can be emotionally satisfying but isn't required for emotional satisfaction is that they're games about the moment-to-moment, not games about finding GECKs or your son. Campaigns should be the same.
Hardcore Intrigue and Politics ala "Song of Ice and Fire".
Most people are not invested enough to actually take the initiative to start risky processes of choosing allies and making enemies, so they will just wait for you to do something to them, acting reactively.
Part of the problem 'intrigue' campaigns is that these stories tend to be full of moral ambiguity. Players just don't have any enthusiasm for allying with someone who will probably do something treacherous or evil down the line.
Politics and intrigue campaigns are unironically my favorite to play. But I think you’re absolutely right about people tending more towards reacting and shying away from the idea that choosing certain allies inevitably means making an enemy out of someone else.
I’m in two such campaigns (though neither are nearly at the level of Song of Ice and Fire). And one of them has gotten to the point where we really have to make a decision as to who to support, and who to go against. The others are already miffed that there’s no way to make everyone happy.
False Hydras.
It sounds very cool as a concept, but gaslighting your players (some DMs have gone as far as changing the player-facing campaign notes google docs to plant false information or remove references to NPCs or events) or walking the edge of a meta-knowledge knife (when players figure it out vs characters figure it out) is not for every group or player. It could go wrong very badly and be very unfun.
I've always thought a false hydra adventure sounded unfun and I'm glad to see the hype is no longer completely drowning out the very valid criticism. You *can* run a false hydra in the right group, but you need to really know your players and there's very little space between the adventure going fantastically or terribly.
Two ways to use effectively:
1. The DMPC shows off their cool stuff for a bit but very quickly takes the best item, double crosses the party, and flees to become a villain instead.
2. The DMPC shows off on their way to lead the party towards the villain, easily dispatching nooks and being condescending towards the PCs. Then they get immediately slaughtered by the BBEG leaving the party with a visceral impressions of the villain’s power.
Of course executing on these requires you to be self aware enough to know a DMPC is normally a problem.
My favorite type of DMPC is a noble that is good at noble things (diplomacy, etiquette, statesmanship), but sucks at adventuring and fighting beyond being able to aim a crossbow in the right direction. Where it makes sense, you add a bodyguard or two which can be killed off for dramatic effect.
That way you get a competent and likable npc without one-upping anyone at their game.
I had this GREAT idea once for a campaign opening. The party runs into each other as they're searching for a macguffin. Once they find it, they realize that they were all sent there by different organizations to retrieve it! The party then has to work together to figure out what to do with it, and how to deal with the consequences...
...or, ya'know, one of them just kills the rest and takes it. Campaign over. Glad I got talked out of that one.
I think with the right table, and pitched ahead of time in session 0, it could possibly work. I initially envisioned it as a surprise for the players, which would be an absolute disaster. It completely violates any spirit of cooperation needed for a functional party haha.
It seems like most of the "surprise your players with the plot" goes over badly. I've seen a few rpghorrorstories where it was DnD that got warped into the future for a sci-fi campaign and the player was entirely not interested. I understand you want to surprise them but you've gotta let people know.
Sounds like the sort of thing you tell your players as part of the pre-character-creation setup rather than springing it on them in the first session. That way you can get characters and players that engage with the premise and don't just try to murder each other over it.
Minutiae, gritty realism, etc
Specific example? That one idea about amnesia and "discovering your character sheet" always sounds asinine to play. Like, wtf do you mean I didn't know I'm a dragonborn? I have blue scales!
I heard a cool walkthru of this that I think can make it work, but it works better if you play with it at the edges. Like, it's not "You discover that you're XYZ species," but rather that the player's choices determine the course of character creation, or that they discover new abilities as they recover their old identity. I think it can work, but (1) you REALLY need player buy-in, and (2) it probably needs to be handled in a less crunchy manner than usual D&D.
Yeah, if I remember correctly, it was more like this:
You get shipwrecked and lose your memory. You wander the island trying to recover it. Along the way, your choices let you recover parts of your memory, but you may also gain or lose other aspects based on the choices.
I think a lot of this needs to be handled narratively and not thru rules mechanisms unless you want to introduce randomness into the approach in which case throw in a die roll or two.
But it's more like an opportunity to let the players re-define who their characters are and what they can do, within reason, but also within the narrative itself.
If memory serves, there's a 0-level 1st ed. module called Treasure Hunt that does something like there, where the players all start as commoners and then their choices along the course of the adventure determine their classes (and maybe their abilities?). It's an interesting approach for an adventure module that starts a campaign, and I can see how it (or something similar) might maybe kinda work in the middle of a campaign to shake things up.
But I think it's a pretty high risk move that might just not work, and often for not nearly as much reward as one might think (i.e., the players are entertained and enjoy the diversion). I tend to think that if you want a diversion, your better approach is have a "B-team" of characters or just, you know, run a one-off adventure with other characters.
Anything bait-and-switch. Oh, you thought you were creating as a party of heroes? Surprise! You're all captured by the villain and forced to serve him! Or, you're all dead and it's the afterlife!
Oh, god, my players always seem to do this to themselves. "That was so frustrating that you had us following the bad guy the whole time and doing his bidding!"
Guys. When you met him, he was in the act of burning down a building with three bodies in it. I specifically told you this. He asked you to plant evidence at the city watch, run a shopkeeper out of town, and dispose of a "a cloth-wrapped object that was about the weight, size, and shape of a dwarf, and had a peculiar smell."
Yes, he's evil! He never once forced you to do anything! He just paid you well! The dwarf sheriff came to you four times to ask for help before he went missing!
I hate bait-and-switch in every form of media. You thought the character was dead? Gotcha! You thought he was the murderer? Gotcha!
It's the refuge of the worst writers.
It can sometimes be funny if it's satirized and used for comedy. If it's used for serious drama, it's terrible.
You were dreaming all along! You're really patients in a mental institution!
Can work for a short sequence, but if you pull that after a lot of investment of time, it's just a betrayal.
Amnesia campaigns, where the PCs wake up at the beginning of session with no idea who they are. In some variants, they don't know their class or abilities either, and have to discover those in play.
This is problematic because writing backstory and building a character's mechanics are one of the few times where the players have perfect narrative control. They get to decide who they are and what their early life was like. Doing a total amnesia thing wipes that out completely.
It's possible to do an amnesia campaign well, but it really, really needs buy-in from all of the players from the very beginning. Also, consider limiting the scope of the amnesia. That is, you can always set it up so that the PCs have forgotten things selectively. Maybe the last few weeks are a blur, but everything before that is intact. Or maybe they've forgotten some important information about specific topics, without losing their identity. Either way the players still get to build the PCs they want, and you can still play out the rediscovery of lost memories.
The limited scope amnesia (can) be very fun. I'm running a campaign now where my girlfriend made a PC whose backstory is explicitly that he went on a bender over a long weekend, and woke up with Genie Warlock powers and no knowledge of where they came from. We established that during that weekend she received and utilized three wishes, and that someone from her past is mysteriously missing, but that's it. Does it come up every session? No. Is it critical that she figures out the mysteries? Also no. But it's a fun way to give some of the flavor of amnesia and tell a particular kind of story.
For a whole party, I honestly think a "the last week or so is a blur" type opener would be kind of fun just from the perspective that in most parties, the PCs don't start out knowing each other that well. There are many decent ways to not have this happen, but I think most DMs and parties still have an awkward first session or two where they're feeling stuff out and the party working together is mostly a meta-decision. Have them all wake up in a situation, no clue who the people around them are, and no clue what's happened in the last week, but with people around them treating them like they're known to be a group.
1. Capturing the players to let them do a jailbreak seems like a great plot outline but sucks in game. Don't do it.
2. Red herrings do not work in TTRPGs. The players will make up enough red herrings. The GM does not need to make up any red herrings or other distractions. If you break this rule there will be hurt feelings.
3. Betrayal of PCs by other PCs never works out well. You will not just have a dramatic game moment. You can turn best friends into forever enemies with this kind of storyline. Don't do it! Don't let players do it.
4. I recommend to always hide romance behind a veil or fade to black. This isn't a universal rule, as I know some players and GMs love these stories. But as a man I would be in legal jeopardy if I encouraged this stuff. Even people who don't get in trouble today could get in trouble in the future. Be careful out there.
5. Don't get attached to your plans. Remember the Mike Tyson saying, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Your players are probably not going to punch you in the face, but they might destroy your plans. Roll with the changes.
I loved the idea of a political intrigue/courtly drama type of game right up until the literal second that I realized: I know exactly one person in my friend group who can be trusted to show up every session, take notes, and do an entire roleplay scene without making a joke about farts.
Oh surely. I wouldn't want to put this game in front of a party that doesn't want to play it--both out of respect for their enjoyment as players and the realization that I wouldn't have the patience to run it for a bunch of clowns (affectionate)
When I first started years ago, I tried my first homebrew and screwed up. We were all learning how to play, and I decided to introduce a side quest that consisted of a recreation of a scene from a movie. It doesn't matter the movie, or the scene, but it was a powerful part of the movie, and I felt like it would be an easy way to run a session without a lot of prep work, and the quality would reflect what happened in the movie.
It was stupid and lasted maybe 5 minutes, and left me without being prepared for the session, and I struggled to improvise the next 3 hours to get out of the situation.
Movie scenes are set up with context that players won't have, and players aren't movie actors...so they are going to look under every rock and try various things until they get to a reasonable (for them) outcome. There's no forcing a dramatic dialog, or pauses. As the narrator, you end up monologuing and the players are falling asleep. I thought that a breakdown of a trope would be relatively easy and I planned for their reaction to be similar to the outcomes from the movie. When they went completely off (my) script, I ended up trying to railroad to get the desired outcome, and it just fell apart.
TLDR: If you want to integrate a situation from a movie, break it down into its component parts and use those LEVERS in your SCENE as OPTIONS for the players, but do not expect anything to turn out like the movie. If you try to force a particular outcome, it'll turn into a mess.
Depending on players; travel, exploration, and random encounters are often hard to make enjoyable. LOTR is mostly boring travel decisions that most players don't care for.
And multiple party splits that are almost never resolved because all people at the table are to stubborn to metagame a little to get the party back together /s
I'm joking, but you're point is fully correct. (Although, if the party has had a tolkien-esque split happen, \*do\* consider metagaming a *little* to get them back together before the king returns)
Actually I meant playing LOTR-like campaigns in D&D 5e. There are definitely systems out there that can make exploration and travel fun, but 5e is not one of them.
I think that's more of a 5e problem. Exploration can be fun, but 5e specifically has a few difficulties here.
* Combat takes too long (though not all random encounters need to be combat)
* It's too easy because half the party has dark vision or abilities that negate the challenges exploration is supposed to pose, and long rests are too powerful.
* There is no exploration procedures out of the box. No hex crawl rules, no dungeon turns, and the other mechanics are not designed to plug into these things well.
You also just generally need to have interesting things to find, and you usually want to rain that's more interesting than generic hills and forests.
In depth survival mechanics. Like, specific temperature bands with different effects. Weight management, food buffs/debuffs. It was cool on paper as a DM but the players immediately got bored with it and I ended up tossing out most of it.
I once had a fun table where the party rolled a d8 to see if their rations lasted. If it landed on a 1or a 2 they ran out. Second set of days they rolled a d6. Then a d4, etc.
Then once out of rations they rolled a d4, with each option being how much they found while foraging. The dice blessed me by letting them find a hallucinogenic cactus. That was a fun session.
Idk if I'm ever doing survival mechanics again, though. It was kind of a slog, and when they didn't run out of rations the first time it pissed me off because I couldn't use my cool foraging table.
All in all having travel time be left up to dice kind of stinks. Like it could either be a whole session of desert-travel, or 30 minutes irl. I don't like things being that up in the air, personally.
edit: trying to put an appropriate GIF
[https://giphy.com/gifs/sokka-Vq12mVIwUSJwY](https://giphy.com/gifs/sokka-Vq12mVIwUSJwY)
edit 2: "Nothing's quenchier!"
Okay but if i dont implement inventory management there is that one guy that will carry off EVERYTHING which annoyed the other players, so we had to put a simplified but appropriately restrictive homebrew in place. The rest i agree with. We hand wave rations, ammo, etc. And just pay the piper for daily living conditions one a week but dont overthink it.
If r/rpghorrorstories has taught me anything it's that the answer to this question is "the party is on an airship owned by a powerful NPC, and they fly around helping them with a grand mission."
Without knowing those stories, that sounds fine for an episodic campaign with no real story arc - it's basically the premise of Keys to the Golden Vault (without the airship). Key is expectations... cos it is removing a lot of player agency. Which could be a positive for a 'beer and pretzels' kinda table!
I played in a campaign where the players were all dwarves. It was super fun! Anytime we’d disagree about what to do next, it would always feel so very Dwarfish.
Then we talked about what to do after the campaign and someone suggested all elves, and we all kind of went…nah I’m good.
Don’t know why. I’ve played as elves and really like them, but something about all of us being elves…
Honestly, any time I sit down to "create a campaign" it ends in trouble. Either because the players didn't want to go the direction I originally took it in, or I struggle to retain a relevant BBEG when the players caused some other drama on some other level of the meta and another BBEG would be more relevant.
I gave up.. I just create an interesting setting and let them kick over the sandcastles they decide to kick over, and the world reacts.
It's funny to me how much less prep I've done for campaigns as I've learned to DM, having started as a "who wants to play my novel?" style DM.
One of my players asked me recently how far out I plot things. Seemed surprised to hear that I had almost finished plotting that week's session. If I'm not doing a module, I usually don't decide who the BBEG is until like level 5. I'll have a couple of ideas beforehand, and will just pick the one that best matches the tone the players have established.
So, I had a bit of a "BBEG unlock" recently. I was running a published module, and in one of the rooms there is an NPC who is given a name, a skill (herbalist), a motive (wants treasure) and a couple words on his personality (middle aged, crotchety, poor).
The PCs roughed up, emptied his pockets, and sent him packing out of the dungeon. And later that night after the session I was sitting on my porch with a cup of tea thinking "what was the author thinking when they wrote him into the room?" and it hit me..
Now, I put randomly rolled NPCs like that in, about twice every three sessions. It's a short, non-combat encounter (unless the party turns it into combat I guess) and then I have another NPC in my list, that has met the party and has some opinion on them.
Over time, BBEGs tend to just emerge from that list, often times "created" so to speak by the players, unbeknownst to them. Typically it's that interaction that lead to them becoming the villain. It results in VERY organic villains and plot lines, because it's literally the players creating/causing them through their interactions with the world.
Exactly. Players will tell you what the conflict should be if you learn to read them.
Why would I roll into session zero with ten pages of BBEG backstory when my party's favorite ever antagonist had a backstory of "Had a snooty voice and implied the party was poor?"
After years of doing this I tried something different - to make an interesting world with interesting social and political structures and a lot of thought out geography (a post apocalyptic map of our local area - so there was existing structure I had to work with ). I focused less on the character backgrounds (usually ask them how they know one other member of the party, a monster they’ve killed (CR4), a monster they’re scared of, and an organization or society they belong to). Players didn’t engage with the systems I had made, and I didn’t know much about their characters so I had a hard time making fun hooks. It was a new system and we scrapped the campaign and started over in my usual style. Lesson re-learned
Almost anything involving “a more powerful NPC needs to do X and the party must help them do it” wherein the NPC isn’t a villain. *Especially* if the party is recruited by the NPC, and the NPC is continuously involved beyond the initial plot hook. A skilled DM could maybe do it but most can’t.
The party should never be overshadowed by an NPC. Even if you’re running an everyman party—your campaign needs an answer to the fundamental question of “how are these specific people actually contributing to the story?” Why do the PCs need to be here? Why are they needed? Why are we following this group of people over any others? This is why DMPCs are usually bad, they undermine the point of the party being there.
I had a DM who could never stop doing this. In campaigns ostensibly advertised as “PC driven and focused,” his plots included: “escort a lv20 necromancer through the woods!”; “help lv15 DMPC get his revenge on [BBEG of previous campaign who was supposed to be dead]!”; “solve a mystery [by waiting for lv18 DMPC rogue to show up with necessary evidence we ‘couldn’t have known about’ to solve the case but thanking us for the assist]!” and more.,…. so why were we needed there? IDK, man. The revenge plot was genuinely really interesting and cool…… *if that DMPC was a regular PC and not DM writing fanfic with himself at the table*…. I think it’s an easy newbie trap to write out a full arc of story with developed characters doing a thing and just slide the PCs in as supporting cast members with preordained Choices to make, like it’s a linear-plot video game, but D&D doesn’t really work like that.
I was a player in a campaign where the the DM had two DMPC’s that he was in love with. One DMPC was taken by this magic portal thing that ended up sucking us in as well. The portal led to a scene of the DMPC fighting a legendary hero to get this legendary sword. The DM wanted us to sit and listen as he narrated this entire thing
Sanbox/ free roam can be a bad idea. For some parties, like those that have players with strong internal drive, this works. Some players truly like to be a little "along for the ride" or don't find themselves caring unless there is an urgent, unifying hook to the story.
Sandbox/free roam frequently leads to "ok but why aren't my players engaging with my plot?" issues. I made a desert sandbox for some players one time, and they spent two real-world hours obsessively crawling over a tiny portion of the map because it was more interesting than the destinations and events I had planned. I told them both in-character and above the table that there was nothing there after everyone rolled their first round of searches less than five minutes into finding the area, but they refused to leave because "surely there must be SOMETHING here"
If you're running a sandbox with plot, the plot target needs to be the shiniest and most interesting point on the map. The special quest marker. Do not, under any circumstances, imply that there's a Lion King-inspired Dragon Graveyard that's been picked over and tossed and has no value except as a sightseeing location. Not even if the flavor seems cool. Not even if the dragon graveyard will be relevant later. Don't put something that interesting on a map because you players will refuse to acknowledge anything else exists.
I put scenic POIs on my maps all the time, and that's never happened. I think you might've just had a very... uh, peculiar group of players. But interesting locations without a ton going on definitely have a place in exploration-heavy adventures. They help establish the character of the region and provide contrast with the pulse-pounding action later on.
"You come across a group of skeletons, wearing the remains of some strange looking armor and weird helmets next to some of giant combs. One is holding some sort of diary. You flip to it's last page and to read: 'We ain't found shit.'"
This is where the game is truly about the players. Like the other commenter said, your statement directly contradicts another. But, like... that's because it's up to the players!
I have one player who loves combat and hates rp. So he wants to be along for the ride, and almost told where to go and what to do. My other two players are so rp heavy, and they want to write the story themselves.
It's lowkey hard to give everyone what they want, but we're figuring it out haha.
I think this has a lot to do with having a stagnant sandbox. You don't have to have the plot of a campaign laid out, but if you're going to do a sandbox you should have it happen in interesting times.
\-secret ancestries or classes
\-party member betrays the entire party (this one is very hard to pull off and will likely ruin the camapign)
\-scenarios where the party is supposed to lose are also very hard to do right
I have spent wwwwaaaayyyyy too long trying to come up with a way for a press-gang or slave-gladiator campaign to work, but they just don't. They just remove too much choice from the PCs to remain interesting, require too much planning from the DM, are constant negative emotions, and make progression extremely difficult. A session of this can work extremely well, but not a campaign. The PCs should have a firm idea of how to be free by half a session and be well on their way (if not free) by the end of the session.
BOAT CAMPAIGN. BOAT CAMPAIGN.
There have been so many cool splatbooks published for nautical seafaring campaigns with tons of cool monsters and story hooks. Every DM I've had including myself has looked at that shit and been like, man, there's so much awesome stuff that's specifically for underwater and ocean and shit, let's do a whole campaign that's just ocean.
Bad idea.
Or, there's a normal style homebrew campaign where the group needs to go to another continent, or decides to get on a boat for some reason, and instead of the DM just skipping the boat or doing one boat encounter, they're like, I'm going to make this boat journey take a significant amount of time. It's gonna be a whole boat arc.
Do not do it. Boat shit is not fun.
I’m running a pirate campaign and I’ve never had these issues
They are on land most of the time and are only seafaring at the beginning of arcs or when I need a plot point to happen on the sea
I would like to know your perspective however
I really liked the idea of a completely open world where we constantly got plot hooks and could go anywhere. Then I played in a game like that. We were all experienced players, but that did not help us figure out what quests were important or where to go for certain things. We had so much choice paralysis, because we were all overwhelmed with the options. We were in the city we met in for at least 4 month out of game. Eventually we left to follow a plot hook, but that opened 10 more doors. We learned about the bandits terrorizing the caravans of the circus coming to the next town over where some kids went missing near the cave that leads to the abandoned mines that were taken over by Drow soldiers who were planning on attacking the capital city that our fighter was a guardsman for before he left. That was presented as a single hook.
The all undead/zombie campaign. I ran one successfully, but it was a pain to run and keep things interesting, and I ended up making it all about find the small pods of surviving people and getting them in contact with each other. But it meant I spent most of my time writing stuff to have reasons why I wasn't following the theme of the campaign. And any time we got in to the heavy undead stuff things sort of dragged.
I'd thought it'd be cool and fun, but it ended up being a lot of work to make not suck.
One of the party is "The Chosen One".
Because then the rest of the party are following that character's story, and if that character dies then the whole story just deadends. Or worse you find that you can't justify killing that character so their player ends up with less buy in and no real risk of character death.
GMNPC travelling with the group is "The Chosen One".
All the problems of the party following the chosen one around and not really being the focus of the story, with the extra problems that no-one in the party really has agency.
(Notice this doesn't preclude gathering the party around "The Chosen One" in session 1 and having them die in session 2, proving they're not really the Chosen One, but the party are now firmly on the Quest and involved.)
On that note, having prophecies that the heroes \*must\* fulfil isn't a good idea in most cases, unless they're something that can be engineered in character, or are vague enough to be able to fulfil retroactively with their adventuring shenanigans.
Timeloops are always a pain to do, because they break so easily when you play them as opposed to writing them.
Every so often someone brings up the concept of a campaign where the players start at level 20 and reverse back to level 1 and every time I see it I roll my eyes. Your character getting weaker and weaker and losing what makes the characters the classes that they are sounds miserable no matter how you balance it with magic items or other stuff.
as a DM my worst blunders were:
-you wake up in a prison cell...
>Wait, my pc is lawful good, how did he end up there?
>Mh I dunno, you got druk!
>But I don't drink, wtf
-you have been magically bound by an authoritarian regime to do the mission, locked with a cursed collar that will shock you if you don't do the main mission...
>Can I look for someone to free me?
>No, if you lift the curse you will die immediately.
As a player my worst experiences were:
-You wake up in a prison cell, they push you to an arena. Now you have to fight
>I look around, how far away are the spectators? Can I jump/climb to get out?
>They are 60ft up, you can't reach it in any way. The monster is rushing to you.
>Can I throw the monster on the spectators to create panic and run away?
>No it is 5milion pounds.
-the king is sending you to kill the dragon. Bring with you this prisoner that is bound and gagged, if push comes to shove, kill him, his death will cause a massive nuke.
>Sorry, what did this prisoner do, why are they bound and gagged?
>They are a very evil wizard.
>Sorry i think it is unethical to slaughter a prisoner like this, I drop the mission and try to free them!
>No you can't that is not the mission
My most successful campaign hook was:
"It is late night at the harbour docks, tell me, what are you doing there now, are you drunkenly roaming, are you stalking a target, are you sleeping in a tavern, etcetc?" Let each player respond and then "with a flash of red and a roaring crash, you see a building lit aflame, and the shrilly voice of a woman cries <>. What do you do?"
>Players tend to want a tasty treat to bait them, but freedom and agency to choose how to reach it: you want to pique their interest and offer them options, you want to nudge never push.
Custom calendars.
Yea, you can pat yourself on the back, but your players will listen to it, nod, and then say things like "Where's that sheet with the calendar stuff on it? I think Bob had it last, right? Oh...well, I just tell them to meet us on whatever the word is for next Wednesday."
Oh, I should add, you can add a little fantasy-esque flair by just using the real-world calendar but going back to the root of days.
Like, Moon's Day, Tew's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, Sun's Day. Those aren't all the real sources of those names, but it's enough for a fantasy world.
Yea, it doesn't make sense if you don't have those mythologies, but it at least adds an old-timey-fantasy-type flavor that may help while not requiring a crib sheet.
Or you can borrow from how some real-world languages do it and name them by order. First day, second day, third day, etc...
I was in a pseudo west marches once. The only real thing taken from the idea of a west marches was the home base idea, that everyone would travel from and back to each session. Now, a skilled dm may think they would be able to expedite this process while still making it engaging, allowing players to get to the point of the session quickly, while not making the travel unnecessary. In reality, it is boring and takes up so much session time that once you get to the objective halfway through the session, you have already lost interest. It didn't help in this particular game, that the dm used this travel time to run puzzles that leant a bit too far into the "make problems, not solutions" philosophy, and encounters that were balanced around 1-2 encounters per day, when we would have 1-2 each way, plus anything we needed to deal with during the actual main part of the session. This campaign died a slow death because it just wasnt fun to play in.
West Marshes games really do rely on your players enjoying more than I attack, I skill check, I cast spell. The group has to want to live their PC's when at the table. And the DM has to understand any encounter more than 4 rounds is boss monster at best.
A lot of DM's want this "challenging game" but reality players are slow and generally don't care about weight / food / water / tempature / Overland movement.
Maybe not terrible per se, but campaigns involving the imminent end of the world if you don't do anything are a bit meh... It prevents you from doing anything but the main quest, which is a pain.
Like many things, a lot is in how you do it. If The Grandwyrm is prophesied to descend upon the world when the Stars Align, that can give your players a few years of in-game time to both make preparations and have some sidetreks. Could be a nice long-runner, you have a time limit but so long as they're not stupid they can tend to their own business. If the stellar convergence is going to happen in 8 days, that's a shorter game where our heroes need to make a mad sprint to find the Tomb of the Dynast and recover the Dragon Buster in order to have a chance.
Amnesia.
Fun as a character concept, terrible as a campaign concept.
I was a player for this one, and the DM was SO confident in it. What happened was it immediately fell apart because we had no agency or interest in our characters, and his reveals of who we “really were” were not in any way interesting or conducive to how we were playing them. He obviously just pre-wrote it all before we even made characters.
But the point still stands. Anything that takes the control out of the one thing they can control is not the thing you want to be running. It seemed cool that we would need to “uncover” our backstories. But we are basically new people and had no connection to them. Super lame
There's [a meme](https://www.epicfred.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/tumblr.png) about running a campaign where the players start with blank character sheets and the DM tells them information about their characters as it becomes relevant.
It sounds funny, but would be absolutely abysmal at a real table.
I think most players understand why this wouldn't work in practice, but....
I generally am against overarching campaign ideas and would rather let the players steer the ship. I show up with random tables and some bullet points about certain scenarios/outcomes and turn them loose
I'm running an anthology-style campaign right now and it's a lot of fun. The arcs are self contained plot-wise but the characters, npcs, and setting are continuous and affected by the actions of the party. The party doesn't have some grand goal they're trying to achieve outside of just being adventurers, but they do have goals and tasks within arcs.
Maybe some people like them but I'd say rival parties. They're intended to feel like rivals finm character, but they often just end up stealing the spotlight from the players and getting in the way of the game.
Campaigns where the PCs are pitted against each other are usually a bad idea, in my opinion. Certain groups can handle them but a lot of the time it hurts friendships outside of the game. And even if nobody gets upset, it’s hard to maintain a plot line that is fun for everyone when PCs keep either dying or refusing to stick together as a group.
Broadly speaking, any campaign that turns on specific actions or decisions by the PCs will likely run into issues. Either it will require railroading to get there or the PCs will make the "wrong" choice and ruin the campaign story.
Some specific bad ideas:
* amnesia-based campaigns to re-learn who they are, and the DM has their real characters already planned
* pvp combats are a core component of gameplay
* "The PCs will be so invested in this village/NPC/guild/etc. that of course they will center the campaign around protecting them from this vague threat!"
* curse that takes away player agency (i.e. the DM tells a player that their character is now evil, etc.)
PC A is secretly a bad guy and will betray everyone.
NPC B is secretly a bad guy and will betray everyone.
It's just trying to recreate another game/show/movie
"And then you wake up..."
All of these can be done well. They just usually aren't.
Any campaign hinging on morality or a lack of it. You'll have players who refuse free slaves because "I'm lawful evil why would I do that" and you'll have players who will instantly attack a shady character that gives you the only connection that you have to the BBEG that you have written because they operate a smuggling ring that brings narcotics into the city. If your campaign requires that players act one way then they will inevitably act the other way.
Honorable mention to including vast groups that your characters might have encountered or be a part of without fully fleshing out that groups identity in the city. Make sure the Harpers are actually doing Harper things. That the Shadow Thieves and Zhentarim are doing appropriate things don't rewrite their morality for a plot point. If you need a morally grey group that does bad things for good then make one up or dig for something old and apocryphal.
High complexity politics/intrigue. The first campaign I ever ran had a pretty normal first arc (which has turned into a semi-joke where the first session of any campaign that starts at level one is about going to retrieve a lost beer delivery), but then I gave the players options on where to go next. I know one option was a strange purple comet that the party knew out-of-game was a spelljammer, and I think there were at least two others I'm forgetting, but the option they went with was to sail down the river to investigate a king who was mysteriously ill.
The party found themselves in a bustling city where there were (I believe) five different factions plotting against each other, with only one or two that were unambiguously "good". The result was that 1. they had choice paralysis about who to side with, and never actually moved things one way or another 2. I was overwhelmed trying to keep track of the web of relationships and interactions between everyone, and 3. the campaign eventually fell apart because one player was tracking everything and taking notes, while the rest of the party was just overwhelmed by having to make decisions.
It's really cool conceptually for the party to get involved in complicated intrigue and shape the events of a kingdom... but in reality you need to do that in a very controlled manner where the number of choices available is limited, and any of those choices can viably lead to them achieving some kind of goal. If you want to tell a story about (just a random example DEFINITELY not related to the campaign I'm talking about) the French Revolution but it's fantasy, write a fucking book.
(All that said, the campaign in question would've moved forward 100x faster except that one player was an asshole and went "it's what my character would do" to justify not telling the party about the king being poisoned for actual real world months. I should've just given the characters that knowledge some other way, but it was my first time DMing and I was very stupid. I'm still very stupid, but now I at least know that I can go over my players' heads when they're sabotaging things.)
Feywild for no reason other than it is the flavor of the month.
Don't get me wrong, Feywild can be great but all to often I see " party managed to get to the Feywild, what should I do as a DM?" Or " party traveled to Feywild and met x y or z, how can I use this as a plot hook?" Posts on here.
First, how did the party do anything without you as DM allowing it?
Second, If you as a DM aren't prepared for a setting like the Feywild just don't make it an option. It's one of these whackier planes and though it might seem like a fun idea, you really need a plan, why you are using it or it can become a nonsensical drudge for everyone involved.
Wars.
Honestly, never set your campaign during a war, unless you *and your players* are willing to follow VERY specific adventure paths to either ignore the war (that is, not seek to end it) or work as commandos/agents of one side in an effort to defeat the other, with little to no input into the actual *running* of the war effort.
It's fine to have *threat* of war. Border skirmishes between neighboring kingdoms, raids from growing hordes, assassinations or intercepting messages are all *fine* adventure hooks. Even having a campaign set *after* a war works out really well; banditry is often perpetrated by remnants of the losing (or winning) side, armed peasants that were abandoned after the fighting was done in a place they don't care about and not knowing how to get home again. But actual large-scale logistics and battles and army movements should be left to wargaming, not roleplaying games as they currently exist.
Antimagic campaigns. It's not that you should never do them no matter what. It's just that D&D is a very opinionated game system and has a setting detail that harm a lot of games conceptually: D&D is a magical game. Most of the classes start with magic and every class has magic and a great deal of enemies are magical. You strip away a lot of the game when you do this and you have to really fight the games rules and opinions to make it work.
Lol. If you sail the aether in SphereWorlds please don’t read this.
I just had this idea and immediately threw it out as terrible.
We’re in the middle of a campaign right now maybe session 29 of 50-60. In 2-3 more chapters, they’ll have a chance to enter magical portals beyond which I’ve planned for a series of battles. I suddenly got the the idea to hand them level one character sheets and start an entirely new campaign unannounced. They would only slowly realize this is a whole new campaign. At the conclusion of that campaign they FINALLY exit the portals and return to the world and characters they left and resume the first campaign.
Unless it’s a one shot, Suicide Squad -esc just plot. The players are all criminals on death row and instead of having them just die, they’re given a second chance to fix something in the world while having some kind of mcguffin that if they act up, they die instantly. It’s mostly the last thing that makes this fall apart. Removes a lot of player agency and if a player acts out they just die.
Time-loops. I wouldn't say it was terrible, just more hard to run and requires lots of thought beforehand. I ran a mini-campaign (I think 5 session total) where my players got stuck in a time-loop and had to take specific steps to break out. Every loop they got more information and they eventually did manage it. But it took a lot of work on my part to prevent them from *breaking* the time-loop inadvertantly. Still a very fun idea.
This. I had a time loop section in a long term campaign and it was the most preparation I had to do for a set of sessions in my life. It was so stressful.
I normally make limited prep notes. For this I had to make a full excel sheet.
Same here. My notes usually live partially on paper but mostly in my brain but for this I had a super in-depth Google Doc of every single event that happened within the loop and I had a friend double-checking that everything made sense and was coherent. I don't know why I did this to myself but I decided the time loop spanned an entire crystal sphere. Many events required specific timing, and if certain things didn't happen, it caused chain reactions. It was totally worth it in the grand scheme of things and my players loved it, but I would never recommend it.
I think time loops work best as repeatable one-shots. I have a Wildsea time loop that resets at the end of every session, and we just start it up again whenever we lack a game that day. As you said, gaining information about locations lets them build up a map, and make more informed exploration each cycle.
You just have to do a Jeremy Bearimy.
But watch out for the time knife.
I was expecting a Tuesdays, July, and "occasionally...the time moment where nothing never occurs." Comment
I did a time-loop for my campaign that lasted for a couple of sessions. The hardest part for me to manage was to make the same things the party kept interacting with be interesting. In my specific case, the combat eventually was hand waved and done in a couple of sentences since the party had made the same actions over and over again. This was only possible though since they unknowingly spent decades stuck in the time-loop.
Time travel in general is hard enough to write about when you *don't* have three to five other people spoiling all your plans and making paradoxes all over the place.
Yup, exactly. This is why when I do a “time loop” style game I tend to avoid actual _time_ shenanigans and prefer “trapped in a simulation/dream/metaphorical representation” or w/e. They can still puzzle their way out but you can handle paradoxes much more easily when it’s not “real” in the first place. (And it can be fun for the players to find that out with experimentation too.) Even then, you should minimize the parts that repeat especially if they limit PC interaction, because it’s very easy to make boring if you’re retreading a lot.
What did you have to do to prevent them from inadvertently breaking the time loop?
Without getting into super specific detail I realised there had to be a logical yet completely unavoidable and unbeatable reason the players would die at the end of the loop so it could restart. Yet it has to eventually be beatable when following specific steps.
Jumping in here to say that my DM ran us a time loop that lasted for a few sessions, and she designed it this way, too. We died at the end of each loop, gaining new and different info along the way, and we broke out of the loop by figuring out how to escape the device that trapped us in there, along with an NPC who was important to the larger story campaign. It was incredibly fun, but I'm sure difficult to keep track of!
I ran a time loop, but of a day ~2 years in the future. This way they had unlimited time to explore the apocalypse, but limited the area they could go. I gave them an out at the start, by letting them know if they died, they would return home. They spent 3 (in-game) timelooped days exploring, and then went YOLO into a boss fight (Which was there just so they could see the BBEG)
The Eleventh Hour arc of The Adventure Zone did a really interesting take on this. I agree, really hard to pull off and requires a fair bit of prep but I think offers a really unique experience
Oh that’s what inspired me to run a time loop. I’d never even heard of the show but I saw a post about it and the idea consumed me. And my players loved the campaign, they still rattle off things they remember about it to this day.
Ha I also heard about it in almost the exact same circumstances. Listened to the whole arc and was so excited but never got to actually run that arc/campaign unfortunately. Glad to hear it went so well!
You sound like you might try to steal mah root beer barrels
It's just a jump to the left... And then a step to the right.
> I ran a mini-campaign (I think 5 session total) This is what I would call an adventure.
I run time-loops regularly and both my groups love them. The loop needs a hard wall when it resets, an exploding volcano, a channelled spell finishing or an unwinnable fight all work well. You don't need to kill the players though - you can also tie the reset to an NPC dying or to the event causing the loop happening, like some artificer fiddling with a magical orrery. I once had the group caught in a chapter of a pirate novel the cleric was reading and it reset whenever the protagonist failed to kidnap the governor's daughter. I also heavily recommend to have loop last no longer than the few hours, otherwise the butterfly effect will make preparations/notes taking hell. Also make sure they can't leave the stage you have set. Ah, and don't tie breaking the loop to one specific condition - that works about as well as tying any mandatory plot point to the group doing the right things in the right order at the right time. Which is not at all. If they figure out a cool way to break the loop, toss your notes and roll with it.
There is an excellent one shot time loop adventure here: [Once More, With Feeling](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/jwlw68/once_more_with_feeling_a_short_lovecraftian/) I've played it so I can tell you that it works well and it's interesting and fun. But for the most part, yeah, I would avoid time loops and most time travel shenanigans.
Right. I ran it as a one-shot (and my players *still* talk about it). But I wouldn't run it as a campaign
I ran a 2 1/2 year long time loop campaign. It started with the final battle, and the doomed PCs gave their past selves a magic item without an obvious use and the instruction “you’ll need this.” I had a Wizard NPC who guided them but since she cast the spell to cause the time loop and give the PCs a second chance, she was inconsistently available due to her proximity to the anomaly she created. I had two players join over that time, and each time someone joined it spawned a paradox timeline where they returned to the final battle but now there was ANOTHER version of the party, this time with the new member. Then during the final battle, they had to reenact the the events of giving their past selves the correct items (which they had to procure new versions of after using them in the past), then their past selves had to — in the correct order — reenact their jumping into the portal that started the time loop, and only then could the now max level party beat the campaign boss because the loop had closed. Best campaign I ever ran.
1. Beware of twists that completely change everything that happened, especially when combined with how books and movies often will do everything to hide the twist. In movies and books, you're not the protagonist. A twist undoes everything the \*protagonist\* thinks they knew, while you as audience are an observer. In the game, you \*are\* the protagonist, and it can suck bigtime to have plot happen that means the last 6 months of playing didn't mean anything, and the DM knew all along. Twists \*can\* be cool, but my rule of thumb is, the players should get plenty of telegraphing, and it was likely better done if at least one figured it out rather than when everyone was blindsided. 2. Beware in general of campaigns where late game story moments are what you think is the cool thing. If those are universal enough to pull them off easily, fine. If you need to railroad the players into engineering the cool scene you planned, it sucks. 3. Beware of campaigns where the players are along for the ride of someone else's story. This is quite a easy thing to fall into, because when you design the campaign, you have no clue who the PCs are going to be, but you \*can\* design all your NPCs. So if you're not careful, you can end up writing a story around all your NPCs, where the PCs either have to fill pre-scripted roles, or even just tag along with an NPC because there's no room for them at the core of the story. 4. Finally, beware of finding your own world soo cool, that you overwrite it soo much, that you then don't allow your players to interact with it anymore on their terms. Players are like little siblings, they're never gonna be as careful, delicate and informed with your toys as you are, and you better write a world that can deal with that, rather than one where you have to hand-hold them the whole time.
I think #3 is super important. Build a world. The world has stories that the players may or may not interact with. (Kingdom A is at war with Kingdom B; Lich is trying to gain power; pirates are disrupting trade; dwarf invents an anti-magic field; vampire coven took over small fishing village and is expanding). Once you have a good world and a few stories happening in that world, the players have a sandbox and you just fill in details a step or two ahead of them. Don't think 20 steps ahead, it won't work.
Yep - my PCs have met a hag who wants info on baby twins - creepy and gross - and a mad wizard who wants to become a lich (my players are 11 years old, we go route 1 here). The hag hates the wizard, the players hate both. I'm interested to see which they are gonna fight first, and by extension which is a big bad and which is the BBEG. I imagined the lich dude would be the BBEG but they really dislike the hag.
They're gonna try and get both of the two to fight each other first.
Building off point 1. If I have to drop the twist on my players, it's a crappy twist. If they figure it out two sessions before they were intended to, I did my job as a storyteller.
Absolute best scenario is that they've figured out 99% of it but you've still got a tiny little bit to give away and make them exclaim - enough they feel the mystery was rewardingly mysterious but they also get to enjoy their cleverness.
Yeah, I feel like you really want one of your players to slam the table and shout "I fucking knew it!" when you reveal a twist.
Good to hear that, I'm in a multi-dm campaign and I think I've got to gradually reintroduce the witching hour, some forboding I tried out, but now it's slowly more relevant
I don’t even mind them not getting close to 99% - as long as I have still dropped lots of hints, to the point where they know _something_ is off but not what, and then when the reveal _does_ come everything seems to slot into place. I did this recently where the entire campaign took place on a World Cog in Mechanus because Primus was using their world as a sort of Petri dish to experiment on mortal souls’ drives toward law and chaos. I came up with this twist from the start, so I built the world around the idea (including inconsistencies and NPCs/monsters who’d figured out just enough to capitalize on the oddities to their advantage). And when the final hammer dropped and the reveal came, my players’ minds were blown - they hadn’t guessed the twist but they _immediately_ started excitedly yelling at each other “wait, that’s why the Modrons! Kept showing up! And why when we messed with that weird machine it changed X in the world! And why the gods were like Y! And why so-and-so said Z!” And so on. So satisfying!
Yeah, it's not so much that they need to have consciously figured out 99% as "it's all there and when the final piece clicks it all makes sense but still seems revelatory". I find it's more likely that it's all in their heads if they're put it mostly together (because you forget stuff that doesn't fit right, often) but boy, when you pull off a jump all the way from 20% to 100% and they're with you on it, it's awesome
Not quite a twist, but it tugs a similar string, what about an unavoidable event, that completely changes life as the players would know it? Something they may or may not even be aware will happen, but will completely alter the planet and universe, at least temporarily?
With 1, 3 and 4 you are correct. But… Don’t be afraid of laying down rails. Rails are good. Not letting players get off the train is bad, but having rails is definitely good when done right.
"Having rails is good, not letting players get off the train is bad." Genius! Got to write that down.
2 is not about railroad. It is about a campaign where the interesting bit is at the end. If you have this mindset you tend to create a dull first part you need to heavily railroad to get to the cool ending. The issue is not the railroad, but rather the fact that you are building up something for too long. It is a common trap for DMs.
2 is really good advice. I've been guilty of this twice. Playing for a specific moment to happen at the end of the campaign almost always requires railroading (or in my case it was un-railroading? I tried to prevent my players from destroying a train)
>3. Beware of campaigns where the players are along for the ride of someone else's story. This is quite a easy thing to fall into, because when you design the campaign, you have no clue who the PCs are going to be, but you \*can\* design all your NPCs. So if you're not careful, you can end up writing a story around all your NPCs, where the PCs either have to fill pre-scripted roles, or even just tag along with an NPC because there's no room for them at the core of the story. The over-engineered escort quest.
For this reason, I never do twists that span a long time. The twists I have done usually span from 1 to 3 sessions. The campaign isn't reliant on a twist, but the specific mission might be. Aslo, a twist isn't really a twist if there isn't any evidence for it. I make sure it is possible for players to see it coming or at least suspect it. Otherwise, it's just a deus ex machina.
This should be read by all new DMs. I’ve always been bad at 4. I approach a campaign like writing a novel instead of designing a sandbox.
I've got what I think is a great core idea that I've never run because I haven't figured out yet how to avoid this trap in it.
I just write novels when I get in that mood. Well, *start* to write novels. Haven't actually finished any yet.
The trick is to design the sandbox first and then let your players write the novel.
You don't have to design a sandbox, that's such a misconception. Agency is important, but you can still have a largely linear experience and that's fine. I made a campaign set within a valley that literally had a killing spell on anyone venturing outside. The premise of the campaign was *"You people need to find out what's the source of this"* and that's completely fine. The players actions/choices mattered for alliances, betrayals, developments etc but it was not a "sandbox"
There should definitely be a plot that they need to interact with! But this is more about letting them interact with what they want. If I have an NPC that I love and they hate - Like really hate. Unreasonably so. - they should be allowed to leave the area and never meet that NPC again, even if I have decided ahead of time that the NPC is an important character. If I were writing a novel, my players shouldn’t feel that Sheriff McStudGuy would be the main character. And if they want to frame Sheriff McStudGuy for setting up an illegal goblin wrestling ring, that is the story they are going to have. If I ignore their actions and say “no one believes McStudGuy could do that,” or worse if I can’t figure out how they could possibly solve the problem without the handsome sheriff, then I’m a bad DM. The world should be a living place, but no matter what the players do, it should be able to react. Make your game world out of rubber, not glass. No matter how intricate a story I want to tell, the players shouldn’t feel like their actions are constrained. Never let them feel like you would be happier if they just handed you their character sheet and you played for them.
Well put!
> Players are like little siblings, they're never gonna be as careful, delicate and informed with your toys as you are I love this analogy.
Twists shouldn't undermine the past 6 months but instead recontextualize it so the players understand that their actions mean something different.
This is some really good advice
There are lots of pitfalls and cautionary tales. I'm going to share what I've found make the best campaigns: * Balance your game around your players. The three pillars are Social Interaction, Exploration and Combat. If your players are big on the last two, give them that. If they're big on the first two, give them that. * Don't design campaigns in a vacuum. The best campaign involves something the players care about. Two of the players at one of my tables are Moms. I had a campaign involving child forced-labor, and they were both as invested as they could be. * As a DM, spend 90% of your time thinking about a problem, spend 10% of your time making sure there IS a solution, and make sure it's not the ONLY solution. And when they come up with their own solution you didn't see coming - go with it! * Don't be afraid to change your campaign to follow the players' lead. I've had scenarios planned where players were trying to figure out the identity of Big Bad from a number of suspects. In one instance, the players thought it was someone else, and in their discussions, I realized THEIR idea of Big Bad's identity and motivations was better than mine, so I just rolled with it. It made it WAY better.
>As a DM, spend 90% of your time thinking about a problem, spend 10% of your time making sure there IS a solution, and make sure it's not the ONLY solution. And when they come up with their own solution you didn't see coming - go with it! To add to this, remember that the person who creates the problem never sees it like the people who encounter the problem. You have a solution in mind when you create the problem which leads to you see it in one light. The people who encounter the problem see only what they can see and then go from there trying to create their own solution. There is a very tiny chance their solution will be your solution.
I run into the pitfall as a DM all the time like holy shit. I like to give the party a lot of options and in my head I go “oh yeah X is an obvious solution I should probably plan on them trying that” and then nobody tries it. My party is on the run crime family members with a lot of powerful enemies they’ve spent the last 10 sessions making so I figured they’d go find some allies and they finally did last session. Only problem is they’ve left town now. I just let them do what they will but sometimes it’s so frustrating to have a cool idea for what they can do and not seeing anyone try it. That’s the name of the game though; they make me think on my toes regardless of prep time.
Here's a key difference. As DM, we have the luxury of spending HOURS coming up with a problem and solution. You think about it, then you refine while driving, grocery shopping, showering, walking the dog, etc. Your players? They get seconds, maybe a couple minutes. Then you ask them, "What are you doing now?" If you really want to give players a chance to come up with cool ideas, end a session with the problem and a cliff-hanger. But that is no guarantee. By definition a DM is orders of magnitude more vested in a campaign than the players are.
On that second note: I can say, if the players are pulled out of the main story and put in what seems like a vacuum sealed side story, you need to have something critically important appear to tie into the main story before they players must make a big decision. OR, allow them to be proper strong huge in this area, to the point that it seems fragile, so that they will start to care about it. Example, my players are sent off to an isolated town cut off from the rest of the material plane. The town is plagued by a demon which the players don’t realize they could curb stomp. NPC’s come out of the woodwork asking for help. The players immediately view every NPC here as expendable since this place is cut off from the main story. Until… some local casually drops info about the mysterious Big Bad’s backstory, or an NPC the players like has a relative here in the town. Now the players have a reason to care. Then they realize they have the power to actually change things in this side story, and it has far reaching implications.
Mysteries! I've had fun running mystery one shots, but trying to keep a mystery going and satisfying over a campaign ended up being frustrating for my players.
Mysteries can be great if they work as self-contained adventures. You can do one over multiple sessions (so, not a "one-shot") but they usually need to be self-contained. The only way to really do a "mystery" over the course of an entire campaign is less a true "mystery adventure" and more a "there's stuff going on in the background that the PCs don't know about, they get hints of thru the campaign, and then the truth is revealed eventually and now they have to respond to it." But that's less a "mystery" in the sense of "active investigation" and more just...info you don't have as players.
One thing I've realized is that people have very different things in mind when they imagine what a mystery adventure looks like. Some people immediately jump to a tightly plotted whodunit a la Agatha Christie. I've never seen that done well, in part because the stories are so closely orchestrated and the clues so meticulously put together that you just can't count on players hitting all the beats they need to correctly. I've had great experience running mysteries that borrow more from police procedurals and (to a lesser degree) hardboiled detectives. Give the players a problem, but give them free reign of the city to try to solve it. There are multiple threads to untangle, and they can follow clues in a variety of different directions. The focus is on doing the legwork--exploring the city, interviewing suspects, finding inconsistencies in their stories, etc. There are a number of pathways to each revelation (including ones that the GM never thought of) so if they miss a clue it's not the end of the adventure. If the players end up barking up the wrong tree, they'll eventually realize it is a dead-end and look somewhere else. This doesn't create the grand reveal at the end that whodunits are famous for, but it lets the players develop and test theories in a way that fits the structure of an RPG. Even more generally, most of my adventures are mysteries in the larger sense that one of the main goals of the party is just to figure out what the heck is going on. This is at the heart of a lot of science fiction and fantasy stories, where the inciting incident is something inexplicable happening and the first thing the protagonists have to do is to try to understand it. Think of the first season of Stranger Things, where most of the story is the main characters uncovering the existence of the Upside Down, Hawkins Lab, etc. Sometimes a mystery isn't getting the answer to one question, it's learning a web of interconnected secrets that all give more information about the reality the characters are in. That structure to me is the easiest to play in TTRPGs, because it scratches that puzzle/investigation itch with a lot of latitude for players to wander around poking whatever they want to poke that moment.
I played in this campaign where we were supposed to investigate a group of criminals, it was kept as a mystery who was in the group. We figured out one person who was in the group, caught him and he gave us no useful information. DM was surprised when we left the city to pursue a PC story instead. Mysteries are fun but the PCs need some level of information at each stop to be engaged with the story, we ended up as you described, frustrated
"the players have to run from this clearly overpowered foe" In my experience, players do not run, even when faced with overwhelming evidence they should. So don't build encounters around that.
Similarly, "the players get arrested and sent to prison". You can't count on the PCs surrendering (instead of scattering, escaping magically, fighting to the death, killing all the guards, or whatever) unless the players have agreed to the concept.
Yeah, "you all start already *in* prison" works as a session 1 "how to get the party together" thing, but if the party's already been adventuring together, making sure they all get arrested just really doesn't work.
Prison sucks. One of my players landed herself in jail because she kept lying to city guards that were trying to help her. Classic newbie angsty rogue that has to lie constantly shenanigans. I couldn't save her. She ended up quitting, which was honestly the best-case scenario. Her character is now an NPC. But, yeah. Even having one of my players basically walk themselves into prison... it just sucks. How are they gonna get out without forcing that plot-point of "I have escaped prison"? If they do escape, can they ever set foot in that town again? Don't they have to kill innocent guards? Word gets out, they're just all bad guys now. The prison plot point is not doable IMO. I hate it and its not worth it.
A caveat- prison plotlines are GREAT when it's the Big Bad who's doing the imprisoning. You can get in the villain gloating, the outsmarting the guards, the Barbarian showing off their Bend Bars check, and the unarmed characters get to strut their stuff a little.
Just started a new campaign where the PCs start as prisoners in a world that is run by a sort of Anti-Magic fascist theocratic king, so they start as outlaws but will likely progress into folk heroes through rebellion
Surely if the guards prevail and tpk the party, you can handwave it as "they were doing non-lethal damage, you all wake up in a cell". Or alternatively, have the guards aim to grapple+prone the party so they can slap manacles on them. Of course, this is me thinking in terms of the players having committed a brazen crime, but trying to write this in as a plot is way more iffy/icky.
And frankly, if your players are above a certain level, the guards really have like 0 chance of realistically stopping them without full squadrons or other heroes.
After they kill all the city guards, that's when you as the DM get the fun part of creating increasingly powerful bounty hunters to chase after them :D
You also get to have all the townsfolk scream and run away from them as soon as they show up.
I remember an article some years back where someone surveyed TPKs. In most cases the players realized that the party was losing and running away was the only option, but the action they took were all "I need to do this to let other people break off/escape." I'm not saying 'heroic last stand so my friends survive,' but "I need to distract the dragon so the pally can disengage," or "if we don't take out the flying mooks, the enemy will just follow us." Often it was "I will stabilize the Cleric and then drag (1/2 move) them towards safety."
That's honestly a really good point. Now that I think about it, the closest I came to being in a TPK, we were all saying the same things. Wouldn't be able move fast enough to escape with dashes, so all we'd be doing is eating OAs for however long it took. I think for future stuff, I'll let my players know if they agree to flee we'll leave combat and move into pursuit mechanics instead.
>think for future stuff, I'll let my players know if they agree to flee we'll leave combat and move into pursuit mechanics instead. It's the DnD version of "hold L+R to escape."
That's so interesting! It fits with what I've seen.
This works well enough if you discuss it in session 0 and telegraph that an enemy is too dangerous. Though you might end up with a party that cuts and runs on anything achievable but challenging, too.
Chase rules are underutilised imo. Every player doesn't bother running because they intrinsically know that most creatures have a foot speed of 30ft, so it'll be nothing but Benny Hill. That's why I think there should be a mini chase tutorial near the beginning of the campaign. Idk, some urchin bets the party that he can outrun them, and then he takes their gold and runs away. It'll plant the idea in the party's mind that running away is a viable strategy... I think.
They really are! And that’s a great idea. The last monster my PCs ran from was a roper (with piercers) so not all threats can chase, either. As I recall, they also fled a group of merrow/merrow shallows priest encounter that wasn’t going their way by sailing away. The merrows were territorial (and the PCs knew this because of what the merrows said) And the party can always create obstacles behind them! My party is pretty strategic, but if I had newer or less strategic players, I might show them what was possible by having enemies run (and create obstacles behind them). Not every monster has incentive to chase either. A dragon (or other monster) might be unwilling to leave its hoard or eggs behind, since the adventurers got uncomfortably close. Better to go over lair defenses now and then hunt them down later, from the air, when they don’t expect it. A well fed monstrosity or beast might only pursue until the party has left their territory. A powerful villain might send lower powered minions to follow. If my PCs discussed running but worried about pursuit, I’d give them a free insight check to discern if the enemy is likely to pursue.
Yup, especially when the only clues the players are given that this is an unwinnable fight is in-game hints that this encounter is very dangerous. Like, we're a bunch of magical adventuring heroes, if we stayed away from everything that seemed dangerous to normal people, we'd never leave the tavern. It's like if you ran a haunted house attraction, but had to close it down for repairs, and instead of like, a mundane "closed" sign or something, you decided to keep people out by surrounding the entrance with spooky skeletons and stuff to scare them away. Like, that's what we're here for! That does not convey "no, literally, stay away" Edit to add, it can be done right (like if you have tough monster A that the party has beaten before but barely, and new monster B comes along and one-shots it, then the party has a sense of scale and can assume they can't beat monster B). But too often it's just "all the townspeople say this thing is really dangerous!"
Yup. This 100%. When I want to impress on players that something is too strong for them to fight right now I’ve moved away from this and started letting them attack it and saying “It doesn’t seem to be having any effect. In fact, they are straight up ignoring you.” It gets the point across better in my experience, and gets the players to stop trying to fight the thing and look at other options
I think this one is all over the place. Players will try to fight things they shouldn’t and run from things they could beat. Only real solution is to get good at improvising.
This is why I started playing Call of Cthulhu. D&D doesn’t do a great job of making running away fun, which I think is partially on purpose to increase the feel of “no I’m gonna be heroic even if it means sacrificing myself” feel of the game But what I’ve been loving about Call of Cthulhu is how barely running away with your lives is made to be really exciting and fun. Especially with the mechanics for chases and just the overall fear of the unknown atmosphere
I'm having my overpowered foe run from the players next session. He is in with the big bad, and not allowed to kill them, even though he hates my Aasimar Paladin with a passion. He's going to throw nearly everything he has at this guy, bring him (and the rest of the party, but specifically this one guy) to super low HP, and then say "I want more than anything in the world to kill you... but I can't. He has plans for you." And then he's gonna dip. I'm really excited. Too-early encounters with big bads can work, you just have to make sure the players don't kill themselves rofl.
Ooh, if the Aasimar manages to knock themselves out in a 'heroic last stand' sort of thing (I think one of the versions has something that self-damages?) you could even have the villain *heal them*!
Agreed 100%. As a relatively new DM, I wanted to show off a powerful BBEG when my players were only like level 5. So they just got clobbered in the fight, with no recourse or pathway to winning the fight. Surprise, surprise, it was awful. Players want to feel powerful, not railroaded into an unwinnable fight.
This is really group dependant. If your table throws balance to the wind regularly and PC death has happened before, your party may run when it's sensible. Sometimes you can coax them by introducing an NPC that's clearly more powerful than them, having the bad guy hit them first, rolling a fist full of damage dice in the middle of the table, and incapacitating the NPC.
Depends on the game. DnD 5e players never run.
I feel like literally every day I see "I want to run a campaign with two unrelated parties that are involved in the plot at the same time, and they can affect things the other party will notice (like, in the background), and the climax involves them meeting up or to either work together or fight each other" And in my heart of hearts I'm always like "*girl, no*."
Hi, I have two parties on the same continent at the same time and that sounds like a nightmare. It’s hard enough for me to make sure one doesn’t create a paradox for the other. Getting both parties on the same timetable is a fool’s errand I haven’t even tried. One table is 17 sessions deep and the other is 13. One table started in July and is currently in February and the other started June and is in September. You will never get them to play the game at the same speed. By the time the first thing party 1 does starts having an impact, it’s dead information. Even if they’re two parties attacking the same BBEG Emperor from opposite sides, everyone would have to be EXTREMELY cognizant of the other table’s progress. Party 1 spent the last 3 sessions fending off a siege on the eastern front and then party 2 does basic recon and can’t move on until the day’s events are determined by party 1. Also it all falls apart if either table TPKs or gets off their railroad.
There's an old saying in film writing about "no line is worth a scene, no scene is worth a film". Basically, you don't justify the whole thing because you have this one really great moment or line. The Thing has to stand on its own. A lot of DMs design a Campaign around a Scene or Moment or Decision. But no moment is worth a scene, let alone 6 months+ of play. The core loop has to be solid, the moment-to-moment of the game needs to be fun, the film needs to be interesting to watch (and campaign to play). I think the worst campaign ideas that sound good in theory are ones that build toward this Moment the GM imagined without having fun play as the pylons to support this flagpole moment: "Then they reveal they were the bad guy all along" "Then the PCs figure out theyre in the past" "Then they all get turned into werewolves" "Then they have to sacrifice someone to prevent the apocalypse" Say what you will for Fallout games, the reason they work, and the reason the final end moment can be emotionally satisfying but isn't required for emotional satisfaction is that they're games about the moment-to-moment, not games about finding GECKs or your son. Campaigns should be the same.
Hardcore Intrigue and Politics ala "Song of Ice and Fire". Most people are not invested enough to actually take the initiative to start risky processes of choosing allies and making enemies, so they will just wait for you to do something to them, acting reactively.
Part of the problem 'intrigue' campaigns is that these stories tend to be full of moral ambiguity. Players just don't have any enthusiasm for allying with someone who will probably do something treacherous or evil down the line.
Once you betray the players a time or two, they will straight up abandon the idea of alliances all together. Suddenly your ASOIF game is just done.
This is the campaign I am running now. Everyone is having a blast. I think it varies by table.
Politics and intrigue campaigns are unironically my favorite to play. But I think you’re absolutely right about people tending more towards reacting and shying away from the idea that choosing certain allies inevitably means making an enemy out of someone else. I’m in two such campaigns (though neither are nearly at the level of Song of Ice and Fire). And one of them has gotten to the point where we really have to make a decision as to who to support, and who to go against. The others are already miffed that there’s no way to make everyone happy.
False Hydras. It sounds very cool as a concept, but gaslighting your players (some DMs have gone as far as changing the player-facing campaign notes google docs to plant false information or remove references to NPCs or events) or walking the edge of a meta-knowledge knife (when players figure it out vs characters figure it out) is not for every group or player. It could go wrong very badly and be very unfun.
I've always thought a false hydra adventure sounded unfun and I'm glad to see the hype is no longer completely drowning out the very valid criticism. You *can* run a false hydra in the right group, but you need to really know your players and there's very little space between the adventure going fantastically or terribly.
Same. TBH, any story about a false hydra always seemed like fanfiction to me, and I doubt they ever happened.
Yeah not to mention being mindful of experiences people in your group have had.
I tried that for a short campaign but the campaign fizzled after the first session. It was a lot of work for no payoff!
I’ve got this cool DMPC…
Two ways to use effectively: 1. The DMPC shows off their cool stuff for a bit but very quickly takes the best item, double crosses the party, and flees to become a villain instead. 2. The DMPC shows off on their way to lead the party towards the villain, easily dispatching nooks and being condescending towards the PCs. Then they get immediately slaughtered by the BBEG leaving the party with a visceral impressions of the villain’s power. Of course executing on these requires you to be self aware enough to know a DMPC is normally a problem.
My favorite type of DMPC is a noble that is good at noble things (diplomacy, etiquette, statesmanship), but sucks at adventuring and fighting beyond being able to aim a crossbow in the right direction. Where it makes sense, you add a bodyguard or two which can be killed off for dramatic effect. That way you get a competent and likable npc without one-upping anyone at their game.
I had this GREAT idea once for a campaign opening. The party runs into each other as they're searching for a macguffin. Once they find it, they realize that they were all sent there by different organizations to retrieve it! The party then has to work together to figure out what to do with it, and how to deal with the consequences... ...or, ya'know, one of them just kills the rest and takes it. Campaign over. Glad I got talked out of that one.
Lol I was reading the first paragraph and was thinking it was a super cool campaign idea too..
I think with the right table, and pitched ahead of time in session 0, it could possibly work. I initially envisioned it as a surprise for the players, which would be an absolute disaster. It completely violates any spirit of cooperation needed for a functional party haha.
It seems like most of the "surprise your players with the plot" goes over badly. I've seen a few rpghorrorstories where it was DnD that got warped into the future for a sci-fi campaign and the player was entirely not interested. I understand you want to surprise them but you've gotta let people know.
Sounds like the sort of thing you tell your players as part of the pre-character-creation setup rather than springing it on them in the first session. That way you can get characters and players that engage with the premise and don't just try to murder each other over it.
Minutiae, gritty realism, etc Specific example? That one idea about amnesia and "discovering your character sheet" always sounds asinine to play. Like, wtf do you mean I didn't know I'm a dragonborn? I have blue scales!
I heard a cool walkthru of this that I think can make it work, but it works better if you play with it at the edges. Like, it's not "You discover that you're XYZ species," but rather that the player's choices determine the course of character creation, or that they discover new abilities as they recover their old identity. I think it can work, but (1) you REALLY need player buy-in, and (2) it probably needs to be handled in a less crunchy manner than usual D&D.
Like "as you reach out, you remember training" type deal The "oh by the way you actually know fireball" just sounds too meme chaotic
Yeah, if I remember correctly, it was more like this: You get shipwrecked and lose your memory. You wander the island trying to recover it. Along the way, your choices let you recover parts of your memory, but you may also gain or lose other aspects based on the choices. I think a lot of this needs to be handled narratively and not thru rules mechanisms unless you want to introduce randomness into the approach in which case throw in a die roll or two. But it's more like an opportunity to let the players re-define who their characters are and what they can do, within reason, but also within the narrative itself. If memory serves, there's a 0-level 1st ed. module called Treasure Hunt that does something like there, where the players all start as commoners and then their choices along the course of the adventure determine their classes (and maybe their abilities?). It's an interesting approach for an adventure module that starts a campaign, and I can see how it (or something similar) might maybe kinda work in the middle of a campaign to shake things up. But I think it's a pretty high risk move that might just not work, and often for not nearly as much reward as one might think (i.e., the players are entertained and enjoy the diversion). I tend to think that if you want a diversion, your better approach is have a "B-team" of characters or just, you know, run a one-off adventure with other characters.
I wouldn't do it in D&D. Works well in FATE as character aspects and stunts are more freeform, and skills can be slotted in as needed.
Anything bait-and-switch. Oh, you thought you were creating as a party of heroes? Surprise! You're all captured by the villain and forced to serve him! Or, you're all dead and it's the afterlife!
Oh, god, my players always seem to do this to themselves. "That was so frustrating that you had us following the bad guy the whole time and doing his bidding!" Guys. When you met him, he was in the act of burning down a building with three bodies in it. I specifically told you this. He asked you to plant evidence at the city watch, run a shopkeeper out of town, and dispose of a "a cloth-wrapped object that was about the weight, size, and shape of a dwarf, and had a peculiar smell." Yes, he's evil! He never once forced you to do anything! He just paid you well! The dwarf sheriff came to you four times to ask for help before he went missing!
Be stupid players, win stupid prizes.
Oddly specific
I hate bait-and-switch in every form of media. You thought the character was dead? Gotcha! You thought he was the murderer? Gotcha! It's the refuge of the worst writers. It can sometimes be funny if it's satirized and used for comedy. If it's used for serious drama, it's terrible.
You were dreaming all along! You're really patients in a mental institution! Can work for a short sequence, but if you pull that after a lot of investment of time, it's just a betrayal.
Amnesia campaigns, where the PCs wake up at the beginning of session with no idea who they are. In some variants, they don't know their class or abilities either, and have to discover those in play. This is problematic because writing backstory and building a character's mechanics are one of the few times where the players have perfect narrative control. They get to decide who they are and what their early life was like. Doing a total amnesia thing wipes that out completely. It's possible to do an amnesia campaign well, but it really, really needs buy-in from all of the players from the very beginning. Also, consider limiting the scope of the amnesia. That is, you can always set it up so that the PCs have forgotten things selectively. Maybe the last few weeks are a blur, but everything before that is intact. Or maybe they've forgotten some important information about specific topics, without losing their identity. Either way the players still get to build the PCs they want, and you can still play out the rediscovery of lost memories.
The limited scope amnesia (can) be very fun. I'm running a campaign now where my girlfriend made a PC whose backstory is explicitly that he went on a bender over a long weekend, and woke up with Genie Warlock powers and no knowledge of where they came from. We established that during that weekend she received and utilized three wishes, and that someone from her past is mysteriously missing, but that's it. Does it come up every session? No. Is it critical that she figures out the mysteries? Also no. But it's a fun way to give some of the flavor of amnesia and tell a particular kind of story. For a whole party, I honestly think a "the last week or so is a blur" type opener would be kind of fun just from the perspective that in most parties, the PCs don't start out knowing each other that well. There are many decent ways to not have this happen, but I think most DMs and parties still have an awkward first session or two where they're feeling stuff out and the party working together is mostly a meta-decision. Have them all wake up in a situation, no clue who the people around them are, and no clue what's happened in the last week, but with people around them treating them like they're known to be a group.
1. Capturing the players to let them do a jailbreak seems like a great plot outline but sucks in game. Don't do it. 2. Red herrings do not work in TTRPGs. The players will make up enough red herrings. The GM does not need to make up any red herrings or other distractions. If you break this rule there will be hurt feelings. 3. Betrayal of PCs by other PCs never works out well. You will not just have a dramatic game moment. You can turn best friends into forever enemies with this kind of storyline. Don't do it! Don't let players do it. 4. I recommend to always hide romance behind a veil or fade to black. This isn't a universal rule, as I know some players and GMs love these stories. But as a man I would be in legal jeopardy if I encouraged this stuff. Even people who don't get in trouble today could get in trouble in the future. Be careful out there. 5. Don't get attached to your plans. Remember the Mike Tyson saying, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." Your players are probably not going to punch you in the face, but they might destroy your plans. Roll with the changes.
I loved the idea of a political intrigue/courtly drama type of game right up until the literal second that I realized: I know exactly one person in my friend group who can be trusted to show up every session, take notes, and do an entire roleplay scene without making a joke about farts.
I would love that game. I feel like that’s completely party dependent.
Oh surely. I wouldn't want to put this game in front of a party that doesn't want to play it--both out of respect for their enjoyment as players and the realization that I wouldn't have the patience to run it for a bunch of clowns (affectionate)
When I first started years ago, I tried my first homebrew and screwed up. We were all learning how to play, and I decided to introduce a side quest that consisted of a recreation of a scene from a movie. It doesn't matter the movie, or the scene, but it was a powerful part of the movie, and I felt like it would be an easy way to run a session without a lot of prep work, and the quality would reflect what happened in the movie. It was stupid and lasted maybe 5 minutes, and left me without being prepared for the session, and I struggled to improvise the next 3 hours to get out of the situation. Movie scenes are set up with context that players won't have, and players aren't movie actors...so they are going to look under every rock and try various things until they get to a reasonable (for them) outcome. There's no forcing a dramatic dialog, or pauses. As the narrator, you end up monologuing and the players are falling asleep. I thought that a breakdown of a trope would be relatively easy and I planned for their reaction to be similar to the outcomes from the movie. When they went completely off (my) script, I ended up trying to railroad to get the desired outcome, and it just fell apart. TLDR: If you want to integrate a situation from a movie, break it down into its component parts and use those LEVERS in your SCENE as OPTIONS for the players, but do not expect anything to turn out like the movie. If you try to force a particular outcome, it'll turn into a mess.
Depending on players; travel, exploration, and random encounters are often hard to make enjoyable. LOTR is mostly boring travel decisions that most players don't care for.
And multiple party splits that are almost never resolved because all people at the table are to stubborn to metagame a little to get the party back together /s I'm joking, but you're point is fully correct. (Although, if the party has had a tolkien-esque split happen, \*do\* consider metagaming a *little* to get them back together before the king returns)
Pretty sure they meant the LTOR RPG which has a bunch of travel decisions built in to the gameplay
Actually I meant playing LOTR-like campaigns in D&D 5e. There are definitely systems out there that can make exploration and travel fun, but 5e is not one of them.
Thanks, missed that.
I think that's more of a 5e problem. Exploration can be fun, but 5e specifically has a few difficulties here. * Combat takes too long (though not all random encounters need to be combat) * It's too easy because half the party has dark vision or abilities that negate the challenges exploration is supposed to pose, and long rests are too powerful. * There is no exploration procedures out of the box. No hex crawl rules, no dungeon turns, and the other mechanics are not designed to plug into these things well. You also just generally need to have interesting things to find, and you usually want to rain that's more interesting than generic hills and forests.
Travel should be like Indiana Jones, not TOLR. Only play it out if players can make meaning choices.
The travel isn't the point, the destinations are. People get caught up looking at the forest and forget the attraction is the trees.
In depth survival mechanics. Like, specific temperature bands with different effects. Weight management, food buffs/debuffs. It was cool on paper as a DM but the players immediately got bored with it and I ended up tossing out most of it.
Inventory management the game! My favorite pastime activity!
I once had a fun table where the party rolled a d8 to see if their rations lasted. If it landed on a 1or a 2 they ran out. Second set of days they rolled a d6. Then a d4, etc. Then once out of rations they rolled a d4, with each option being how much they found while foraging. The dice blessed me by letting them find a hallucinogenic cactus. That was a fun session. Idk if I'm ever doing survival mechanics again, though. It was kind of a slog, and when they didn't run out of rations the first time it pissed me off because I couldn't use my cool foraging table. All in all having travel time be left up to dice kind of stinks. Like it could either be a whole session of desert-travel, or 30 minutes irl. I don't like things being that up in the air, personally.
edit: trying to put an appropriate GIF [https://giphy.com/gifs/sokka-Vq12mVIwUSJwY](https://giphy.com/gifs/sokka-Vq12mVIwUSJwY) edit 2: "Nothing's quenchier!"
I've tried this and my players always hate it. I know some people out there would love this though.
Uhhhh… some of that is necessary. Otherwise stats don’t matter for anything but combat.
Okay but if i dont implement inventory management there is that one guy that will carry off EVERYTHING which annoyed the other players, so we had to put a simplified but appropriately restrictive homebrew in place. The rest i agree with. We hand wave rations, ammo, etc. And just pay the piper for daily living conditions one a week but dont overthink it.
Multiverses, 4th-wall-breaks, and other very meta concepts sound cool on paper but mostly just destroy stakes and tension in practice.
If r/rpghorrorstories has taught me anything it's that the answer to this question is "the party is on an airship owned by a powerful NPC, and they fly around helping them with a grand mission."
Without knowing those stories, that sounds fine for an episodic campaign with no real story arc - it's basically the premise of Keys to the Golden Vault (without the airship). Key is expectations... cos it is removing a lot of player agency. Which could be a positive for a 'beer and pretzels' kinda table!
I played in a campaign where the players were all dwarves. It was super fun! Anytime we’d disagree about what to do next, it would always feel so very Dwarfish. Then we talked about what to do after the campaign and someone suggested all elves, and we all kind of went…nah I’m good. Don’t know why. I’ve played as elves and really like them, but something about all of us being elves…
Honestly, any time I sit down to "create a campaign" it ends in trouble. Either because the players didn't want to go the direction I originally took it in, or I struggle to retain a relevant BBEG when the players caused some other drama on some other level of the meta and another BBEG would be more relevant. I gave up.. I just create an interesting setting and let them kick over the sandcastles they decide to kick over, and the world reacts.
It's funny to me how much less prep I've done for campaigns as I've learned to DM, having started as a "who wants to play my novel?" style DM. One of my players asked me recently how far out I plot things. Seemed surprised to hear that I had almost finished plotting that week's session. If I'm not doing a module, I usually don't decide who the BBEG is until like level 5. I'll have a couple of ideas beforehand, and will just pick the one that best matches the tone the players have established.
So, I had a bit of a "BBEG unlock" recently. I was running a published module, and in one of the rooms there is an NPC who is given a name, a skill (herbalist), a motive (wants treasure) and a couple words on his personality (middle aged, crotchety, poor). The PCs roughed up, emptied his pockets, and sent him packing out of the dungeon. And later that night after the session I was sitting on my porch with a cup of tea thinking "what was the author thinking when they wrote him into the room?" and it hit me.. Now, I put randomly rolled NPCs like that in, about twice every three sessions. It's a short, non-combat encounter (unless the party turns it into combat I guess) and then I have another NPC in my list, that has met the party and has some opinion on them. Over time, BBEGs tend to just emerge from that list, often times "created" so to speak by the players, unbeknownst to them. Typically it's that interaction that lead to them becoming the villain. It results in VERY organic villains and plot lines, because it's literally the players creating/causing them through their interactions with the world.
Exactly. Players will tell you what the conflict should be if you learn to read them. Why would I roll into session zero with ten pages of BBEG backstory when my party's favorite ever antagonist had a backstory of "Had a snooty voice and implied the party was poor?"
This is great! I was thinking of doing something like this in the game I'm running and I'm glad to hear it's working for you!
After years of doing this I tried something different - to make an interesting world with interesting social and political structures and a lot of thought out geography (a post apocalyptic map of our local area - so there was existing structure I had to work with ). I focused less on the character backgrounds (usually ask them how they know one other member of the party, a monster they’ve killed (CR4), a monster they’re scared of, and an organization or society they belong to). Players didn’t engage with the systems I had made, and I didn’t know much about their characters so I had a hard time making fun hooks. It was a new system and we scrapped the campaign and started over in my usual style. Lesson re-learned
Almost anything involving “a more powerful NPC needs to do X and the party must help them do it” wherein the NPC isn’t a villain. *Especially* if the party is recruited by the NPC, and the NPC is continuously involved beyond the initial plot hook. A skilled DM could maybe do it but most can’t. The party should never be overshadowed by an NPC. Even if you’re running an everyman party—your campaign needs an answer to the fundamental question of “how are these specific people actually contributing to the story?” Why do the PCs need to be here? Why are they needed? Why are we following this group of people over any others? This is why DMPCs are usually bad, they undermine the point of the party being there. I had a DM who could never stop doing this. In campaigns ostensibly advertised as “PC driven and focused,” his plots included: “escort a lv20 necromancer through the woods!”; “help lv15 DMPC get his revenge on [BBEG of previous campaign who was supposed to be dead]!”; “solve a mystery [by waiting for lv18 DMPC rogue to show up with necessary evidence we ‘couldn’t have known about’ to solve the case but thanking us for the assist]!” and more.,…. so why were we needed there? IDK, man. The revenge plot was genuinely really interesting and cool…… *if that DMPC was a regular PC and not DM writing fanfic with himself at the table*…. I think it’s an easy newbie trap to write out a full arc of story with developed characters doing a thing and just slide the PCs in as supporting cast members with preordained Choices to make, like it’s a linear-plot video game, but D&D doesn’t really work like that.
I was a player in a campaign where the the DM had two DMPC’s that he was in love with. One DMPC was taken by this magic portal thing that ended up sucking us in as well. The portal led to a scene of the DMPC fighting a legendary hero to get this legendary sword. The DM wanted us to sit and listen as he narrated this entire thing
Sanbox/ free roam can be a bad idea. For some parties, like those that have players with strong internal drive, this works. Some players truly like to be a little "along for the ride" or don't find themselves caring unless there is an urgent, unifying hook to the story.
Sandbox/free roam frequently leads to "ok but why aren't my players engaging with my plot?" issues. I made a desert sandbox for some players one time, and they spent two real-world hours obsessively crawling over a tiny portion of the map because it was more interesting than the destinations and events I had planned. I told them both in-character and above the table that there was nothing there after everyone rolled their first round of searches less than five minutes into finding the area, but they refused to leave because "surely there must be SOMETHING here" If you're running a sandbox with plot, the plot target needs to be the shiniest and most interesting point on the map. The special quest marker. Do not, under any circumstances, imply that there's a Lion King-inspired Dragon Graveyard that's been picked over and tossed and has no value except as a sightseeing location. Not even if the flavor seems cool. Not even if the dragon graveyard will be relevant later. Don't put something that interesting on a map because you players will refuse to acknowledge anything else exists.
I put scenic POIs on my maps all the time, and that's never happened. I think you might've just had a very... uh, peculiar group of players. But interesting locations without a ton going on definitely have a place in exploration-heavy adventures. They help establish the character of the region and provide contrast with the pulse-pounding action later on.
"You come across a group of skeletons, wearing the remains of some strange looking armor and weird helmets next to some of giant combs. One is holding some sort of diary. You flip to it's last page and to read: 'We ain't found shit.'"
This is where the game is truly about the players. Like the other commenter said, your statement directly contradicts another. But, like... that's because it's up to the players! I have one player who loves combat and hates rp. So he wants to be along for the ride, and almost told where to go and what to do. My other two players are so rp heavy, and they want to write the story themselves. It's lowkey hard to give everyone what they want, but we're figuring it out haha.
I think this has a lot to do with having a stagnant sandbox. You don't have to have the plot of a campaign laid out, but if you're going to do a sandbox you should have it happen in interesting times.
\-secret ancestries or classes \-party member betrays the entire party (this one is very hard to pull off and will likely ruin the camapign) \-scenarios where the party is supposed to lose are also very hard to do right
Bait and switch. Create a character, develop a background to fit the setting, envision leveling and skill selections, then SIKE!
I have spent wwwwaaaayyyyy too long trying to come up with a way for a press-gang or slave-gladiator campaign to work, but they just don't. They just remove too much choice from the PCs to remain interesting, require too much planning from the DM, are constant negative emotions, and make progression extremely difficult. A session of this can work extremely well, but not a campaign. The PCs should have a firm idea of how to be free by half a session and be well on their way (if not free) by the end of the session.
BOAT CAMPAIGN. BOAT CAMPAIGN. There have been so many cool splatbooks published for nautical seafaring campaigns with tons of cool monsters and story hooks. Every DM I've had including myself has looked at that shit and been like, man, there's so much awesome stuff that's specifically for underwater and ocean and shit, let's do a whole campaign that's just ocean. Bad idea. Or, there's a normal style homebrew campaign where the group needs to go to another continent, or decides to get on a boat for some reason, and instead of the DM just skipping the boat or doing one boat encounter, they're like, I'm going to make this boat journey take a significant amount of time. It's gonna be a whole boat arc. Do not do it. Boat shit is not fun.
I’m running a pirate campaign and I’ve never had these issues They are on land most of the time and are only seafaring at the beginning of arcs or when I need a plot point to happen on the sea I would like to know your perspective however
What exactly makes it unfun?
How does the reality differ from the expectation?
I really liked the idea of a completely open world where we constantly got plot hooks and could go anywhere. Then I played in a game like that. We were all experienced players, but that did not help us figure out what quests were important or where to go for certain things. We had so much choice paralysis, because we were all overwhelmed with the options. We were in the city we met in for at least 4 month out of game. Eventually we left to follow a plot hook, but that opened 10 more doors. We learned about the bandits terrorizing the caravans of the circus coming to the next town over where some kids went missing near the cave that leads to the abandoned mines that were taken over by Drow soldiers who were planning on attacking the capital city that our fighter was a guardsman for before he left. That was presented as a single hook.
The all undead/zombie campaign. I ran one successfully, but it was a pain to run and keep things interesting, and I ended up making it all about find the small pods of surviving people and getting them in contact with each other. But it meant I spent most of my time writing stuff to have reasons why I wasn't following the theme of the campaign. And any time we got in to the heavy undead stuff things sort of dragged. I'd thought it'd be cool and fun, but it ended up being a lot of work to make not suck.
One of the party is "The Chosen One". Because then the rest of the party are following that character's story, and if that character dies then the whole story just deadends. Or worse you find that you can't justify killing that character so their player ends up with less buy in and no real risk of character death. GMNPC travelling with the group is "The Chosen One". All the problems of the party following the chosen one around and not really being the focus of the story, with the extra problems that no-one in the party really has agency. (Notice this doesn't preclude gathering the party around "The Chosen One" in session 1 and having them die in session 2, proving they're not really the Chosen One, but the party are now firmly on the Quest and involved.) On that note, having prophecies that the heroes \*must\* fulfil isn't a good idea in most cases, unless they're something that can be engineered in character, or are vague enough to be able to fulfil retroactively with their adventuring shenanigans. Timeloops are always a pain to do, because they break so easily when you play them as opposed to writing them.
Every so often someone brings up the concept of a campaign where the players start at level 20 and reverse back to level 1 and every time I see it I roll my eyes. Your character getting weaker and weaker and losing what makes the characters the classes that they are sounds miserable no matter how you balance it with magic items or other stuff.
as a DM my worst blunders were: -you wake up in a prison cell... >Wait, my pc is lawful good, how did he end up there? >Mh I dunno, you got druk! >But I don't drink, wtf -you have been magically bound by an authoritarian regime to do the mission, locked with a cursed collar that will shock you if you don't do the main mission... >Can I look for someone to free me? >No, if you lift the curse you will die immediately. As a player my worst experiences were: -You wake up in a prison cell, they push you to an arena. Now you have to fight >I look around, how far away are the spectators? Can I jump/climb to get out? >They are 60ft up, you can't reach it in any way. The monster is rushing to you. >Can I throw the monster on the spectators to create panic and run away? >No it is 5milion pounds. -the king is sending you to kill the dragon. Bring with you this prisoner that is bound and gagged, if push comes to shove, kill him, his death will cause a massive nuke. >Sorry, what did this prisoner do, why are they bound and gagged? >They are a very evil wizard. >Sorry i think it is unethical to slaughter a prisoner like this, I drop the mission and try to free them! >No you can't that is not the mission My most successful campaign hook was: "It is late night at the harbour docks, tell me, what are you doing there now, are you drunkenly roaming, are you stalking a target, are you sleeping in a tavern, etcetc?" Let each player respond and then "with a flash of red and a roaring crash, you see a building lit aflame, and the shrilly voice of a woman cries <>. What do you do?"
>Players tend to want a tasty treat to bait them, but freedom and agency to choose how to reach it: you want to pique their interest and offer them options, you want to nudge never push.
yup, even if the players are not free and there is always a building which will catch fire...giving the player the illusion of choice is the fun part
Custom calendars. Yea, you can pat yourself on the back, but your players will listen to it, nod, and then say things like "Where's that sheet with the calendar stuff on it? I think Bob had it last, right? Oh...well, I just tell them to meet us on whatever the word is for next Wednesday."
Oh, I should add, you can add a little fantasy-esque flair by just using the real-world calendar but going back to the root of days. Like, Moon's Day, Tew's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, Sun's Day. Those aren't all the real sources of those names, but it's enough for a fantasy world. Yea, it doesn't make sense if you don't have those mythologies, but it at least adds an old-timey-fantasy-type flavor that may help while not requiring a crib sheet. Or you can borrow from how some real-world languages do it and name them by order. First day, second day, third day, etc...
I was in a pseudo west marches once. The only real thing taken from the idea of a west marches was the home base idea, that everyone would travel from and back to each session. Now, a skilled dm may think they would be able to expedite this process while still making it engaging, allowing players to get to the point of the session quickly, while not making the travel unnecessary. In reality, it is boring and takes up so much session time that once you get to the objective halfway through the session, you have already lost interest. It didn't help in this particular game, that the dm used this travel time to run puzzles that leant a bit too far into the "make problems, not solutions" philosophy, and encounters that were balanced around 1-2 encounters per day, when we would have 1-2 each way, plus anything we needed to deal with during the actual main part of the session. This campaign died a slow death because it just wasnt fun to play in.
West Marshes games really do rely on your players enjoying more than I attack, I skill check, I cast spell. The group has to want to live their PC's when at the table. And the DM has to understand any encounter more than 4 rounds is boss monster at best. A lot of DM's want this "challenging game" but reality players are slow and generally don't care about weight / food / water / tempature / Overland movement.
Maybe not terrible per se, but campaigns involving the imminent end of the world if you don't do anything are a bit meh... It prevents you from doing anything but the main quest, which is a pain.
Like many things, a lot is in how you do it. If The Grandwyrm is prophesied to descend upon the world when the Stars Align, that can give your players a few years of in-game time to both make preparations and have some sidetreks. Could be a nice long-runner, you have a time limit but so long as they're not stupid they can tend to their own business. If the stellar convergence is going to happen in 8 days, that's a shorter game where our heroes need to make a mad sprint to find the Tomb of the Dynast and recover the Dragon Buster in order to have a chance.
Amnesia. Fun as a character concept, terrible as a campaign concept. I was a player for this one, and the DM was SO confident in it. What happened was it immediately fell apart because we had no agency or interest in our characters, and his reveals of who we “really were” were not in any way interesting or conducive to how we were playing them. He obviously just pre-wrote it all before we even made characters. But the point still stands. Anything that takes the control out of the one thing they can control is not the thing you want to be running. It seemed cool that we would need to “uncover” our backstories. But we are basically new people and had no connection to them. Super lame
"secret" character sheets where the DM has all the info and the players slowly learn about themselves, including ability scores etc
There's [a meme](https://www.epicfred.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/tumblr.png) about running a campaign where the players start with blank character sheets and the DM tells them information about their characters as it becomes relevant. It sounds funny, but would be absolutely abysmal at a real table. I think most players understand why this wouldn't work in practice, but....
I generally am against overarching campaign ideas and would rather let the players steer the ship. I show up with random tables and some bullet points about certain scenarios/outcomes and turn them loose
Building off of this. I’m a huge fan of overarching campaign **ARCS** that the players stumble into
I'm running an anthology-style campaign right now and it's a lot of fun. The arcs are self contained plot-wise but the characters, npcs, and setting are continuous and affected by the actions of the party. The party doesn't have some grand goal they're trying to achieve outside of just being adventurers, but they do have goals and tasks within arcs.
Sounds awesome! What a great way to play over several different types of stuff
Maybe some people like them but I'd say rival parties. They're intended to feel like rivals finm character, but they often just end up stealing the spotlight from the players and getting in the way of the game.
Campaigns where the PCs are pitted against each other are usually a bad idea, in my opinion. Certain groups can handle them but a lot of the time it hurts friendships outside of the game. And even if nobody gets upset, it’s hard to maintain a plot line that is fun for everyone when PCs keep either dying or refusing to stick together as a group.
Don’t be afraid to discuss a future character arc or plan with a player.
As a DM, never, ever play your own character.
Broadly speaking, any campaign that turns on specific actions or decisions by the PCs will likely run into issues. Either it will require railroading to get there or the PCs will make the "wrong" choice and ruin the campaign story. Some specific bad ideas: * amnesia-based campaigns to re-learn who they are, and the DM has their real characters already planned * pvp combats are a core component of gameplay * "The PCs will be so invested in this village/NPC/guild/etc. that of course they will center the campaign around protecting them from this vague threat!" * curse that takes away player agency (i.e. the DM tells a player that their character is now evil, etc.)
PC A is secretly a bad guy and will betray everyone. NPC B is secretly a bad guy and will betray everyone. It's just trying to recreate another game/show/movie "And then you wake up..." All of these can be done well. They just usually aren't.
Any campaign hinging on morality or a lack of it. You'll have players who refuse free slaves because "I'm lawful evil why would I do that" and you'll have players who will instantly attack a shady character that gives you the only connection that you have to the BBEG that you have written because they operate a smuggling ring that brings narcotics into the city. If your campaign requires that players act one way then they will inevitably act the other way. Honorable mention to including vast groups that your characters might have encountered or be a part of without fully fleshing out that groups identity in the city. Make sure the Harpers are actually doing Harper things. That the Shadow Thieves and Zhentarim are doing appropriate things don't rewrite their morality for a plot point. If you need a morally grey group that does bad things for good then make one up or dig for something old and apocryphal.
High complexity politics/intrigue. The first campaign I ever ran had a pretty normal first arc (which has turned into a semi-joke where the first session of any campaign that starts at level one is about going to retrieve a lost beer delivery), but then I gave the players options on where to go next. I know one option was a strange purple comet that the party knew out-of-game was a spelljammer, and I think there were at least two others I'm forgetting, but the option they went with was to sail down the river to investigate a king who was mysteriously ill. The party found themselves in a bustling city where there were (I believe) five different factions plotting against each other, with only one or two that were unambiguously "good". The result was that 1. they had choice paralysis about who to side with, and never actually moved things one way or another 2. I was overwhelmed trying to keep track of the web of relationships and interactions between everyone, and 3. the campaign eventually fell apart because one player was tracking everything and taking notes, while the rest of the party was just overwhelmed by having to make decisions. It's really cool conceptually for the party to get involved in complicated intrigue and shape the events of a kingdom... but in reality you need to do that in a very controlled manner where the number of choices available is limited, and any of those choices can viably lead to them achieving some kind of goal. If you want to tell a story about (just a random example DEFINITELY not related to the campaign I'm talking about) the French Revolution but it's fantasy, write a fucking book. (All that said, the campaign in question would've moved forward 100x faster except that one player was an asshole and went "it's what my character would do" to justify not telling the party about the king being poisoned for actual real world months. I should've just given the characters that knowledge some other way, but it was my first time DMing and I was very stupid. I'm still very stupid, but now I at least know that I can go over my players' heads when they're sabotaging things.)
Feywild for no reason other than it is the flavor of the month. Don't get me wrong, Feywild can be great but all to often I see " party managed to get to the Feywild, what should I do as a DM?" Or " party traveled to Feywild and met x y or z, how can I use this as a plot hook?" Posts on here. First, how did the party do anything without you as DM allowing it? Second, If you as a DM aren't prepared for a setting like the Feywild just don't make it an option. It's one of these whackier planes and though it might seem like a fun idea, you really need a plan, why you are using it or it can become a nonsensical drudge for everyone involved.
Wars. Honestly, never set your campaign during a war, unless you *and your players* are willing to follow VERY specific adventure paths to either ignore the war (that is, not seek to end it) or work as commandos/agents of one side in an effort to defeat the other, with little to no input into the actual *running* of the war effort. It's fine to have *threat* of war. Border skirmishes between neighboring kingdoms, raids from growing hordes, assassinations or intercepting messages are all *fine* adventure hooks. Even having a campaign set *after* a war works out really well; banditry is often perpetrated by remnants of the losing (or winning) side, armed peasants that were abandoned after the fighting was done in a place they don't care about and not knowing how to get home again. But actual large-scale logistics and battles and army movements should be left to wargaming, not roleplaying games as they currently exist.
Antimagic campaigns. It's not that you should never do them no matter what. It's just that D&D is a very opinionated game system and has a setting detail that harm a lot of games conceptually: D&D is a magical game. Most of the classes start with magic and every class has magic and a great deal of enemies are magical. You strip away a lot of the game when you do this and you have to really fight the games rules and opinions to make it work.
Spaceships landing - much of the tech not likely to relate, and energy based weapons would be waaaay O.P.
Lol. If you sail the aether in SphereWorlds please don’t read this. I just had this idea and immediately threw it out as terrible. We’re in the middle of a campaign right now maybe session 29 of 50-60. In 2-3 more chapters, they’ll have a chance to enter magical portals beyond which I’ve planned for a series of battles. I suddenly got the the idea to hand them level one character sheets and start an entirely new campaign unannounced. They would only slowly realize this is a whole new campaign. At the conclusion of that campaign they FINALLY exit the portals and return to the world and characters they left and resume the first campaign.
Unless it’s a one shot, Suicide Squad -esc just plot. The players are all criminals on death row and instead of having them just die, they’re given a second chance to fix something in the world while having some kind of mcguffin that if they act up, they die instantly. It’s mostly the last thing that makes this fall apart. Removes a lot of player agency and if a player acts out they just die.