Players Make the Game!

The Would-Be Knight, The Princess, The Scoundrel, . Time for adventure!

Build Campaigns, Not Modules

Once a campaign gets underway there are many directions it can go, and a good game-runner will want to keep a steady flow of interesting new developments and challenges for the group to take on. Unfortunately, many DMs put too much pressure on themselves to generate content for their campaign in a creative vacuum... that is, charting out adventure paths and plot hooks in the same way you might write an adventure module. This process is one in which the adventures are built before any of the player characters are introduced, and the characters are then inserted into the existing campaign plans.

But creating a campaign for a play group that is designed like a published module is far from ideal. Modules come heavily pre-programmed because they don't have a choice in the matter. No publisher can predict the intricate relations of the player characters and the choices they will make, nor can they teach you how to adapt the story in a drastically different direction based on an unplanned sequence of events. Modules are like microwavable pizza. They can be tasty, but they are prefabricated and manufactured for convenience. When baking your own pizza from scratch, it is counterproductive to try and make it taste like a microwavable dish. It's a home-cooked meal after all! Why not use fresh ingredients and make it the best you can?

The ingredients of your home campaign are the players and their own creativity. They have each built their own characters with unique backstories and motivations. Take the pressure off yourself to come up with the material for ongoing adventures, and find out what your players want. In the words of Stephen Wardle of D6 Mafia: "Let your players tell the story... when they have their story, step back and get out of their way."

Planning ahead in broad strokes is fine. You can assume that there will inevitably be a battle with whatever Big Bad is threatening the realm. You can plan for the inevitable involvement of The City of Brass, or whatever unique location you'd like to showcase. But trying to plan an entire campaign in minute detail is like trying to predict the next year's stock market trends.

The best adventures are the ones that are adapted from the ideas of the players. These are the stories they are guaranteed to be invested in, because they had a hand in their conception. So keep your quests to save the world, your ancient hordes of golden treasure. But let the players show you the personal stakes. Add connections between them and the story, crucial connections that may drastically alter your initial plans.

It's not about the end of the quest, it's about the journey

Drawing Out Character Traits

Your player characters are your main characters. Your NPCs are your supporting cast. The main characters should have the most impact on your story, and the most influence on the direction of your game. Your greatest task is in drawing out the important information from them so you can build around their characters. And the most important piece of information to start with is "What does this character want?"

The answer to this question should be concise but not necessarily simple. Any player character worth their salt will have a goal and purpose that guides their actions (Even more so than their moral alignment.) This goal may change over the course game, but it is important to establishing the current vector of their story. It also is a more nuanced question than it seems "I want to get paid." May serve as a solid answer in-game, but it is not the real answer. Money is only a currency for the exchange of goods and services, so what does that person want to do with this money? Escape their past? Live in a mansion by the sea? Start their own company? That's the kind of goal you want to define, because that's where the real story lies.

One way to draw this out is to play out vignettes, flashbacks of certain key moments in your cast of characters' lives (I will detail this method in a future entry.) Another method is having NPCs question characters about certain aspects of themselves. When the sad orphan boy asks a player if they ever lost someone close to them, it is a moment of discovery and character building that you will be able to build off later. A more contrived but nonetheless effective method is some kind of ritual or magic that requires the players to openly share something about their character. I once introduced a perfume that smelled like each character's favorite memory, and so the group related something about themselves through a description of the scent and where it originated (Such as the scent of seawater and smoke that belonged to their father, the chain-smoking sea captain.)

A team with a lot of variety, but a lot in common as well.

Characters Grow From Your Game

Some groups encourage players to think up these backgrounds and storylines ahead of time and even write them down. It's not very conductive to a smooth game, for a couple of reasons. First, the group really doesn't have time to hear a detailed biography of every character, it is better to have that info come out naturally over the course of the game.

Also when you create your character in a vacuum without collaboration with the other players you get a mish-mash of diverging plot threads . I have seen this happen too many times, when each character's backstory has no connection to anyone else's, and is extremely involved in its own regard. It's as if every character is the main character from a different movie, and they just happened to cross over with everyone else's story. John Mclaine, Frodo Baggins and Robin Hood all happen to be on the same team, all come from different lands, and all have their own goals to pursue but none of them have anything in common so they fight for the spotlight.

Instead I recommend bringing a couple paragraphs of general background for their character and then letting the character develop organically during the game. I also encourage players not to marry themselves to particular character details right off the bat. If, like a Dungeon Master, they are willing to adopt certain new attributes for their character that they hadn't considered before, then they will have the flexibility to tell a better story than if they didn't allow themselves the option.

And of course the main purpose of this is to allow the players to tie their story more closely to the setting and each other. This is another key to a great campaign, when the player characters share connections to each other and the world around them. If two characters come from the same land, perhaps they know each other? Perhaps they share a history? Events in that land will have had an effect on both of these characters. They may have to return to face some sort of consequence. That's a story with direction. That's a story with characters with which you can empathize. That's DMpathy!

Art from Rich Burlew's Order of the Stick (Giant in the Playground)