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Campaign Writing

  
 
charrellz
21:08 / 19.06.05
How do you do it? Do you dream up an elaborate plot? Think of a situation and then struggle to get the players there? Are your adventures carefully planned out in several notebooks, or done on the fly? Any tips for those of us who suck at DMing? Can I ask any more questions?

I'm writing up a D20 Modern campaign right now and was talking to my usual DM when I discovered just how different our approaches are, so I thought I'd ask more people for more methods.

By the way, how the hell long has this forum been here? I really need to scroll down now and then...
 
 
Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!
22:54 / 19.06.05
How do you do it? Do you dream up an elaborate plot? Think of a situation and then struggle to get the players there? Are your adventures carefully planned out in several notebooks, or done on the fly?

Actually, I think my process differs every single time I run a new Chronicle. My Changeling game began as vague inspiration and planning, eventually culminating in a quest for the new High King of Britain. We ended it there, as it had been a two-year story, but we all plan on playing a final story arc sometime soon. I involved a lot of metaplot from Changeling, and have been hinting at a coming Winter for quite some time.

In my current game, Mage, I had the early story arcs completely planned out and expected to head in a specific direction, but the players seemed uninspired and so I took it in a different direction. We're still headed to the same destination, but by way of a different route. It's just starting to get it's stride, actually, and I now have a good idea of how mood and theme need to be handled in this game. I actually originally did a Tarot reading in order to help with plot, but it just ended up sparking off my imagination. I diverged from the reading, but only in good ways.

For me, dreaming up an elaborate plot is often a mistake. My players have a different play style than I do - I'm more active than they are, but they tend to be quite passive largely. It's hard to maintain a balance between guiding and railroading them forward, but in the end (as a couple of recent games have shown me) they do end up going their own way. An elaborate plot is asking to be derailed in my game, so I have to do quite a lot on the fly.

Any tips for those of us who suck at DMing?

I learned a couple of years ago that above all else, think of your game in cinematic terms. Plan scenes, visualize everything before the game so you have images in your head you can exploit even if things don't head in the right direction. Oh, and always end on either a cliffhanger or resolution. Never just say "Well, it's quite late" and close up shop - end on a dramatic moment.

Hand in hand with that, build dramatic tension. It's far better to hint at the presence of an old enemy very subtly than to throw him at the players. Scare them, make them anticipate, and surprise them. Also, don't allow the players to ruin a dramatic moment just because they're not in the current scene. The occasional joke or chatter is fine, but there's a time and a place.

Above all else, remember, you are a better GM than you think. Trust me on this.

Can I ask any more questions?

Feel free.

By the way, how the hell long has this forum been here? I really need to scroll down now and then...

Just a week, actually.
 
 
eye landed
06:59 / 20.06.05
i usually work around characters. villains, victims, rivals, romance. i use my powers to encourage interaction between the players, so each character introduced should associate at least two of them. after a while, the network of characters is so tangled its easy to oversee the self sustaining concatenation of plot.

usually my character design falls into place around some kind of epic plot, whether its a journey through the wilderness, a drawn out political struggle, or the end of the world as we know it. the amount of epicness that actually makes it into gameplay is sort of an emergent property.

i also enjoy drawing maps and creating languages, so i integrate those aspects when i can.

good tip for improv: act! if you use a different voice for every character, they will all agglutinate personality like magic.

this forum is gonna be sweet. :P
 
 
ORA ORA ORA ORAAAA!!
10:49 / 21.06.05
I've written quite a few one-shot freeforms and tabletops, for cons and things, but they mostly come out of talking to my co-designer at post-con parties, thinking of the stupidest thing we could run, and then writing it. A terrible plan, not one I can recommend, even though the games are usually quite good.

I only ran a campaign once. Before I started, I had a vague idea of a game set over three worlds, one 'our' world, one a ww2-era/Indiana Jones style pulp world, and one a high-fantasy city/world like sigil, but different. With Lovecraftian business intertwined between them all.

The ww2-era world was a computer RPG being run by supercomputers in the 'real' world, which was itself a story being read in the high-fantasy world, which was being dreamed by characters in both of the other worlds (and so on and so forth - the ww2 was also a story in the fantasy world, etc). It was stupid and complicated and horribly wanky. But entertaining.

Unfortunately, though I wrote more for this game than I do for an average university course, I'd change everything (entire metaphysics/world relations, NPC goals and identities, character goals and identities, etc), every time I ran it. So it rapidly got reasonably confused, though not for the players, since they didn't have any idea about those things at the point we'd got to. I ran it for five sessions or so, and then stopped because I was tying myself in knots all over the place, and had no-one there to help me out.

So, uh, to answer the question, there's a lot of winging it, but also a large amount of world-building beforehand.

If I ran a game again, I wouldn't have three games contained within it, which would help significantly with keeping things in order. I would, however, still run lots of things by the seat of my pants, as I cannot be having with games that are scripted in any significant way.

Generally the closest thing to scripting I have is to have some scenes that I want to have play out at some point, in order to move whatever semblance of a plot I have along, but I leave the negotiating from one scene to another up to my players (unless they get stuck).

This is quite long, and now I have been stricken with new-user Barbelith paranoia. I do so hope I'm doing the right thing!
 
 
Tom Tit's Tot: A Girl!
11:14 / 21.06.05
This is quite long, and now I have been stricken with new-user Barbelith paranoia. I do so hope I'm doing the right thing!

Don't worry! You're fine, and your contribution is appreciated.
 
 
Evil Scientist
10:31 / 06.07.05
I find it helps to have some backup storylines to hand, just in case your Players decide to bugger off and do something totally different to whatever it was you had planned for them that session. I'm sure most GMs know the cold horror of watching from behind your screen as the group charge off after an irrelevant plot point.

I tend to have an overall plan for my campaigns, but I do try to avoid too much detail. That let's me improvise to suit the way my Players do thing.

Remember, no storyline survives contact with the Players.
 
 
Quantum
16:39 / 06.07.05
What they said. Strong characters with a couple of memorable mannerisms will imprint on your players, and DESCRIBE THE SCENE. Lots of adjectives, appeal to films your players have seen ('He looks like a very tall Agent Smith'), give them a hook to visualise it.
 
 
Quantum
16:51 / 06.07.05
I always write a campaign like fighting fantasy book- three directions to go in and elaborate from there. Otherwise all your planning goes out the window when the players get hold of it...
There's an excellent example of this in 'Dork Tower' when the GM spends months setting up a LotR plot exact to the last detail, then they start playing-
PCs-"Gandalf summons the Eagles, we fly to Mordor and drop the ring in mount doom."
GM-"What? GAAAH!" *headbutts table repeatedly*
PCs-"How much XP do we get?"
 
 
I, Libertine
16:26 / 28.07.05
I'm also writing a campaign for d20 Modern entitled (somewhat uncreatively) Nova Terra; it's a post-apocalyptic setting, and in its development I've been making use of the d20 Modern core book, d20 Apocalypse, Darwin's World 2, the old-school Aftermath! Gamemaster's Book, and a select few of S&S' Gamma World d20 books.

First thing I did was to sit down with a blank sheet of paper and write up a "wish list" of all the things I'd like to have in the campaign. My list included:

zombies
plague
ruined Martian tripods
mutants
insane androids
ruins
radiation
cults
road warriors & bandits
settlements
a trading post
poisoned rivers
etc...

Next I found a suitable section of modern-day Montana, USA, to use as my setting. Once I'd found a nice piece of it on TerraServer, I drew my own (crude, post-apoc) version of Black River Valley. I'd decided that this campaign would take place about 100 years after the Ruin, so I allowed myself liberties with the geography.

Now I had some place-names and a nice picture to jolt the old creative muscle (not that one, the other one). So I wrote a geographical primer for my players.

The idea with this document was not only to set "baseline knowledge" for the PCs, but also to supply them with a bunch of mysterious details and events. I'd like play to be directed by the players' curiosity rather than the DM's script.

Next I'm going to detail the hometown of Sleeping Buffalo.

The idea with this campaign was to create a relatively small area and not write down every detail. We wanted a milieu that the players could enrich by exploration, and one that they would eventually "outgrow." When they leave, we'll be discovering the rest of Nova Terra together.

(Here's the home page of Nova Terra, if you're interested. I'll be posting game summaries there once we commence in September.)
 
 
Supaglue
08:44 / 29.07.05
Quantum:

"I always write a campaign like fighting fantasy book- three directions to go in and elaborate from there. Otherwise all your planning goes out the window when the players get hold of it...
There's an excellent example of this in 'Dork Tower' when the GM spends months setting up a LotR plot exact to the last detail, then they start playing-
PCs-"Gandalf summons the Eagles, we fly to Mordor and drop the ring in mount doom."
GM-"What? GAAAH!" *headbutts table repeatedly*
PCs-"How much XP do we get?"

Heh. Reminds me of the time I ran a campaign and the PCs had to get to this 'Oracle' type figure to find various answers in the plot. They battled over three weeks of sessions to get there. And when they finally stand in front of the all powerful, yet munificent Oracle who is sat in a grand room, seated behind an ornate carved ivory table with golden table legs, what do they do?

Try to steal the fucking table legs.

How do you roleplay that? [loud, booming authoratiative voice, a la Brian Blessed: "I am the Oracle the all seeing prophet of... what? What are you doing? No. Stop that.... They were a gift... stoppit...."


As Quantum says. Never plan too much....
 
 
Lord Morgue
03:38 / 30.07.05
Heh, friend of mine had this Cyberpunk character, Shockwhite, who was a real campain-killer. G.M.'s got this intricate plot worked out, pages of notes, whole thing rotates around the bellboy in this hotel, crucial, plot-driving NPC. Game begins. Shocky walks in, first player action, shoot the bellboy. G.M. lets out a long breath, picks up his notes, drops them in the bin. "Alright, it's ANOTHER shoot-em-up.".
Not that Shocky wasn't a great character, it was just that other characters generally didn't live long enough to develop when she was around.
 
 
Laughing
19:46 / 30.07.05
Quantum's tip of using strong characters with identifiable mannerisms, Tom Tit's idea of visualising scenes in cinematic terms, and Libertine's wish list concept are all things I use in my GM/DM/ST/HGing. They're all great ways to set up a solid story and to get your players really interested and looking forward to playing. Most gamers I've met are easily distracted and holding their attention for the length of time it takes to get a chronicle really going is tough.

Strong non-player characters are important to any game. I always try to put fleshed out NPCs in my games, characters with identifiable quirks and specific ways of talking, because that makes it a lot easier to portray them to the players. If the main villain has a persistent cough and calls everybody Chuckles then the players can identify who I'm portraying right away without me having to tell them who it is. (A case of "Show, don't tell.")

One of my favorite tricks for building drama and tension is cheap, underhanded, and always effective. I spend time building up the PCs' relationship with a likeable NPC, someone not particularly important to the storyline but someone who's always there - a bartender at their favorite bar, a neighbor, the cute guy/girl at the newsstand. I get the players to like this character, to look forward to seeing them, and possibly even get the PCs involved in the characters's life through some misadventure. I try to get to the point where the players smile as soon as I start portraying said character (a time when an identifiable way of talking is essential). I get them to expect this character to be there in every game session.

Then I murder the poor bastard.

Manipulative and not terribly imaginative, I know. But it works every time.
 
 
Lord Morgue
01:59 / 31.07.05
In Hong Kong Action Theatre, this is known as the Sacrificial Buddy. When he is inevitably killed, you must scream "NOOOOOOOOO!", and then your Chi pool is replenished and you get a bonus to hit the killer.
 
 
Tezcatlipoca
06:49 / 01.08.05
I admittedly have the slight advantage of having been doing this, in one form or another, for over a decade now, and writing for large-scale LARP events really hones your ability to invent convincing plot at the drop of a hat...

...which is handy, as I write my weekly tabletop game in pretty much the same way. I have a few definite ideas as to the grand plot arcs, and how each group/individual of note relates to those arcs, at least initially.
I roughly know the major events that will occur in the world, no matter what, if not necessarily knowing exactly how those events will unfold.

I then largely ad-lib the game and incidental plot(s) as I go along, giving the players as much freedom as possible. Discovering how the plots unfurl is as much an enjoyable mystery for me as it is for the players.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:17 / 01.08.05
Heh, friend of mine had this Cyberpunk character, Shockwhite, who was a real campain-killer. G.M.'s got this intricate plot worked out, pages of notes, whole thing rotates around the bellboy in this hotel, crucial, plot-driving NPC. Game begins. Shocky walks in, first player action, shoot the bellboy. G.M. lets out a long breath, picks up his notes, drops them in the bin. "Alright, it's ANOTHER shoot-em-up."

Could he not simply have introduced another bellboy?
 
 
lekvar
18:23 / 02.08.05
I've been playing about with wikis as tools for laying out campaigns. Paper is all very well and good, but the immediacy of being able to click links and edit at will makes for an easier time. If I can focus my energy on telling the story and advancing the plot instead of shuffling paper every two minutes the PC will have more fun.
 
  
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