As we enter the holiday season, I want to take a minute to discuss the art of giving within your campaign. Many times as DMs, we have the opportunity to structure battles, fudge rolls, and generally massage things in the favor of our players. Occasionally, I like to take the opportunity to actually give my players something within the scope of the game, be it relevant to the plot or simply something they have always wanted.

Learning the appropriate relevance of gifts

If you plan to give your players something, you should do it with certain guidelines in place. If the item they are being given is relevant to the plot, you should take safeguards to ensure that this item doesn’t simply pass immediately to the local merchant.

If you don’t safeguard these items in some way, or make them relevant enough that the players don’t desire to hock them, then you should plan some sort of a side quest to track the item down again or plan what path that item takes once it is out of the players hands. It can be a great opportunity for deep roleplaying, be it haggling with the merchant to get the item back or tracking it across country in order to divine its resting place.

Desire based gifting

If you intend to give your player that “item of affection” that they have always wanted to get hold of, you must be very careful (both in and out of game) to balance this gift against the rest of the party’s possessions. If you don’t provide either roleplaying opportunities or some other method of engagement for the rest of the party, this gift can appear like overt favoritism which is never a blessing for an adventuring party.

I have found that if you give the entire party a gift, they are quick to ignore the fact that Ceril the Barbarian got a nicer greataxe compared to what they got, they will likely just be happy with their present. This is generally a good opportunity to address level based inequity between different classes and generally even-up your party so everyone can effectively participate in roleplaying or direct conflict.

Narrative Elements

Much to the chagrin of a few of my more traditionalist co-DMs, I have often assumed the guise of an in-game Santa Claus or Easter Bunny in order to dispense with the merriment. Sometimes this has taken the form of a more “realistic” altruist merchant, but I prefer the little dash of whimsy that more familiar icons of gift giving can bring.

In the end, it is really up to what you want… my regular players have taken to expect a gift-giving entity surrounding the Christmas and Easter holidays, and I enjoy the Narnia-esque dash of fun that this interaction often brings.

Honestly, I have no idea if anyone else actually does this within their campaigns. Our college DM started the trend with an Easter Bunny visit one year, and I liked that encounter so much that it was just something that I continued out of the sheer fun of it.

Have a happy holiday season, everyone!

Hey everyone, just wanted to apologize if anyone was impacted by some system outages last night. It appears that our hosting provider experienced some pretty interesting server outages that took them some time to resolve last night.

Their support analysts have assured us that they are looking into ways to prevent this type of outage in the future. Thankfully, I was able to put together the extra meaty post that I posted this morning to make up for the outage, I hope everyone enjoys that!

I got so excited about my previous topics that I nearly forgot to return to my own source material and have a look at the trials and tribulations of an overland, high adventure based campaign like our very own here at SR Central.

Today I will take a look at some generalities about this style of campaign and how they can be prepared for effectively.

Terminology Defined

First a few clarifications: an overland campaign is one where the characters are driven by storyline or desire to travel to disparate locales within a given setting. The high adventure piece simply means a standard adventure which, in the words of Nigel Tufnel, is turned up to 11.

These themes are fairly standard in D&D, but may be a little more unfamiliar to those of you playing modern or urban based campaigns. My personal opinion on the matter is that campaigns of this type represent “classic” D&D and I tend to gravitate more toward this type of thing.

When the party goes off-script

The construction of this type of campaign can seem quite daunting due to the sheer scale and volume of detail represented in most campaign settings. In our group, we tend to set the “happy path” and then rough out some contingency plans based on the standard negative reactions to the stimuli that we present. This covers most of the plot devices within our games fairly well, but you can’t generally plan for everything so I prefer to have a fairly sharp set of improvising skills ready to go in case the players decide to jerk the reigns and take things in a different location than what I have planned.

These are good things… the planning that you must do to have a valid campaign plot should help you find holes in your story, and address common failure opportunities. In my job, we often use a tool called a failure mode and effects analysis (or FMEA, and yes, I am surprised there’s a Wikipedia article about this) that helps us by listing all possible ways a given concept can fail and it helps to drive satisfactory resolutions.

The inputs are also weighted such that you can prioritize common problems and handle them with the greatest care. This helps to plan for the common ways that your party could diverge from a given theme or encounter that you place in front of them, and I think this helps drive to the appropriate level of planning that is neither too simple nor too complex.

The Joys and Terrors of the World Map

I mentioned that overland campaigns have their own difficulties, and this also tends to trend toward the vast amount of cities, realms, and kingdoms that your characters could encounter once they hit the ol’ dusty trail.

Planning for every eventuality in this space will drive you crazy. I find the best bet is to establish a certain amount of handwaving and descriptive detail that will allow you to gloss over the less important attributes between Point A and Point B, only expanding into details when your players ask to stop in That City or what Those Mountains look like. Knowing a general background on the realms that your players may be able to travel through in a given night is usually a good bet, and having a few stock small town templates available is always a benefit.

That being said, your players have a lot of freedom with this model and you have a lot of breadth to interject your own episodic content into the realm once they begin their travels. The greatest benefit of this style campaign is that both the players and the DM are free to invent what happens next, but the DM controls the plot and can therefore steer the action in such a way that they can always be somewhat prepared for what happens next.

Coupling this freedom with the aforementioned FMEA style of preparation tends to work out pretty well for us, so lets hear what you think!

In the comment blast that occurred last Wednesday, catdragon mentioned a few specific problems that are plaguing his campaigns. I made a mental note as I read his comment to come back and touch on those problems because they are very familiar to me as well.

Regarding unreliable players
Luckily, in my current group we don’t have any players that I would classify as unreliable, however I’ve been around long enough to see it a few times. This is a relatively common topic around the D&D blogosphere, however I will echo a few of my favorite tips on the matter.

1. Have a schedule, and communicate it clearly.

   We have a Google Calendar AND a forum for our group to ensure that everyone knows when the next session will be. Some of our frequent players have some complexity in their schedules so it became very easy for us to collaborate in this way.

2. Have a contingency plan in your social contract.

   If someone can’t make it, or drop out at the last minute have a plan of attack. Do you play without them? Who runs their character? What experience do they earn while being “ghost played”? Answering these questions up front with the group is always a good way to go. This doesn’t mitigate the damage that is done by unreliable players, but it does help to have a plan of attack when the situation arises.

3. You can always fix it with structure.

   If you have a core set of recurring players and a few outliers that can’t seem to come consistently, you can always go for a campaign model that allows for the less frequent players to play NPCs, or plot related characters on an as-needed basis. Or you can plan for them to take place in a tangent campaign on the side that only incrementally intersects with the main party on nights that they can be there.

   This can be done through electronic media, such as email or online if the infrequent players don’t have much time in their schedules. With a bit of planning can lead to some pretty interesting interaction with the main group and can let everyone join in on the fun!

Some notes on subtlety

Catdragon mentioned having some problems with subtlety, and I’d like to reiterate something I have covered a few times here before: your players don’t know all the things that you do. Sometimes when you’re doing this right, you will hit them over the head with a clue or two and that will get them sniffing around in the right areas and then you can back off a little and let them find their own clues.

Barring that approach working, I wouldn’t hesitate to start questioning the players a little, both in game and out of game… ask some leading questions if they’re not picking up on a clue, or after they get exposed to the clue via brute force ask them how or why they didn’t make the connection. It might be that some additional description, or a differently presented clue might do the trick and sometimes you must just have that honest discussion to find out what could be done differently to have them find your breadcrumb trail.

A common thread running between many of the comments last week was that of the mash up campaign. Most mash up campaigns borrow thematic elements from multiple source materials, and can be as innocent as borrowing a locale from one source and using it on your own.

Today I’m going to focus on what I am calling the constant mash up… a campaign that is always integrating new and interesting content from a variety of sources. This can happen both in plot, character development, setting, treasure… in any combination. It makes for a very interesting dynamic!

The Good Stuff

The benefits of doing a mash up campaign are almost too many to list here. There is such a wealth of excellent D&D source material out there, and in a mash up campaign you have the opportunity to use as much or as little of it as you want.

In fact, I ran into this excellent distillation of exactly this point over at Braindump. The author has posted a laundry list of source books that they have wanted to use but never have, and this is the dangling carrot of mash up campaigns… you can pick and choose whatever you want in the pursuit of that Ultimate Campaign!

I don’t like (nor do I have time for) extensive planning, so I am happy to report that the selection process can be a spur of the moment thing. This is one of the great benefits of the d20 system, is that many things are common and can be interchanged. I’ve rolled for treasure, selected cities or theme elements, and even stolen an NPC template or two from various books on the fly in past campaigns and I’m pleased to report that this has gone extremely well for me. You may have to modify certain descriptive elements to match your setting, but that’s usually the only effort that is required in most cases.

The Bad Stuff

Unfortunately, this is a double-edged sword. Often time the lure of multiple sources puts the DM into this sort of sugar high, and it is very easy to lose sight of your proposed plot because most can’t stop with just a taste of a certain setting or book.

That NPC you borrowed had a really interesting backstory, and you just *HAVE* to tailor that so that the party can experience that goodness. But why stop there? There was this great quest for this weapon of legend that fits that scenario properly! Why not drop that in?

Why not indeed… running too far down this track (or at least, all at once) can make you forget your planned plot is still going on in the background. If you’ve engineered a situation where a deviation and side quest can occur then that is excellent and you’ve got free ready-made campaign material. If you left the princess of the realm in utter peril, then you may have just sealed her fate by leading the party down this side line.

As you can see, its a delicate balancing act. Sometimes you want to put your players in a situation where they have to choose between the current interesting element and the advancement of the overarching plot. In moments of weak planning, a drop in that has a good hook like some found in other source books can be a real benefit but it can easily get taken too far out of hand and you lose sight of the regular plot.

In the end, you can gauge this by how your players take to the proceedings. If they are really engaged and are having a good time, go with it for awhile. You will be able to see their motivation flag if they are disinterested with new developments or are overwhelmed by the various options that you place in front of them during a mash up. If you see this, it is time to get back to regularly scheduled programming.

The Answer Lies Within

It may sound overly obvious, but as the DM you have free reign to control this element. As long as you are careful in your planning, or use off-the-cuff mashed up elements sparingly you will likely be OK but it is important to constantly gauge your players reaction to the frequency, length, and duration of deviations from the normal chain of events.

The truly good DMs can add and remove elements so seamlessly that the players won’t even know. I am by no means a good DM in this regard, but I sure am working on it! Any thoughts on the most elegant way to introduce varied elements into your campaign?

As promised yesterday, I’m going to continue on the thread of political campaigns for one more go-around here. I got some excellent further inspiration from reading our friendly neighborhood ChattyDM’s DM log.

For those of you that maintain that there is a stigma around blogging about your own campaign I challenge you to read that blog and NOT walk away with a few new ideas of your own. There’s a good mix of DM advice and player advocacy going on there, its a quality read.

On to the Good Stuff: Do better with your plot

I’m going to revert back to one of my commonly held precepts: for characters, inclusion is your friend. Many (if not all) of the political campaigns that I’ve been involved in have been steeped in the plot device of a single player being a lost ruler or someone of unknown merit to the rest of the story.

Even non-political campaigns can take this approach, but I think that political campaigns suffer more heavily from the pain that is caused by cultivating a star within your party. If the party is pushed out of the spotlight artificially, they will get bored if you don’t give them something significant to contribute.

I suggest taking your plot to the group as a whole. Try to cultivate plots that would affect the group together, and diminish (or use sparingly) plots that would require a single player to “take point” and speak or act for the larger group. Our last session was a bit politically charged and the main scene of the night affected the group as a whole.

There were great moments of roleplay and real fireworks, and it seemed that everyone was very enthralled in what was going on. To me, that defines a successful session.

A few more words on making your political campaign relevant

I came across a decent article on by Matthew Ryan discussing some possible applications of politics in an epic level campaign. This happens to be the situation that we are currently operating in, and it has been going rather well however it presents its own unique challenges.

As I mentioned yesterday, it is important when working within the confines of political turmoil to engage your players. As Matthew mentions in his article, characters at moderate to high level have many belongings that can be leveraged in your political campaign. They have land, strong friendships, professional ties, and renown in the lands that can all be used to help or hinder them along the way.

This gives you many options, and by borrowing a bit from the previous actions (or backstories) of your characters you can ensure without much effort that they will be interested in what happens next. And as we all know, a little engagement goes a long way!

What is going to happen the rest of this week.

StupidRanger is taking this week off in order to finish a few holiday gifts for our family and Vanir remains busy at his day job, so you’re going to get more than your average dose of me this week. I sure hope that’s ok with everybody!!

Today’s topic was inspired by a comment from our good buddy Yax over at DungeonMastering regarding political intrigue. He jokingly mentioned that his players would gladly face the dungeon instead of sticking around for the political intrigue that he had planned, and that got the ol’ gears turning.

Since I often talk about what not to do, today I’m going to take the opposite approach and unpack some elements that I think are truly necessary to make a political plot work.

Find the balance between realism and boring

Politics by their very nature are fraught with detail and nuance. In order to make a political campaign work best, I believe that a balance must be struck between realism and simplicity. I don’t recall where I heard this advice, but you should be able to explain your ruling class in adequate detail using only a few sentences. Any more than that, and your players will run the risk of tuning out, or forgetting important detail that you had counted on them remembering.

As a player, I have been involved in several political campaigns over the years and I have to say that I vastly prefer the ones that kept the heirarchy and society structure detail to a minimum and focused more on the plot elements. These campaigns tended to have only one or two key NPC characters, and favored deep involvement with these NPCs.

As a DM, you want to be very careful about overwhelming your players. If they must keep track of the six cities of this barony and be able to recite the names of the last five rulers and their wives in order to be involved in the plot that you wrote, they will become disengaged very quickly. On the other hand, if you cop out with “the king rules the land, that’s it” your players will not give a damn about that king, his land, or any trouble that he might be getting into UNLESS you roleplay the crap out of that king and make his plight extremely relevant to them. We all know that is a tough nut to crack sometimes.

Give your characters a break

If immersed in a political campaign over the span of several sessions, your players (and their characters) will start to grow weary of even the most well structured plot. My advice to making a political game work is to build in some completely unattached side quests, shopping trips, and the like that have nothing to do with your main plot.

In this vein, try your best not to corner your party in a position where they can’t make use of one of these plot threads. If you’re a good planner, you might be able to come up with generalized episodes that would allow you to drop one in literally anywhere but that is also a very difficult and potentially time consuming task.

Yax’s tongue-in-cheek joke is actually pretty spot on in this regard. If you know the politics are going to get grating, build in a completely detached dungeon for your characters to crawl for a session or two and resist the urge to drop a plot point in at the end. Just allow the characters to let off the steam of the campaign up to this point and pick it back up when they get done with their task. It will be cathartic and they will likely emerge ready for more plot.

The Moral of the Story

The moral of the story: structure things simply enough so they are not overwhelming and give the characters an out if it becomes overwhelming despite your best efforts.

Much more can be said on this topic, there could very well be a follow-on article on Wednesday after I get to mull it over for a few days. In the meantime, how do you ensure success of your politically charged games?

First off, I’d like to officially thank everyone who posted a comment on my Wednesday post to talk about their campaigns! Talk about an outpouring of excellent ideas… I hardly know where to start, so today I’m going to discuss a general theme that I saw across the board that really impressed me.

First, a note on game settings

Before I launch too far into the minutiae, I would like to make a few general comments regarding my own lack of exposure to certain gaming systems. I am 90% a D&D man, having played both 2e, 3e, 3.5e, and I intend to play 4e when it arrives. In case it wasn’t dreadfully obvious to those of you that frequent other systems, most of my perspective is only relative to D&D.

I have played (or attempted to run, in some cases) Call of Cthulhu, Deadlands, Star Wars RPG, and a handful of others. I occasionally draw experiences and lessons learned from these, but my experience is limited. I would be much more prone to trying new settings if I had more books or materials for given systems, but alas right now this is not the case. Until I get more “hands on” exposure with some of these gaming systems, I might not be too much in the details of those settings however I will attempt to do some research and maybe give some cursory feedback where applicable.

That being said, I would like to address a common theme among the Wednesday comments.

Creativity and the Player Role

I was utterly astounded at the amount of diversity in ideas around how to structure the player experience. Some of you have set up the players to be heroes, some have gone the “political cog” route, and some have created a group of anti-heroes. These ideas are all excellent, an
d certainly merit further discussion but the takeaway at a general level is simply this: Don’t be afraid to shake up the role that players and their characters will play in your campaign.

As I have mentioned here several times, players tend to get bored when presented with the same concepts of heroism, adventure, and intrigue. Turning their worldview on its ear and questioning what the role of the character will be within your world is a very powerful tool and can revitalize a sagging campaign.

Doing this organically

And I’m not talking about fertilizing heavily. Well, maybe I am… to continue this strange botony reference you really need to spread crap all throughout your campaign, and by crap I mean character development opportunities. If you build up this major engineered moment of character change where you thrust them into a new role that has been designed specifically for the purpose of doing something new, they will freak.

In literature, this is called a journey. Noah T. Lukeman has written a very appropriate article on the matter, where he asks a relevant question at the end of his discussion on why the journey is important for characters in fiction writing “Do your characters arrive at any inner realizations throughout the course of the work?”

In the case of our abrupt thrust into a new role, your players and characters really haven’t taken a journey at all and they are responding to a forced march that you have placed them on as a DM. This is a very dangerous course and usually leads to player disengagement and the potential for complete artistic corruption of the character that they are running. By shoehorning a character into a role that they had no real preparation for you are making the story drive the characters instead of the other way around, and in my opinion this is one of the worst sins a DM can commit.

What to look for in coming weeks

Honestly, I really enjoy hearing reader feedback and I find it quite energizing to consider some of the campaign ideas that were listed on the Wednesday post. This has given me a wellspring of great inspiration, so expect that I tackle a few of these ideas each week and eventually I may ask for more feedback on different areas of the roleplaying experience.

Hopefully, this discourse adds some value to your gaming sessions and gives you some things to consider. As always, don’t hesitate to email us with ideas for future columns and one of us will pick up the ball and run with it.

Thanks again everyone!

Yax posted a great article on D&D Nemeses… those things that detract from enjoyment of the game. Included in Yax’s list: his roommate, crits, stress and conflicting schedules. I completely agree with (at least the sentiment) these nemeses, though I do have a slightly different take to add to my list.

The Parents

Instead of the roommate factor, I have the parental factor. My family consistently forgets about D&D night, and even if reminded that afternoon, will call and expect to talk. Now, we don’t have a no-phones-at-the-table policy, and as much as I like to ignore the phone, I am always concerned it might actually be something important.

The Oops!

I do truly enjoy the critical hits (what player doesn’t?!)… it the critical misses that undermine my game enjoyment. There’s really nothing more degrading than hitting yourself in the foot during a very crucial moment of battle. And if it happens multiple times, well, just call me cranky for the rest of the night.

The Calendar

Scheduling conflicts are definitely in my top list of nemeses. A long hiatus can ruin the cliff-hanger moment and create a distance from my character that can be difficult to overcome sometimes. Unfortunately, with the holidays, there’s not much we can do about the scheduling except to try our best to find a time that works for everyone. The implementation of a Google calendar has facilitated our scheduling, but there’s only so much organization can do in the face of family gatherings.

And The Arch-Nemesis is…

In-game stress can very quickly reduce the level of fun. I have had situations where evil characters have attempted (and succeeded) in killing party members (me). Or recently, the strict laws of a matriarchal society created a lot of tension and arguing among the party. The kind of stress that does not lead to good roleplaying but instead leads to anger is my arch-nemesis (also, Taryn, who stabbed me in the back).

Following the success of our recent series on puzzles and investigation campaigns, in coming weeks I intend to continue writing articles on major thematic elements and campaign types.

What I’m getting at here

Since this site is pretty much all about you, loyal readers, I want to make sure that I get to your campaigns first. If you really want to hear my $0.02 on the type of campaign you are running (or participating in) go ahead and post a comment below and I will run a few articles together discussing those thematic elements or campaign types.

If I don’t get any feedback, you’ll be subjected to whatever takes my fancy on Friday! Our recent campaigns here at SR Headquarters have been overland style campaigns, where our party has to travel long distances to accomplish goals and advance the plot. Barring no comments, I will likely start my new series by examining this type of campaign along with common problems, pitfalls, and benefits.

So let’s hear it!