Director of Game Development
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Here's an idea I've been thinking about:
I've got a decent-sized pool from which to pull players and many of those players have also put on their DM hats in the past, but living a full life means that sometimes things other than D&D can creep in a wreck a schedule. My last campaign technically has the pause button pressed, but as we all know restarting a campaign that's fallen to the wayside can be tricky at best.
What's worse is that I'm already thinking on the next big thing, but to be honest after all these years I'm getting tired of long extended multi-year campaigns. There are so many options out there and ideas I want to playtest that I want to do something different more often. The long stuff is great because of the character development and that is something that I didn't want to get rid of in favor of a series of one-shots or mini-arcs.
The idea I'm working with my group is to have an "adventurer's guild" where everyone makes three to four characters at varying levels. For example Player A has a 1st level fighter, a 5th level rogue/monk, a 10th level paladin and a 15th level sorcerer/spellwarp sniper, Player B has...blah blah blah. With 6-8 players in the pool we're looking at an organization of 24-32 characters.
This kind of set-up will allow each player a chance to DM an idea they have or an adventure they really liked. The gap in power levels of the different PCs means that a group can be assembled from the pool to take on a specific task (or meet suggested level of the adventure). Each adventure could run from one to a dozen sessions when it would be time for either another player to DM and give the previous one a break or for the current DM to try out a new idea they'd been working on with very little chance at burnout.
Having the PCs all be part of an organization would provide character development as they work out the hierarchy of the group. The subordinates would rise in power with the guild as they rise in power. Leadership struggles could occur for the high-level PCs. New members could etch out their niche. Friendly rivalries could exist between two different spellcasters. The PCs with a more roguish lean could even set up a secondary group within the group.
I think that this idea would fit my group of on-again/off-again players and every-week fanatics equally. It opens the game up to potentially more people and allows for a complicated schedule. The players that don't necessarily like to play with other players could choose to show up when the weekly roster is most favorable to them.
Enough with me, what do y'all think?
I think it's a great idea and perfectly articulates an idea that's been floating around in my busy brain for a bit.
Try it out and tell us what happens!
Cant stay long to chat on it, got to prep for game, but I did this three years ago for my college game club, and it worked well, in and of itself (other issues ended the experiment, but not related to this part of it). I'll try to post some more contructive observations and experiences later!
This follows the same basic pattern of something I got involved in back in the late 70’s and early 80’s. One of the major DM’s in my area decided he was a bit burned out with all the responsibilities so he decided to pawn some of them off on other promising players who wanted/needed to begin spreading their own DM wings. So, he carved his world up into chunks and assigned random bits to random people. Each became totally responsible for “creation” in that area. They did all the towns and cities; they were responsible for all the dungeons and ruins. They had to make all their own random monster tables, etc., etc. In short, they were God for that part of the world.
The guy who started it would take a group only so far then send them to another area controlled by someone else. The new DM would then take over and run them as he saw fit, even if it meant eventually returning them to the first guy, or passing them on to another DM. Those who were playing could end up being the new DM, and the current DM could end up becoming a player as the group left his turf to go elsewhere.
There were no super-secret, long-term, layer-within-layer, epic plot lines. The characters were just adventuring types doing their thing. There were some kinks to work out, but it came off well. I remembered it. It’s exactly what I’ve just started doing this week. I have three people at the table, at least two of which have already been offered chunks of my world (homebrew using the old Greyhawk maps, but no other information). I’ll add people as time goes on and folks show themselves interested and capable of interacting in this complicated manner…no one at the table should be incapable of or absolutely unwilling to DM, and vice-versa, though not everyone will actually get a DM slot (like I said, kinks to work out).
One quick piece of advice though, on the level differences…way long ago, we found that it was best (at least for us) to have everyone start out small and work up, that way over time each character that survived to those upper levels had a solid, believable and known background. They had history that was solid. We found that just creating 5th, 10th and higher level characters out of thin air left these characters feeling kind of thin and undeveloped when our group interacted with them. We would ask a question about that character’s knowledge, background, etc., and the player and/or DM would always pause the game and there would be either a bunch of dice rolling for random determination of skill, knowledge, etc., or long discussions/debates about what this guy did or should know. I think you can imagine the kind of thing I’m talking about. Characters with known history and abilities are just so much better. I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just pointing out the semi-obvious that you might not be best pleased with the results and recommending this part of the be given more thought.
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This concept is doable but can put PCs in awkward positions of interaction and survivability. I tried this concept with a thieves' guild campaign back when adventures had their difficulty scaled by "total party levels". Higher level PCs tended to take the limelight and then complain when I divvied up "equal XP" to the whole thief squad. No "I" in "team" but sure is one in "thief"! Then the game where I had 14 players show up...well my head exploded with sensory overload. The pressure on me to find "episodic" situations for each session also became a burden. No matter how hard you try to wrap up a "job" in six hours, there is still some adventure that slops over to the next session and when the player make up changes it's hard to explain where Grimble wandered off and why Kinndyr suddenly arrived and didn't bring refreshments for everyone.
For this to work smoothly, you'll need to have a relatively large pool of scenarios to pull from to fit a variety of players/class/level mixes. It helps to have one steady player the designated "captain" and the rest of the players willing to fall into accepting orders and not doing their own thing (which suddenly reminds me how I tried this concept with a Spelljamming ship as well...that worked much better actually) as that slows down the scenario and jeopardizes its chances of being finished in the allotted time. Be wary of level differences of greater than six levels as middle ground is still deadly for the lower levels and boring for the higher.
Good luck and let us know how this works out for you.
An add-on note to what I wrote above. I don’t use a lot of plot stuff with this method. I give the players their head and let them go and do whatever. I keep track of their activity and let them build their own history. I can draw on things they’ve done in the past to set up things to come.
Example:
A party enters a new town. They end up in a bar fight. One of the locals gets killed. That’s the history. From this I can do some obvious and easy things.
1) The guy’s family wants revenge so some of his brothers start adventuring so they can build up and punish the characters.
2) The guy’s family has some money so they hire an assassin to kill the guilty character
3) The guy’s family are merchants and the characters suddenly experience pressures. a. Prices for their stuff are always high.
b. Some merchants just won’t sell to them any more.
c. The stuff they get frequently ends up faulty somehow.
4) The guy’s family has connections to power (noble houses or some such) and now they have warrants out for their arrest and they have to avoid certain towns/areas or have run-ins with the law
The list can be endless. But, from what the party does I can then get ideas of things to do for them that they have a connection to and some investment in. When characters cross to another DM’s territory, that person puts his character down (don’t worry about “motivation”, that’s just the way it is) and takes over running the game. He’s been in the mix and knows the party’s history too, so he can also come up with his own stuff that can mesh with my area or not. It doesn’t matter. Each DM’s turf (territory) is basically sovereign to itself so repetition or overlap, if it happens, is fine, but I’ve found that a lot of originality occurs and overlap is rare.
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Director of Game Development
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Last night I talked about my idea with about half of the group. They liked the idea and agreed that it's sometimes a drag playing the same character for a year or two. They really liked the guild/organization idea and they were throwing around organizational ideas almost immediately. One of the best ideas was that the organization be working for a museum based in a large city. I think there's much to work with in that idea.
We are most likely going to go with four characters per player and have the level breaks occur at 1, 5, 10 and 15. We decided that when anyone loses a character one of their four can be replaced, but the novice always comes into the guild at 1st level.
I'm probably going to be doing the initial design of the group as far as location, name and theme goes. I'll probably come up with a few different options and then put it to a vote. As, always keep talking...share some group names (Platinum Mountain Trading Company) or any other stuff, and I'll keep y'all posted with updates.
RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32
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Seems like a pretty cool idea. I wonder about the logistics of it though. Are you going to have each player make a 1st level character, a 5th, a 10th, and a 15th? Or are they going to make multiple characters at each level? If you have them each make 1 character at each level, how do you handle proper group structure? Do you tell them that they must make a cohesive party at each 'tier'? For example, let's say you've got 4 players and their names are Bob, Joe, Tim, and John. They make these characters:
Bob - 1st level fighter, 5th level rogue, 10th level cleric, 15th level wizard.
Joe - 1st level rogue, 5th level wizard, 10th level fighter, 15th level cleric.
Tim - 1st level cleric, 5th level fighter, 10th level wizard, 15th level rogue.
John - 1st level wizard, 5th level cleric, 10th level rogue, 15th level fighter.
Now, any time you say "For this adventure, we'll use your 15th level characters" they have a balanced party ready and available. However, if you just let them make whatever character they want in whatever slots they want and you say "This quest is going to be a dungeon crawl" you might end up with a 15th level wizard, a 1st level rogue, a 10th level fighter, and a 5th level cleric going along on the same assignment, skewing your CR tables rather horribly.
I guess I'm looking for more clarification on your plan. Am I missing something here? It sounds like a good idea in principle, I'm just curious as to how you plan on executing it.
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Director of Game Development
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Yes, my initial idea was to have everyone make four characters each, one for each level break. I feel your concern Fatey, but our group more often than not goes into an adventure/campaign with only a little bit of concern applied to the classic four person set up. We've played successful campaigns without dedicated healers, meatshields, lock/trap monkeys or spell-chunkers.
I think sorting out the roster will be more difficult at the beginning before leveling comes into play. It is a concern of mine indeed, but I think that everyone will take this into consideration when they make their characters. I also had a question about what I was going to do if a chosen adventure was for level 7-8 would I throw the 5ths at it or allow a couple of the 5ths to go assisted by one of the 10ths. It can certainly lead to some tricky sessions, and I think planning ahead of time would be the best help in those situations.
One of the things we were talking about doing was to keep an online group calendar that we could keep track of who able to play on which nights and who was running what type/level game on which night.
I very well could be making this more complicated than it needs to be.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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I'm running a campaign on a similar model, though I'm having them bring up each generation of characters. Each person made 2 characters at creation and can run either one in a particular game. They are part of an adventurers guild and have a base. Between each game they can follow up on adventure leads, improve the base, or do other activities. It's going okay for now, though I'm honestly getting bored with it. I have a really hard time not running some sort of metaplot despite myself.
I think a large part of the problem is running it as a non-core campaign. It feels too weird but doesn't have the story to support its weirdness. The other problem is that the characters aren't all that well developed.
Also, the characters aren't getting enough screen time to develop very well. The website is dominated by the activity of one player, the others aren't really paying that much attention.
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Director of Game Development
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Thank you, Sebastian. Those are great points you brought up and had been something that I was initially concerned with. Just one question, is this an online/pbp game that you reference? If that's the case I can see where that format within that format could lead to those issues you mentioned in your last point.
Knowing this group of players ( I've got a possibility of getting up to ten people involved), I'm certain that the three or four that will end up DMing the most will inevitably weave their own style and plots into the parts they run. I'm hoping that and the internal hierarchy of the organization will provide enough character building and role-playing for everyone. I could be shooting high in this, but we have played heaps of sessions where it was all RP and "housekeeping". I still have to run this idea across the others before I even know if this is what we're going to do, or else I'm gonna resume my uber-political Keoland campaign.
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Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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Thank you, Sebastian. Those are great points you brought up and had been something that I was initially concerned with. Just one question, is this an online/pbp game that you reference? If that's the case I can see where that format within that format could lead to those issues you mentioned in your last point.
Knowing this group of players ( I've got a possibility of getting up to ten people involved), I'm certain that the three or four that will end up DMing the most will inevitably weave their own style and plots into the parts they run. I'm hoping that and the internal hierarchy of the organization will provide enough character building and role-playing for everyone. I could be shooting high in this, but we have played heaps of sessions where it was all RP and "housekeeping". I still have to run this idea across the others before I even know if this is what we're going to do, or else I'm gonna resume my uber-political Keoland campaign.
It's a tabletop game which was supposed to have a significant online component. I used google's group website because I lack tech skills, and it is a subpar tool. The message board type feature sucks. I was really hoping that the players would all chip in on the board and keep things moving between sessions but it just hasn't happened.
If you've got a handful of motivated players, that could make a big difference. I generally like the idea; I think my biggest mistake was making it all non-core. It was just too much to deal with on top of the irregular game and unusual format. No one knows which non-core classes are good tanks and which ones are good healers off the top of their heads. We also don't have enough sessions.
I think if you've got mulitple people willing to DM, your player base will be active enough to make it succeed.
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Director of Game Development
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I ran a similar idea years ago. The one extra we did was award 1/4 of XP earned by the active party to the "background PCs" on the assumption that they were working smaller projects and leads. Thus keeping one players characters from getting too low if he runs a few extra sessions than the others.
Did you award the 1/4 XP to each of the player's characters? That's a pretty good idea, but I think a sliding scale would be more balanced for the level gap I have planned.
Adventuring Company?
Sounds kinda like the Justice League...
But, workable.
Good idea
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I like it. Methinks it could get out of control with a lot of different story threads going on, and you'd have to look out for abuse with dm's trying to funnel their characters equipment....but with a little work and inter-dm papal bull legislation (no givaways between characters allowed unless discussed beforehant) I think it could be lotsa fun.
And it does answer the question of what do you do with the guy who can't come this week.