RPG Superstar 2013
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Has anyone ever considered the idea of a joint campaign..like where the home campaigns in different places are telling the same overall story, but the parties don't realize that other campaigns are concurrently affecting the world they live in.
So every couple of weeks, the aprticipating DMs have a chat or conference call, compare notes, etc.
It isn't a competition. Maybe to ensure that, each DM runs another DMs important plots. I dunno. I have spent exactly this much time thinking about it.
Then at gencon, or using Insider, different groups can meet and realize what's been going on.
Does that sound dumb to anyone?
Has anyone ever considered the idea of a joint campaign..like where the home campaigns in different places are telling the same overall story, but the parties don't realize that other campaigns are concurrently affecting the world they live in.
So every couple of weeks, the aprticipating DMs have a chat or conference call, compare notes, etc.
It isn't a competition. Maybe to ensure that, each DM runs another DMs important plots. I dunno. I have spent exactly this much time thinking about it.
Then at gencon, or using Insider, different groups can meet and realize what's been going on.
Does that sound dumb to anyone?
Not dumb but something stressful, you would have to add to the burden of preparing your adventure the fact of having to talk every DM and update the campaign world. I would not do it.
Has anyone ever considered the idea of a joint campaign...like where the home campaigns in different places are telling the same overall story, but the parties don't realize that other campaigns are concurrently affecting the world they live in.
A concurrent world-building game experience? Yeah, I've considered it. It's something that could be done with PbPs or regular face-to-face games, but the GMs would really need to stay on top of their communication in order to be effective.
Isn't this what RPGA does? It is only significant though if your players meet. Otherwise party A is just some historic content that party B will assume to be DM created (or worse we are playing in your previous characters shadow). But yes I like the idea. We alternate between DMs and it might be kind of fun if one DM had all minotaur PCs and the next DM's pcs run into a group of well armed minotaurs...
I'm currently running two parties in the same homebrew, on 'my' continent. My buddy Niels runs another party on a completely different continent at the same time and we do some talking whenever someone screws up big. Because of that the players have introduced plot for others they didn't even know they were creating. Its fun and for us not all that much work(because we live an hour away maybe).
But on the internet? Duno, sounds dodgy and prone to drop-outs.
Has anyone ever considered the idea of a joint campaign..like where the home campaigns in different places are telling the same overall story, but the parties don't realize that other campaigns are concurrently affecting the world they live in.
I saw one of these happen in college. Two DMs started off a joint storyline. DM A had the good guys. DM B had the bad guys. Campaign A lasted for something like seven years (well after college), but Campaign B folded within a month. The issue was DM B really didn't have the ability to commit and stick to it.
That said, if you have people that you know will follow through, it might just work out. What is the advantage to the players and/or the DM? Reduced backstory preparation time? Shared ideas? Something else?
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RPG Superstar 2013
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Hehe. The advantage might be satisfied hubris.
One payoff I envisioned is that the players do't know they're in the middle of something more ambitious until a big moment in the game - a forced conflict or anniversary episode or something like that.
Another is the dynamic of having your world, or competing nations or churches, or whatever, developing somewhat naturally for you. I think that's different from having all your own NPCs decide whther to go to war, whether it's worth it to pursue X artifact in Y dungeon. The players will have some selfish, and some dramatic, reasons for pursuing what thew want, Sometimes thawt might reduce workload, other times I just think it would be more interesting.
Plus, what could experienced, dedicated DMs do with a campaign of this scope? Pick five DMs on these boards. Your favorite five. Now pretend any of us/them have the time for such an engagement. Would you want to be able to say you played in that game? I would love the chance to pick two or four and collaborate with such great DnD minds.
Now, let's not go posting our five favorite DMs. We don't want to turn that idea into 'Nic Logue, Dungeon Grrl, and three others'.
I would play the hell out of that game. I would spend a weekend in some other town playing in one of the associated campaigns if I could. I would buy and distribute T-shirts.
But my campaigns are always amibitious these days, and I am not sure other DMs would think it worth the investment.
So, a shared world experience then. Like Thieve's World in D&D, but constantly growing. I think there's tremendous DM appeal (chance to be creative, work with others, etc). What's the player appeal? Is there some benefit like occasional "interleague play" where you get to have your character cross over to someone else's game or to join in on a large group episode occasionally? (Ironically, I'd proposed something like this at Monte's boards after Gen Con this year, but with a very different slant - everyone gets to play the same PC but in any setting the DM wants. You take your character from world to world.)
I've considered something like this before. I've thought it would be fun to have multiple parties wrapped up in the same storyline at the same time, and the idea of one group playing the villians also appeals to me.
It would probably be difficult and there would be some things to iron out but it's probably doable.
We had a group of good aligned characters going after a powerful wizard. This wizard had powerful minions. We played as both the band of heroes, and the wizard's vile minions (under different DMs).
It would have been legendary, if we still gamed with the same group. Unfortunately, two important players (one of whom was the DM for the evil group) decided to quit playing D&D and instead to become addicted to World of Warcraft, to the exclusion of all else. (Curse that game to the lowest level of the abyss.)
The inevitable clash that would have followed is still talked about to this day!
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A while back we had something similar in my homebrew.
There was a war going on and a friend of mine and me decided to show both sides of the war by running two different groups through the meta-plot on both sides of the conflict.
The DM of the other group was a player in mine and vice versa.
It was really cool.
We didn't meet to talk about the meta-plot, we just took on developments and events that happened in the games and developed them further and further.
We only planned the next session and waited what happens on the other side.
It was really a blast, because it resulted in lots of unexpected twists and had a grand finale, wherein the characters of the opposed groups finally met and ended the war.
I found it really cool that it worked and I found it really challenging as a DM. I'd do it again, if the opportunity would arise...
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I do this with many of my campaigns. In fact, I had two campaigns converge on Waterdeep at the same exact time: a low-level group looking for work and a high-level group that plane-shifted in the sky overhead - their flight spells propelling them across the city and out of view. Though the two groups never met up, the fact that there were players that had characters in both campaigns drew some laughs and OT discussions.
It's a very bad idea!
Actually, it's not that bad, but it's too 'science-fiction-ish for my tastes.
This is only indirectly related....
I am in the process of making up my first homebrew world where the characters are going to start as joe-average citizens in a small isolated island village. The deities for this world are going to be the ascended versions of the players old characters which we are about to retire due to level.
Not nearly the same interaction you are talking about but, hey, it is loosely linked.
Goo
I've done it before a few years ago, in a White Wolf game.
We started the game with 7 players (I think), under 1 storyteller, as a Dark Ages Vampire game, then the story broke off into two parties. 1 group stayed with the original storyteller - and fast forwarded right away to the present day.
I took over as storyteller for the second group, which stayed a Dark Ages game for 5 or 6 more sessions, then skipped ahead again to modern times, and continued there.
At the same time as the original group split, a third party started, with a GM who had been in on the whole thing from the beginning, and her players were gypsies, rather than vampires.
The three groups were all playing in the same world, and we storytellers would meet for coffee every week or so and chat about developments, which characters were free to be used in other groups, etc. We went all out and wrote newspaper articles and stuff about things each individual group had seen and done, so all three groups were able to read them.
Eventually, all three groups met up in a one night LARP, and they worked together to take care of the big bad, who was a vampire from the original Dark Ages game sessions.
I'd do it again. It was a blast, and very cool, but it took a LOT of work to pull off. Some story threads didn't transfer over exactly as we'd have liked them to, and there were some personality conflicts within the players and the storytellers, but in the end it was a pretty good experiment.
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RPG Superstar 2013
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That's the kind of success story I'm talking about. I think a few of us could pull off a very grand plot and really excite some players. Might even be worth a blog or journals, if we could arrange that the players never knew those resources were out there.
This is somethign that may not have been as possible before DnD Insider.
Hmm.
This is somethign that may not have been as possible before DnD Insider.
Hmm.
Not easily without everyone being fairly physically close to each other.
Maybe a wiki or some sort of collaborative thing -
I'm trying to think 'free' rather than D$D In$ider