All of my experience to now has been as a sandbox GM; I once made it from 1st to 6th level in a 3e game having just a single kickoff adventure planned.
My players are the other extreme: they enjoy boardgame campaigns like Descent and computer RPG's because these games have very little story and decision making to really engage them.
Help me find a middleground. Currently I'm planning a campaign from 1st level and I'm struggling with how much/little to create ahead of time, how linear to make the game and how to progress through plot points without a guarantee of player involvement.
Right now I've got one adventure in the can. It moves along using decision trees like you'd have in a computer/console RPG: for example the first key decision point has the party either following a fleeing band of goblins into a nearby sewer or helping the city guard save some folks trapped in a burning building. If they go after the goblins they have a small adventure ending with a few clues pointing toward a bigger threat at a nearby cave. If they save lives they are directed that way by an NPC contact they earn from being heroes.
Can anyone help me motivate players to get involved? I don't want to spoon feed the entire plot but at the same time I know from my last campaign that letting them completely set the pace get us almost nowhere.
One final note: I have spoken with the players directly and while they acknowledged that full on sandbox isn't what they want we couldn't come up with a happy medium and thus my last campaign died at 5th level and this new one will be a reboot. Please help.
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I find a sandbox is a great place to put a railroad. When I do my own campaigns I like to set the players up with a goal and some information on how to complete it. I design and prepare at least two solutions and create all the people I would need for that. Then I create a few generic NPCs and monsters. Then I give the players their starting information and see where they take it. If they seem stuck I can give them a hint that leads toward a prepared solution and sometimes they just jump on the tracks and run it down. Other times they take parts of the solutions and create their own. Which is fine too.
For example: The PCs are tasked with eliminating a goblin tribe as a threat to a nearby village. They are told that the goblins live in a nearby cave network that was once used by smugglers. The goblins also like to raid on cloudy or moonless nights. The selected solutions are go into the caves and kill them all or wait for a raid and hunt them guerrilla style. I prep some Goblins, villagers, map of the area and the goblin caves.
What if the players decide to fortify the village? That's great we can plan out the fortifications and role-play them trying to get supplies and support. Maybe the goblins raid when the fortifications are partially complete and it makes for a good opportunity to kill some and set up the BBEG goblin and his guards.
If they can't seem to agree on a plan some NPCs suggest one or both of the courses I planned.
Parts you prep and never use you can use in a later adventure.
There is a difference between railroading and giving the characters a motivation. Railroading is GM driven and doesn't worry about what the players and their characters want. The GM will put the tracks where they must be for his own purposes.
When the adventures provide motivation, you can still open up the adventures to go in any number of directions. Maybe the village is cursed and they need to figure out why. Turns out there is actually a poison that has infected the water supply. The party decides that there are several ways to address this and maybe they want to implement a few of them instead of just one. Maybe the lizardfolk upstream don't realize they are polluting the water. They party could negotiate with the lizardfolk. They could fight the lizardfolk. They could work on a way to filter the poison out of the water, never dealing with the lizardfolk at all. They may decide that they want to negotiate and filter the poison.
Look at the adventure paths. They are structured but not really railroads. The party has a lot of choices, some of which have effects much later on. The party has short term and long term goals. Each short term goal gets them one step closer to their long term. They would be railroaded if they only have a single option. That isn't the case most of the time.
The difference between railroading and providing motivation is all in who the focus is. If the GM's story is the focus, it's railroading. If it's about giving the players something fun that they choose to do, then it's about motivation.
@ Bob_Loblaw, if you read the OP well, it sounds like the players want to be railroaded, or at least, partly railroaded.
@ Bob_Loblaw, if you read the OP well, it sounds like the players want to be railroaded, or at least, partly railroaded.
I agree with bfobar and Bob. Try an AP. They're popular for a reason.
I will look at AP's but I REALLY like designing my own; it's my highlight as GM.
I like Karkon/Mr Loblaw's suggestions; it's kind of in line with the decision tree idea I was using as a work around.
I think where I struggle is how far to the end of the adventure should I go to give them a goal. For example: I want them by the end of their first couple of game sessions to uncover that goblins are raiding for slaves; slaves are mining obsidian; obsidian is being handed off to a bunch of Asmodeans and finally that the volcanic glass is being used in a dark rite to trap soul energy in order to appease a devil to carry out the cult's plans to unleash a pyroclastic blast they hope will take out the nearby city.
So in the above, using Karkon's planning scenario would I just say goblin raids are up in the area (one actually happens IN the city to kick off the campaign). They are suspected of coming from some nearby volcanic caves. In their raids they've kidnapped many folks. And at that point I just pull the ripchord? ORRR... do I say the church suspects dark rituals are being carried out in nearby caves which are also suspected of housing goblins...etc.
In either case (and I'm not exaggerating here) I could honestly see my players not doing anything about any of these unless someone came along and said: "go to Blackfurnace Caves and do X".
As I said - I had a campaign get 5 levels on before it imploded with these players. In the course of this previous campaign they were: invited by an NPC to a haunted site, drafted by an NPC to go after a legion of undead, portaled to a swamp where a spirit told them to go into a dungeon, and finally upon returning to town, they left again for some bookeeping/magic item gathering from a nearby wizard only to find a disease had broken out and it wasn't until a new NPC TOLD them to look for a cure that they started looking for a cure. The last adventure they were on was to take out a BBEG in her spooky castle/dungeon after one of their NPC contacts was kidnapped AND another NPC had told them what was going on.
Bear in mind; they all had personal goals they wanted to achieve but none of them actively pursued said goals. For example one wanted a unique set of armor, worked in a library in his down time AND had an in with all the local nobility; he never once looked up any research on said armor in his down time. I even asked "how do you want to find out about the armor?" in an email. Eventually he stumbled onto it in the swamp adventure.
They are not scooby doos.
So I guess a better OP should have been - how do I get them to do things OTHER than what I tell them to do through my NPCs?
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If your players are not that involved in the story I think you should just give them the bits they need to go where you want them. Then at the end of each game summarize what they have discovered. There is no sense in making it harder on yourself. Some players really don't want to think too hard.
You can also give xp bonuses to players who put the clues together on their own. Announce that you will give out 100xp every time some one figures out a plot point without it being spelled out. Some players will do anything for extra xp and that can get them a little motivated.
I dont think you can get people to prefer a player-driven campaign to a dm-driven one. That said, perhaps you could be very sure to heavily reward any player who actively pushes the plot forward. Seize on any kind of initiative and make sure there's some payoff at the end which they'll appreciate.
In regard to your initial OP, I played in a campaign once which was very similar - the DM loved an open-style 'There's all kinds of options, which do you want to go with?' and we were looking for something more tightly focussed. His solution was to make us relatively free-acting, deniable 'special agents' of a high ranking noble - we were generally left to our own devices, but whenever we got really stuck or bogged down with indecision, we had an easy way for him to prod us in one direction or the other (often based on what he thought our consensus view was, even if we werent able to make a choice).
It's a little contrived, but it may be a good solution to what might be an otherwise frustrating experience - that way you can at least give them the option to become more proactive, reward them if they take it, but still keep the game going if they choose to ignore your various hooks.
Be sure to ask your players where they stand on the sliding scale of RolePlaying vs RollPlaying.
Be sure to ask your players where they stand on the sliding scale of RolePlaying vs RollPlaying.
also a good thing to do.
What I usually do with a campaign that I'm creating all by myself I'll write out a prologue to their story and act like they're the characters in a book. there's always a big over arcing plot to follow and usually some recurring villains, but I leave decision making and what role they actually want to play in the story completely up to them. I'll also usually have some generic dungeon maps with lists of monsters depending on what kind of dungeon or area of the world they find themselves in. Then it's just following the story as you go. I like this because most of the time your players will surprise you with the decisions they make and it ends up being more fun for everyone involved. There is never a specific way to solve the issues they're facing but there are a lot of options for them.
Y'know what I think works, along w/the decision points or the cause and effect sort of storyline? Factions.
I read through the PDF on PFS and the factions really stood out. I don't know if I'll go full on PFS but I think it'd really appeal to my players to have someone else pulling the strings. You see one of the 3 guys in question made 2 really good points when we talked all this over in the last campaign:
1) My players don't really know what they CAN do when I say "do anything and be creative." For example I told them up front and through the campaign that they could try and use skills in creative ways like the 4e skill challenge mechanic. You've got a trapped/locked door? Use Knowledge: Engineering to figure part of it out, perhaps UMD for the trap, and so on to either lower the DC or overcome the issue completely.
2) After a long week-month-whatever of family, work, school etc the players are a little burnt out. By that I mean they WANT someone to come in and tell them to go to the dungeon, rather than have to re-read gaming notes from a month ago, remember where we are and what's happening, then make decisions on what to do next.
So those 2 being said, plus what you all have suggested, I think a logical extension would be to work w/my players the way I work w/my 8 year old daughter in our game at home. Not to say my grown up, professional and highly capable players have the mindset of an 8 year old girl but hear me out.
When my daughter gets to a room I say "you can either attack, run, or try and talk w/the monster." and I'm thinking I should have a grown-up mechanic like that with my players. Like the video games they enjoy I should have them get to key points and say "The building before you is on fire and 3 goblins are fleeing the scene. The guards on the scene cry out that a few citizens are trapped on the upper floor of the guildhouse. If you give chase now you might be able to catch the goblins; otherwise the guildmembers's lives are yours to spare"
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I think where I struggle is how far to the end of the adventure should I go to give them a goal. For example: I want them by the end of their first couple of game sessions to uncover that goblins are raiding for slaves; slaves are mining obsidian; obsidian is being handed off to a bunch of Asmodeans and finally that the volcanic glass is being used in a dark rite to trap soul energy in order to appease a devil to carry out the cult's plans to unleash a pyroclastic blast they hope will take out the nearby city.
I meant to address this before. I like to give my players a general idea of who the big villains are and what the threat will be for the whole campaign. Using your goblin example, "The goblins are the pawns of a greater evil and you must discover and stop that evil."
It gives the players an idea of where the game is going so that if they are not sure what to do they have an idea of what is supposed to be going on.
I do the same for individual pieces of the campaign. "Goblins have recently become a nuisance for the local area. Find out why and stop it."
Now they know what they need to do for the next few games.
In times past I've always done the following: 1) grab either a tested homebrew adventure or an open ended adventure/module and put it down as the base springboard for the campaign. Once in place I create an end villain, imagine a final goal and then string the middle part together based on how the players act.
For example: Start - Keep on the Borderlands; a 1e module about disparate humanoids inhabiting a bunch of caves near a walled town on the edge of the wilderness. End - a ghoul queen accused of heresy when alive has all she needs in her gothic dungeon to open a portal to pure negative energy; the portal is aligned with elven runestones to pump out the killing wave into every civilized settlement for miles. Middle - the party's got to learn 1) who the ghoul queen was and is, what the runestones are, and where her dungeon is.
There's a lot of ways this could happen but life got in the way. I think the reality is: If we were still all in HS and playing every week this would be shockingly easy and I never would've posted here. But playing a few hours ever 4-6 weeks as adults with lives, families, work and such takes its toll making it hard to follow and participate in a purely sandbox plotline.
So to sum up: 1) first and foremost establish what kind of game my players want; 2) lay out some kind of short and long term goal, whether vague or definite, ensuring they have some kind of victory marker to go by, 3) provide choices and incentive to motivate the players to make them i.e. either an xp award or loot; 4) look at the AP's.
I have every Dungeon Mag with the 3e Savage Tide AP, so I'll re-read those again. I don't know that I'll play them all the way through but I can use them to get an idea of what you've all described.
I had another thought to keep the players and I on the same page: Adventure Cards. I'd make up 6-8 index cards with some of the things you folks've suggested. Ex:
Explore the Ruins of Karnoss
- Ruined city's been found in the Eldwynn Forest, nearly reclaimed by the woods
- Short Term: venture into the ruins and return with an item or artifact the merchants of Dunspar can put on display in their guildhouse
- Long Term: figure out why the famed ranger Fagan went mad after he discovered a way into Karnoss and why his touch causes madness in others.
So then... just whip up some maps, some monsters, and figure out for myself why Fagan's mind snapped like a twig so I can add clues for the party to find.
The reason to use the cards would be to set the initial tone of the campaign. In the Karnoss example its kind of generic but I could imagine one would be a murder mystery atmosphere, another could be serious horror and so on. That way the players can not only decide how involved in plot they want to be but also in the theme as well.
what's the difference between a sandbox and a railroad?
if I understood it correctly, it's that you have to find your own encounters and the railroad brings you faster from one encounter to the other.
I consider myself a sandbox GM too, but I only once had a (one time) group that said "oh no, we don't want no freaking town interaction adventure", so I gave them 2 hints how to do it very fast, and we got on to the next fight. Everyone was happy.
I means there has to be something in between fights, but just let everyone say a few phrases and roleplay everything out, just "yeah, the next day you go to the mayor and you get the quest to clean out a cavern, you buy a few horses, go there, you are now in front of the cavern". The railroad types will like it.
You don't have to plan more or less because of this, because with fight obsessed players, they will plan for so long, it takes the same time.
I find to railroad or not is based on the players. If you have players that want to play through the story you are telling then railroad away, that's what the players want. If you have group who is all about creating their own story though GM interaction then Sand box is the way to go where you create an environment for the players to do their own thing. If you have mix then hybrid is the best. Railroad the players who want it but leave it open enough in sandbox style for the players who don't, basically don't let your railroading take over.
For me as player, put me a sandbox and I'll create a story based on my characters concept. I have players who if you do that with will be stuck on what to do and will go looking for the railroad.
I've had some of the same problems in the past with my group.
When I tried to give them a sandbox type campaign we ended up with:
Weapon fights within the party because they couldn't decide on what to do next.
Arguments within the party because they had nothing to tie their very different personalities together.
About half the authority figures in the city had a reason to arrest or assassinate them (and little to no reasons that I could come up with not to do it).
They just refused any job offers or plot hooks I dangled.
etc...
I also suggest an AP at least once to get them into the idea of a campaign. (From what I've heard it sounds like they would do poorly with Kingmaker.)
If you don't want to run an AP, I would suggest at least reading one and using some of the same techniques. Like the traits to tie them to a person or mission. And the way a mission gets almost resolved and leads clues to the next.
Things I have seen used well in the past are having them be part of group (at least initially).
1) The group is all the members of the same church. These groups are known as the Fist of Rathalgar and sent out on missions such as recover the 'X'
2) You are a few of the agents known as the Lavodes. The Lavodes were created to solve primarily non-military problems for the empire. your group is being sent to investigate the 'Y' {I stole this concept from Steven Brust}.
3) Everyone in the group has to be human or half-human. Though you didn't know it until now, you are the bastard children of Mage Zamakand. Unfortunately, the mage has made some enemies. Those enemies are trying to kill all of you to eliminate his bloodline. You are trying to get to his tower before they kill all of you (hopefully, he is still alive).
Ideas like these limit the group some on character creation, but insure a reason they can and will work together and at least start them all heading in the same direction.
@Chobe: yes, they made background info. Even though they made characters in a vacuum (at home/offline, what have you) 2 of them had somewhat similar anti-noble things going on. Here's what I did:
First villain - an undead lady who was very obviously noble when alive: manerisms, symbols; hell I even took the time to create a gallery of evil nobles so the PC's could see who should be on their hit list.
Then I threw in a personal journal, gave the PC's a handout w/her family monogram. I figured all this would inspire them to go after her with a vengeance, that being the intent of the entire campaign.
I asked them in emails between games - what do your characters do in their downtime. One of the 4 responded: I sleep in the forest and wait for the other characters to come get me for the next adventure.
They never, in 5 levels and 10 months of gaming, ACTIVELY went after the main villain. Not til one of the NPC's actually went to them and said: Priestess - you were tasked by your church to hunt down this heretic, Barbarian and Paladin - she's threatened you both personally AND sent a deadly disease to the town you're sworn to protect; Rogue - you have made it your personal mission to bring justice to corrupt noble houses by not only attacking THEM but their valuables and this woman is the last link to the most vile and most wealthy of ALL of them... PLEASE GO TO HER CASTLE AND SEE IF SHE'S THERE!
Bear in mind that I'd given them her journal, a library full of info on heretics of the church (she was in there), a sympathetic Matron Mother and half a dozen other sources not to mention the fact that I'd actually directly asked them on 2 occassions if they were researching the villain which they chose not to do.
Bottom line is - I'm PRETTY SURE my players didn't want to follow that plot hook. Now there were others to be sure; an evil dragon using its power to send minions all over and make pawns of men, thereby controlling political power - they chose not to pursue that one but I wasn't surprised since they're not political intrigue guys. But toward the end I'd gone from trying to run a sandbox to "here's your mission this week..." with no real plot to the missions, just here's some monsters, go kill em.
I know it sounds selfish but it wasn't very fulfilling for me.
@RL and Voskaa - yes, my players enjoy riding the rails. they prefer the monster a week motif. But it took me SO long to get on board w/that because one guy actually said he wanted more plot and all of them are HUGE Joss Whedon fans. I figured ok, following the J-W motif I'll have the recurring villain (evil noble lady) and her little plots that they slowly foil, but leading back to her so they eventually go get her. Then I was going to have that tie into a bigger thing w/the draon I mentioned...only they never ACTUALLY went after her. I think they were honestly waiting for the evil lady to a) be behind a curtain in the last room of one of the dungeons, or b) come directly at them in some final showdown on the street.
@ KDM - they had 4 VERY different and even opposing characters. To their credit I did say they could play "whatever" they wanted so...
Ch. good Dex Barbarian
Ch Neut bard (dropped out early b/c player moved. Replaced by...)
L. Evil Wizard (necromancy)/Cleric (D&D goddess of Magic/Undead called Wee Jas).
Ch Neut Rogue 1/2 ogre... that's right, I said "half ogre"...with 18 dex, 9 str...
and finally...wait for it...
L. Good Elven Paladin (player obsessed w/her one line character description: "mighty swagger")
Needless to say...I had my work cut out for me. Still I tried the best I could to build games that would integrate them all together. Several sessions degenerated into infighting, drama, and frustration over 4 very disparate gaming personalities.
Lessons I've learned from this previous campaign:
- a character gen session, with all the PC's present, is vital!
- for these players less is more: less plot, less fluff
- at least in regards to these PC's, make their starting goal a SMART goal: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Saying "my goal is to go after evil nobles" isn't SMART; saying "I'm going to bring justice to Lord Robilar, Baron of Telofshire, by confronting him at the Dawnlight Festival" is way better.
Mentioning that they are Joss Whedon fans made me think of this: How about villain cutscenes? Sure, they break immersion, but it doesn't sound like that's something your players are really in to. The plus side is that it establishes who the big bads are, why they are evil, that they are plotting against the players, the effects of the players' actions, etc.