What, in your opinion, makes a campaign or adventure fun?
If you were to play the ultimate long campaign, which elements would you most desire to be present?
Which elements of a great game do you most remember years later (not counting the antics of the actual players)?
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For me, it's a great villain to hate. A recurring villain is hard to pull off, but completely worth the trouble.
Fun: My way.
Not fun: Anyone else' way.
More seriously, a game with equal parts mechanical interplay and character interaction, where a world can be guided by the players and believably interacted with.
I've had good times from both strongly emotional and roleplay heavy moments and the joy of a character coming together mechanically in a way that lets them shine. But the bad ones have almost always come from some sort of mechanical failure. Which is why finding that perfect balance that can increase the good and mitigate the bad is so important to me.
As an occasional DM, I've always found that the best moments happen when the players and the DM are gelling and bouncing off eachother effectively. I always have the most fun when I put the players in a situation where they need to come up with a creative plan (and give them plenty of time to do it) then throw obstacles in their path that require some fast thinking.
Example: One of the characters had been kidnapped at the start of the game by the evil count, and was being held in the dungeons. I'd put a secret passage into the dungeons for the characters to find and use to sneak in, dropped some hints etc, but instead of that they decided to loot the uniforms of some castle guards they'd killed earlier and bluff their way in.
The resulting completely improvised social encounters (they pretended to be guards escorting the Goblin party member to the dungeons) was some of the best fun I've had DMing. We still talk about that session 2 and a half years later (I've only been playing for about 3-4 years, so that's a long time for me).
So I guess my advice (and I'm no expert) would be to give the players a goal they care about, and plenty of freedom in how to achieve it. With good players they'll give you plenty to bounce off of, and you can ride their creativity to a great adventure.
^That too.
I never realized how much our group was missing until we got a new member who was more experienced (and thus more comfortable playing his role). That session was the most fun I'd had playing since the first few we'd done, even factoring in the hilariously tedious fight that took up half the session.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough with the question. There's not much a scenario writer can do to give you a fun group. What I'm asking is what plot elements make a great game, in your opinion?
So far, I'm hearing:
- A connection between PCs and game world
- Opportunities to improvise
- A recurring villain (yes, that one was mine)
What else?
Depending on who your players are there can be any number of things that hit them individually. However here's 2 general ones to help impact MOST players in some way:
1. Have interesting and engaging NPCs: this means have some art for the players to see; give the NPC some quirk or bit of info that makes them instantly identifiable. This will really aid the immersion of any player at the table who vibes off of the roleplay aspect of the game.
2. Create tactically engaging fight scenes: more than just a tough foe, add something to the fight or its environment that players have never or rarely encountered, such as ambient arcane magic, a unique terrain like a teeter-totter floor, or perhaps monsters with highly unusual powers.
The point of both of these suggestions is to really engage your audience. The same advice for writers in general goes for the authors of adventures or long-term campaigns. Know your audience. Whenever possible, cater to them; either positively, playing off the players' strengths or negatively, working at their weaknesses.
The one other thing I've noted in my own experience is that no matter how much players say they don't mind or even enjoy railroading, no one wants that forever. Players crave choice, so give it to them. If you've got down time between set pieces in the plot don't just dangle a couple plot hooks; throw out six of them. Also leave several paths for potentially arriving at one of the set pieces. If it's critical to the campaign that the party go to a ruined tower, drop 3 or more sources to get them there. For example:
You know you want them to get to said tower. You then introduce them to Captain Radek, a guard captain who's charged with assembling a team to go to said tower. But you also know that, if for some reason they don't meet him and go to the bar instead either he might be there or perhaps another member of his last team drunkenly raving that NO ONE could survive that place. If this still isn't motivation enough and they just ditch town drop a map to the tower or just put the tower in their path somehow.
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I've had groups who:
- Wanted a deep, involved story
- Wanted to murderhobo
- Wanted to talk mechanics
- Grit
- Humor
- Didn't care about any of the above, but wanted an excuse to spend time with friends
- All or any of the above, though one of the true threads that ran through them all:
They wanted to matter.
I compare this to something I'd read once on social media. Why do people use things like Facebook or G+? It isn't to read someone else's status updates about "today I got coffee," generally. It's to "be heard." People want a voice. If we're pushing out an update to media, it's as though someone hears us.
Even if it's 'maybe.'
Similarly, when running a game, we provide a form of escape.
Players, characters, heroes, want to matter.
This may not involve being King, but it may involve entering the Druid Grove and seeing their nature-spirit enter in the form of a great beast, and personally, yes personally, assign them a quest to save the world.
Or it may involve something else.