I looked around but couldn't find any threads on this, so here's a post on a pretty fun campaign style I've been playing, and a suggestion if you've been looking for something new to spice up a campaign!
The group I play with enjoys playing around with the rules and whatnot, and a while ago we started a new custom campaign called Stranger Danger. The general concept is that all of the PCs make their characters in secret, only discussing them with the GM. We all created characters at level 10, and the GM placed us in a room with ~20 NPCs. Since we're playing this campaign over a forum, for several weeks we were even working through figuring out who the other PCs were among the NPCs. It's been a really fun session so far, and level 10 gives opportunities to make some pretty fun builds to leave other PCs questioning - My gun-juggling bard has had a pretty good time. Our campaign has been going really slowly due to some players, so I've had to spend literal months guessing at just the race of another PC (once we worked out NPCs vs PCs), but it's all a part of the fun.
The main downsides to this type of campaign is that it's extremely GM intensive (especially at the beginning of ours, where the GM had to consolidate everything into posts so we wouldn't know who was controlling which character), and it'd be pretty difficult to manage off a forum. That and you'll have no team balance because no one will know what anyone else is making - you could very well end up with a party of 5 summoners. I can see how it wouldn't be for everyone.
Thoughts? Anyone played through a campaign similar to this?
Looks like a recipe for pvp, or worse, unwitting pvp.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
PVP isn't necessarily a bad thing if you have a group that enjoys it- or a group that enjoys storytelling and view PVP as a means to that end, which sounds like it's the case here.
This game actually sounds very interesting. I've been considering similar setups recently, like a Battle Royale type game where each player has multiple characters and some of those characters are likely to die, I just haven't really figured out the right way to actually run such a game. Yet.
I can see how PvP could be an issue, but we fortunately haven't had any issues with it so far. All of the PCs and NPCs start out with a common goal - they're in Barrowood, split into smaller teams to deal with an undead problem, so they have incentive to at least try teamwork. Personality conflicts have been inevitable, but there hasn't been any bloodshed between PCs yet. Eventually they'll be friends. Hopefully. It's probably also important to mention that the goal is to eventually learn who all the PCs are and most of what they do, so anonymity doesn't need to keep up forever.
Another good way to avoid conflict in a scenario like this, if your PCs are willing, is to set down some basic guidelines in character creation that will make it easier for these unknown PCs to get along - make a PC who will work with others, give everyone an approximate common goal, giving alignment suggestions, etc. Most things can be worked if you have PCs that are willing to develop from a group of strangers to a well-working party. For this I think it's best to know your PCs, if they'd enjoy making it work, and how much PC-PC conflict they're likely to have. Some conflict can be fun. A dead PC at the very beginning, not so much.
For your Battle Royale type game, if you're not set on doing it on tabletop, have you considered trying Roll20 for it? If you'd like each PC to be anonymous, you have options to type as the character, not the player, and each player can control multiple tokens. No voice chat or you lose that surprise, but I can't see how to avoid that.