Campaign Journal, The players choose the game.
Ok, Since I started this blog I've been meaning to do a campaign journal of my RPG campaigns, partly for the interest of those who might be interested, partly for the players themselves who could then check my blog and get updates on what has been happening. It’s time for a new campaign to start, so now seems to be as good as a time as any to start. For about the last 5 years the campaigns that I have run have been pretty undemanding fluff, D&D campaigns, with a focus on action and adventure, where complex stories have taken a back seat. While there is nothing wrong with that, recently I’ve wanted to run something a little bit more challenging.
I also came to the conclusion that I have rather a lot of rpg books, and while I’ve read 95% of them, I’ve probably only used about 50% of them in actual games. It would be great if I could run a game that used some more of these books, maybe even ones that I’ve not read in years.
So I’m going to try combining the two, with a bit of a twist. I’m going to let the players decide what game they want to play, surrendering some of the control over the game to them, in the hope that they will become as engaged in the process as building the campaign as I am. As this is a bit of an experiment I’m hoping to record the results of what happens here and on RPG.net, as hopefully people will find the results quite interesting.
The way the game is going to run is in intermittent periods of 1-2 months, interspersed with my wife’s Arcarna Evolved (D20) game. The reason that we are starting now, is that it’s the first time that she’s ever run a game, and we’ve been going for about a year so she feels like she could do with a bit of a rest. The group as a whole has been going for about three years, but we’ve had various players drop out and come in, drawn from the pool of our local RPG club. If successful this will be the third campaign to be run in this group.
The players are:
Myself: (yeah, GM’s are players too) I’ve been Role-playing about 17 years now, since I was about 13. Generally I tend to run adventure/action oriented RPGs, with a preference for fantasy. In the past though I’ve been through many passions for various games, OWoD, 7th Sea etc… but the one game that has been almost constantly run through all these years was always D&D.
MP: My lovely wife. She’s been role-playing about 6-7 years, since she came to university, where we met. She started out doing LRP, and moved into tabletop from there. She’s mostly played D&D games, with a smattering of others, and she is just running her first long term campaign, as mentioned above (I’m so lucky and proud!)
TB: My Wife’s best friend. She had maybe role-played once or twice before joining the D&D group a couple of years ago, and has been introduced to a number of other games through the local RPG club. She also Shares my taste in old and bad horror movies.
MR: Joined our group at the beginning of the Arcarna Evolved campaign, he’s probably the other most experienced Role-player besides myself. I see him as something of an RPG omnivore, who would be willing to play anything within reason (though he has stated a prejudice against Call of Cthulhu).
MG: Also joined the game at the outset of Arcarna Evolved. He’s an experienced gamer and GM, who has mostly run WFRP, NWoD and D&D. We share a lot of gaming interests, but he’s played and run in a lot of games and systems that I haven’t, which should make life interesting.
J: The newest member of the group, who has been with us since just after Christmas. So new in fact that I don’t even know his second name… He’s also the youngest person in the group, so it goes along side that he’s not been role-playing that long, although that may be doing him a disservice. In the amount of time he’s been playing I don’t think he’s actually been in too many long term campaigns, and he is eager to widen his horizons.
----How do we start?----
So to make this clear, these players are going to be deciding the game they want to play, and then I will be building the campaign around the groups desires, and their characters. I can see two main problems with this, the first being that I have rather allot of games to choose from:
The second problem is that I know my players, and they are an easygoing kinda bunch, so if any-one has any strong desires to play a particular game, the others will most likely agree. But I want the players to each openly state their preferences, so that we can make a decision that takes every-ones desires into account.
We’re going to narrow things down a bit first, to make life easyer, so what we’ll start by doing is asking the players what Genre of game they would like to play first, and then narrow things down further from there.
The three Genres I’ve broken down are as follows:
Fantasy (including historical fantasy and low magic settings)
Sci-fi (all the way from star wars to superheroes)
Horror (including World of darkness and other such).
All the players will be asked to write down their preference, giving the genre they most want to play score of 3, and rating the other genres either 2 or 1 according to their preference. If they really do not want to play a particular genre, they can rank it 0. We will total the points together, and see what has the most points at the end, and then repeat the process for each individual game in the genre.
There are some provisos however: The first is that Generally speaking, I’d rather the players chose a game because of the world rather than the system. Systems can be played about with after all.
The second is that I do have a final veto. There are some games that I would not really like to run, and some games that I flat out couldn’t run. So While I’m going to do the best to accommodate my players, if they wind up choosing to play something like Changeling the dreaming I know that I would struggle to make a decent game of it.
Well, that just about sets things up. The first session is on Sunday, when the choosing will commence. It’s the first time that I’ve done an actual play thread (I’m presuming that this is the right place for this to live), so comments and suggestions are welcome throughout the process. Also let me know your interest in the thread that would be appreciated, as if I know people are reading it will make it more likely that I won’t loose interest and stop posting!
I also came to the conclusion that I have rather a lot of rpg books, and while I’ve read 95% of them, I’ve probably only used about 50% of them in actual games. It would be great if I could run a game that used some more of these books, maybe even ones that I’ve not read in years.
So I’m going to try combining the two, with a bit of a twist. I’m going to let the players decide what game they want to play, surrendering some of the control over the game to them, in the hope that they will become as engaged in the process as building the campaign as I am. As this is a bit of an experiment I’m hoping to record the results of what happens here and on RPG.net, as hopefully people will find the results quite interesting.
The way the game is going to run is in intermittent periods of 1-2 months, interspersed with my wife’s Arcarna Evolved (D20) game. The reason that we are starting now, is that it’s the first time that she’s ever run a game, and we’ve been going for about a year so she feels like she could do with a bit of a rest. The group as a whole has been going for about three years, but we’ve had various players drop out and come in, drawn from the pool of our local RPG club. If successful this will be the third campaign to be run in this group.
The players are:
Myself: (yeah, GM’s are players too) I’ve been Role-playing about 17 years now, since I was about 13. Generally I tend to run adventure/action oriented RPGs, with a preference for fantasy. In the past though I’ve been through many passions for various games, OWoD, 7th Sea etc… but the one game that has been almost constantly run through all these years was always D&D.
MP: My lovely wife. She’s been role-playing about 6-7 years, since she came to university, where we met. She started out doing LRP, and moved into tabletop from there. She’s mostly played D&D games, with a smattering of others, and she is just running her first long term campaign, as mentioned above (I’m so lucky and proud!)
TB: My Wife’s best friend. She had maybe role-played once or twice before joining the D&D group a couple of years ago, and has been introduced to a number of other games through the local RPG club. She also Shares my taste in old and bad horror movies.
MR: Joined our group at the beginning of the Arcarna Evolved campaign, he’s probably the other most experienced Role-player besides myself. I see him as something of an RPG omnivore, who would be willing to play anything within reason (though he has stated a prejudice against Call of Cthulhu).
MG: Also joined the game at the outset of Arcarna Evolved. He’s an experienced gamer and GM, who has mostly run WFRP, NWoD and D&D. We share a lot of gaming interests, but he’s played and run in a lot of games and systems that I haven’t, which should make life interesting.
J: The newest member of the group, who has been with us since just after Christmas. So new in fact that I don’t even know his second name… He’s also the youngest person in the group, so it goes along side that he’s not been role-playing that long, although that may be doing him a disservice. In the amount of time he’s been playing I don’t think he’s actually been in too many long term campaigns, and he is eager to widen his horizons.
----How do we start?----
So to make this clear, these players are going to be deciding the game they want to play, and then I will be building the campaign around the groups desires, and their characters. I can see two main problems with this, the first being that I have rather allot of games to choose from:
The second problem is that I know my players, and they are an easygoing kinda bunch, so if any-one has any strong desires to play a particular game, the others will most likely agree. But I want the players to each openly state their preferences, so that we can make a decision that takes every-ones desires into account.
We’re going to narrow things down a bit first, to make life easyer, so what we’ll start by doing is asking the players what Genre of game they would like to play first, and then narrow things down further from there.
The three Genres I’ve broken down are as follows:
Fantasy (including historical fantasy and low magic settings)
Sci-fi (all the way from star wars to superheroes)
Horror (including World of darkness and other such).
All the players will be asked to write down their preference, giving the genre they most want to play score of 3, and rating the other genres either 2 or 1 according to their preference. If they really do not want to play a particular genre, they can rank it 0. We will total the points together, and see what has the most points at the end, and then repeat the process for each individual game in the genre.
There are some provisos however: The first is that Generally speaking, I’d rather the players chose a game because of the world rather than the system. Systems can be played about with after all.
The second is that I do have a final veto. There are some games that I would not really like to run, and some games that I flat out couldn’t run. So While I’m going to do the best to accommodate my players, if they wind up choosing to play something like Changeling the dreaming I know that I would struggle to make a decent game of it.
Well, that just about sets things up. The first session is on Sunday, when the choosing will commence. It’s the first time that I’ve done an actual play thread (I’m presuming that this is the right place for this to live), so comments and suggestions are welcome throughout the process. Also let me know your interest in the thread that would be appreciated, as if I know people are reading it will make it more likely that I won’t loose interest and stop posting!