mayhembymoonlight

[mayhembymoonlight]

Oops

So I forgot to update... like, at all...

I think I may just move on to using this blog to chronicle the adventures of the party and my thoughts on what I might do with the campaign starting next semester, so stay tuned! (Unless I forget again. As I sometimes do.)

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This Blog Isn’t Dead

I promise. I’ve been on hiatus while I finish up some other stuff. I should be back to working on this (...publicly...) around next week!

[mayhembymoonlight]

Inspiration

Still waiting to see if people have input on the last post! But in order to keep things moving, here’s some more thoughts.

Making something that’s completely original is either very hard or just outright impossible depending on who you ask. So it’s important that we find something that inspires us. This doesn’t mean you have to model your world/campaign after one from an existing work; rather, that using other works to think about what you like and/or what you’re interested in is a good way to figure out a place to start.

My players asked for something with more of an urban fantasy feel for this next campaign. This is... tricky, as that’s not really something that D&D is designed to accommodate. There’s a bunch of other systems that probably work better for that - FATE, VtM, etc. But I want to stick with D&D, as to several of my players, so we’ll see how we can make this work. This campaign will definitely be a mix of urban fantasy and your standard high fantasy to help with that, but let’s see what things help me to think about each...

(Campaign warning: mild spoilers below, though nothing people won’t know by the third or fourth session probably.)

1. The Six of Crows Duology. I’ve been reading this recently, and wow, it’s quite good. It has some fun ideas for urban fantasy elements I can include - organization of gangs, certain types of heists, a look at how local governments can interact with criminal elements, etc.

2. Chrono Trigger. I’ve been playing it recently and wow I love this game. I won’t say too much of what I want to pull from here just yet (partially because I haven’t decided) but it has some fun organizational things and some very interesting characters that can be looked at for inspiration.

3. Dragons Wild series. I read this a while back - I’ll probably glance at some parts again. It’s fun for thinking about supernatural culture inside of major cities. While the supernatural/fantasy elements of my campaign probably won’t be quite so hidden/unknown to the wider public since, well, it’s D&D, it’s probably still worth a look.

These are just three examples I pulled off the top of my head - I in no way want to model the whole of the world after any one of these, but they still have very interesting elements that I can consider from each of them, that I can work with, that I can play with and make my own.

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Lessons Learned - Part III

We’ve hit the hard part. It’s time for me to talk about one of the two or three major conflicting issues that I have to figure out before this next campaign - and really, that I have to figure out before I can do much in the way of campaign prep.

Let’s talk about pacing.

Pacing is... difficult. It’s something that’s usually left to the DM to figure out, even though it’s really more dictated by the players. The DM has the ability to encourage pacing, but unless you’re really good at it you’re often going to find that your players do. You can stick interesting things in a room all you want - sometimes your players will just want to walk on out of that bar.

My players are very inconsistent with what they prefer as far as pacing goes, and it’s very difficult for me. I don’t hold it against them - they’re still a wonderful group - but it means that I’m often fighting against opposing desires as far as pacing goes.

There are two or three members of the party that prefer things fast-paced. Moving between plot points, between encounters, with speed, with tension being always at play. This is how this last campaign was towards the end. 

There are two or three members of the party that tell me that things move to fast. That they’d like time to slow down, to dwell on decisions and consequences. That they want to enjoy time spent on the road, and on details. And frankly? This is the group that I would align myself with in terms of how I’d prefer to go about things.

So what do I do? Well, first of all, since I do want this to be interactive, I’d encourage those reading this to tell me what you think (using replies, asks, whatever) since I don’t entirely know myself. I’m probably going to think about this for at least a couple more days - I’m leaning towards slowing things down because the party is relatively evenly split and that would be both different and more in line with what I want to do, but I also want to see what other people think. This is something quite impactful - if I want to slow things down, then I might design this campaign to just last longer in theory to accommodate for it.

Let me know what you all think! But once this is figured out, there’s still more to discuss...

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Lessons Learned - Part II

The second part - because really, what the players think is more important here.

There were two surveys I sent out that will pertain here - one towards the end of the campaign and one a few days ago after the campaign has ended. What I’m going to do now is attempt to draw out things that I see as consistent that I need to address. I will note - my players are fairly diverse, as I said. This means that sometimes what they ask for contradicts each other. I’ll deal with that later. What I’m going for right now are evident trends and/or things indicated strongly.

1. My players want more direct puzzles. Alright, cool. That wasn’t really a focus of this last campaign, but I can definitely do puzzles. 

2. My players want less deific interference. Again, should be doable. That was basically the whole plot of this last campaign or I wouldn’t have had nearly as much. Since this next campaign will be, well, different, it should be easy to settle back into more standard fantasy religious practices.

3. People want smaller quests. Well... some of them. Pacing is something I’ll be addressing soon (see: next post) since it’s very inconsistent among my players what they prefer, but I think at the very least throwing in some “side quests” won’t make anybody upset.

4. Fewer NPCs in the party. Again, a lot easier, since part of the focus of the last campaign necessitated NPCs in the party. It’s nice that several of these things are fixed basically by having a different focus of the campaign.

5. Players like moral decisions, and the ability to talk through the aftermath. This is unfortunately something I can less account for with world design and something that I have to deal with via DMing style - while many of my players have stated this, they don’t always play to make it happen, and so it falls to me to be able to encourage this.

There are other things, but they’re smaller and/or less consistent. In looking at these points, I’m relatively pleased - it looks as though several of these things I can fix quite easily just because the focus of the next campaign will be different. Unfortunately, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve avoided the big stuff in this post. The real difficulties - some of which arise from players not having consistent expectations / desires. Let’s see if we can address those...

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It’s generally going to be useful to have a place to write down world building details, or to keep track of notes while running a game, or similar things. Sometimes that place is a leather-bound notebook with a dragon on the cover that you didn’t realize you owned.

(More stuff on the campaign coming soon!)

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Lessons Learned - Part I

So what have I learned from my last campaigns?

Well, it’ll probably take at least a couple of posts for me to get through everything here, so let’s start with what I learned in terms of how I DM, how my players seem to interact with my DMing style, and what I prefer as a DM. In other words, we’re going to start by looking at things from my perspective - we’ll get back to the players later.

Well, I definitely prefer continuous campaigns. Episodic formats just don’t satisfy me - I like continuous stories, character development, etc. But we’ve basically already established this as what we’re doing, so no need to dwell on that.

I like my players. I have no particular issues with any of them. So no issues there.

I definitely tend to prepare a lot - some would say I even over-prepare. While that doesn’t seem like an issue, it can sometimes lead to either a) me losing energy I could use while actually DMing or b) me not actually allowing the players true choice - rather, having sets of possible outcomes. I’ve been doing better about the latter recently, I think - but I still might try to prepare just a bit less than I sometimes do for specific sessions this campaign to see if I could potentially ameliorate some of these issues.

I’m pretty good with rules, but there are segments that I’m also perfectly willing to toss the rules to the wind to suit the story and the players. With that said, I definitely know there’s a few sections of rules I need to brush up on before this next campaign - it’d be lovely to have a functional economy, for instance.

My players definitely go off the wall from time to time. I wouldn’t say it’s an issue, but it does mean that I need to prepare for that. It also means I need to be ready for them to throw whatever they want to do at me. In this last campaign I brushed up against the idea of romance, and I think it would be interesting to have it be more present in this coming campaign since, you know, it’s a thing that people do - but it also means I will need to practice things like dealing with players flirting with my NPCs and potentially how to do the same right back to them. So that needs to go on my list of preparation to do.

I also think I would do better to have more prepared battle maps on hand - even just generic ones if they get into a fight somewhere I’m not fully prepared to handle. I didn’t use battle maps as often as I wanted to in this last campaign because I kept getting surprised by where they got into combat, and that’d be nice to fix.

Let’s see.. that’s most of my mechanical concerns and a few of my roleplaying concerns. Are there other roleplaying things I need to brush up on or practice?... I can’t think of anything, but I’ll probably ask my players if they noticed anything, just in case there’s something I didn’t realize from my end.

This is kind of the thought process I go through from a DM perspective. Most of my stuff is focused on the players, but occasionally I do need to think about, you know, myself. I’ll probably make individual posts discussing how I’m dealing with brushing up on the things I mentioned here later on, once I’ve gotten through the sort of initial brainstorm.

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Starting Out - the Table

This is gonna be a LATP (Long Ass Text Post), so be prepared. Okay, let’s see what we have here.

So, it’s time for a new campaign. I know heading into this next campaign that I will have basically all of the same players involved. I am personally a DM that (with my current group, at least) values my players over guarding any precise sense of style, so I know that I’ll be trying to model my campaign around what they want - combined with, of course, what I’m interested in actually doing.

In terms of how this group is composed, we have an interesting mix. The group is currently six players and the one DM that is me. The group has mixed experience in terms of D&D before they started playing with me - with that said, I’m pretty sure that for most of them my previous campaign(s) they’ve played with me constitute the larger and/or more consistent part of their D&D experience, so I don’t think I’m dealing with too many expectations re: exact monsters or mechanics they’d expect.

Two of my players have significantly more experience with the rules system of 5e than the others. Neither of them are rules lawyers, necessarily, but both do seem to quite enjoy when I stick to rules where I can. The other players, while they do seem to appreciate the rules at least somewhat, are what I’d call roleplay-focused. So if I had to sketch out a distribution:

6 Players Total (1 DM) 1 Player: Rules Heavy 2 Players: Mixed 3 Players: Roleplay Heavy

Which works out quite well for me, all things considered. I do thoroughly enjoy roleplay as a DM, but, well, I also play D&D instead of a system like FATE for a reason - I enjoy the ramifications and the like that can come from a system of fairly complex mechanics. I definitely do lean towards roleplay more than some DMs though, and the group reflects this, which is good.

We’re a bunch of college kids that do our best to meet consistently once a week - which is looking like an actual possibility this coming semester, which is very exciting for me after several instances of people having to unfortunately be randomly absent throughout the last campaign. Because I get this degree of consistency, it allows me to do more work with their characters than I otherwise might - it’s hard to work character backstories / arcs into your campaign if the player to whom it’s relevant isn’t there to see it.

My group is also a reasonably diverse group of people in general, which I like to try to reflect inside of the campaign. Considering the number of various colored flags that my group waves around, I personally consider it important to make sure that everyone can see at least some sort of representation within the campaign where possible. Is it altogether necessary? I'd personally say it is. Not only does it allow people to potentially feel more comfortable and more welcomed... but it’s honestly a lot more fun when you have different types of characters around. 

One of the first things I’ve done in preparation for this campaign was to send out a survey to my players from the last campaign (which is... the same people). This survey is just basically to ask them what they enjoyed from the last campaign and what they didn’t, as well as what they want to see in this campaign and what they don’t. I’m still waiting on responses from that, but from previous conversations/surveys with this group, I already have a pretty decent idea of what they thought of the last campaign.

Which is what we’ll discuss next...

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The Beginning

Hello and welcome! This is a side blog (written by @moonsideshade) dedicated to creating my next world and campaign that I run for Dungeons & Dragons 5e. I’ll be periodically posting my thought process as I go through this, and when the campaign itself starts I will likely post updates as to how things progress. While this is, of course, primarily my campaign and I always have to bias my own ideas (since that’s what’ll make running the campaign fun!) I also do think it would be fun to hear what other people’s thoughts/suggestions are! So feel free to reply to posts or submit on the asks page and I’ll try to respond.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes! I’ll post my preliminary concepts/thoughts sometime tonight or within the next couple of days. See you then!