For my next campaign, I'd like to do something a bit more episodic. Essentially, I just want to take a bunch of short, unrelated adventures (from Dungeon and the like) and run them with minimal modification. Many such adventures aren't set in any specific campaign setting. Do you think it would work to just run them like that without giving the PCs a map or any hard-and-fast setting information? They're essentially just wanderers who go from place to place doing good deeds or whatever - but where those places are in relation to each other isn't clear and ultimately doesn't really matter.
Traveling and downtime would be things that mostly took place off-screen in between episodes. I was thinking I'd do it like the Adventurer's League does it, so after each adventure, PCs would earn a set number of downtime days that they could then spend off-screen doing whatever it was they wanted to do with them.
Would that work? Does that sound appealing to anyone? Do you think you could play in a campaign where you don't know exactly where your PC is on a map? Where there are no homogenous religions and cultures and such-like?
Or do you need to be able to ground your PC in the world and know where they are and where they came from and how town A interacts with town B and so on?
I'd love to know what others think. Thanks!
In my experience you don't need to start with those thigns, but you should probably allow them to build up as time passes. Heroes save a town from trolls, then they'd probably be recieved well shoudl they turn up there again. Players will remember the oddest things at the strangest moments and will attempt to make use of them.
A setting matters as soon as your players backtrack or once things grow past a certain point. But you could certainly make a setting as you go, adding towns and dungeons and npcs as you go.
In fact, I'm really considering doing that exact thing with my setting: rebuild it as players play.
I think grounding a setting does help build character connection to the world but you can build it as you go. If the players are into the game, small things like that add to it but some players might not be, be the judge at your game table. Back when I was the only DM in our group in 2e in the 1990s, some of the best adventure arcs were separate stuff I strung together but set in their world, we still joke around about stuff that happened 20 years ago.
rampant wrote:
You can provide all the potential answers you want, short of rail roading the players, they will do something unexpected anyway. If you don't want them to backtrack, they will back track, believe it!
Keeping the extraneous details down isn't an issue, but have a few options ready in case the characters decide to dig into something. I once had a party on a dragon hunt completely derail the adventure because the Minotaur got them sucked into the local Flumph politics. The whole mess climaxed with a shocker lizard stampede.
rampant wrote:
That's not railroading, that's a clever way to maintain story structure without railroading.
Just to be clear, it was never about if players needed to back track, but that they would decide to. Players will get strange ideas lodged in their heads.
rampant wrote:
Depends on what the players want, I guess. I'd be fine with that kind of gameplay, not every game has to have great details of the world the game is set in, sometimes what's in the adventure is enough.
I may be wrong, but weren't the 4e encounters based on this kind of premise? A quick encounter, no campaign setting needed? I'd say each adventure you run could be like that.
pukunui wrote:
Hmm. An airship puts me in mind of the old Final Fantasy games I used to play on the Nintendo. While cool, I think it might make some challenges a little too easy to circumvent, at least at low level.
A magic tower could work though.
As an alternative to the Sliders idea, I've also been thinking about making it so the PCs are working for someone - maybe a gold dragon in human form - who sends them out on missions. There'd be a sort of Quantum Leap element to it, though, where they'd be stuck wherever they were until they solved the problem, so they wouldn't be able to just jump back to the gold dragon's base whenever they felt like it. But they would be able to communicate with the dragon and get help from him in the form of ideas and research and such.
I personally like small short story adventures. They don't need to be part of a greater story, lore or world imo. As long as the short story is good, it's still fun to play. And reason to stick together between the short stories can be as simple as "You are adventurers and friends that are in the same adventurer's guild and take up tasks given by clients".
I wouldn't mind to be teleported left and right to the next world, or scenario, but I think I would like if there was "some" connection between the scenario.
Even something as clichè as "at the end of the adventure, you get one of the 353 gems that you're supposed to collect to summon Heaven on Earth".
Maybe I'll never collect the 353 gems, but at least I would have the feeling that what I'm doing has some sort of "meaning".
I remember when I watched the Hercules show, he was going from town to town to solve their problems, but I always asked myself "where is he going TO?"
We played a collection of old BECM adventures that ended up becoming a 'loose' setting. The PCs were traveling do-gooders (like Hercules and that shorty Iolaus from TV :-)). I wonder: DId they ever change their outfits? No wonder they had to wander the land --after three days they'd stink to high heaven 
.
Anyway: Some things carried over from one game to the next but it was always easy to get 'caught up' (just like that TV show). A few recurring NPCs (that's when we first realized we had an actual campaign on our hands), a few mentions of Threshold (among other places) but all rather loose, just as backdrop, more or less.
We refer to it as our Gaunlets & Cauldrons campaign 
. A very homebrew version of the Known World; no real setting guide, just a collection of old D&D adventures.
pukunui wrote:
If the player's don't care about the campaign setting and multiple adventures or campaigns aren't going to be set in the location, it doesn't matter.
A full campaign setting might be overkill. You don't need to know what'a beyond the borders of the local kingdom if the players remain in dungeons in the heart of the nation.
Other than a vague outline in my head, I did a campaign without an actual map. They never seemed to be bothered by it. Heck, after a while distance didn’t really matter when they acquired an airship. To creative a cohesive feel for the campaign, I established the themes that should tie everything together, and used that to focus adventure design.
At the end of each adventure, I gave them a choice of hooks to investigate – or if it was in the middle of an adventure, different paths to take within it.
Thanks everyone! I'm feeling a lot better about this now.
I do have my group's buy-in for something like this already, so now it's really just a matter of working out the specifics.
pukunui wrote:
My campaign setting right now - and the PCs right now are level 7 - started out simply as tent/pub run by a bronze dragon, in a valley with ruins to plunder. I added an oldwest town in a nearby desert when I ran an adventure from d20 Past, and a forest when I ran an adventure set in a forest. That is the whole setting as of the last time I DMed. The first player to spell me as DM ran an adventure set in an elven forest, so that now exists somewhere bordering the desert. The second player to take over the DM reins is running an adventure set in that oldwest town, and underneath it he placed ancient elven ruins, adding some history to this region.
We're all having fun, and feeling connected to our characters and the setting just as much as when we've had a more codified (and sensible) setting.
Well, I'm not so connected to my character. I see him more as an NPC still, since I'm using him as a player only for a couple sessions before he becomes the story hook for when I'm in the DM chair.
Gnarl wrote:
Well, now I’m speaking for myself:
I like to play in predetermined settings. And I especially like to create my own settings. That gives me a sense of “fantasy world made real” and tie-in my characters.
But, I’m a huge perfectionist.
Most players that went through my table weren’t like that. They didn’t really care about the big picture as long as they know what they are doing now. That was the most important thing to them. I do see myself playing a campaign in this style. If the end result is fun, I would play it. But still, a full fleshed out setting is a great thing! Especially when the DM makes the setting, that kind of thing gets pretty exciting pretty quickly.
But, it’s just me. There are a lot of players with much fewer demands on story and campaign world. If they are ok with that, and you said they are, then go. You probably will only need the local region of the adventure, and even that it’s not that necessary to know what lurks in a hidden portal if this portal is off-access to players.
Heck, I would say my perfectionism was the thing that didn’t allow running a table last time I tried. Well, that’s life.
Alternatively, you can create the setting as you play the campaign. But I don’t think that this is what you are asking.
Go, and tell us later how it was
Oh, I like settings too. I'm having enough fun playing on the Sword Coast at the moment. I don't think my players would care if it was set in Greyhawk, Eberron, or some other place instead, though.
I think one of the problems in D&D is the settings are more rennaisance and late medieval with many modern conventions than they were very early on in the game. A setting like England between the 5th to 9th century AD would be very different with many small kingdoms every few miles. Do a setting in the ancient world and their are many powerful city-states, especially before Alexander the Great. There were powerful empires in the ancient world, but their were also huge area's that were pretty much governed by city-states or city-states giving lip service to a powerful empire. I see settings with governments as powerful as the modern governments of today with powerful centralized authority and organization that was not very common historically. I am not saying all D&D should be this way at all. I think their is not enough diversity in they types of settings available.
I was not a big Dark Sun lover because of the psionics and super high attributes in 2E, but I really liked the city-states and the very BC feel of the place with the architecture. As a setting it was different.
I think you make a good point. You only "need" the things that player want. If the DM doesn't care about having a setting and the players don't care about the setting then it's irrelevant. However, after playing for a while your sort of going to have a setting, in some form, as a by-product.
cbwjm wrote: