New Campaign!

Starting up a new one tonight. The system is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The players are all women. One is completely new to roleplaying, another has hung out with roleplayers for a while and played a single session of Exalted, two were in my Traveller game but haven't done any roleplaying outside of that, and the last was in my Traveller game and now also plays in Trollsmyth's group game online.

Should be interesting.

The Next Game

So it's coming up on a year since I last ran a campaign, even a short one. And I'm pretty happy with that, honestly. Playing 2-3 times a week continues to be pretty rad. Being a player is just fun, and it's given me a lot to think about in terms of how I'm going to run the next game. I'm also enjoying the opportunity to get some time to really think about what I'm going to run next, and for whom.

I still really, really want to run my own chat game. The format really clicks with me, as a player, and I'm not going to master it until I run my own game. I've got the player base. And I've got some ideas and inclinations that wouldn't really work except in chat. I know that if I were to run a tabletop game, I'd spend at least some of my time thinking, "Man, if this were chat, then we could..."

And yet, I've got this gentle, persistent nudging that my next game should not be the intimate, 1-3 player online chat that I'm really digging right now, but open, anyone-who-shows-up tabletop. Some kind of crazed LL/S&W/LotfP WFRPG/"you want to play a centaur? sure!" megadungeon sandboxy thing, just to get that all out of my system. The game itself wouldn't be quite as good, not quite what I'm grooving on at the moment, but the game isn't everything.

In short: My social life revolves around gaming. A lot of this is just because people I have other things in common with tend to be gaming-curious; partly it's because I make a conscious effort to be "out" about my gaming, and to bring my non-gaming friends into the fold. The overall effect is that, since seventh grade, about 90% of the people I voluntarily interact with on a regular basis (as opposed to classmates and such) have been people who I'm actively gaming with, or people who I'd gamed with in the past but for various reasons wasn't at the moment. Which means that, at the moment, a great deal of my social life is online.

I should probably be more worried about that than I am, but I'm actually pretty happy with that right now. Skype is an awesome thing, I'm weird enough that "mostly online" means "fits my strange niche interests," and a lot of it is that I'm using the 'net to keep in touch with the people I hang out with at college, now that we're scattered across the state.

However, what mostly gaming online does mean is that I don't have a whole lot of influence on my local social scene, and that's going to be even more true once I get back to college. I'd like for there to be a little more communication between the different groups of gamers I'm in touch with at school. I'd like for there to be a reliable group of people around for me to hang out with, who understand how to socialize without getting as drunk as they possibly can, as quickly as they can. I worry about some of my friends who, when I'm busy with my online gaming, often end up hanging out with people who drink more than said friends are really comfortable with. Running a game isn't necessarily going to have the effect that I want, and it's obviously not the only way to create that kind of environment, but it's a tool that I'm comfortable with, and fairly good at using.

So there's that. Plus, like I mentioned before, the kind of "anyone can show up!" old school exploration game I've been curious about running for a while is going to be a lot easier to wrangle while I'm still at college, and have a handful of people bugging me about running some variety of old school D&D already, than it will be once I graduate and have to start over cold in a social environment. I'm not quite convinced that's the kind of game I want to run, but it's enough that I've started (once again) scribbling down notes and maps for something of the kind.

Other Options for the Language Problem

"Over the next day or two." Yes. Right then.

I've got a number of ideas about ways to deal with the language problem, most of which aren't exclusive; in fact, I think a lot of these would work better if you used them together in some kind of combination. Most of them have to do with campaign design and group interaction, rather than in-game and setting issues, so they're going to be of limited utility in a lot of cases. (I tend to do most of my real campaign building while the players are making their characters, because I'm lazy and procrastinate.) I'm not entirely sure what'll happen with most of these if they're actually tried at the table, so I'd love to hear about it if you do try one, or come up with something along similar lines.

• Everyone speaks elvish? Great! We'll start in the Elven Homelands. Basically, just take the language that the PCs all speak and find a place in the setting where that language is, effectively, "common." This does require that you to be familiar with a fair amount of your setting at the start of the game; it'd be a particularly good option if you're running a published setting, especially if you're not sure where in the setting that you want to set the game, since the players basically pick for you. It also doesn't help much if the characters end up wandering far afield from their starting location, but for some campaign concepts that won't be an issue.
• We only buy things from Gnomes. If the "common language" that all the PCs speak is a trade language of some kind, you can solve a lot of the problem just by running the kind of game where the characters mostly talk to merchants; put most of the action in the dungeon, say, and only require them to deal with aboveground NPCs when they need to sell loot or buy equipment. Then, as long as you have the right kind of players, it doesn't matter what the main local language is, as long as there's a gnome caravan (or whatever) around.
• The Foreign Quarter. If the language that everyone shares is one that's only spoken widely in places that would be sort of weird to set a campaign in (goblin, for instance), then you might set up the campaign so that the dominant language is something else, but the PCs for the most part don't deal with the dominant culture. Instead, they interact mainly with some subcommunity that shares their language; the foreign quarter, or the goblin underclass that runs the city's utilities (and criminal underworld). Ideally, I think, you'd pair this option with rules that made learning new languages possible, if not exactly easy; when the PCs did start to have to deal with the area's upper class on a regular basis, they could then pick up the necessary languages.
• Blue-booking. If the campaign is set up in such a way that most of the vital, everyday interactions use the language everyone shares, but it's still possible to talk to NPCs who not everyone understands, you can handle those interactions outside of the regular game time with the players who are interested.
• Online play. Online play of various kinds can make blue-booking easier; in some kinds of PBP games, it's practically not even a separate activity from the main game. Chat games also have the advantage that players can "get up from the table" without distracting the rest of the group. If the group decides to have a short chat with someone who one or two people can't talk to, the people who aren't involved in that conversation can do something else for a bit. If this started to happen a lot in a given game, I'd look for another solution, but depending on the players, as long as it stays an occasional, temporary event, in chat this isn't much of an issue.
• Babelfish. In the Doom & Tea Parties game, my character interacts with a number of characters on a regular basis who don't all speak the same language as her, but we're getting around it with some semi-permanent magic and a bit of DM handwave. Giving the PCs access to some kind of universal translation magic or technology isn't always the most interesting way to deal with this issue, but it's very simple and effective, and a good way to go if your main problem with a common language is that it wouldn't make any sense for world-building purposes.
• Flavors of Speak Language. On the other hand, universal translation nullifies the possibilities of language as a logistical issue. That's not something that you're never going to want to deal with on a regular basis, but the right group might find it fun to have to solve "the language problem" when they travel to a new place. One option there is to make speak language, or something like it, either permanent or long-term but also very specific. You do have to keep track of who speaks what language, but that information is mainly necessary so you can find the right spell.

Overall, I think "common" is definitely the best way to go if you're just not all that interested in language, which is going to be true of a lot of groups. On the other hand, if you do think language is fun to play with at the table, some of these options might help you make it gameably interesting and avoid the usual frustrations.

On Systems and Skills

So lately I've been jotting down notes for a new setting and discussing dice rollers for a Wave game with potential players and generally doing the things one does when one has a mind to run a game. I won't be able to really get it rolling for a few weeks at least -- no time until after finals -- but I've been thinking about it regularly and it's starting to sound like a viable idea.

The thing that I'm currently hung up on, besides matters of time, is system. I did something unusual, for me, and started sketching out a setting system-less, (Took a page out of Trollmyth's notes and started with themes, in fact.) and while I'm pleased with the results so far it means I still need to figure out the mechanical side.

While I haven't gotten quite down to the level of what the player characters look like and do, I know I'm going to need at least some kind of jedi-knight analogue, a mutation system, and some way to handle magical tattoos. I'm also considering a cyberpunk-ish or otherwise somewhat post-modern tech level. So Swords & Wizardry and Labyrinth Lord, which otherwise are my go-to systems right now, aren't a completely natural fit. I can crib Mutant Future's mutation system, but I'd also kind of like something that's more forgiving of acquiring them in play, in addition to your existing class/race. And I might be able to make clerics work as the jedi-guys, but depending on where I go with those I might need to make a full new class (which is something I've wanted to do for a while, so that wouldn't be too bad) and then I'd need to figure out what else to do with clerics, and healing in general.

But LL and S&W are my go-to systems for a reason. Right now, they do everything I want out of a system and nothing I don't: fast, deadly combat, magic with for interpretation and additions, a save system, and a couple of other odds and ends. None of the other systems I've used before or have the books for quite fit that bill; I was considering new World of Darkness for a while, but discarded it before I really got serious about the setting. I don't have any use for most of its skill system as implemented (in particular the social stuff; while I can understand the arguments for mechanical supports for certain kinds of characters, with the way I've been playing lately those skills would just get in the way) and I'm similarly suspicious about how the morality system would interface with the kinds of gaming I've recently gotten used to. While I still want to try Vampire, Mage, and all their ilk at some point, that game will have to wait.

One system that has caught my eye, however, has been BRP. I've been looking for an excuse to pick up that book and take it for a spin ever since sirlarkins started posting about BRP, and it has a reputed flexibility that appeals to me: I suspect it would be fairly easy to tweak its character power subsystems to support the character types I have in mind. It does have a lot of dependence on skills, but I'd feel more comfortable ignoring or downplaying certain parts of that system if it didn't mean tampering with some platonic grid of ability scores, and it might do me some good to have a skill system to mess with again. I've gotten perhaps too suspicious of them lately.

Kung Fu Cowboys . . . with Lasers

I am seriously tempted to make this the basis for my next campaign.

Campaigns I Won't Run This Summer

The rest of my group and I have different tastes. At some points, they overlap, and those are the games that we play. This leaves me with a number of games that I'd like to play, but have to put off until I find the right group; I assume it leaves them in a similiar situation occasionally. (Though it's possible that I take these things a tad more seriously than the rest of them, seeing as I'm the only one of us who blogs about games.) That's the case this summer.

Promethean: the Created. This one, I crossed of my "possibles" list almost immediately. I had a number of reasons for that, but first and foremost was that I didn't think the group would take it "seriously." When I showed a couple of them the book, their immediate response was to sit down and start designing character builds -- which is normally a tendency I like, or at least don't mind, but in this case I feel like that's missing the point. There are other games that encourage that style of play, no need to go grafting it on to a game with a different intent. Add in that my serious "character drama" players don't seem particularly enthused about the specific themes that Promethean handles, and you've got a game for another day. (And a game I'd rather play than run, anyway. But only with a perfect GM.)

Encounter Critical. I threw this one out as a possible game, but they all seem to hate it. Apparently it's too silly for a "real campaign." Even though we've had a lot of fun with our goofy-ass one-shots, they want (or claim to want) something more serious for an on-going game. Ah, well. I have high hopes for my college group, some of whom have shown signs of understanding that stupid and awesome go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Feng Shui. This is one that my group would like to play again, but that I have no interest in GMing. I'm the de-facto GM this summer, for various reasons, so it's off the list. We've had fun with it in the past, but once my initial excitement wore off I realized that I really dislike the shots sytem, and a couple of the other more fiddly elements it contains. There's another guy who does still like it but who's out of town this summer, so I'll leave it up to him to run when it's his turn.

There are a couple of games that are still on the "possibles" list, but just barely. Superheroes and Megadungeon in particular both face heavy resistance from a couple of the other people playing this summer. I suspect that resistance is based on prejudice more than experience, and that I could convince the objectors to at least give it a try, but I've got other games in the line-up that wouldn't require such efforts.

A Little Case of Concept Trouble

The other day, as I was writing up the list of campaigns I've played, it occurred to me that I've had a shift in my thinking about campaigns over the past seven-odd years I've been gaming. With all the games I'm thinking about running now, I consider the system first, and then think about what I'd actually run with it. When I came up with my first couple of games, that order was reversed: concept first, then a system to match. I don't think this is a good trend.

There's a certain degree of inevitability to the shift. I know about a lot more systems than I did when I first started playing, I own a lot more systems, and I have a lot more interest in trying systems just to see what they're like. Back in the day, I couldn't think up a campaign system-first, because while I knew there were other systems out there, I didn't have any idea what they were like. I pretty much had to come up with a concept, and then go looking for a system.

But still, I don't like it, especially since my last few campaigns have been a bit thin in the concept department. They picked up more character over time -- Traveller got a big ol' burst of concept during character creation, and Is This Fair ended up with some honest-to-Gygax nuance in the end -- but the danger there is that they get defined by the loudest player's character. Next time around, I want to see if I can make the setting and concept itself a bit more vivid.

My Campaign "Planning" Process

My campaigns seem to have a tendency to undergo fairly significant changes in between first concept and final execution. Not all, certainly. My first campaign, with pre-campaign prep of less than two weeks, stayed more or less the same all the way through. The game I ran last summer was similarly constant, but since the whole of the concept was "run Keep on the Shadowfell" that wasn't really surprising.

But then there was Is This Fair, which was originally going to be elementally themed fantasy superheroes. Then I got Stormwrack (and a player on a pirate kick) and jettisoned the earlier idea in favor of island hopping adventure. By the time it actually hit the table I was running a murder mystery, and the campaign as a whole ended up as a loose retelling of the main plot of Oblivion and a vehicle for Captain Blank's antics.

The Desert Game got it even worse. It didn't go through quite as many iterations, and not much changed during the (quite short) planning phase of the game. But once I got to it, I decided that the "adventurers academy" idea I'd had just wasn't interesting, and the PCs soon found themselves teleported (in spectacular, climactic battle fashion) to a mysterious desert land. Which they wandered around in a bit, until we all got bored with it and its fancy names for dwarves and elves and werewolves and they settled down to lunch time monster hacking in the evil sorcerer's tower.

And that only covers the games that actually saw the light of play. I've got a lot more campaign ideas rattling around that I worked on for a week or two, then dropped in favor of something shinier, since I didn't have the pressure of immediate play to get me really working. I do try to recycle that material, in some form or another, so most of the more interesting one should see some use someday.

This came up now because the same thing is happening with the game I've got planned for next semester. I've been working on a weird science tropical island hex crawl thing for about a month now, and I'm kind of starting to lose interest in it. Or rather, I've stumbled upon some newer ideas and am starting to get more excited about them.

At first I was sort of frustrated, especially since I've always kind of admired those guys spend ages building wacky detailed settings. But now I'm thinking it's just kind of my natural game-planning process, when I'm given any length of time to do it in. It's not like I'm under any kind of time crunch, since I know from experience that I'm fully capable of running a decent game with just a sketch of a setting. I'll hang on to the really cool bits (Gamma Knights!) and I may well end up back working on my little patch of hex terrain once I've worked the other ideas out of my system, but I'm allowed to put it aside for a while and play around with something else.

A Problem of Lists

The Traveller game hasn't started yet, but it's coming along. I'm most of the way through my starting sub-sector, and I've started sketching out the larger political situation. Nothing detailed, mind you. I just needed to know who was running all those spaceports, if there's no Third Imperium in my Traveller universe.

The answer is: another sort of space empire. So far mostly cribbed from Dune, but I'll add in other bits as I go along. Combined with at least some of the Class A and B starports being alien relics, run by robots, this satisfies what need I have for the setting to make sense. I'll make up for it with the planets -- I still need to figure out a place to put the Red-Eyed Cat-Apes.

I am, though, struggling with how much detail to put into that upper-level political situation. I'd like to keep it as loosely defined as possible, partly for philosophical reasons, and partly to avoid doing work. I do plan on making up a minor noble from a minor house (noble houses being the main thing I'm stealing from Dune) to be governor of the sub-sector, and eventually I'll work out a few rivals and allies, to aid in the generation of schemes and plots. But there's no need for a big list of all the houses and nobles and all of that.

Except that I had this idea, that if each of the houses has its own army and so on, then some of the characters might have pre-existing allegiances to them, or old grudges or something. Which would, then, necessitate some manner of list. Unless the players could manage to make something up on their own, if the idea interests them, but I've had mixed success with those sorts of schemes.

Random World Generation Official Verdict: Awesome

Planets I have made so far:

• D79A65-7 S NI Wa. Gola Tau. Run by the engineers who keep the environment bubbles working. They will challenge you to duels!
• C683589-8 A NI. Degenerate agrarian communists. Currently being pestered by one of their neighbors (to be decided, as I fill in the sector) who keeps trying to set up a puppet government to take them over.
• C7838AF-4 S P Ri Lt Amber. Deutsches Reich. They got hold of some old Nazi propaganda tapes, liked what they saw, and now they have tourists swarming all over what the travel agency calls "Hitler World."
• E2108CE-4 P Lt Na. Holo. Religious nuts trying to keep their atmosphere generators together with duct tape.
• C555300-6 Ga Lo NI. Sukka. A bunch of Heinlein-ian farmers, mostly notable for the guy calling himself "the King of Cold" who keeps bothering space travelers and trying to set up his own little kingdom.
  
• B000A53-14 N T I As Hi Ht In Na Va Red. Hox Anoth. Alien space arcology that the Imperium (or whatever) desperately does not want to antagonize.

So yeah, I'd say I'm having fun. No group together to play it yet, but I'm working on it. It may take me a week or two to get the sector sketched out anyway.

Not Post-Apocalyptic, It Was Actually Cyberpunk

Huh. So, I always thought of my first campaign as post-apocalyptic, in genre. Then noisms comes along with a new and exciting definition --

But cyberpunk was always about more than that, at root - its heart has always been in what Bruce Sterling called "the victims of the New"; the people who the Brave New World of the Future has left confused, damaged and trodden underfoot. From our perspective in the new millenium, what are the kind of things that will make people into outsiders, rebels, dropouts and scumbags, and what will those people - the ones with the pizazz to do anything, that is - be directing their rage against?

-- and I realize, no, it was cyberpunk.

Post-apocalypse never really worked, anyway. It had some elements of that, but it also had this whole techno-city-biz thing going on next to that, and the point was the conflict between the post-apocalyptic part and the shiny happy capitalism part. Cyberpunk.

Armed with this knowledge, I might go back and run another cyberpunk game some day. Using a setting built off of what I used for that original campaign, but making significantly more sense now that I have a better idea of what it's about. (That'll help with the novels I keep trying to write about it, too. A lot.)

One thing I know I'd change would be to add a lot more genetech to it. Gene manipulation, out of control retro-viruses, some kind of GM ecological disaster. In the real world, as a general rule, I think GM crops and gene therapy and so on are a good thing. But I like the themes their mis-use suggests, especially for a game. Lets me give people mutant powers and fun things like that. Out of control technology, generally, is something I'd like to play with; robots run amok and people buying military hardware off the street.

Unfortunately, I've got a lot of other games I'd like to run, so this may sit on the back-burner for a while. And I don't know what system I'd use -- I love d20 Modern, and I have both it and Future, but the equipment lists aren't that great, and I don't know that it handles genetech abilities that well. GURPS would be better in both those areas, but I'd actually have to send in my core books to get replaced (bad first 4th edition printing) and I'd want to get a couple other books. And while I like GURPS, I've never had that much success actually playing it.

Dungeons and Dragons and . . . Gladiators

With 4e, my long simmering idea to run a gladiator campaign has re-emerged. Not in anything approaching full force, mind you; the tropes of classic heroic adventure and sandbox-y wilderness exploration sing their own siren songs.

But ever since I read Dragon #303 (the only issue of Dragon I have ever owned, though now I'm not sure now where it is) I've thought that having an entire campaign revolve around the gladiatorial arena was a pretty neat idea. I put it aside in favor of other things, but what's got me thinking about it again is that I think 4e would be a much better fit for it than 3e.

Having just one fight per day wouldn't massively skew the power curve or the XP system; I'd just have to take into account that the players would pretty much be able to use all their dailies, if they wanted to, and make the fights a little tougher than usual. And the game seems geared towards big, set-piece battles, so I can use lots of monsters and throw in lots of gimmicks and I'd have a lot of support from the books on how to do that. It's also an excuse to use mechanically interesting but plainly bizarre monster combinations.

If I was going to do this, I'd make the party a team of gladiators, and the setting would revolve around them and other teams fighting monsters and occasionally each other. Put together a tournament system, some kind of rankings they could work up in, and probably use an actual, numerical system so the players have something to keep track of. Then add in enough behind the scene schemes within their stable and between stables to keep things interesting outside the fights, and to make ways to make the fights meaningful. Rivalries, bets and so on; maybe the start out in some small town, outskirts ring and have to work their way up to the big leagues, maybe there's an emperor who they can impress by pulling stunts and doing daring deeds in the ring, or particular kinds of daring deeds.

I'm still considering whether they'd be slaves or whether gladiatoring (gladiateering?) is legitimate employment. To a certain degree it depends on the death rate, and how final death is. I'm kind of leaning towards the former, based on its potential to generate subplots, but figuring out why they're crazy enough to want to be doing this could be interesting in itself. The free-agent model would also work better with mixing the idea with some urban adventuring/mystery solving.

There's a lot more I could do with this, but right now I haven't figured out where it ranks in the ever-shifting pantheon of games I want to run. I really badly want to do a straight up, 1st-30th sword&sorcery-ish exploration game, but I doubt that's particularly realistic. I'm also not sure which one I'd get more players for, as I don't yet have a solid college group, and might need to do some recruiting.

Character vs. Setting

As I was writing about the assumption of a long term campaign in 1st edition, it occurred to me (at least partly) why that is. The game is about the world, not the characters. That's why Gygax keeps going on about "the milieu," that's why the game is supposed to last as long as possible. Because the point is the world that everyone is building.

This is a huge contrast from the sort of game that I usually run, and learned how to run from the 3rd Edition DMG and places like Gnome Stew. The game is about the characters; when they end, when they die or their adventures come to a satisfactory conclusion, the game ends, and you start a new one.

And on a slight tangent, to me, character death makes a lot more sense in a game of the prior variety than the latter. If the point of the game is the world, then one character dying just means it's the end of his particular story, and the chance to add another dimension to the setting. In a game that's about the continuing adventures of one specific group of people, there are probably other ways for them to fail, without having to deal with a character-sized hole in the campaign. Which can work, and be interesting, depending on how the characters are related and what they're doing, but it's a lot more disruptive.

An Endless Campaign

The thing that really jumps out at me, as I read through the 1st Edition DMG, is the focus on long term play. 3rd Edition, the only one I've played so far, assumes the game tops out at about two years of solid play. I don't think the books explicitly discuss it, but that's the advancement rate built into the XP tables. Sure, you can go into epic, but then the game gets really dang weird, and you need another book.

4e goes even further. You can not play your character past 30th level, because at 30th level you get the power of "You die, but it's awesome." Which is perfectly good if you have one group of players and their awesome adventures, with plot arcs and so on. Eventually, you'll need to have a satisfying conclusion.

1st edition is different. Right off the bat, Gygax tells us that "Limitations, checks, balances, and all the rest are placed into the system in order to assure that what is based thereon will be a superior campaign, a campaign which offers the most interesting play possibilities to the greatest number of participants for the longest period of time possible." How well the system, the maths and so on, supports this, I can't say, not having played it, but that's at least what it's designer assumes you'll want to do with it.

The other main section that got me thinking along these lines was "Territory Development by Player Characters." You don't play your characters to the maximum level (or the maximum interesting level) and then start a new campaign; eventually, your characters should settle down, clear some land, and maybe continue adventuring but also start dealing with managing a stronghold and political maneuvering and so on. Then, even if that player leaves the game, the DM still has their character and their stronghold and their contributions made to the world, and can continue to use them as background for future adventures.

None of this is particularly new--I wouldn't necessarily have noticed it if I hadn't already read about the sandbox-y, multi-character nature of those early games, and their assumed end game. But it does seem to stand out.

Dreams of Continuity

I always get kind of jealous when I hear about people who have been running different campaigns using the same setting, often for decades. I've never had any kind of serious, long term continuity in my games. The longest campaign I've ever run lasted about six months, maybe a little longer. And each of them has had, at least in theory, a completely distinct setting.

Which has had its advantages. I've been able to play with a lot of different kinds of things, and I like that. But I've never had a setting that I worked on for a long period of time, that grew from something basic and straightforward to something complex and multi-faceted. I like the idea of having a project like that.

What I always get stuck on is in building a cosmology that can acommodate "anything." Some kind of mult-world thing. That's always where I get stuck on setting design, when I do get stuck; I get the idea into my head that I have to have some grand framework supporting the whole thing, and I can never get that finished. And making it "multi-world" from the beginning always ends up seeming ridiculous and forced and opening up all kinds of weird problems that I don't want to deal with.

So I'm going to stop doing that.

The campaign I'm going to run this summer will end when the summer ends. And setting isn't going to be its main focus; I'm starting it off with Keep on the Shadowfell, may consider moving on to Thunderspire Labyrinth if that goes well and doesn't bore me out of my mind. (Though I'm going to need something to write for WoAdWriMo, and using an adventure written for the campaign seems like the obvious thing to do.)

If I end up needing setting material, I'm going to start with the 4e default setting and work my way out from there, see how well that goes. I've had some success with taking existing settings and tweaking them to my needs, and I want to see what I can do with the new setting. In general, though, I plan to focus more on developing my description and encounter-level skills than my world-building and scheme-planning skills.

But I'm going to have another campaign to run in the fall, and if I like 4e, and I like whatever setting evolves out of the summer campaign . . .

Well, we'll see.

Character Death and a Good Campaign

I've been reading Jeff Rients' tales of PCs past and their rousing adventures, and something odd occurred to me: I've never had a character die. (Properly, in influencable circumstances, I mean. I've been victim of "rocks fall, everyone dies," but I don't know that quite counts.)

And I've had precious few character deaths on the other side of the screen. Three characters died in the "Desert Campaign," the most combat heavy game I ever ran, and the only one that had anything approaching a dungeon crawl. A couple died in the Gnome Town game I ran, but that was exclusively PC-on-PC violence.

In other campaigns, I had the occasional close call, but I always fudged it. Once I got a guy ressurected by the main villain of the piece (long story, it almost made sense at the time) and once I took the more convential route of "misremembering" how the dice came out.

Part of me feels bad about those incidents--lack of character, or something. Part of me thinks it worked for the campaigns. The way I tend to run games, I get very interested in the characters, and what they're going to do, and the history they're building for themselves. When I'm in the moment, running those kinds of games, even if I've said to myself beforehand that I'm going to let the dice fall where they may, killing them just seems like a waste of time.

On the other hand, fudging at the last minute probably isn't the best solution. But it always worked out alright. Those campaigns went fairly well, everyone mostly ended up having fun.

But the "Desert Campaign" was pretty fun, too. When people weren't arguing with me, or complaining that I wouldn't let them play a half-illithid whatever, anyway. But it had a different sort of style to it. We played at lunch, and it was mostly guys who liked building characters, killing things, and taking their stuff, in roughly that order. I flailed around a bit at the beginning, but once I figured out that what they reall wanted was to kick in the door and have a fight every day, things started to go pretty smoothly.

I was a lot less focused on story -- that is, what had happened before in the campaign, and what was going on outside the characters, and what might happen next if they didn't get involved -- and a lot more focused on what was going on in the fight of the day, and prepping the dungeon so I'd be ready for the next day.

Because I didn't particularly care about what the characters had done, or were going to do--they were interesting enough, on an individual level, but the the guy the player came up with next would be, too--I was a lot more comfortable really dropping the hammer on them. I even used a death ray on one of them.

It was fun. The players liked the fights, and the occasionally liked rolling up new characters, and not taking things too seriously. I had one guy who liked arguing, another who liked making just-barely-almost-broken characters, and another who liked playing the weirdest things he could find, but I handled it.

I liked the change of pace from my usual games, and actually getting to use the random monster and treasure tables in the Dungeon Master's Guide, for once. And I liked building the dungeon. The dungeon--which was, in the game, a tower, but in practice it was a dungeon--wasn't particularly good. It wasn't much more than a bunch of rooms filled with monsters and treasure. Very little in the way of traps, description, puzzles, or interaction amongst its inhabitants.

It did have a couple of virtues. It was extremely non-linear. Any place you could get to, you could get to in a couple of different ways. Which was good, because the players could still get to the stairs after they decided that the black dragon, and later the basilisk, just weren't worth messing with.

I think, if I'd continued to run that dungeon, or something like it, that I might have eventually worked out the finer points of dungeon design. But they finished it, killed the sorcerer at the top of the tower, and a short time later the campaign went on permanent hiatus, in favor of a campaign by the guy who liked to argue that ended pretty quickly, too.

It was fun while it lasted. I some important things from that game, even if, at the time, it was a source of serious frustration for me, and it didn't end quite how I would have liked.

I'm thinking about running my summer campaign along similar lines. Improve my dungeon design, because I know a lot more theory than I did then, that I'd like to put into practice. And maybe get more comfortable with PC death, so I don't back down from it as much even in games where specific characters are more important to the players, and to me. I'll have a good mix of players for that style, and it'd be good to test how well 4e can handle it.

Metal Steampunk Vikings

Yes. This is what my next campaign needs to be. Metal. Steampunk. Vikings.

Loud, horned hat dudes wandering around in a Conan-esque Lost World, fighting robots and finding rayguns.

Weird, clanking, brass and springs constructs rampaging around in the wilderness. Mysterious machines from dimensions beyond time. Mad scientists demanding tribute along with the necromancers and dragons and mad god-kings.

Dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs Make Everything Better

The PCs are all dinosaurs. You run around avoiding meteors and stomping things.

This could be played totally straight where the players are all dinosaurs doing dinosaur things. I spent a lot of time pretending I was a dinosaur as a kid, so there's got to be some fun there.

Or it could be more of a reverse Turok kind of deal, and the dinosaur-PCs eat Marines or Lost World explorers or scientists or whoever it would be entertaining for dinosaurs to eat.

Maybe Dinosaur Escape: Washington, D.C.

Multi-DM Persistent World Campaign

Crazy idea: a sandbox game with no regular group, in the style of the West Marches but with the setting that powers it shared between multiple DMs.

This could just be on the design end: you have multiple people collaborating on a setting that one of them then uses to run a game. Co-operative worldbuiling. Or you could get fancier, and have each participating DM run their own player pool through the game.

Which could, in turn, run a couple of ways. You could have multiple independent games, seperated geographically or by convention, or you could have multiple DMs supporting the same player pool, with players switching back and forth between games. My personal situation better supports the former option, since I don't know many other DMs locally. But the second option could be interesting.

There big issues I've identified so far are time-keeping, DMing style, and griefing.

That last is also the least important; though I assume there's some potential for one DM to put way to powerful monsters in places they're not supposed to be, without warning for the players or the other DMs, a little thought put into who you invite into the project ought to keep the chance to a minimum. A bigger problem would be people doing that kind of thing accidentally, but that would happen even in a single-DM game.

Slightly bigger issue is time-keeping; if you put everyone on personal time, affected solely by in-game activities, as I tend to do in my normal games, then you could potentially end up with some groups way behind others, depending on how active the different DMs are. Then you get weirdness like dungeons that haven't been cleared out yet, but will be, so you can't go there because of what will happen, but hasn't. My solution would be to put everyone on universal time, perhaps locked to real-world time, and your character hangs around in taverns until you take them out on another adventure. (Which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing for a character to do.)

Finally, DM style. Part of the idea behind the set-up would be to produce an environment with greater depth and variety than one DM can provide, but this could go too far. And everyone involved would have to use a similar format in their world notes, and a similar level of rigor in applying those notes.

This could work, and it might be fun. It's not something that's likely to happen; I'm probably too distractible to pull something like that off. The vision I have in my head is of a game that keeps going for years, with different players and different DMs, but one persistent world. But at least in my case, it's more likely to stay just as an idea.

EDIT: Reposted because I just realized I misspelled the title. Why do I keep doing that?

What I Might Actually Run

I still haven't gotten a handle on what I'm going to run this summer. I was going to do a sequel to last year's game, but that fell through when it turned out one of the main players wouldn't be able to make it for most of it. I could still run it, but I'd rather do something new, and go back to it later when I've got another game between the old game and the new one.

A significant part of me very, very much would like to run 4e. Not unreservedly, but enough that it's probably what I'll end up doing.

My original plan was to run the preview module, Keep on the Shadowfell, and spin off from there. Maybe even go on to Thunderspire Labyrinth, if Shadowfell is any good. I've never actually run a published module before, and I've got an idea that I might learn something from it.

Of course, I'm also thinking about running a palette-swap on the system, fiddling with the flavor to make it more steampunk. A couple of my players have indicated an interest in the genre, and I'd have a fair few crazy ideas to mine for a setting.

My other major ideas for 4e are to go with (a heavily hacked version of) the new default settting, or make it metal. These ideas are not incompatible, nor are they in oppostion to the idea of starting off with a published module. Even the steampunk idea could be made to work with that; I'd just have to file the serial numbers off the adventure, too.

And then there's the non-4e ideas. I've still never run Eberron, despite it being on my list since it came out, but the two players who have the book are the two who aren't available this summer. I've had Iron Heroes for ages, but I'm more likely to loot it for parts for a 4e game, since if I'm going to run a relatively combat heavy game I'd rather try out the monster/encounter set-up the new edition promises. Encounter Critical is an option; though a few people have expressed desire for a "serious" game, it might work as a pre-4e mini-campaign if I decide not to start the game with the module.

The final factor is the sandbox/megadungeon/hexcrawl game I want to run in the somewhat near future. That's not likely to happen this summer, partially due to player interest, partially due to work requirements. More likely, I'll run something else over the summer and start working on the sandbox thing either during that or right after it ends.