New Campaign Building Style

Oh alas my poor abandoned blog! I have returned to you now that I am planning on running a D&D game again and will hopefully add some observations about 4e game play.

Anyway, my new game has developed out of experiences with my last couple campaigns. My goal in what I think was my first cambridge campaign was to have a kind of special story for each character. My original thought in doing this was to give each character a unique little power boost as well as an interesting side story. It worked pretty well. One of the memorable story lines was the clones of Sojano. I also really liked a side story about how one character became a Weretiger which really confused the players when they were attacked by a tiger in the middle of the city. Unfortunately that player moved on before this story went too far.

I felt like this was such a success that I tried to replicate it in my future games having each character have some little interesting side story. I found that these side stories tended to have as much or more player involvement than the main plotlines.

I was also running a player in the traditional Dragonlance game. I hadn't read the novels at that point. Because the game was based on a novel there was a back story and our characters were worked into things. It was very cool that my character was the son of the main bad guy and it was awesome when I cut his head off! Sneak attack / power attack forcing an instant death save! Although when I realized I couldn't fail at this due to a plot point it took a little wind out of my sails. Of course, when I went back and read the novels everything was eerily familiar....

Anyway, I think what happens with a lot of games is that the game story and campaign are developed without the players. A DM or publishing company creates a world and adventure and the players create characters to jump into this story. What I wanted to try and do was not just have the characters have interesting side stories, but for them to be the main story. In a work of fiction the characters aren't random adventurers who wander into the situation they are key pieces of the situation. They are the desposed princes, the victims, the children of prophecy and so on. In the game I am currently struggling to start I wanted to instead of trying to make a cool idea in my own head, to take the characters and try and make the campaign be their story.

I am still in the planning stage of this game, but I got some mixed success. Some players gave more input and some less. The input was spread out over weeks leading me to focus on the story of some characters while ignoring others. So the central story I have now feels a little lopsided, but I like it. I think it will be more like my previous campaigns than I had planned. Each character will have a storyline. I have rough outlines for many of the characters that have been presented already. Although I don't plan on getting too detailed since who knows where their travels will take them and making assumptions about their still forming character personalities is dangerous. For example, Elymas Rell didn't really seem to care that his family had been kidnapped by demons and probably would have gladly sold their souls for power.... There will also be a central storyline that binds them. I am hoping that answering their 'personal' quests will help involve them more in the central story.

So I generated a set of questions for players to answer, but I noticed that there was a vaguely similar set of questions in the DMG2. There were more and they were more specific so maybe I will take some more inspiration from those questions in the future.