The Campaign Builder's Guild

Been busy, been lazy, been away. How's things?

I'm teaching lately, and that eats up a lot of my time. Funny how life gets busy on you. For a while now, I've wanted to run a game or something, but I've been involved in a long-running game as a player (every week since, hmm... August 2011?) and it's been hard to justify spending more than one night a week on this sort of thing. (Leaving aside, for the moment, the amount of time that I'd have to put into prepwork between sessions. I already do enough of that for class.)

But hey, who knows, that may change. I've got to channel my nerdstyle energies into some outlet, I guess?

Two things I've been pretty excited about that I don't have my hands on yet are Hillfolk and Dungeon World. I think they might have a lot of potential! (My latest computer game obsession is Avernum: Escape from the Pit, and it's gotten me thinking about the possibility of Dungeon World or some other old-school throwback game set in some hardscrabble civilization within a subterranean cavern system. I think it has some potential!)

I also have some notions for games that deviate from the standard "you're a party of adventurers" group structure, and some format ideas that would make it work a little better. I've got a hypothesis that the adventuring party cliche is an artifact of the way gaming groups are set up, and particularly with online formats, there are other possibilities out there. I really want to try this with Amber Diceless at some point.

I've also got ideas for Scion, but I figure that's probably because I just got off of a long campaign of that game, and I think maybe me and Scion need some space, start seeing other people for a while, you know, see how that works out.

Is everybody's plate always this full?

Man, I haven't even started thinking about setting premises, this is all about games I want to run.

Full plate as well, but almost done with my term papers, then free for a month, which hopefully means I will have some time to work on SuperMassive/Grindelrath/Arga.

Haven't gamed in a looong time though, I feel very much out of the loop.

I'm busy, too. I just got a new job and I'm caught in a cycle of special classes/training I need to take for it as well as job shadowing/putting in my 2 weeks in my other two during-college gigs. Phew! Talk about being between worlds. Transitional periods have always made for tumultuous times for poor Weave, but I seem to be managing.

I kinda wanna get a FATE game started using these newfangled FATE rules off of the kickstarter, but that's fairly nebulous right now in terms of planning. I'll eventually get to it, but I need to settle up in my new job before I commit. You should totally post some of these game ideas you have.

Finishing up my undergraduate thesis right now in my other monitor.  Once that's done though, I should be around for some feedback and setting writing magic.  School is the time-killer.

Thanks for reminding me that I need to back that FATE kickstarter. I'm curious to see what they're cooking up.

I've got a bunch of vague setting premise-type ideas buzzing around; nothing really fully-formed yet. I'm taking a break from hyper-detailed encyclopedic worlds like the Jade Stage for a while, to see whether I still can agree with that approach philosophically or not. (As opposed to a more open-ended premise where players have more power to define the world because less of it is nailed down at the outset.)

I have some vague notions about wanting to have players explore creepy and complex magic, with maybe rival schools of sorcery that run on entirely opposed metaphysics/ethics. Maybe in the modern world, with a healthy dose of conspiracy theories, coverups, and secret brotherhoods.

I've also got a bunch of weird notions about the fusing of technology and divinity that might make decent games. Not sure where that line of thought came from, exactly.

I can honestly say that my life, already crazy, is in overdrive right now.  We created a retail board to run the company, and I am on that, coaching and training staff, working with the marketing, and still outselling the other 106 salespeople in the company in my spare time.

I have Accis, my Bronze age thing for quick pick ups games, and I still work on GS/Celtricia as I still run my groups there, but that is pretty much my only social outlet. 

It is good to hear from you; and to read about your, 'weird notions'.

I look forward to your work oh wax stick of perpetual lighting.

I think that one of my favorite things to do with rpg books, because I don't game often, is to read the back history of the settings and stuff. I think that you should do whatever you want, but I don't see anything wrong with a richly written setting.

This is turning into the "everybody says what they've been up to while busy" thread, and I support that wholeheartedly.

Well, I got hired towards the beginning of Octogre at a place I shall call Thank Ye Gods Tis Thor's Day.   I wash dishes.  I'm not exactly over-joyed, but, eh, it's some kind of money.

My internet access is rather sporadic.  I've got some ideas for playing my Island City World of Darkness campaign with my older younger brother and maybe his friends/housemates.


Is that Nomadic November Contest going to get called while I'm still winning?

Quote from: its'-a me, LCI'm taking a break from hyper-detailed encyclopedic worlds like the Jade Stage for a while, to see whether I still can agree with that approach philosophically or not. (As opposed to a more open-ended premise where players have more power to define the world because less of it is nailed down at the outset.)

Quote from: Newb Again..I think that one of my favorite things to do with rpg books, because I don't game often, is to read the back history of the settings and stuff. I think that you should do whatever you want, but I don't see anything wrong with a richly written setting.

I should maybe clarify what's going on in my thinkmeats, here.

There are multiple approaches, and I don't want to imply that one is right and one is wrong, just that I'm exploring my preferences to find out what sorts of things I'm most interested in spending my time and energy on.

I think there's a lot to be said for big, encyclopedic settings. A lot of people love them, and get a lot out of them. I think they set a group up to be more easily able to get certain things out of the game (including the i-word) which I do not believe are objectively the best goals for a game experience (because I don't think there's such a thing), but which are many players' favorite goals.

Lately I've been getting the idea that small, spare, nimble settings have a lot of serious advantages of their own. They don't have hundreds of pages of backstory and history and mythos to learn, which means they have a low bar for entry, which I believe makes them inviting and accessible to new players (and for groups who want to switch games every couple of months). And they are often more easily modified, so that if players decide at the start of the game that they want it to be about a bronze-age desert sultanate city where "magic" is secretly the result of the advanced technological gifts of an extraterrestrial spacefaring race seeking to influence the development of civilization on this primitive test-planet (or whatever), there's room to write most or all of that in. (Couldn't really do that scenario in Jade Stage, or Celtricia, etc. Could probably do it in Asura, but hey, they line up a bit.)

(See what I mean about technology = divinity? I didn't even plan that one; it just came out that way.)

Anyway, it's not that large, detailed settings are a problem, or that smaller, the-entire-map-just-says-"here-be-dragons" settings are better, it's just that they do well at different things, and are desirable for different reasons. And I'm at a point where I'm trying to decide what I want out of my hobby and how to best get it.

Interesting thread.  it seems to me the challenge in creating "nimble" or more "free-form" settings is deciding on constraints.  In a sense, an encyclopaedic world is hyper-constrained: everything is nailed-down, fixed, predetermined.  A smaller, freer world is obviously less constrained as there are more blanks to fill in, more unknowns to concoct; but it still needs certain frames, a measure of rigidity, constraints on creation, or it becomes so amorphous that it's silly.

I'm very interested in your "party-as-artifact-of-gaming" theory and your ideas for alternatives.  What kind of alternate models are you envisioning?

Quote from: Steerpike
Interesting thread.  it seems to me the challenge in creating "nimble" or more "free-form" settings is deciding on constraints.  In a sense, an encyclopaedic world is hyper-constrained: everything is nailed-down, fixed, predetermined.  A smaller, freer world is obviously less constrained as there are more blanks to fill in, more unknowns to concoct; but it still needs certain frames, a measure of rigidity, constraints on creation, or it becomes so amorphous that it's silly.

This is a very valid point. Much as I'd enjoy sitting down with a group of buddies and start working on a new setting, having no constraints could end up being paralyzingly broad. That said, big settings can be paralyzingly stifling. I think finding a solid medium between the two concepts is reachable, but it's also one that depends on your group of players. It's also easier to create a setting "from scratch" (so to speak) when you really know the people you're playing with and what they like. It's hard to do that over the internet.

I'd like to add that sparkletwist and I have been working pretty successfully at expanding upon Opus, which has been tons of fun. It doesn't hurt that we tend to think fairly similarly ;). I'll probably have to put her name in the front page somewhere...

Quote from: Steerpike
Interesting thread.  it seems to me the challenge in creating "nimble" or more "free-form" settings is deciding on constraints.

Yup.

QuoteI'm very interested in your "party-as-artifact-of-gaming" theory and your ideas for alternatives.  What kind of alternate models are you envisioning?

It all really has to do with scheduling, I think.

My theory is this: you traditionally have had gaming when your gaming group met at someone's house for pizza, and all sat around the same table together, and all played at the same time. Your time is limited, because you only meet up for this hobby maybe once a week, and all the players have to share the attention of a single GM/ST/facilitator/whatev. So it only makes sense to stick together as a group, because if you split the group, the GM's attention is split as well, and while you're in the group that doesn't have the GM's attention, you're basically just not playing. And that's part of your limited weekly time to enjoy your hobby that's not getting used to the fullest.

So this is a common format, and it's one that has been around during the whole evolution of gaming, and gaming's conventions and assumptions have been shaped as a result. So the "adventuring party" is a thing that's taken for granted, when I am convinced that it doesn't need to be-- it's one of many possibly arrangements, it just happens to be the one that fits pretty naturally with the "one GM, many players, meeting face to face at a specified time" setup that is so widespread.

But now we have online gaming, and that opens up a lot of new ideas.

I played in a game recently that was run over Skype for quite a long time, and it had two Skype channels: in "in-character" channel that was only ever used once a week during our scheduled game session (as if we were playing face-to-face), and an OOC channel which was used to ask questions and make OOC comments about the game. But everybody stayed in the OOC channel all week, and between sessions, would use it to post silly links and talk about Skyrim and make plans and comments about the upcoming game session. To the point where at any time during the week, there were usually at least two or three people in the OOC channel, often but not always talking about the game.

So I'm thinking: if you've got an online game where people are just hanging out all the time anyway, why stick rigidly to a once-per-week scheduled timeslot? You can run this shit whenever you like!

I've got a notion where you have a setup like this: you've got a scheduled, everybody-plays-at-once session maybe once a month, and the rest of the time, you run little one- and two-person mini-adventures whenever anybody happens to be online and feel up for it. That way you've got a handful of mostly independent characters having mostly independent adventures, but they're connected by this recurring touchstone and by the fact that they can reach out and interact with each other whenever they need help (or a victim for their wrath, or whatever). Like, maybe you've got a "wizzard college" game where once a month you've got the big faculty meeting where you combine your powers to shore up the wards confining Yob Soddoth and also you plan the syllabus for your undergraduate Magical Theory class starting in the fall, and the rest of the time you're just a lone hermetical sage, piddling around or writing your grimoire or going on quests or summoning gremlins to blow up your alchemy lab tower annex, or whatever you want.

The idea is: it's not really a traditional "everybody get together hey it's time to play" game, and it's not really running a bunch of one-shots in the same world, but it's something in between the two that will (hopefully) allow you to touch the best parts of each.

I've also got some crazy notions inspired by Polaris but those are less well-formed and less ready for actual implementation, so, man I don't even know.

I do appreciate and agree with many premises here.
Though some of it still comes back to the heretical 'gm tweaks things to keep challenges in line"
(heretical for me---fine and fun and I do it when I have to but the 'I' word always suffers in my estimation)

but online is different, as you said.  in SIG, Limetom and I run Moss back in Steel Isle Town when he is the only one who shows.  SOmetimes he re-writes a bit that I need to change, but I can do that.  Point being, that this replicares our old gaming group ideal of 'whoever shows dictates whcih group we are playing'. 

And I agree with you about the timing.  I am busy enough to not be able to be online all the time, but this also means that I want to get online gaming in whenever I can....

Quote from: Luminous Crayon

Quote from: Steerpike
Interesting thread.  it seems to me the challenge in creating "nimble" or more "free-form" settings is deciding on constraints.

Yup.

QuoteI'm very interested in your "party-as-artifact-of-gaming" theory and your ideas for alternatives.  What kind of alternate models are you envisioning?

It all really has to do with scheduling, I think.

My theory is this: you traditionally have had gaming when your gaming group met at someone's house for pizza, and all sat around the same table together, and all played at the same time. Your time is limited, because you only meet up for this hobby maybe once a week, and all the players have to share the attention of a single GM/ST/facilitator/whatev. So it only makes sense to stick together as a group, because if you split the group, the GM's attention is split as well, and while you're in the group that doesn't have the GM's attention, you're basically just not playing. And that's part of your limited weekly time to enjoy your hobby that's not getting used to the fullest.

So this is a common format, and it's one that has been around during the whole evolution of gaming, and gaming's conventions and assumptions have been shaped as a result. So the "adventuring party" is a thing that's taken for granted, when I am convinced that it doesn't need to be-- it's one of many possibly arrangements, it just happens to be the one that fits pretty naturally with the "one GM, many players, meeting face to face at a specified time" setup that is so widespread.

But now we have online gaming, and that opens up a lot of new ideas.

I played in a game recently that was run over Skype for quite a long time, and it had two Skype channels: in "in-character" channel that was only ever used once a week during our scheduled game session (as if we were playing face-to-face), and an OOC channel which was used to ask questions and make OOC comments about the game. But everybody stayed in the OOC channel all week, and between sessions, would use it to post silly links and talk about Skyrim and make plans and comments about the upcoming game session. To the point where at any time during the week, there were usually at least two or three people in the OOC channel, often but not always talking about the game.

So I'm thinking: if you've got an online game where people are just hanging out all the time anyway, why stick rigidly to a once-per-week scheduled timeslot? You can run this shit whenever you like!

I've got a notion where you have a setup like this: you've got a scheduled, everybody-plays-at-once session maybe once a month, and the rest of the time, you run little one- and two-person mini-adventures whenever anybody happens to be online and feel up for it. That way you've got a handful of mostly independent characters having mostly independent adventures, but they're connected by this recurring touchstone and by the fact that they can reach out and interact with each other whenever they need help (or a victim for their wrath, or whatever). Like, maybe you've got a "wizzard college" game where once a month you've got the big faculty meeting where you combine your powers to shore up the wards confining Yob Soddoth and also you plan the syllabus for your undergraduate Magical Theory class starting in the fall, and the rest of the time you're just a lone hermetical sage, piddling around or writing your grimoire or going on quests or summoning gremlins to blow up your alchemy lab tower annex, or whatever you want.

The idea is: it's not really a traditional "everybody get together hey it's time to play" game, and it's not really running a bunch of one-shots in the same world, but it's something in between the two that will (hopefully) allow you to touch the best parts of each.

I've also got some crazy notions inspired by Polaris but those are less well-formed and less ready for actual implementation, so, man I don't even know.

That... Is actually a pretty cool idea... I like it. In fact I love it!

Still how is this done? Is it done through forum pbp,or PMing?