Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomsdad
This is a great idea, at the very least have a conversation beforehand. It's much easier for everyone to have fun if we all know the kind of fun we're all trying to have!
I'm lucky enough to have regular group for decades* now so a lot of the above is already built in for us, but I would recommend do this kind of stuff for groups who are new to each other (and even the addition of one new member makes a new group where this would be a worthwhile exercise).
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For a large part of my gaming career, roughly from 1992 to 2016, I had a mostly established group of players in San Diego, which was familiar with my overall style. But it was larger than I could fit into one campaign. My practice was to run two or three campaigns in parallel. When I was ready for a change, I would hand around a list of possible next campaigns—from half a dozen to fifty, and described in anything from a sentence to half a page, at different times—and ask players to bid points for the ones they wanted, with a budget where 2 points was an "average" bid. I guaranteed not to put a player in a campaign where they bid 0, and I don't recall ever having to put one in a campaign where they bid 1; most players ended up in campaigns where they bid 3 or more.
I could always pick out campaigns that were widely enough favored to make this possible, so one payoff was letting me choose campaigns to run that people liked, at least prospectively. Another was that players had bought into the basic idea; I wasn't trying to push them into something I liked and they didn't much like.
I realize that this situation isn't usual for GMs, and I adopted a somewhat different approach after moving to Riverside. But the basic technique of looking for a campaign idea that players are disposed to like, rather than choosing the idea and then trying to sell the players on it, seems to me a productive one. And it can be a useful exercise to try to come up with several different ideas for campaigns and think about how you might handle each of them.