How do You, Yes You, Start a New Campaign

[MGibster]

In the past, after deciding which game we wanted to play, I just had everyone make their characters and tried to fit all the characters together in the same manner I might use a hammer to turn a bag of marshmallows into one giant marshmallow. Oftentimes I found that this could have less than optimal results.


These days I think of which games I want to run, what kind of campaign I want to run within those games, and I ask all the players which game/campaign sounds like the most fun to them. During the 1st game session we all make our characters together and go on from there.

Anyone else do something different?

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by MGibster

Anyone else do something different?

No, that's pretty much it. The only difference, and it's a small one, is that I may coordinate character creation via email or some similar medium so that we don't spend precious group time on what can be done as a series of one-on-one interactions.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by MGibster

These days I think of which games I want to run, what kind of campaign I want to run within those games, and I ask all the players which game/campaign sounds like the most fun to them. During the 1st game session we all make our characters together and go on from there.

Anyone else do something different?

That's a lot like what I do. But what's the medium? I come up with a list of several or many possible campaigns, write up short descriptions, and hand the list around. I pick campaigns so that players end up in something on which they bid at least 2 points (out of a total of 2N for N campaigns); ideally at least 3 points.

In my particular case, this is complicated by my having enough players to run two or three campaigns in parallel, each meeting once a month. So part of the selection process is sorting people out by preferred campaigns.

So, for example, in the current turnover,

DF and JPS are going from Sovereignty to Inhuman Space
EB is going from Sovereignty to Vor
JT and MB are going from Sovereignty to Fixers
AL, LL, and SS are going from Foam of Perilous Seas to Vor
CK and RY are going from Foam of Perilous Seas to Inhuman Space
JHH is going from Foam of Perilous Seas to Fixers

and I'm bringing in five people who weren't in the previous cycle (though two of them have been in earlier campaigns of mine).

Bill Stoddard

[Agemegos]

I can start in any of several ways. Back in the day two or three players would sometimes come to me and say "Please run a Gehennum game for us."

Of late it has usually started out with my getting fired up with enthusiasm for a particular campaign idea, or perhaps for a small collection of ideas. Then I write a prospectus for the campaign I want to run, or a small collection of prospectuses, one for each campaign idea. I try to keep those brief, but they have to be explicit and specific. I circulate these prospectuses among possible players, and wait about a week for expressions of interest. Potential players ask to play in the campaigns that they want to play in, and not in the campaigns they don't, and they tell me what schedules they can make. Then I try to put together a group or groups for one or more games.

This done, I hold group discussions about that PCs ought to be in each campaign, motivations, relationships, and mutual foiling. When I am satisfied that everyone has suitable character idea I announce how characters are to be statted, and players go away to generate their characters. They submit drafts to me, and then we have a (typically somewhat protracted) process of statting, reviewing, and revising characters, during which character concepts are refined and, sometimes, players reconsider their decisions to play.

It works fairly well, but unfortunately my circumstances make holding a game together rather difficult.

If I were in a place with a wider and more definite circle of players I'd like to try a process more like whswhs's. The one time I tried it I only had enough players to assemble two groups with considerable overlap, and time constraints did not permit.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by MGibster

These days I think of which games I want to run, what kind of campaign I want to run within those games, and I ask all the players which game/campaign sounds like the most fun to them. During the 1st game session we all make our characters together and go on from there.

That's what I've been doing, mostly. For my "impatiently awaiting GURPS CCoI" game, I gave them the rules: Come up with a concept for a 15 year old character from a village in a medieval European style fantasy setting, and we'll make the characters together.

We wound up with a squire, a blacksmith's apprentice, an acolyte, and the village wise woman's pupil.

My biggest problem is that once the game gets going, incoming characters (either new players or second characters) sometimes can't get enough attention, and wind up suffering from marshmallow-hammer syndrome.

[knarf]

It usually starts with me picking a system and possibly a setting. I have my group create characters together, in order to create synergy and connections between the PCs and touch on what they want out of the setting. After that session, I will spend my time brainstorming a plot that will encompass those characters and the setting and plot points that they express interest in. Though as I think on it, having a more complete prospectus and more input in the game I'm running seems like a better idea.

[Luke Bunyip]

Given that players can run off in tangents like a bunch of kittens, or worse, a Kombi van load of hippies, I have one phrase of advice: Player Character Generation Templates.

[Sydney]

I just decide on a genre (my current game is a Celtic-Wuxia game, low power presently, but looking to get up there in a few months) invite players who might be interested if they'd like to play, hammer out a game time, and then they make characters with help from me to better fit them into the setting. Presently, I'm building a wiki here for my current game.

[OneSeventeen]

I will refer three posts written by my co-conspirator and I on our blog, then add some further information. The first is my post on where I get inspiration, how I invent the plot and get the PCs mixed into it: How To Make A Campaign. Of related interest are how we structure a campaign and what we think makes a good PC. I don't want to cross-post all of that because they're all three pretty long.

Not covered in these posts explicitly is that I do not build PCs all together. Over a series of months (generally), I'll have several meetings with each player just the two of us as we discuss their character ideas and answer various questions and hash out their place in the campaign world. In the background, I'm working out hooks to get them plugged into the events I've got in mind for the over-arching plot. Eventually, we'll have a good enough understanding of the character as a person that we bust out the rules and figure out how to describe that concept as far as stats go. This approach works best in a system like GURPS (or BESM or Savage Worlds?) with codified advantages and disadvantages and flexible ability paths.

The advantage of this siloing of PC creation is that it allows for PCs who do not know each other at that start of the campaign and have secrets. I've found that it's very, very difficult for players to fake two characters having known each other for years from the outset, especially since the players will barely know their own characters yet. They can then reveal their secrets at a dramatically appropriate time later on, or hoard them, or whatever. It also doesn't time-sink everyone's time at once while we talk about the other PCs. Since it's a lengthy figuring out process for each player, everyone would spend more time talking and thinking about characters that aren't theirs, rather than theirs, which I don't think is constructive in building an understanding of their own fledgling character.

I hope it's not terribly rude to link out so much in the intro. If you don't click over, I think the point about building characters separately is big enough to warrant a reply on its own.


Ben

[Toads]

Being that the group Tech13 (does he still post here?) and I belong to has the blessing and curse of being ten people strong there’s always someone that wants to run the next campaign. That said, one time after we gathered a week after the last Discworld game wrapped up we realized that no one had a campaign ready. So I said, “Fine, the system is Risus. I’ll roll a d12 to give us the GURPS TL.”

I rolled a 10.

‘Okay, Sci-Fi it is. I’ll roll a d4. 1 is hard sci-fi, a 4 is space opera.”

I rolled a 3.

“Okay, That’s super science, but no aliens.”

I took ten minutes to formulate a dystopian future and a ship that looked like a watermelon and we had “Matt’s Sci-Fi game” that took us through almost six months.

Later when we were each confessing what we suck at as GM’s Tech13 expressed disbelief at my ability to make a randomly generated campaign work.

I’d like to pat myself on the back more, but it’s late.