Evil Schemes
It’s no easy thing being a manipulative bastard. You make notes. You make outlines. You try to plan for contingencies, but you leave room for unexpected hijinks and improvisation. Your are the very model of evil plotting mastermind. So when your players inevitably ask you, “Did you plan for all this from the start!?” you will steeple your fingers together and say, “Yes, of course.” But you will be lying.
No matter how much blood, sweat, and notebook paper you put into planning a long-term campaign, you will have to make revisions on the fly. That’s where the aforementioned hijinks and improvisation come in.
I always put it like this. When I write a module, campaign outlines, or individual session notes, I try to include a “most likely path” for the adventure to unfold. “Most likely they will walk in through the front gate. Then they can try to fight the guarding. Then encounter the next thing in sequential order.” There’s a reason that dungeon rooms are numbered, after all. But the second you begin to assume that you can rely on that order of operations, your players will discover shovels and begin digging their own tunnels around your orderly flowchart/dungeon.
Learn to let them. Sure your “most likely plot” is cool. But the ones your players are enacting? That’s cooler.
And that leads us to the question of the day! It’s one for the GMs, and it goes something like this: Do you know how your campaign is going to end? Or do you opt for “what feels right” in the moment? Tell us all your plotful planning and sudden revisions down in the comments!
Depends on the campaign.
I have a number of campaigns (many now defunct) that are or were carried out in the same homebrew fantasy world. Some were silly, some semi-serious, but regardless, the heroes come and go, but that world persists and (fates willing) will continue to entertain folks for decades to come.
The superhero campaign has always continued in my head in real time. Each session would recap what happened between adventures to advance each hero’s personal investigations. Now (if we ever play that game again), there will be a general levelling-up and a recap of the effects of the Covid-equivalent pandemic in the Hero-Verse.
I have players in a samurai campaign who may or may not be aware that there is in fact an endgame of sorts and at least one PC (now jito of a small estate) may be approaching it more rapidly than he thinks.
That supers game is great. Love that you’re folding in the IRL plot twist of COVID in-universe.
My group defies my expectations in the best ways, and I always strive to reward them for their efforts
In my last campaign, I had to rewrite my entire campaign after the third session because they decided to hear out the first boss that was able to talk. They were trapped in a nightmarish prison plane far in the outer realms where an old god was slumbering, and a former group of adventurers from an ancient civilisation had decided to ingest the old god’s ichor to gain immortality to serve as the god’s jailor for all time.
The ORIGINAL plan was, they were going to be tragic former heroes driven to insanity by the ages and the blood they drank; it was going to end with their guide, the only one who had managed to hold on to their sanity, having had the party kill his old friends, offer to kill them with a sacred blade that will cause their souls to be reincarnated into their home plane with no knowledge of the horrors they endured, and should they refuse he will fight them and either A) kill them, sending them back, or B) they kill HIM and become the new jailors in a cyclical sort of way.
However, they LOVED the idea of saving these poor tortured souls. They sought ways to cure their blood afflictions, help mend their broken minds, and by the end of the campaign had rallied everyone in the nightmare to stand against the ones that trapped them in the first place; the first ever hag coven, who wanted to use the cycle of death to empower and free the moon god.
Throughout the campaign, they exceeded my expectations and turned what I had INTENDED to be a tragedy into a story of hope, the strength of a determined spirit, and the might that comes from standing with allies and friends to overcome all odds.
The bit that hit me was how much they came to love these characters I made, they saw the memories of these flawed heroes, and saw all the atrocities they had to commit in order to keep the old god in his prison, and helped them battle personal demons that had haunted them for millennia to allow them to once more be the noble heroes they started out as.
By the end, they had redeemed and saved former heroes Godfrey, Archibald, Sand in the Bloodstained Desert (tabaxi names, man.), Henry Edwards, and Benedict Basilisk; they had brought peace to the soul of Draco von Tempest, the first vampire king; they had slain Dorothy, Aunt Agnes, and Greatmother Margaret, the Coven of the Blood Moon; They had cured the souls of the village of twelve branches, and they left the Lunar God with a new set of jailors: The Vampires of Isle Von Tempest, just about the only group that would be able to exist in a land of eternal night and endless blood without risking their sanity.
Tears were shed by myself and my party when the campaign ended, and every character they interacted with over the three-and-a-half years got a special mention in the epilogue.
You’re a good GM, Tegu. And you’ve got some excellent players. :’)
I don’t GM much, but in general, no… I’m a “play to see what happens” type as a GM as much as a player. Like you, I plan for what seems most likely to happen (and a few contingencies) and have some elements I want to fit in at some point… but ultimately you just have to go with the flow, and see where it ends up, maybe try to steer things back into charted territory if they’re going too far astray.
Chris Perkins did a great article about “the broken railroad” in his Dungeon Master Experience series. The gently steering back into track sounds like his style.
My comment wasn’t so much about a railroad, more about providing a path, a map. It’s good to let the players drive things, but doing so runs the danger of them getting lost… and unless you’re running a full-on sandbox, you want to give them a “campaign is that way” sign.
I see it enough as a player, seizing on some irrelevant detail, or jumping to a wrong conclusion based on incomplete evidence… and while it’s sometimes fun to let that play out, it’s sometimes better that the GM drops some extra information to show you’re chasing a false lead, etc.
Yes. King Arthur and Mordred will kill each other on the field of Camlann, Galahad will have ascended to heaven, after finding the Grail, and Lancelot and Guinevere will enter a monastery/convent respectively. In The Great Pendragon Campaign (GPC)(large campaign book for KAP), you more or less play the whole Arthurian story, from before Arthur is born until just after his death. However…. Even then it can go off the rials. In the GPC that I was part of, Arthur and Guinevere never married, because when he first laid eyes upon her, he fumbled his rolls, and came to fear/hate/loath her. However, after that our GM managed to keep the whole thing going, up to the big battle on Camlann field in which (almost) all of our player knights died.
No way to escape fate for “the big moments” in the legend?
Well, yes and no. As you do have agency as characters, and not all GM’s follow the canon, or allow players to be present at the big events, or players have other things to do during those events, the amount of fate to escape can and will vary. However, there is very little possibility to escape the Big One at the end. Basically both Mordred and Arthur will be gathering anyone who can, and wants, to hold a weapon for their cause. As the whole of the kingdom, and the surrounding countries, are very much radicalized into the Arthurian (knighthood is for protecting the people) and the Mordred (might makes right, I have a sword, and you don’t so you give me your stuff, or you die, and I’ll get them anyway) factions. anyone who is not for one of them, will be assumed to be for the other, so any waverers will be better off by choosing, and going with the big armies, as that is the best change for survival. However, as hinted above, at least two of our player knights managed to survive the whole battle, against very long odds. The same happened earlier, for instance at the Night of the Knives, in which two player knights were busy with preparing a royal feast elsewhere, so were not killed by those duplicitous Saxons. Part of this was the work of the GM, but the other part was just player agency. The players did not know of the treachery, and were very surprised that if happened. And grateful that they were not present to be killed. So yes, it is possible to miss the big moments
Never. Even when running a commercial module, the players have always managed to surprise me and go on tangents. I might know the general layout of the ending, but it’s final shape is always a surprise.
My general campaigns are always freeform, open world exploring. I might throw in story arcs now and then for fun, but it’s always up to the players (well ALMOST always) as to where they go and what they will be doing. I’m used to doing hours long sessions off the top of my head based on the actions of the party. As long as I have my trusty stack of random encounters and they’re in a fleshed out part of my world, I have a fairly robust idea of what they might encounter and how to present it.
Oh, and dice, must not forget the dice!
How is that different from my own formulation of “most likely path?”
Knowing how it ends? I can barely get results anywhere near a writen adventure, often having to point put that what they brought back wasn’t the goal. Hell I’m afraid they would bring the dragon instead of princess if I ever sent them to a task like that… Assuming that the paladin who got traumaticed by a youngling dragons breath attack would ever agree to facing one again.
Also any game that uses dice means plans are worthless other than setups. Because no much you don’t want it or consent to it, one bad roll your character can become monster chow.
But i mean… There are plenty of ways back from the unpleasant land of monster chow. Revolving door of death and all that.
sure, but the plan still went belly up and now needs to be redone and hoping the dice wont fail again. because no plan survives being contact with enemy. enemy being dice.
I know exactly how most of my campaigns will end. An endless series of “sorry everyone, I can’t make it today” or similar.
Jokes aside, I haven’t the faintest clue. I set up an encounter meant to be the end of a campaign either for a year or forever, and my players looked at the mine full of industrious undead and walked the other way. I don’t know the end, that’s why I’m playing
But like… Do you campaigns ever end? How does that come about?
Novels, tv, other fiction, etc have to set it up more than the ‘just as planned’ the BBEG needs to do in tabletop thankfully.
Meaning that players wind up doing the plot work rather than GMs?
Well, kind of but it keeps it easier to build the railroad if you let them trailblaze. 😀
That’s worth putting on a Tshirt. 🙂
I know that my long running campaign is coming to an end soon. With the party stopping the villains gigantic ritual to ascend to godhood (Either by stopping them, or taking the ritual for themselves). With some epilogue afterwards. B
I am just not sure of when exactly it is going to actually happen. But if the players win it, then they are at that point where they are able to deal with whatever their remaining problems are with such ease that they aren´t really worth doing an outright adventure about.
If all goes well, then it will be the first long running campaign I have been in that have had a proper ending. And not just ended because of “life” and “outside circumstances”.
But when I start out a campaign, I rarely have a concrete idea of how I would want it to end. Apart from “This would be kinda cool”. I find that sort of long term planning is doomed to failure when faced with the hijinks of the party.
Did you know there would be villains ritualizing their way to godhood? Or did that develop naturally through play?
I thought one of the characters in a players backstory kinda lent it to it. Then fate, change and some last minute improv kinda led to me weaving all the characters very different backstories together into a great conspiracy, where the villains of their past all seek the same goal (Even if they are at odds with each other).
Which my players seemingly think is brilliant planning on my part, while it is mostly me going “Huh, lets see where that idea goes” spontaneously during sessions.
I have a structure in mind for one of my games, but otherwise, uh, no, I don’t really have end goals in mind for my games just yet.
Mainly because a lot of my style tends to be kind of slice of life. It’s mostly about character expression for me.
Describe the structured one. You’ve got me curious. I mean, structure in my mind signifies beginning, middle, end.
I think a neat trick for DMs is to act All-According-to-Plan no matter what the players do. Oh, yes, that finale was epic, it was the intended finale and not the other one that is on the 40 pages notes the DM spent hours making 🙂
As per usual, you freakin’ get it.
“This is my masterstroke!” no matter what happens.
That moment when DMing and politics overlap 😛
Unfortunately I always know it will end with real life getting in the way, more and more sessions getting cancelled cause players can’t make it, and then we just start a new campaign instead, with contingency plans for when not everyone can make it – which inevitably fail again.
I miss those years when I had a regular group practically every Sunday…
Finally got into a regular Monday night game over on the Handbook Discord. Some of the other Handbook denizens adapting Kingmaker to Exalted 3e with me. It’s been a blast so far. 😀
Depends on the game. In my French Revolution campaign, the game was always going to end with the party killing the Queen or dying in the attempt. In my current game, I have absolutely no idea how it’s going to end. The last scene I have sketched out is a gigantic question: does the party allow the utopia they grew up in continue to exist? Or do they unmake it in an attempt to right historic wrongs? Do they allow the gods to continue existing, kill them, or become gods themselves?
My job isn’t to set up the final scene. My job is to make my players choose their ending. And to ask them if they can live with the choices they’ve made.
We turned a level 3 scavenger hunt into a campaign of “Escape the personal demi-plane/prison of an ancient red dragon and bring the kobald tribe that lived there with us.” I’ve never GM’d before, but I learned that day to NEVER assume you know what the players are going to do.
I’ve always tended towards running sandbox style games, so it’s like “If the game lasts long enough to get to what feels like a proper ending point, that’s good enough for me.”
I’m a narrative-focused planner GM, so I usually have a pretty thorough sketch of the endgame when I start out. Doubly so if I am adapting a Pathfinder module or AP book into a stand-alone adventure. Obviously, things can change, but since I know what the core problem of the adventure is (solve the murders, escape the asylum, prevent the nuclear meltdown), I can reasonably assume that the adventure will end with an attempt to resolve that problem. It’s the path to that point that is less clear (though I’m also good at predicting that).
The most common step I need to do if players go in particularly unexpected directions is to rearrange some pieces. Recently a group finished up Fortress of the Stone Giants by sneaking into the bottom of said fortress and covertly slaying the giant leader. I then shifted a bunch of the skipped content to promote a walk-in-the-room-and-kill-him boss the PCs had missed to second-in-command, forcing the party to race to kill or Dominate him before he can order the giant army to attack the shortfolk lands. The end result was an epic battle against a minor boss (and a bunch of other giants) completely out of order from the game plan. But it still worked fine, precisely because the preplanned elements could be moved.
Thinking back over my major campaigns, while I strive to adapt the stories based on what the characters do, in general they maintain the structure & ending I expected from the start. This might be because I tend to set up fairly flexible frameworks, leaving the details to be filled in, or it might be because my players are generally content to follow where the major plot hooks lead.
Probably the most flexible campaign I ran was the Silver City Insurgency. The premise is that the eponymous city, a cosmopolitan magical metropolis, was captured by the “evil empire” and the PCs are members of a cell of the rebellion planned to throw out said empire. Thus, the majority of the “adventures” that took place in that campaign were missions that the party decided on. Sometimes I provided missions from their NPC informants or from the rebellion leaders while other times they were dealing with the consequences of their actions, but for the most part they decided what to do from session to session.
With that said, the conclusion I planned did occur, with the emperor assassinated, his replacement (a frenemy of the PCs) negotiating a withdrawal and end of hostilities, and the PCs becoming powerful figures in the “new world order”. Of course, I hadn’t planned on the epilogue, for example, including a new clan of vampiric kitsune (founded by one of the characters), but I’m not sure how much that counts for this question topic.