You did it! You decided to be a Dungeon Master! We are happy to have
you join our ranks. However, now you need a campaign. Starting to
plan one out can be difficult, especially if you've never done it
before. So, let's talk about how to start planning one and what
approaches are available. Starting can be one of the hardest parts so
hopefully I'll be even a little bit of help. Feel free to ask questions as well.
Relax, You'll Be Fine
First thing first. If you are running a game for the first time,
relax. It's not so scary. There is some responsibility and some
preparation work that goes into it but it'll be fine. We all had to
start at some time before getting where we are. Being a Dungeon
Master is a very fun and in a different way than being a player.
Do You Know Your Players?
If you are starting off as a new Dungeon Master with a group you've
played with for a while, you'll know quite a bit about your players
and what kind of game they like to play. However, you might want to
ask them some questions ahead of time if you plan to try something
very different than they are used to. If you don't know your players
at all, it might be worth having a session to just talk about what
they want and taking care of the ground work. I find that with some of the
people I play with, this can be a tall order. Getting everyone
together in a physical place to take care of that can be tricky and
might not seem worth the effort for your players, though they'd be
willing to do it for an actual game. For this reason, this kind of
stuff quite often ends up in a pre-game Skype call from what I've
seen.
If you are playing with a brand new group, you should be asking
questions a head of time. You should also be ready to go in a
different direction if it turns out that what you had planned isn't
being received as well as you thought it would. You can do that, and
you should be prepared to. Even if it is being well received, it
could go in a direction you didn't expect. This is also true for
groups you know, but I find that new players are more surprising for
me until I get a feel for them. That's not to say the ones I'm used
to get boring and I can perfectly predict them, but I get more of a
feel for them. However, the first few sessions of a campaign can be
more fluid as you get things rolling.
Pre-Made
There is a large amount of pre-made material available for use in
tabletop role-playing games. Some will obviously have more material
than others. However, one strategy to start a campaign is to go into
the pre-made adventures or campaigns. It's a different set of skills
than coming up with a campaign from scratch, but it provides a
starting point. That starting point should in theory come from
someone with more experience than you and so help you make your first
campaign better. Even if you don't run it exactly as written (this is
very common), it can work as a good starting point and result in
encounters, characters, situations, and story that you wouldn't
otherwise think of. I will say though that you should make sure to
know what you want to do though. You aren't just running the
adventure as written; you'll be bringing it to life and making it
your own. This means you need to have a good feeling for it, even if
you are changing things.There will also always be blanks in the adventure that you'll need to fill in. I find it's best to see it as a reference and inspiration instead of a script that needs to be followed.
From Scratch
World First
You can start your own campaign by thinking about the sandbox it'll
take place in. Building up the world to have its own interesting
elements can help you come up with your own, hopefully unique,
conflict. Different worlds help inspire, or at the very least
reinforce, different kinds of stories because of their rules. It can
also allow an interesting place for your players to go feeling around
for what they want to go after. You can dangle multiple setups in
front of them and just go after the one that gets a bite. This
becomes a lot more enjoyable if the place that they are going through
is interesting. You don't need to come up with the entire world at
one time, but you should at least think about the place where things
will start.
Conflict First
Flipping things, you can think of the rough outline of your big
bad(s). Characters are an important part of stories and villains are
often the best remembered ones of them all. Making their motivations,
their means, and their power make sense goes a long way. It can also
help you come up with completely different stories when you come up
with a particular villain you've never thought of before. Villains
and conflict can also be very inspirational. A certain kind of
character, such as a classic vampire, might inspire a Gothic style
location (oh, hello Raveloft). It could also inspire a different
location by taking that classic style of villain and putting them in
an unfamiliar situation. Your conflict could be not centred around
one being either and instead be around a force of nature, a war
featuring many different complex threads but a small number of goals
at their centre, or something far more bizarre (as gods, hunting down
piece of an item that was never meant to enter the mortal realm over
centuries).
Tools
You can arrive at the same stories regardless of which of the above
you choose. It's just a technique to help get you thinking and it's
sometimes useful to change to the other to get the creative juices
flowing and coming up with new campaign ideas. If you are having
trouble coming up with an idea in the first place, trying one
approach and then the other can help you get some ideas you can turn
into a workable campaign after a couple more passes through the
above.
Too Many Ideas
That's great! Write them down. You never know when it might come in
handy. You might use one later for a subplot, or an alternate climax,
a new villain, the next story, etc. There are a lot of uses for such
a thing. Now, we need to pick one. Sometimes, it helps to just leave
it for a bit and look at them afterwards. Sometimes you'll find
yourself drawn to a couple while you are doing things and realize
that you really want to run one of those. If it's just one, that's
great! We got our idea. Otherwise, you might just need to sit down,
look at what your players want, look at what you have, reduce to a
smaller list and finally make a tough choice. This stuff will be
quite high level so it's very unlikely you'll be dooming yourself here.
However, the right idea can make things very easy going forward
because it makes role-playing and improvisation for you a breeze.
Sanity Check
When I have something that you want to run, I typically like to run
it through a sanity check. This takes the form of looking at the
situations and campaign as a player would and think about what
options I would have. What I'm trying to do here isn't predict what
my players will do, but make sure that the situations I have allow
for multiple solutions. A situation on its own might be fine, but the
next scenario might presume something about the previous. If I find
something like this, I'll either change it so it doesn't or note that
there will be a factor that influences the situation from before.
Depending on how the rest of the campaign goes before that point,
this factor may be different because of how my players dealt with it.
If it's so important that I can't leave it as just a note, it's
probably too railroady and I'll change it.
Other Useful Things I've Written
There are some other things you can read as well. Out of the things I've written I would recommend precedent, reducing difficulty through situation, degrees of influence, and designing a combat encounter. These are additional readings and you can be perfectly fine without them. You just might find them a bit helpful. You can always come back later if one of those elements sounds interesting. When starting out it's not good to get overwhelmed.
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