Notes on Character-Driven Campaigns

April 14, 2009 11 comments

Good gamemasters know to steal from the best, which is why I’ve been reading a lot of advice from numerous sources as a precursor to (theoretically) running a 4th Edition game. Copious notes are being taken, and if I take the plunge and do this I will certainly put together a bibliography of GM advice I’ve used and publish it here. One of the things I’ve also been trying to do is find ways to incorporate elements from other games I like to play and run into 4th Edition without having to hack the rules or add non-canonical elements. An example is something The World Famous Jason D. Corley is doing in his current World of Darkness chronicle: keep a journal of characters.

Before the chronicle started, Jason figured out who the major supporting characters were going to be, and wrote each name at the top of a page in a journal. As those characters were fleshed out, he added info to the page. As new characters were introduced, they each got a page. Whenever the players characters do something or some event occurs, Jason reviews the notebook to figure out who this impacts and what their reaction might be. It’s led to some interesting twists and bizarre subplots, as well as a sense of verisimilitude. The characters’ action affect the world, and their are consequences.

That sense of connectedness is something I’ve always wanted to happen in a D&D world. If you wipe out that band of orcs over here, what does that do not only for the village that was in their path, but those dwarven miners over yonder, the trade route over the hill, and the goblin clan down the river? Were they the only think keeping another, meaner clan from advancing? You need to develop characters with personalities and motivations among the orcs, the dwarves, the merchant traders, the goblins, to know those connections. When the player characters raid those ruins, who else is affected? Another adventuring party who got there too late? The rightful owner of those ruins? The diety whose forgotten temple has been desecrated? The local sheriff who wants to collect tax on all that loot?

None of this requires any changes in mechanics. It doesn’t even require that all of those characters be written up, because some of them might never be encountered face-to-face, and most of them wouldn’t be encountered in a combat scenario anyway. It’s also perfect for a shared world setting, because if you know what the spheres of influence are, who is interested in what, and what sort of resources they wield, it’s easier to see how your actions affect the setting, and to calculate how the actions of another group might impact the storyline in your own group.

This is definitely something I want to try. If I do in fact end up running the 4th Edition campaign, I’ll let you know how it works.