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42:
So the voices in my head have given me permission to return to the board for a while.

So I'm thinking of starting a campaign in the next few months. I've already decided some of th basic setting and story outline, but here are some of my questoins.

1. System rules: I've decided that there isn't a system out there that I completely like. So I think I will just take the DnD 3E system (since I'm familiar wiht it) and get rid of half hte rules and make it the way I want it. Is this a good idea? Does it take away too much control from the players?

2. Players: I'm the kind of player that I like to think can have fun with any character given to me. When make a character I try to think of things that might be challenging. (hmm.. let's a hafling fighter with only a sling sounds like fun). Course, I realize not every one is this way. (One person I currently play with is one of the most blood-thirsty min/max-ers I've ever met and she makes no apologies for it.) So should I limit what kind of players I let into the campaign? Not something I'm very fond of over all.

3. Characters: So I think it is a lot of fun to focus on characters. The dilema here is that, I still want to tell my story. Sometime my story-line and the player story lines don't always come together. This also happens more often when the party is in the GMs custom campaign, but the player is thinking in the world of the premods (Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, ect...). So I've been think of staggering the sessions a little so that I can take time to focus on both. Solution or Problem? I've also thought about asking the players to provide short outlines of where they see their characters heading.

4. Reality: Just how "real" should I try to make the campaign feel? Personally, reality sucks. If you can't pretend in an RPG to be a super-being who can jump off cliff without suffering a scratch or be a lone warrior who can take down a whole orc army then where can you? Despite this I understand that some people want "realistic" feel to the campaign (maybe they just haven't experienced enough trauma to know otherwise). So how much "realism" should I try to include?

Mr_Pleasington:
1)  Messing with 3E leads to bad mojo...I'm talking from experience here.  The system plays great and is completely balanced if you don't mess with it, but once you start taking away rules you start to really mess with the subtlties of the game and the whole thing can crash like a house of cards.  Since it's balanced by so many factors (unlike previous edition which were balanced only by class) it can be hard to see the domino effect a change can make.  Adding rules to 3E works well, but there are few things you can change without really screwing with system balance.  Trust me on this :)

As for the rest of your points, I think the best thing you can do is sit down with your prospective players and talk about what they're looking for in a game.  This allows you to feel them out and adjust your game accordingly.

Every time I'm ready to run a game I send an email out to all my friends with a number of games I'd be willing to run along with a description of the game that let's people know the feel of it.  Kind of like a trailer for a movie.

Lately, I've found one of the biggest aspects of a game, and one you bring up, is whether to make the game narrative or player-focused.  In my 10 years of roleplaying I've played/ran almost exclusively narrative games...the GM has a plot and the players go through it...the Storyteller way.  This can be an absolute blast with good roleplayers but can stagnate into boredom and railroading if the PCs get tired of a certain part.  There's a lot of good and bad ways to do this, running a narrative game well is a sharp edge to walk.  Strangely, this is the type of game virtually everyone plays today.

The other type of game, a player-centric one, has only been recently introduced to me and I love it.  This is old school straight out of early D&D back when the rules were about being a game and not about the GM telling a story.  It was about the story the players wove as they explored the world.  This type of game gives players every freedom:  They do what they want and the GM plays referee.  It's a lot of work on the GMs part as he has to be ready for virtually anything, but can be great fun on both sides of the screen since even the GM doesn't always know what's going to happen.  Little Keep on the Borderlands for Hackmaster is like this and it's what I'm playing through now.  I've already decided the next game I run is going to be a Basic D&D player-centric campaign.

Players tend to love this because they do have so much control.  The GM isn't gently nudging them away from their course of action simply because it doesn't fit the plot he's laid out very well.

Well, enough rambling :)

42:
Thanks for the ramblings.

So as a DM, I should just make up a whole lot of story lines and see which one the players choose to follow? That sounds feasible and a lor of fun.

The only problem I see is that I might have a few players who are really shallow and one-dimensional. I don't think he or she would have any problem leaving the rest of the party behind and just going off on his or her own. Should I dictate some of the party background and motives, just to keep everyone together?

Mr_Pleasington:
If you have a group with a lone wolf or two it is almost always advantageous to use the old "you met each other before the game began and decided to adventure."  Trite, sure, but useful and perfectly fitting in the quintessential fantasy campaign.  This kind of thing works well for a player-centric campaign as they can fill in their history as they go.  Not so good for a narrative one as backgrounds tend to be really important in those type of games.  

For an example of my first attempt at a player-centric game using 3E check out this:  http://www.geocities.com/hoodyfrickinhoo/

The site was designed as a reference for players to help them keep everything straigt since my goal was to weave a living, but typcial, fantasy world with as much versimilitude as possible.
Not perfect, and we only got to play a handful of sessions, but at the end of the first session the players had an hour discussion of what they should do first.  Some wanted money, some wanted prestige, some wanted arcane secret...and there was AT LEAST one hook that was attractive to each of those.  

Fellfrosch:
Story and character are the hardest things for me to deal with as a GM. One of my regular players (I play with a bunch of old high school friends) has an amazing ability for asking all the wrong questions--even if I think I've got all the options covered, he'll invariably decide to do something completely different. On the one hand, this makes the games very interesting and has taught me to improvise better. On the other hand, I feel like smacking him every time he decides to ignore my well-placed clues and interview some random bystanders that I only included for the sake of color.

I suppose what I'm saying is that this style of player-driven gaming can be fun, but it's very hard to pull off. I still don't think I do it well, but I'm getting better.

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