4th & Dragon : Dungeons and Dragons...and stuff

My point was really only that if you fix too many things to specific locations the player characters may never go there. If you are keeping your campaign inside just your group (not publishing it) there is no benefit in creating content that will not be used in your game.

If you are keeping your campaign inside just your group (not publishing it) there is no benefit in creating content that will not be used in your game.

I definitely don’t agree with this sentiment; having extra content makes me much more comfortable when running the campaign. I can easily hint at NPCs and relationships that aren’t on-screen, make allusions that aren’t immediately relevant to the plot, and add verismilitude to descriptions that might otherwise be shallow. Not to mention the value it has in improvising. NPCs randomly generated for an emergency tend to uninteresting, unconvincing, and obviously unimportant; but if I’ve prepared ahead of time, I can borrow a pre-existing NPC, and immediately have a character and an implied situation that the players can probe in-depth.

Of course, this takes a lot of work before even starts, though I find this preferable to putting in a lot of work while the game is running. It’s also worth noting that the players will never find your campaign setting as interesting as you do. The details that you design are mainly useful for filling in blanks that might otherwise hurt suspension of disbelief; don’t seriously expect anyone to care about anything in the setting that isn’t directly relevant to the adventure.

But if they do, hey, bonus!

I noticed everytime I went into detail of a Quest, the group did the opposite of what I originally planned.
So when I play now, I just throw Hack-n-Slash Quests at them and forget the details.
The guys I played with wasnt into the Puzzle/Riddle aspects of some of my Quests, I had to throw alot of hints, just
to get the game going.
That’s why I liked playing with the older players, they had more expeirence than the younger guys I play with.
The older guy group liked the Riddle/Puzzle and detail Quests, and the younger guys just wanted Treasure and XP(hack-n-slash)Quests.
Cant play with the older guys anymore, the main Player, quit playing due to a tragic death last year, his son was killed in car accident.He said he couldnt play D&D anymore, it wouldnt be the same without his son playing with us.
Which I understand, cause we played for many years, mainly 2nd edition.

As to what Rothe was saying; that’s actually what I’ve been working on recently. I made the mistake of thinking that what my friends were going to do was go straight to the place that their first quest had directed them, so that’s all, for the most part, I had set up. I had written a few details about the next town or two I thought they were going to go to next, but not very much. But that’s not what happened. They decided they wanted to go exploring and work on the map quest I had made. So I ended up having to make up characters and names on the fly. So in our non session days, I have been coming up with Npc’s, their personality’s, stats, and so forth. I actually read in one of the books to make a list of random names, and some of those I actually had to end up using in the session. So once I got home, I filled out more information about those “random Npc’s” and made them actual Npc’s. I think one of them is a tavern worker. hah. I didn’t think about assigning the Random Npc’s stats, so I will probably do that next.

As for the plot, I’m slowly unfolding it as the game progresses. Their first quest was/is to go find this dukes daughter. Well, they don’t know it yet, but she’s actually part of this cult, and is a vital part to the cult eventually taking over the main city. So here’s fingers crossed that they don’t decide to kill her. I’m still trying to think of some quests to come up with to kind of show the players that this cult is a key thing in the game, but I don’t want to yell, in essence, “There’s the cult and they are evil and you have to kill them all before they get you!” I know I want to slowly start introduce the cult more and more once they gain a few levels, but I’m not quite sure how to do that. How do I involve and introduce the cult in to future quests? Right now they know there is a cult, but they don’t really know any thing about it.

As for what Kalex said; Although right now all I have is a very basic sandbox-y type of world, I do want to give it more detail. It is my first time playing, much less having to start out as a DM, so I’m tying to get on my feet. I suppose in a sense I’m still learning about the country. I thinking my next campaign, I will start throwing in some more feuds between “kingdoms” (Don’t know if they could truly be called kingdoms, but I don’t really know what else to call them.) Thankfully my schedule should be pretty low tempo, so I should have enough time to work on developing the world. Seeing how I’m only taking 2 core classes and the rest are electives, I shouldn’t have to much homework. But I am going to have to spend a ton of time coming up with quests and encounters seeing how my friends are planning on playing every day during lunch.

Thanks for the help and the response in general. Here’s to hoping everything goes well and that I don’t burn out trying to teach my friends how to play while figuring out how to play my self.

And not to offend anyone, there are a lot of styles to campaign building and DM’ing.
I am more of a general planning and improvisation style GM.

It works well, but it will actually work best if the players don’t know how you do it. They will then grab things you throw at them and twist them into something new. You can just adapt on the fly without cursing at all the lost prepwork you have done.

There is one thing about over-preparing that I like to keep in mind.  Whatever I make will likely get used at some point.  It might not be this campaign, but anything the players haven’t encountered yet is fair game for inclusion in another campaign.

That’s the way I see it Callin.  If you are having fun creating content then you’re not wasting your time.  Even if I never use the world I am creating for anything, I’m still having a great time creating it.

Regards,

Kalex the Omen

I reverse engineer my campaigns.  I start with the major antagonist and work it backwards.  Then I get a feel for how things can really play out.  Sometimes it’s just a 11-20 adventure, sometimes 3-9 or something.  In my current campaign I started with Tiamat.  This is proving to be a bit more than I bargained for.  I knew it’d be a full 1-30 run, but all the stories that have woven themselves into this has added much more material than I thought.  It’s been fun though. 

With that “extra” stuff, I take note of if and will use it for later material.  I love mixing NPCs from one adventure into another.