Home Campaign Design Theory
Showing posts with label Campaign Design Theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Campaign Design Theory. Show all posts
Monday, February 17, 2020
Campaign Design - Map Scale
Map Scale
Fantasy maps are an integral part of most role-playing campaigns, and are often included in most fantasy novels. One question that always seems to loom large is that of the scale of the map. To a certain extent, the scale of your map should determine the potential scope of your campaign. The scale of your map will also give a sense of how diverse and varied the terrain and cultures can be.
For example, suppose that you wanted to create a fantasy version of Britain for a setting inspired by the myths of King Arthur. A map 600 miles wide and 600 miles tall would contain pretty much all of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, so if you made your fantasy map that size, then you could easily make a fantasy world that would encompass what you would need. At that scale you have room for several nations - Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and England in the modern period, while before the Norman conquest in 1066, the islands were divided into as many as a dozen or more. You also have room for multiple languages - in addition to a fantasy version of English, you can have fantasy Welsh, a couple versions of Gaelic, and Danish. The terrain has fields, hills, valleys, mountains, fens, and forests for characters to explore. There are limitations though. There are only a handful of cultures that could credibly exist in a space of this scale. The range of terrain is varied, but it isn't infinite. There isn't really room for deserts or vast open plains. There are rivers, but most of the rivers are relatively modest in size, especially when compared to the large rivers found in the United States. There's also not a lot of sea - the islands would occupy most of the map.
Suppose you wanted to expand your fantasy King Arthur setting to encompass the entire North Sea. If you had a map that was 1,000 miles wide and 900 miles north to south, you would not only get the British Isles and the North Sea, but all of Denmark, most of Norway, and some of Sweden. You'd also be able to have the bulk of Iceland on the map, as well as large portions of France and Germany. This substantially expands the range of elements one could include in a campaign, adding not only pretty much all of Scandinavia, but France and the low countries as well as large chunks of the Holy Roman Empire. This substantially expands the range of languages spoken and also adds some relatively varied national cultures. It doesn't add a whole lot of new variety in terrain - there are still no deserts for example. You could plausibly have some - after all, Spain lies just south of the range of this map and it is "hot and dry" (as described by Gérard Depardieu in The Return of Martin Guerre).
If most of northern Europe isn't big enough for your conceived world, then perhaps a map that covers all of Europe would be. A map that was 2,500 miles by 2,500 miles would cover pretty much all of Europe from Murmansk in the north of Russia and Lisbon in Portugal to Aleppo in Syria. Your map would cover everything from Iceland in the northwest to Turkey in the southeast, and from the Barents Sea in the northeast to the Iberian peninsula in the southwest. This sort of map gives lots of room for a wide variety of pretty much every element of a setting, from languages to cultures to terrain. One might find that such an expansive area is its own difficulty - detailing every part of such a huge map would be an enormous task, so large portions of it will likely be only vaguely defined at best. This does offer the freedom of adding stuff as you need it, so that's not necessarily a problem. On the other hand, if you are the kind of world-builder who needs everything laid out in full it could be bothersome.
A large map doesn't have to focus on Europe. If you wanted to create a version of fantasy China, then a map that was 3,000 miles wide and 2,200 miles north to south would cover the entirety of modern China. It would also capture all of Mongolia and Nepal, most of Korea, and a large portion of India as well as a lot of Bangladesh, Myanmar, and Thailand and smaller portions of a couple other countries. This map actually has noticeably more square mileage than the Europe map - sometimes I think that people fail to realize just how big China actually is - so there is a lot of room for variety, even if you stick with China as your fantasy model. Also, China is much more diverse than a lot of non-Chinese people seem to realize, so there is that as well. Once again, the very scale of this map makes detailing everything a monumental task, which can be good or bad depending upon your personal perspective.
One might want to make a campaign based upon Greek mythology, in which case, creating a fantasy version of the Mediterranean Sea would be a reasonable choice. In that case, you would want a map that was 2,400 miles east to west and 1,200 miles north to south. This captures all of the Mediterranean and all of the bordering lands, including all of the North African coastline, plus pretty much all of the Black Sea. In this case, having large areas of the map that are only imprecisely outlined is probably thematic, given that the ancient Greeks often had only a hazy idea of what existed in the far reaches of the region.
Going back to the fantasy King Artur idea, if you wanted a smaller map, you could focus your map so that your land area was only the size of Ireland. In that case, a map that was 300 miles wide by by 200 miles high would be sufficient. At this level, you can pretty much detail almost all aspects of what is on the map. The drawback is that there isn't really a whole lot of room for variety. Ireland was, at one point, divided into four kingdoms, but it pretty much has a single overarching culture and only a single native language. The terrain isn't completely homogeneous, but it is uniformly wet in nature, with bogs, forests, and hilly grasslands dominating the island. This doesn't mean that the stories set in such an area would be limited - Irish myth is a rich field to plunder - but it does mean that everywhere you go will have a lot of commonality.
The choice for the scale of your fantasy map is a decision that will affect how large and varied the elements of your setting will be. The right scale will serve to elevate and enhance your setting. Ultimately, deciding what the scale is will determine the scope of the setting. The point here isn't to advocate for a particular scale, but rather to give an idea of how big your map is at certain points by comparing them to real world examples. If you want to run a fantasy King Arthur campaign, creating a map the size of China is probably overkill. If you want to run a fantasy version of the Crusades, then a map the size of Ireland is probably too small. My advice here amounts to this: When you start making your fantasy map, figure out what sort of setting you want, and pick a scale that works with that setting.
Home Campaign Design Theory
Home Campaign Design Theory
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Campaign Design - Religion in Dungeons & Dragons
Religion in Dungeons & Dragons has always been something of a conundrum for me. While on the one hand, the system has elements that are built in that assume a polytheistic arrangement, the base elements of the system are heavily weighted in favor of monotheism.
Way back in the mists of time when role-playing games were first being developed, the games were more or less just an adjunct to wargames. Some versions of early role-playing games were nothing more than a side element of a larger wargame - the main wargame would involve a medieval army laying siege to a fortress, and the "role-playing" element took the form of the participants taking the roles of heroes from the besieging army infiltrating into the fortress via the castle sewers. This resulted in the idea that players would play a single character, and also more or less originated dungeon crawling.
But the important facet of the game was that even though each player was responsible for a unit consisting of a single individual, these were not really characters. They were military units in a wargame. and they all had roles to fill. Fighters were for fighting things. Wizards were for blasting things. And clerics were for healing. Thieves were added later, as were all of the other character classes. There was no real thought given to where clerics derived their powers. They were a wargame unit with a certain array of abilities. They were not as good at fighting as a fighter. They were not good at blasting like a wizard. And they could heal. That was pretty much the sum total of thought put into the game design element. And that works perfectly fine for a wargame.
Eventually, the game that would become Dungeons & Dragons reduced the focus of the wargame element and made the role-playing more important. And note that I said "reduced", not "left behind". Because if one goes and looks at the old first edition Dungeons & Dragons books, the tendrils of its wargame association weave throughout the rules. Distances are expressed in inches. Time passes in the game in segments, rounds, and turns. The game directs players to put together a "marching order", and have one player be the conduit of information to the DM. Characters are assumed to aspire to build a fortress and draw together an army of followers that they could put into the field. And so on and so forth. And the basic character classes reflect this. Which meant that clerics still held to their role as healing batteries for the other players.
In these early years of Dungeons & Dragons, that was pretty much all the thought that was given to religion. Clerics came in two flavors: good and evil. Good clerics refused to shed blood (using bludgeoning weapons) based upon the fact that Bishop Odo (the brother of William the Conqueror) used a club as a weapon. Good clerics could heal others and had a collection of magic that mostly bolstered their allies plus a grab bag of spells drawn from various effects found in places like the Bible, medieval tradition, and a couple other places. Evil clerics had magic that was mostly just the magic of good clerics reversed. For some reason, evil clerics also retained the prohibition on using non-bludgeoning weapons as well. In effect, the game assumed something more or less akin to a pseudo-Catholic medieval church transported to whatever fantasy land the adventures were set in, and didn't really clarify things much further.
And when one looks at old published adventures and game materials from that era, it is clear that this fairly simple paradigm of religion in D&D reigned supreme. When the paladin class was introduced into the mix, it fit alongside the medieval pseudo-Catholic cleric in the role of a crusading zealot out to smite unbelievers and evil-doers. The fact that evil clerics were the exact opposite in many ways from good clerics also explains the constant drumbeat of players wanting to know when the rules for an "anti-paladin" would be put forward. After all, if you have what amounts to a cleric and anti-cleric class, then you should have a paladin and anti-paladin. For the relatively wargamish style of dungeon delving adventures that dominated the early years of role-playing in Dungeons & Dragons this system worked perfectly well. When the druid class was introduced, it was placed in the "neutral" position, but to do so, a whole set of new mechanics had to be created, because simply making a "neutral" cleric would have been difficult under the then presiding cleric paradigm. When you have a "pro" and an "anti" as your established design, a middle ground is hard to make work.
In 1980, six years after the first print version of the game was released commercially, TSR published the Deities & Demigods game book. The book itself was kind of mediocre, presenting the deities in its pages more or less as supermonsters with not much detail concerning the religious practices that should be tied to them. (Plus, it had some legal problems as the book included material from the Cthulhu, Melnibone, and Newhon settings without getting appropriate permissions from the owners of those intellectual properties). But that seems more or less predictable. Clerics were basically undifferentiated mechanically no matter what deity they chose to follow. There was really no reason to give the faiths of the various deities more detail because clerics were essentially all drawn from the same two flavors: good and evil.
But the introduction of such a plethora of deities and the development of players more interested in more in-depth (or sometimes "more realistic") role-playing resulted in an internal struggle in the dynamics of the game. Confronted with a fairly rigid alignment system, a fairly two-dimensional cleric class, and a system that more or less tacitly assumed the kind of monotheism that prevailed in Western Europe during the middle-ages, game writers, dungeon masters, and players struggled to make games work with a collection of polytheistic pantheons. And those results were often somewhat hilarious. I have an old adventure that was published in Dragon magazine during the 1980s in which the adventure writer has to explain that clerics devoted to the Celtic god of death Arawn can use daggers for ritual sacrifices, and then goes on to explain that this doesn't change the fact that they can only use bludgeoning weapons in combat. And this sort of silly explanation is the direct result of the pseudo-Catholic roots of the cleric class which made it ill-suited to provide a framework for a variety of polytheistic divinities. In another development, the same module also saw the introduction of the "huntsman" class, which was basically just a repackaging of the ranger class with the sole alteration being that huntsmen were required to be evil.
And the pseudo-Catholic design of the cleric class (and incidentally, the paladin class) fits quite poorly with a polytheistic system. While polytheistic religions in our history did have concepts like heresy, the idea of an infidel is somewhat foreign to them. In a polytheist's mind, all of the gods are real, even the ones that are "evil", and mere mortals don't strive against the gods. For an ancient Greek, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, and Ares were all quite real, and all had their sphere of concern. A sailor might look to Hera to ensure his wife had a good delivery of her pregnancy, and to Hermes to make sure the physician tending to his ailing brother was skilled, and to Poseidon to ensure he had a safe sea voyage. But he would not look down upon a smith because he had a shrine to Hephaestus in his smithy, or be annoyed that his neighbor offered prayers to Demeter in the hopes that her garden would be bountiful. All of the gods had their sphere of influence, and he might need to call upon one of them for aid at some point. Even foreign gods were still gods, and still worthy of honor. A Greek sailing to Egypt didn't think that its inhabitants were somehow in the wrong for venerating Horus, Anubis, and Isis. In fact, he might translate their gods into terms he was familiar with, or bring an idol of one of the Egyptian gods home so that his countrymen could be sure to offer prayers to this divine being. The Romans made it a practice to try to identify all foreign gods with their own pantheon, equating the various divinities of other peoples with their own Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and so on. In short, the cleric/anti-cleric design of the classic Dungeons & Dragons setting was poorly suited to reflect a polytheistic world.
But polytheism became the standard model for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, resulting in a collection of mostly ad hoc rules additions to make clerics more individually attuned to their particular deities. This seems to have first been widely implemented in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, but it was then ensconced in the second edition Dungeons & Dragons game via the somewhat modest mechanic of clerical "spheres", which served to customize a cleric's spell selection to a certain extent. The third edition Dungeons & Dragons game uses a system of having clerics select "domains" which give them bonus spells to choose from plus some sort of unique ability. But the system is still, at its roots, built on monotheistic assumptions, and a whole host of spells, class abilities, and other game effects are tightly tied to the alignment system that flows from those assumptions.
Without eliminating or massively rewriting numerous character classes and discarding the alignment system (and consequently discarding the large chunks of the game that are built upon the alignment system) it is difficult to create a religious system in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that is not monotheistic in character (or, more accurately, dualistic). But to make the system work as it is structured now, one must provide a collection of divinities to attach clerical domains to or have the somewhat game-breaking set up that allows a cleric to choose almost any pair of domains that they want. Plus, losing polytheism, unless well handled, would rob the game of a fair amount of fun.
So what is a campaign designer to do? When confronted with a game that is filled with mechanics that point to monotheism sometimes and polytheism in other places, the solution that I have usually come to is to create a religious system that is a hybrid of monotheism and polytheism. I have taken a couple different tacks with this sort of arrangement. In one, I established that there was a single, distant deity but that the inhabitants of the campaign interacted with that deity by means of a collection of intermediaries such as archangels and saints. Each cleric would attach themselves to a particular intermediary. All of them were opposed by a cadre of rebellious fallen angels, who evil cults revered. I'm not going to use that exact system for the Realm campaign, because I want to use divine powers that are influenced by the Celtic and Norse mythologies, but I'll probably implement something that follows similar lines of reasoning.
Home Campaign Design Theory
Way back in the mists of time when role-playing games were first being developed, the games were more or less just an adjunct to wargames. Some versions of early role-playing games were nothing more than a side element of a larger wargame - the main wargame would involve a medieval army laying siege to a fortress, and the "role-playing" element took the form of the participants taking the roles of heroes from the besieging army infiltrating into the fortress via the castle sewers. This resulted in the idea that players would play a single character, and also more or less originated dungeon crawling.
But the important facet of the game was that even though each player was responsible for a unit consisting of a single individual, these were not really characters. They were military units in a wargame. and they all had roles to fill. Fighters were for fighting things. Wizards were for blasting things. And clerics were for healing. Thieves were added later, as were all of the other character classes. There was no real thought given to where clerics derived their powers. They were a wargame unit with a certain array of abilities. They were not as good at fighting as a fighter. They were not good at blasting like a wizard. And they could heal. That was pretty much the sum total of thought put into the game design element. And that works perfectly fine for a wargame.
Eventually, the game that would become Dungeons & Dragons reduced the focus of the wargame element and made the role-playing more important. And note that I said "reduced", not "left behind". Because if one goes and looks at the old first edition Dungeons & Dragons books, the tendrils of its wargame association weave throughout the rules. Distances are expressed in inches. Time passes in the game in segments, rounds, and turns. The game directs players to put together a "marching order", and have one player be the conduit of information to the DM. Characters are assumed to aspire to build a fortress and draw together an army of followers that they could put into the field. And so on and so forth. And the basic character classes reflect this. Which meant that clerics still held to their role as healing batteries for the other players.
In these early years of Dungeons & Dragons, that was pretty much all the thought that was given to religion. Clerics came in two flavors: good and evil. Good clerics refused to shed blood (using bludgeoning weapons) based upon the fact that Bishop Odo (the brother of William the Conqueror) used a club as a weapon. Good clerics could heal others and had a collection of magic that mostly bolstered their allies plus a grab bag of spells drawn from various effects found in places like the Bible, medieval tradition, and a couple other places. Evil clerics had magic that was mostly just the magic of good clerics reversed. For some reason, evil clerics also retained the prohibition on using non-bludgeoning weapons as well. In effect, the game assumed something more or less akin to a pseudo-Catholic medieval church transported to whatever fantasy land the adventures were set in, and didn't really clarify things much further.
And when one looks at old published adventures and game materials from that era, it is clear that this fairly simple paradigm of religion in D&D reigned supreme. When the paladin class was introduced into the mix, it fit alongside the medieval pseudo-Catholic cleric in the role of a crusading zealot out to smite unbelievers and evil-doers. The fact that evil clerics were the exact opposite in many ways from good clerics also explains the constant drumbeat of players wanting to know when the rules for an "anti-paladin" would be put forward. After all, if you have what amounts to a cleric and anti-cleric class, then you should have a paladin and anti-paladin. For the relatively wargamish style of dungeon delving adventures that dominated the early years of role-playing in Dungeons & Dragons this system worked perfectly well. When the druid class was introduced, it was placed in the "neutral" position, but to do so, a whole set of new mechanics had to be created, because simply making a "neutral" cleric would have been difficult under the then presiding cleric paradigm. When you have a "pro" and an "anti" as your established design, a middle ground is hard to make work.
In 1980, six years after the first print version of the game was released commercially, TSR published the Deities & Demigods game book. The book itself was kind of mediocre, presenting the deities in its pages more or less as supermonsters with not much detail concerning the religious practices that should be tied to them. (Plus, it had some legal problems as the book included material from the Cthulhu, Melnibone, and Newhon settings without getting appropriate permissions from the owners of those intellectual properties). But that seems more or less predictable. Clerics were basically undifferentiated mechanically no matter what deity they chose to follow. There was really no reason to give the faiths of the various deities more detail because clerics were essentially all drawn from the same two flavors: good and evil.
But the introduction of such a plethora of deities and the development of players more interested in more in-depth (or sometimes "more realistic") role-playing resulted in an internal struggle in the dynamics of the game. Confronted with a fairly rigid alignment system, a fairly two-dimensional cleric class, and a system that more or less tacitly assumed the kind of monotheism that prevailed in Western Europe during the middle-ages, game writers, dungeon masters, and players struggled to make games work with a collection of polytheistic pantheons. And those results were often somewhat hilarious. I have an old adventure that was published in Dragon magazine during the 1980s in which the adventure writer has to explain that clerics devoted to the Celtic god of death Arawn can use daggers for ritual sacrifices, and then goes on to explain that this doesn't change the fact that they can only use bludgeoning weapons in combat. And this sort of silly explanation is the direct result of the pseudo-Catholic roots of the cleric class which made it ill-suited to provide a framework for a variety of polytheistic divinities. In another development, the same module also saw the introduction of the "huntsman" class, which was basically just a repackaging of the ranger class with the sole alteration being that huntsmen were required to be evil.
And the pseudo-Catholic design of the cleric class (and incidentally, the paladin class) fits quite poorly with a polytheistic system. While polytheistic religions in our history did have concepts like heresy, the idea of an infidel is somewhat foreign to them. In a polytheist's mind, all of the gods are real, even the ones that are "evil", and mere mortals don't strive against the gods. For an ancient Greek, Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Hermes, and Ares were all quite real, and all had their sphere of concern. A sailor might look to Hera to ensure his wife had a good delivery of her pregnancy, and to Hermes to make sure the physician tending to his ailing brother was skilled, and to Poseidon to ensure he had a safe sea voyage. But he would not look down upon a smith because he had a shrine to Hephaestus in his smithy, or be annoyed that his neighbor offered prayers to Demeter in the hopes that her garden would be bountiful. All of the gods had their sphere of influence, and he might need to call upon one of them for aid at some point. Even foreign gods were still gods, and still worthy of honor. A Greek sailing to Egypt didn't think that its inhabitants were somehow in the wrong for venerating Horus, Anubis, and Isis. In fact, he might translate their gods into terms he was familiar with, or bring an idol of one of the Egyptian gods home so that his countrymen could be sure to offer prayers to this divine being. The Romans made it a practice to try to identify all foreign gods with their own pantheon, equating the various divinities of other peoples with their own Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and so on. In short, the cleric/anti-cleric design of the classic Dungeons & Dragons setting was poorly suited to reflect a polytheistic world.
But polytheism became the standard model for Dungeons & Dragons campaigns, resulting in a collection of mostly ad hoc rules additions to make clerics more individually attuned to their particular deities. This seems to have first been widely implemented in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, but it was then ensconced in the second edition Dungeons & Dragons game via the somewhat modest mechanic of clerical "spheres", which served to customize a cleric's spell selection to a certain extent. The third edition Dungeons & Dragons game uses a system of having clerics select "domains" which give them bonus spells to choose from plus some sort of unique ability. But the system is still, at its roots, built on monotheistic assumptions, and a whole host of spells, class abilities, and other game effects are tightly tied to the alignment system that flows from those assumptions.
Without eliminating or massively rewriting numerous character classes and discarding the alignment system (and consequently discarding the large chunks of the game that are built upon the alignment system) it is difficult to create a religious system in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting that is not monotheistic in character (or, more accurately, dualistic). But to make the system work as it is structured now, one must provide a collection of divinities to attach clerical domains to or have the somewhat game-breaking set up that allows a cleric to choose almost any pair of domains that they want. Plus, losing polytheism, unless well handled, would rob the game of a fair amount of fun.
So what is a campaign designer to do? When confronted with a game that is filled with mechanics that point to monotheism sometimes and polytheism in other places, the solution that I have usually come to is to create a religious system that is a hybrid of monotheism and polytheism. I have taken a couple different tacks with this sort of arrangement. In one, I established that there was a single, distant deity but that the inhabitants of the campaign interacted with that deity by means of a collection of intermediaries such as archangels and saints. Each cleric would attach themselves to a particular intermediary. All of them were opposed by a cadre of rebellious fallen angels, who evil cults revered. I'm not going to use that exact system for the Realm campaign, because I want to use divine powers that are influenced by the Celtic and Norse mythologies, but I'll probably implement something that follows similar lines of reasoning.
Home Campaign Design Theory
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Campaign Design Theory - Top Down, or Bottom Up?
When setting out to design a campaign setting, a prospective DM is confronted with the question of where to start. Although most DMs that I have met mix and match to some degree, there are two broad ways to design a campaign which can be described simply as "Top Down" and "Bottom Up". I believe that no campaign setting is ever designed by a writer who strictly adheres to one of these two structures, but in broad strokes, I think these ideas are widely applicable. Neither method is "better", each style has its uses and what may work for one DM may not work for another. Although I generally adhere to a "Top Down" approach, there are clear advantages and disadvantages to both methods of campaign design.
Bottom-Up
"Bottom Up" campaign design is probably the original form of campaign design used in role-playing games. The classic method of building a campaign setting was to lay out a dungeon and some sort of nearby "safe haven" and let the characters delve deeper and deeper underground fighting progressively deadlier foes while taking brief breaks to rest, recover, and reequip in the nearby village conveniently equipped with a tavern to find rumors and mercenaries in, a blacksmith to make weapons and armor, and a priest to dispense healing. The original Greyhawk campaign appears to have started in exactly this way: a giant dungeon that player characters would explore and a nearby city for the weary adventurers to spend their non-adventuring time in. Eventually the characters left the dungeon and began to explore the world around the city and new towns, rivers, forests, countries, and so on were progressively added. For many DMs who began playing in the olden days when dinosaurs roamed the Earth like I did, this was how their first campaign (and in some cases, first several campaigns) was developed. In my case, my first campaign setting began with the Caves of Chaos and the Keep found in the classic module B2: Keep on the Borderlands, and then expanded from there.
Advantages: The primary advantage of this style of campaign design is that the DM can immediately focus on campaign elements that the players will interact with directly. By starting small and focusing on material that is going to be directly useful to the players the DM can avoid potentially wasted effort and concentrate on writing down stuff that is directly relevant to the adventures that take place during the game sessions. This form of design style usually works well for campaign settings that are developed "on the fly" while the actual campaign is being played, which points to another advantage of this type of design method: you can jump in right away and begin putting people around the table to roll dice and slay villains without needing too much lead time.
Disadvantages: The obvious disadvantage to this sort of campaign design method is that because you are developing your campaign as you go, it is easy for continuity errors to crop up as later designed material contradicts earlier designed material. In that case, you would need to either discard your cool new idea because it contradicts material you already wrote or go back and fix the earlier details that are now contradicted. This can be an especially thorny issue if you are designing the campaign setting while also running actual game sessions in the setting, in which case the players have probably already seen the now potentially invalid material. In some cases this accidental contradiction could provide a potential adventure hooks as the mystery of why (for example) halflings now all have lavender hair could be a topic that fuels investigation by the players. Another disadvantage of this style of campaign design is that long term planning is difficult. Trying to plan a long term campaign plot for the players to follow, or including an archenemy is difficult when you don't have the campaign parameters worked out in advance. This dovetails with yet another disadvantage of this type of campaign design - new elements can seem forced and artificial when they are introduced to the setting. If the first time the characters hear of the nation of Goblivania is when it is revealed that the Duke's trusted adviser is a spy for that nation, then the revelation will probably have little impact on the players. It takes time to build up some ire, and when a DM starts introducing elements on an ad hoc basis they run the risk of having the players react with indifference.
Top Down
"Top-Down" setting design is more or less the exact opposite of "Bottom-Up". When designing his game world with the Top-Down method a DM starts with the "big picture" elements and then works his way down to the more local details. The DM will first paint the broad strokes of the campaign setting - the cosmology, religions, geography, nations, governments, and so on - and then starts filling in the smaller details of the world down to the environment the characters will actually interact with at the outset of the game.
Advantages: The central advantage of this style of setting design is that it provides a comprehensive framework for the game world. A world designed from a "Top-Down" perspective will likely have better cohesion with specific elements "fitting" better into the whole. Because the campaign world has a ore or less fleshed out framework, the DM is better able to create large scale plots and find lots of potential adventure hooks. Because much of the groundwork has been laid down in the setting development process, if the players decide to go off on a tangent, the DM won't be caught flat-footed and stuck trying to fill in the gaps in a hurry. Yet another advantage is that creating campaign setting material is fun. At least I find it fun. And building an entire game world in toto gives lots of opportunities to do just that.
Disadvantages: Even though creating an architectural framework to hang your campaign sessions on is quite useful, there are a number of disadvantages. The first is that when confronted with a blank page and the need to build an entire world, a DM can feel overwhelmed by the volume of work needed to prepare the setting. Knowing when to leave things vague at the edges and avoid getting bogged down in unnecessary detail is an acquired skill. Once a DM starts building an entire world, it is easy to get into the weeds developing material that the players will never see, will never affect them, and which if they did, they probably would not care about. The players probably don't need to know about the price of broccoli in a country a hundred miles away from them, and probably would find it to be tediously boring if you told them. The real danger of this sort of far ranging design is that after a DM has put a lot of effort into defining the number of dresses owned by every one of the Queen's ladies in waiting there is a great temptation to try to wedge this information into the game session in order to show all the work off to the players. A second problem is that this style of campaign design may curtail spontaneity and provide a setting that isn't as able to bend to accommodate the flow of the actual campaign. Because so much is predefined, if the DM has an interesting idea after the setting has been developed and details relayed to the players, there may be no good way to incorporate the idea into this particular setting. Another disadvantage is that this style of setting design requires a fair amount of preparation. Because you are starting the design process at such a large scale, it takes some time to work down to the level where you are actually ready to sit down with a group of players and engage in gaming sessions.
As I said before, there is no right way or wrong way to design a campaign setting, it all comes down to personal preference. I like designing top-down, but I often mix and match, jumping back and forth between large scale elements and tiny details on a regular basis. As I go through the process of designing my new fantasy campaign setting, I'm sure I will do this several times.
Home Campaign Design Theory
Bottom-Up
Advantages: The primary advantage of this style of campaign design is that the DM can immediately focus on campaign elements that the players will interact with directly. By starting small and focusing on material that is going to be directly useful to the players the DM can avoid potentially wasted effort and concentrate on writing down stuff that is directly relevant to the adventures that take place during the game sessions. This form of design style usually works well for campaign settings that are developed "on the fly" while the actual campaign is being played, which points to another advantage of this type of design method: you can jump in right away and begin putting people around the table to roll dice and slay villains without needing too much lead time.
Disadvantages: The obvious disadvantage to this sort of campaign design method is that because you are developing your campaign as you go, it is easy for continuity errors to crop up as later designed material contradicts earlier designed material. In that case, you would need to either discard your cool new idea because it contradicts material you already wrote or go back and fix the earlier details that are now contradicted. This can be an especially thorny issue if you are designing the campaign setting while also running actual game sessions in the setting, in which case the players have probably already seen the now potentially invalid material. In some cases this accidental contradiction could provide a potential adventure hooks as the mystery of why (for example) halflings now all have lavender hair could be a topic that fuels investigation by the players. Another disadvantage of this style of campaign design is that long term planning is difficult. Trying to plan a long term campaign plot for the players to follow, or including an archenemy is difficult when you don't have the campaign parameters worked out in advance. This dovetails with yet another disadvantage of this type of campaign design - new elements can seem forced and artificial when they are introduced to the setting. If the first time the characters hear of the nation of Goblivania is when it is revealed that the Duke's trusted adviser is a spy for that nation, then the revelation will probably have little impact on the players. It takes time to build up some ire, and when a DM starts introducing elements on an ad hoc basis they run the risk of having the players react with indifference.
Top Down
Advantages: The central advantage of this style of setting design is that it provides a comprehensive framework for the game world. A world designed from a "Top-Down" perspective will likely have better cohesion with specific elements "fitting" better into the whole. Because the campaign world has a ore or less fleshed out framework, the DM is better able to create large scale plots and find lots of potential adventure hooks. Because much of the groundwork has been laid down in the setting development process, if the players decide to go off on a tangent, the DM won't be caught flat-footed and stuck trying to fill in the gaps in a hurry. Yet another advantage is that creating campaign setting material is fun. At least I find it fun. And building an entire game world in toto gives lots of opportunities to do just that.
Disadvantages: Even though creating an architectural framework to hang your campaign sessions on is quite useful, there are a number of disadvantages. The first is that when confronted with a blank page and the need to build an entire world, a DM can feel overwhelmed by the volume of work needed to prepare the setting. Knowing when to leave things vague at the edges and avoid getting bogged down in unnecessary detail is an acquired skill. Once a DM starts building an entire world, it is easy to get into the weeds developing material that the players will never see, will never affect them, and which if they did, they probably would not care about. The players probably don't need to know about the price of broccoli in a country a hundred miles away from them, and probably would find it to be tediously boring if you told them. The real danger of this sort of far ranging design is that after a DM has put a lot of effort into defining the number of dresses owned by every one of the Queen's ladies in waiting there is a great temptation to try to wedge this information into the game session in order to show all the work off to the players. A second problem is that this style of campaign design may curtail spontaneity and provide a setting that isn't as able to bend to accommodate the flow of the actual campaign. Because so much is predefined, if the DM has an interesting idea after the setting has been developed and details relayed to the players, there may be no good way to incorporate the idea into this particular setting. Another disadvantage is that this style of setting design requires a fair amount of preparation. Because you are starting the design process at such a large scale, it takes some time to work down to the level where you are actually ready to sit down with a group of players and engage in gaming sessions.
As I said before, there is no right way or wrong way to design a campaign setting, it all comes down to personal preference. I like designing top-down, but I often mix and match, jumping back and forth between large scale elements and tiny details on a regular basis. As I go through the process of designing my new fantasy campaign setting, I'm sure I will do this several times.
Home Campaign Design Theory
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Campaign Design - Spells: Power Word, Deafen
Power Word, Deafen (found in Conjuration: By Bell, Book, and Candle)
Conjuration (Creation, Sonic)Components: V
Casting Time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 feet + 5 feet per 2 caster levels)
Target: One creature with up to 100 hit points
Duration: See text
Saving Throw: NoneSpell Resistance: Yes
Home Three Worlds Spell List
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