Quote:
Originally Posted by Hypelord Timelord
Hello! My name is Sammich, and I am going to try to DM this summer! I've been in two sessions throughout my lifetime, and both of the separate DM's I talked to had drastically different advice for me. That said, I had a question to ask.
What aspects make a campaign good?
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A difficult question to answer in the general. The aspects that make a campaign good vary from genre to genre and person to person.
The best way to figure out what would make a campaign good
for your group is to figure out what drives the players to play. This can be difficult as many people can have difficulty articulating what they like.
Watch the players as you play. What piques each one's interest?
Generally, here are some basics:
Start out simple. Since you are looking at 3.5, choose as few books to include as you are comfortable with initially. Get a handle on the rule basics before adding extra complexity. As a new DM, I recommend you pick an adventure to run. There can often to a temptation to fiddle with the rule set / adventure when starting out. Some rule sets are more brittle than others and don't handle change that well. Don't necessarily muzzle that desire, but ask yourself the following questions: Does this change make the game more fun for all the players? Is there extra bookkeeping or adjudication involved? Is the solution worse than the problem being solved? Is the table going to remember the change during play? Are there unintended side-effects to the changes -- does the change favour one character type over another or are there ripples into other rules? If the change involves a random element, what happens when the unlikely results occur?
Give the players variety, both in terms of visualisations, and how situations can be approached. This helps you identify what interests each player and gives the players another dimension to consider. This is a limited value if you are running some else's work.
Keep the world moving. Nothing can kill energy like the group being stymied by a situation that they can't find a way out of especially if the situation is a empty one "There's nothing to do!" is a terrible cry. Make certain the players feel they have things they can try. Note the emphasis on the players' feeling here. As a DM you are privy to inside knowledge and will see 'obvious' things the players could be doing at every stage. That doesn't mean the players can see the options. Don't feed the options to the players, but make certain your descriptions are sufficient for the players to find the linkages themselves. If the players are missing key components, engineer ways to bring the connecting pieces back to their attention. Avoid the DMing trap of requiring a specific key by used to get out of a situation. The "yes and" and "yes but" DMing advice helps here.
Encourage and reward player interest. A player attempting to interact with the game world is singularly string signal of what interests that player. The "yes and" and "yes but" DMing advice helps reward the attempt. Once you identify something in the game world the players are attached to, involve it in interesting ways. Note the interesting qualifier.