Well, well, well....this is one of my favorite-occasional-pastimes, although I must confess I don't have too much experience in taking it to an end of sorts, as every campaign I've ever designed was designed for normal human beings with feelings and RP capabilities, not for brain-eating-loot-hunter-beasts, as my party turned out to be every. single. time.
Needless to say every-time I failed in designing a simple enough campaign I tried writing another one from scratch...just so I can fail again.
By failure I'm referring strictly to the fact that the campaign was either too hard to follow or too "puzzley and not action-packed enough" ...what can I say? I am more inclined to write something a tad bit intelligent than "Your family is dead. Now kill goblins. Now loot. Pull lever. What is above your head. Roll perception. You are dead." (I tried to and it didn't work).
Part 1: The Players
So, back to the title, writing a campaign is extremely easy and intuitive if you already have the "vocation" to do it, the end product however might not, however be satisfying for your players and that's where it becomes pretty tricky.
The 4th ed DM Guide explains it pretty well:
You must know your players. And you must also understand that your game sessions, however good your setting, feeling, dungeon etc. might be, it isn't always going to be a perfect game, because of the players, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I mean, they're human beings, they're going to need to go do stuff while playing, that includes eating, speaking OOC and just being a troll. Sure this can all be avoided by getting a dedicated group, but for the casual "I just wanna try it" group there aren't many chances that this will be the case. And to be honest it's kind of hard to get players anyway because of the whole "nerd" stereotype that surrounds the game, I mean, when I asked my friends if they wanted to give it a shot most of them were either plain "rude" and said stuff like " Get that thing out of my face"
(that's what she said) or just "nah". I found out that they didn't want to play because it's nerdy, not because of the idea itself, which they liked.
The DM guide divides the players into eight types:
Actors
Explorers
Instigators
Power Gamers
Slayers
Storytellers
Thinkers
Watchers
Now, it's obvious that these player types were made so that you have a wider, better idea of how people are generally gonna react to whatever you put on the table and how to please them all.
So think about your players and how their psychology fits into the stereotypes, it's really not that hard to assign them, for example one of my players is very excited about shields.Any kind of shield will do, any story will fit into his expectations and suit him as long as he has a shield. Strangely enough(or not at all) this player has a very stoic physical build and likes to smash things with his forehead.
Another one of my players liked the Idea of being an illiterate barbarian and eating hearts while running around naked, you get the point. Don't ask me how I put this group together...
More on players and how to write a D&D campaign in the next post, so stay tuned!
