Ideas to make an ongoing campaign seem fresh / prevent the relentless murder-hoboing that repetitive dungeon crawls devolve into…. Go!
Ideas to make an ongoing campaign seem fresh / prevent the relentless murder-hoboing that repetitive dungeon crawls…
Ideas to make an ongoing campaign seem fresh / prevent the relentless murder-hoboing that repetitive dungeon crawls…
Cliche, but give the players a one shot game where they are the monsters.
Really put effort into the struggles of being a monster, give them families and ultimately have them raided by a low level group of adventurers. Let them win.
Two or three sessions later, let the players raid the same dungeon, but only give them vague hints. Make the NPCs they played like mini bosses and ultimately have their children/families witness the deaths.
Maybe start a story arc where the families try and get revenge
Give the characters something to do other than a dungeon crawl.
Bring things to a close, don’t be afraid to say “the end”. Set up threats and fronts with high stakes, something that will truly give the characters the epic fight they deserve, let them at it, and once the battle is done… Revel in the great epic you’ve created, close the game and play something different.
Alberto Muti nailed it. Give the players a grim portent – there are only two sessions left! That way players have some urgency in wrapping up their character’s stories.
Here’s an idea. Have someone chasing them. And they aren’t really sure who it is. That should take the murder-hoboing tendencies away, at least for a little while.
Give the players a home base to build up and maintain.
What Alberto Muti said.
My experience is that DW does not lend itself to thirty year campains. Which is not a bad thing because I would never be able to take a character to 133rd level anyway…
Yeah, DW is fast. Characters start out already very competent, and the advancement to level 10 is fairly quick. Also, due to the “moves snowball” effect, plot progresses really quickly, much more than in most trad games like D&D or Pathfinder. Trying to do a many-years campaign with it may be fiddly and just fall a bit flat: better to pull out all the stops and just let the game run its course. Once you’ve solved the fronts you have and the big picture is over, it may be the case that your characters just have had an interesting, satisfying character arc. If so, close up shop, let them pass into legend, and play something else – more DW with different characters and settings, or an entirely different game.
If you really feel the need for continuity, what you can do is keep playing in the setting you’ve created – maybe set a new game a few generations after your old one, with new protagonists and new problems?
#Stonetop
To be flippant: have a plot. And NPCs with interesting and complicated motivations that can’t just be reduced to “They’re evil, get ’em.”
Players will get trained to kill on sight if everyone they meet is an enemy. Run your game in a city for a while with lots of NPCs to talk to. Make them as interesting and conflicted as you can manage. Make it unclear who the real bad guy is. And also – if the party wants to preempt whatever silly plot the NPCs are up to by simply slaughtering their way into control of the city, let them! See how they do when the king’s army shows up to take the city back.
Send them down this path: http://rpg.divnull.com/wiki/index.php/Whispering_Deck
I like to do episodes, so to speak. Give them a plot, they follow it through how they want to, creating as many side Grim Portents as the fiction creates. By the time the characters are level 10 or near it (you can determine this with proper pacing) you have them confront the big bad of the campaign. They either triumph or fail. Then go a number of years after, whatever seems fit, and have them playing in the world created by their decisions. They didn’t stop that dragonling from escaping after they slayed it’s mother? It’s gotten bigger and has followers now. They befriended the orcs who were just misunderstood? Orcs are now a playable and somewhat respected race! You can even have them play as descendents of their former characters (especially if they got drunk one too many times at the tavern and woke up next to some random stranger!). They could start the game with an item that their last character had at the end of that campaign. The options are endless, just keep to your fiction. Plus your players may want to just try something new. I know mine get bored of their characters sometimes.
That Whispering Deck is ferocious.
Thanks. Let me know what happens if you use it.