So, I'm curious as to what you guys think about this...
What makes a "Living" campaign?
Is it the interaction with an overarching storyline spanning many gaming groups?
The influence of some/many/all gaming groups on the game world?
The interaction between characters/parties across the game world?
Are you asking in terms of what the "Living Greyhawk" and "Living Forgotten Realms" campaigns are?
The answer there is that it's a shared campaign world with multiple DMs and a large (multiple thousands) player-base. The player groups can interact because they are all considered to "live" in the same world.
Do you mean "living" in the sense of official stuff like "Living Greyhawk" "Living Realms", etc?
Or do you mean "living" in the sense of "Bob makes his campaign world really come alive!"?
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Character Continuity
The ability to start a character and have the advancement and items remain with that character regardless of what group, DM, or venue you are at.
How well the shared universe is presented is just icing not the primary draw.
Quote from: estar;366004The ability to start a character and have the advancement and items remain with that character regardless of what group, DM, or venue you are at.
How well the shared universe is presented is just icing not the primary draw.
I agree. The better the universe, the more interesting the living campaign, but I think character continuity is the key point.
Quote from: Thanlis;366011I agree. The better the universe, the more interesting the living campaign, but I think character continuity is the key point.
I think the presentation of the shared world would make a difference if there were any serious competitors to the current Living campaign of Wizards (now Living Forgotten Realms).
But what sucks people in the first place is the ability to take your character from game to game.
Quote from: estar;366014I think the presentation of the shared world would make a difference if there were any serious competitors to the current Living campaign of Wizards (now Living Forgotten Realms).
I hear good things about the Pathfinder Society. I do wonder if they're not hurting themselves by charging for the adventures -- that was Ryan Dancey's big idea for monetizing living campaigns, but it didn't work out so well for anything his company ran. On the other hand, there may have been other factors at work there.
Quote from: estar;366014I think the presentation of the shared world would make a difference if there were any serious competitors to the current Living campaign of Wizards (now Living Forgotten Realms).
There's a few others out there. There's the Pathfinder Society (which could be thought as a "Living Golarion"), a Living Blackmoor type campaign, and I think L5R and Shadowrun have a living campaign as well.
EDIT: Thanlis scooped me. I had no idea they were charging money! Hey, isn't this what Jibba Jibba was advocating?
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366017There's a few others out there. There's the Pathfinder Society (which could be thought as a "Living Golarion"), a Living Blackmoor type campaign, and I think L5R and Shadowrun have a living campaign as well.
EDIT: Thanlis scooped me. I had no idea they were charging money! Hey, isn't this what Jibba Jibba was advocating?
Yeah, there are a bunch out there, I just don't think many of 'em get much play. Living Traveler, Living Arcanis, Wyrmstone, Legends of the Shining Jewel...
I was kind of interested in Wyrmstone (http://wyrmstone.org/) when it came out- (It uses FantasyCraft right now, but originally it was going to be 3.5) because they had a maxim that "no books are brought to the table". During the 3.5 era, that attitude was unique.
So I like their approach.
Their Campaign Rules (http://wyrmstone.org/x/commdoc/CampaignRules) sound like a lot of fun.
Yeah, I'm definitely talking about Living campaigns as in Living Greyhawk etc...
I'm just trying to think of ways that could make it feel more interactive somehow.
I haven't played in living campaigns for any great length of time, at least not greyhawk/arcanis/pathfinder society, though I played a game here and there and never got a feel for what it meant to be in a "Living" Campaign.
I'm mostly trying to understand what makes these sorts of campaigns unique, and how they differ in terms of scope, etc. in comparison to your regular, local-GM-ran campaigns...
To me, the appeal would be if my character could influence things on a local level and have it be reflected in the game world somehow. That and the ability to take my character to other game tables and retain things I've gained, as estar mentions, though the former is more appealing to me...
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366022I was kind of interested in Wyrmstone (http://wyrmstone.org/) when it came out- (It uses FantasyCraft right now, but originally it was going to be 3.5) because they had a maxim that "no books are brought to the table". During the 3.5 era, that attitude was unique.
So I like their approach.
Their Campaign Rules (http://wyrmstone.org/x/commdoc/CampaignRules) sound like a lot of fun.
Whoa, that's pretty smart. I really like the character portability option.
Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;366024Yeah, I'm definitely talking about Living campaigns as in Living Greyhawk etc...
I'm just trying to think of ways that could make it feel more interactive somehow.
I haven't played in living campaigns for any great length of time, at least not greyhawk/arcanis/pathfinder society, though I played a game here and there and never got a feel for what it meant to be in a "Living" Campaign.
I'm mostly trying to understand what makes these sorts of campaigns unique, and how they differ in terms of scope, etc. in comparison to your regular, local-GM-ran campaigns...
To me, the appeal would be if my character could influence things on a local level and have it be reflected in the game world somehow. That and the ability to take my character to other game tables and retain things I've gained, as estar mentions, though the former is more appealing to me...
This stuff has been discussed at length in other threads but an issue with the wish for your actions to influence the larger world is that the 'living' adventures have to be instanced (to use an MMO term) if you are goignt o have 20 groups , or 100 groups running 'X1 - The Storming of the Bastile of Ice' then you can't allow the actions of any one group to influence the whole world. Its just like in an MMO where you can't kill the goblin king and expect him to stay dead because 30,000 other players want the chance to kill him as well.
You can take an overall effect of X1 being completed into mind when you design X2. But not all runs through X1 will be the same and the more radically different the less chance that it can feature so the one in which the rogue secudes the Frost Giant turns him human and marries him and spawns a new race is unlikely to be the conclusion that is built on in X2.
I think if a living adventure was small enough such that each DM was in contact with all other DMS in a formum and the adventures were genuine Sandboxes and not run simulateaously, so you had 10 locations and each one was only run at one time and the effect of that was then updated on to the location before it was rerun by the next DM, would work, but its really untenable and certainly woudl never work on anythgin like a comercial scale.
So the influence you have will be limited to that seen in an MMO which is to say your guild might get a popular rep and you might get known on a meta level but the ablity for the DMs to write your history into the world is goignt o be limited.
I suspect ... al suposition of course, AM hs the most exposure to this
(PS my advocating monetisation of the living experience was tongue-in-cheek though with the amount of cash WOW makes I still think it has a potential if done exceptionallly well)
Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;366024To me, the appeal would be if my character could influence things on a local level and have it be reflected in the game world somehow. That and the ability to take my character to other game tables and retain things I've gained, as estar mentions, though the former is more appealing to me...
It's definitely a challenge. We are talking about anywhere between 100+ to 25,000+ players. Allowing any of them to change the world is going to be a campaign management issue.
Here's how Living Realms does it, anyhow:
The adventures have questionnaires at the end that asked in general terms how things went. "Did the players kill the treacherous agent, imprison him, or did they even find out about his perfidy?".. that sort of thing. When the adventure gets reported back, the feedback goes along with it, and writers can look at the overall impact of one adventure when they write the follow up. This is mainly to help the campaign staff and writers come up with adventures.
A second way is that there are player-driven organizations called Adventuring Companies. So if you want to have a thieves guild house, or a knightly order, or just a named adventuring party.. you could have that. Just declare yourselves a group, and you get a little bonus: an extra "group" action point which can be spent during the game. I have founded three Adventuring Companies so I can tell you a bit about these. Often there's a roleplaying theme that is used to create cohesiveness in the group. My latest project is an all-Drow house in the Underdark.
The third thing is that DMs can write their own adventures using a special template (because normally adventures within the Living Campaign are created by the campaign staff). These take place within the assumed continuity of the campaign.
Ok, so the challenge is this: how do we create
continuity and still allow for
portability.
And the answer (I think!) is those last two things working in sequence.
First, put on your player hat and form an adventuring company under the banner of the Adventuring Companies. So you put this together, and have this really cool flavorful player-created organization. Then you hand it off to someone who really is a player to manage.
Then you put on your DMs hat and write MyRealms adventures that focus exclusively on the activities of the Adventuring Comapny. Adventures can have maps and NPCs, so you use that power to create continuity and even detail out key npcs. You can even get into detail and put together the NPC relatives of each player character in the group.
Then you run the adventures. 100% custom content, but taking place under the banner of Living Realms
THEN when players want to take part in other living realms games, (let's say they go to GenCon or a gameday) their characters are still portable.
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366038It's definitely a challenge. We are talking about anywhere between 100+ to 25,000+ players. Allowing any of them to change the world is going to be a campaign management issue.
Here's how Living Realms does it, anyhow:
The adventures have questionnaires at the end that asked in general terms how things went. "Did the players kill the treacherous agent, imprison him, or did they even find out about his perfidy?".. that sort of thing. When the adventure gets reported back, the feedback goes along with it, and writers can look at the overall impact of one adventure when they write the follow up. This is mainly to help the campaign staff and writers come up with adventures.
A second way is that there are player-driven organizations called Adventuring Companies. So if you want to have a thieves guild house, or a knightly order, or just a named adventuring party.. you could have that. Just declare yourselves a group, and you get a little bonus: an extra "group" action point which can be spent during the game. I have founded three Adventuring Companies so I can tell you a bit about these. Often there's a roleplaying theme that is used to create cohesiveness in the group. My latest project is an all-Drow house in the Underdark.
The third thing is that DMs can write their own adventures using a special template (because normally adventures within the Living Campaign are created by the campaign staff). These take place within the assumed continuity of the campaign.
Ok, so the challenge is this: how do we create continuity and still allow for portability.
And the answer (I think!) is those last two things working in sequence.
First, put on your player hat and form an adventuring company under the banner of the Adventuring Companies. So you put this together, and have this really cool flavorful player-created organization. Then you hand it off to someone who really is a player to manage.
Then you put on your DMs hat and write MyRealms adventures that focus exclusively on the activities of the Adventuring Comapny. Adventures can have maps and NPCs, so you use that power to create continuity and even detail out key npcs. You can even get into detail and put together the NPC relatives of each player character in the group.
Then you run the adventures. 100% custom content, but taking place under the banner of Living Realms
THEN when players want to take part in other living realms games, (let's say they go to GenCon or a gameday) their characters are still portable.
But the stuff you are talking about is all local appart from an Adventures Guild which I guess get some central regontion like Guilds in WOW (I don;t liek them by the way as I don;t think the idea of an adventurer is immersive. My PCs are thieves, drunken fighters, homosexual hobbits or whatever, they have adventures but adventuring isn't a career for them). I doubt very much that if my play group founded a guild (even a large one that had 100 members across a couple of cities) that if i ran a series of games in which that guild managed to kill a recognised 'Living' NPC say the King of Samarkand and set up a republic that that change would be made 'official' I suspect the adventure templates you talk about actually limit this activity as a way of removing the risk of that event occuring (that is how I would do it, if I were going to do it). This is of course inevitable or a bunch of twats in some poxy town in Arizona could make their Players king of the world but for me it doesn't limit what you can do from a campaign perspective to a pretty linear kill things and take their stuff.
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366038A second way is that there are player-driven organizations called Adventuring Companies. So if you want to have a thieves guild house, or a knightly order, or just a named adventuring party.. you could have that. Just declare yourselves a group, and you get a little bonus: an extra "group" action point which can be spent during the game.
The Adventuring Company concept sounds very interesting. Could you please elaborate a little more on this extra Bennie or action point that the group is awarded to use during play? How does it work? What can be done with it? Are these points a one-time deal and once spent gone forever, or do they renew somehow?
Quote from: Drohem;366042The Adventuring Company concept sounds very interesting. Could you please elaborate a little more on this extra Bennie or action point that the group is awarded to use during play? How does it work? What can be done with it? Are these points a one-time deal and once spent gone forever, or do they renew somehow?
It's just a single action point and you get it once per game.
In D&D4 terms, characters can do a move, a standard action, and a minor action in a round. An action point allows for "one more action". So usually each player starts with one action point. The AdCoAction point is for the guild.
In my experience, it is usually never used.
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366022I was kind of interested in Wyrmstone (http://wyrmstone.org/) when it came out- (It uses FantasyCraft right now, but originally it was going to be 3.5) because they had a maxim that "no books are brought to the table". During the 3.5 era, that attitude was unique.
So I like their approach.
Their Campaign Rules (http://wyrmstone.org/x/commdoc/CampaignRules) sound like a lot of fun.
I was looking at that -- it looks pretty cool.
And although they discourage rulebooks, I'd have to at least call to roll on the Table of Ouch at least once, just for kicks.
Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366044It's just a single action point and you get it once per game.
In D&D4 terms, characters can do a move, a standard action, and a minor action in a round. An action point allows for "one more action". So usually each player starts with one action point. The AdCoAction point is for the guild.
In my experience, it is usually never used.
Cool, so just like a normal Action Point that a character can use. So, if spent by a group in play, then does every character in that group gain the benefit of the extra action, or does the group have to choose to apply it to a single character in the group?
Quote from: jibbajibba;366041(I don;t liek them by the way as I don;t think the idea of an adventurer is immersive. My PCs are thieves, drunken fighters, homosexual hobbits or whatever, they have adventures but adventuring isn't a career for them)
Well, it doesn't have to be an adventurer's guild -- adventuring company is just the blanket term. You could create the Homosexual Halflings of Harforth if you wanted to. ;)
In any case -- yep, it's more local structure than global structure. Living campaigns share the drawback of MMOs in that it's very difficult to affect the world beyond a certain size. The end of adventure feedback does matter -- if everyone who plays a certain adventure reports that they killed a certain NPC, that probably gets written into the campaign. But it's hard to see the effects of that from the player perspective.
The big convention events go the other way. I went to DDXP this year and played in the big event, the battle interactive. Something like 40 tables played at once, at all level ranges, and all the PCs were located at the same battle at the same time. The course of the fight was determined by how well the tables did as a whole, and you could send help to other tables, or ask for help, and so on. At one point there was a vote on a morally ambiguous decision, and the majority ruled. Totally new kind of experience for me, and it was a blast.
Also my character now has a fountain named after him in a certain city in the Forgotten Realms. And I mean in canon. I have a piece of paper from WotC that says so. Obviously it's not going to make it into the 5e Forgotten Realms sourcebook, and I'm sure if they do another 100 year skip it'll be torn down, but by god, right now it's there.
Quote from: Thanlis;366048Also my character now has a fountain named after him in a certain city in the Forgotten Realms. And I mean in canon. I have a piece of paper from WotC that says so. Obviously it's not going to make it into the 5e Forgotten Realms sourcebook, and I'm sure if they do another 100 year skip it'll be torn down, but by god, right now it's there.
My minotaur Ionos has a small monument to "Ionos, for the glory of battle" located near the south wall in Elturgard. It's a bronze statue of a minotaur with several dozen arrows sticking out of it.
Quote from: Drohem;366047Cool, so just like a normal Action Point that a character can use. So, if spent by a group in play, then does every character in that group gain the benefit of the extra action, or does the group have to choose to apply it to a single character in the group?
I was really curious about this. Does anyone know involved with the LFR the answer?
Quote from: Drohem;366154I was really curious about this. Does anyone know involved with the LFR the answer?
Just one character. This makes it less exciting, obviously.
The other big adventuring company flaw -- one PC per player per company. You can't join a given company with multiple PCs, which makes it really tricky to ensure that you're adventuring with other AdCo members. I think it's a good idea which could have been implemented better.
Quote from: Thanlis;366160Just one character. This makes it less exciting, obviously.
Meh, yeah that's kind of weak. Thanks for the answer. :)
Quote from: Drohem;366161Meh, yeah that's kind of weak. Thanks for the answer. :)
It has its moments. I used the AdCo point once as a fighter to grant someone a second wind, move, and then grant someone else a second wind. Kind of clutch. But that may be the coolest thing I ever do with it.
Quote from: Thanlis;366165It has its moments. I used the AdCo point once as a fighter to grant someone a second wind, move, and then grant someone else a second wind. Kind of clutch. But that may be the coolest thing I ever do with it.
Sure, I didn't mean that it's totally useless. It's always cool for any one character to have an extra Action Point in any one encounter. As in your example, it could really be a clutch play that saves the day. I guess I would be more impressed if it affected more than just a single character- and, yes, one could argue that a single character's action(s) could affect the whole group, but that's not how I mean it. Damn, I hope that makes sense.
Taking this Living Campaign idea outside of the realm of Living Greyhawk, Pathfinder Society, etc, one could in theory run a much more interactive, multi-game group Living Campaign...
Now THAT is something I could get behind... A living campaign where "killing the Goblin King" actually makes him quite dead, but may have heavy repercussions in other games being played.
This would probably require that the GMs be given a lot of leeway with what is happening in their campaign, while a storytelling team is handling potential consequences of the actions taken by other groups...
I'm sure some GMs have run games set within the same game world for two or more different groups. This living campaign I imagine would not be so different, except that in scale it would be much larger, of course...
Does anything like this exist somewhere?
Should it?
I could see how hard this must be to manage if there were more than two or three dozen games being run at any one time but it just seems fun to me.
Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;367120Taking this Living Campaign idea outside of the realm of Living Greyhawk, Pathfinder Society, etc, one could in theory run a much more interactive, multi-game group Living Campaign...
Now THAT is something I could get behind... A living campaign where "killing the Goblin King" actually makes him quite dead, but may have heavy repercussions in other games being played.
This would probably require that the GMs be given a lot of leeway with what is happening in their campaign, while a storytelling team is handling potential consequences of the actions taken by other groups...
I'm sure some GMs have run games set within the same game world for two or more different groups. This living campaign I imagine would not be so different, except that in scale it would be much larger, of course...
Does anything like this exist somewhere?
Should it?
I could see how hard this must be to manage if there were more than two or three dozen games being run at any one time but it just seems fun to me.
As I hinted up there somewhere you could only do this if you didn't run the adventures simultaneously and if you have 10,000 members in 2500 groups of 4 that would mean you needed to create 2500 diffferent scenarios to enable every group to play, so its not going to work. I can see it working for a user population of up to 100 but beyond that its just not practial.
You also have the additional problem of quality control. Even in a well structured rules driven game where gm fiat is reduced as much as possible there will be crappy DMs that allow their PCs too much leeway and that can have repurcussions across the whole environment.
It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh :)
Quote from: jibbajibba;367132It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh :)
No, no. What's ironic is that WotC has been running living campaigns since 2nd edition using the same "instanced" techniques, and yet people still think it has something to do with 4e.
Quote from: jibbajibba;367132As I hinted up there somewhere you could only do this if you didn't run the adventures simultaneously and if you have 10,000 members in 2500 groups of 4 that would mean you needed to create 2500 diffferent scenarios to enable every group to play, so its not going to work. I can see it working for a user population of up to 100 but beyond that its just not practial.
You also have the additional problem of quality control. Even in a well structured rules driven game where gm fiat is reduced as much as possible there will be crappy DMs that allow their PCs too much leeway and that can have repurcussions across the whole environment.
It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh :)
Lol, yeah, definitely not something I would see happening on a scale of 2500 groups...
As for quality control, you're right, it might be the largest concern... The Master Storytelling team would have to rely on each GM to handle a region according to their guidelines, but then again, it's the problem everywhere, isn't it?
No matter how interactive a Living Campaign can become through the proper development, it comes down to a group of individual GMs to pick up the slack and run a good game for his players...
Quote from: Thanlis;367146No, no. What's ironic is that WotC has been running living campaigns since 2nd edition using the same "instanced" techniques, and yet people still think it has something to do with 4e.
Yes, that's quite backwards. The real story is that 4e was directly and heavily motivated by the idea of the "Living" campaign, and serving ITS needs, rather than those of the regular gaming group.
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