When you're homebrewing, it can be difficult to create a large sense of world. The PCs start off in one village, and then they need to be told about every potential place that there is for them to visit. Since you're homebrewing and probably have a life outside of the game, it becomes difficult to plan out large amounts of areas for the players to visit, so instead of a sandbox world to explore the game can become more or less a railroad, since there are only so many options of where to go. Alternatively, for the DM the planning gets frustrating when you've built a number of maps, NPCs, custom monsters etc. and the PCs don't bother to visit them.
One solution to this is to just invent new locations on the fly. But I've been running a campaign in a way that I think gives the players a true sense that they are exploring and could go anywhere, whilst also ensuring that they actually go to all the places I want to send them. And I'm totally cheating, reducing the amount of planning I have to do significantly whilst still giving the 'big world' theme.
This is how. I use what I call "Redirects" (if you go X, you'll redirect to Z) and "It's all actually the same place."
Step 1) Design your region map so that regions look geographically different, but actually mirror each other. So on my map I have the starting point on the coast, and then three real choices to explore: an old lighthouse, some foothills, or a dead woodland. Beyond those, heading north east the players will pass through Swamp A, before reaching a town called Town A. If they head west, they will pass through Swamp B, before reaching Town B.
Step 2) In the lighthouse, there are NPC enemies and clues that direct them to an NPC in the foothills. In the foothills, there is an NPC who wants something from the lighthouse, but also is worried about her dryad friend in the dead woodland. In the dead woodland, the dryad is insane and will indicate that she can be helped by the druid NPC in the foothills. Whichever of these 3 fairly small starting locations they go to, the level 1 PCs will do an encounter or two, reach level 2, and receive invites to go to at least one of the other regions. Therefore they are making the choices about where to go, but you can be relatively confident that if the hooks are good, they'll end up going to all of them.
Step 3) It doesn't matter which way they go after that, but they think that it does. You don't need to plan more than one swamp, or Town A and Town B. You only need to plan swamp encounters, and one Town. They are sufficient to cover both. All you need to do is change the name of the town on the players arrival, and voila, whichever town they have headed to is fully planned out.
Step 4) The town is sufficiently engaging that they forget about travelling all the way back to the other town. So Town A/B is a quest hub (in my campaign this involved a number of events, and 3 different dungeons in the region).
My campaign has moved on from this now, and the players sometimes say "I wonder what would have happened if we'd gone to Town B instead." Because everything else is so heavily planned, and they were given total free choice of where to go, nobody has realised that secretly they have a far more limited number of options as to where to go than they thought that they did.
Of course, the players have taken control of the game as players always do: instead of wanting to go to the mountain pass that I thought they would, they decided to wait for an airship. They then slaughtered the local garrison (entirely unintended), where the airship lands, so they can't use that even after waiting 9 days for it. So they hired a pirate ship and headed up a river on the map (totally unintended by me) so I changed the airship encounter which would have crashed the airship into the mountain pass to a ship encounter which... crashes the ship beside the mountain pass. And voila, we're back on track, they've still had free choice of where to go and I haven't had to spend 400 hours pre-designing every area of the game. But whether they took the airship, the pirate ship, or just headed to the mountain, they end up at the mountain pass because there's a huge quest hub there to explore. Even better, they were responsible for crashing their own ship by instigating a combat, so I can legitimately say "It's your choice that brought you here."
Of course, free-roaming like this will occasionally waste some of your time. Past Town A and Town B there was a forest with lizardfolk encounters which are all built and they just didn't go there. Sometimes you have to take the knocks.
Anyway, this is just my way of saving some time and giving the illusion of free choice (and everything in this game is an illusion, after all) whilst actually making sure I don't make too big a rock for my own DM back.
That's very cool, and I might try that for an in-person game. But given that I'm running a PbP, I have a lot more time to do things on the fly, not to mention that part of the whole reason I'm running this campaign is to flesh out my world and to get used to worldbuilding.
The problem is that PCs aren't generally going to just do blind wandering, they're going to try to gather information so they know where to go, and if you actually give them any information, you have to make what they find reasonably consistent with that information.
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When you're homebrewing, it can be difficult to create a large sense of world. The PCs start off in one village, and then they need to be told about every potential place that there is for them to visit. Since you're homebrewing and probably have a life outside of the game, it becomes difficult to plan out large amounts of areas for the players to visit, so instead of a sandbox world to explore the game can become more or less a railroad, since there are only so many options of where to go. Alternatively, for the DM the planning gets frustrating when you've built a number of maps, NPCs, custom monsters etc. and the PCs don't bother to visit them.
One solution to this is to just invent new locations on the fly. But I've been running a campaign in a way that I think gives the players a true sense that they are exploring and could go anywhere, whilst also ensuring that they actually go to all the places I want to send them. And I'm totally cheating, reducing the amount of planning I have to do significantly whilst still giving the 'big world' theme.
This is how. I use what I call "Redirects" (if you go X, you'll redirect to Z) and "It's all actually the same place."
Step 1) Design your region map so that regions look geographically different, but actually mirror each other. So on my map I have the starting point on the coast, and then three real choices to explore: an old lighthouse, some foothills, or a dead woodland. Beyond those, heading north east the players will pass through Swamp A, before reaching a town called Town A. If they head west, they will pass through Swamp B, before reaching Town B.
Step 2) In the lighthouse, there are NPC enemies and clues that direct them to an NPC in the foothills. In the foothills, there is an NPC who wants something from the lighthouse, but also is worried about her dryad friend in the dead woodland. In the dead woodland, the dryad is insane and will indicate that she can be helped by the druid NPC in the foothills. Whichever of these 3 fairly small starting locations they go to, the level 1 PCs will do an encounter or two, reach level 2, and receive invites to go to at least one of the other regions. Therefore they are making the choices about where to go, but you can be relatively confident that if the hooks are good, they'll end up going to all of them.
Step 3) It doesn't matter which way they go after that, but they think that it does. You don't need to plan more than one swamp, or Town A and Town B. You only need to plan swamp encounters, and one Town. They are sufficient to cover both. All you need to do is change the name of the town on the players arrival, and voila, whichever town they have headed to is fully planned out.
Step 4) The town is sufficiently engaging that they forget about travelling all the way back to the other town. So Town A/B is a quest hub (in my campaign this involved a number of events, and 3 different dungeons in the region).
My campaign has moved on from this now, and the players sometimes say "I wonder what would have happened if we'd gone to Town B instead." Because everything else is so heavily planned, and they were given total free choice of where to go, nobody has realised that secretly they have a far more limited number of options as to where to go than they thought that they did.
Of course, the players have taken control of the game as players always do: instead of wanting to go to the mountain pass that I thought they would, they decided to wait for an airship. They then slaughtered the local garrison (entirely unintended), where the airship lands, so they can't use that even after waiting 9 days for it. So they hired a pirate ship and headed up a river on the map (totally unintended by me) so I changed the airship encounter which would have crashed the airship into the mountain pass to a ship encounter which... crashes the ship beside the mountain pass. And voila, we're back on track, they've still had free choice of where to go and I haven't had to spend 400 hours pre-designing every area of the game. But whether they took the airship, the pirate ship, or just headed to the mountain, they end up at the mountain pass because there's a huge quest hub there to explore. Even better, they were responsible for crashing their own ship by instigating a combat, so I can legitimately say "It's your choice that brought you here."
Of course, free-roaming like this will occasionally waste some of your time. Past Town A and Town B there was a forest with lizardfolk encounters which are all built and they just didn't go there. Sometimes you have to take the knocks.
Anyway, this is just my way of saving some time and giving the illusion of free choice (and everything in this game is an illusion, after all) whilst actually making sure I don't make too big a rock for my own DM back.
Happy dungeon designing!
That's very cool, and I might try that for an in-person game. But given that I'm running a PbP, I have a lot more time to do things on the fly, not to mention that part of the whole reason I'm running this campaign is to flesh out my world and to get used to worldbuilding.
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The problem is that PCs aren't generally going to just do blind wandering, they're going to try to gather information so they know where to go, and if you actually give them any information, you have to make what they find reasonably consistent with that information.