Our group is wrapping up our second campaign, each of them have taken 2 years. Skip this bit if you don't want background. Our first story was a large campaign spanning Faerun as a whole, trying to stop BBE from taking over the region. The second campaign they have a BBE trying to get Zariel to break free from the first layer of hell and devastate Faerun. Having these big epic stories has run a bit dry with the group so we now want to scale it back and hit the roots of D&D, exploration, variety of quests and locations, exploring all types of fantasy.
So I have an idea to not have a main conflict or BBE. Instead, the party are crap adventurers with the aspiration of becoming great and well known. They do this by looking at the quest board, earning money and reputation, upgrading their gear, buying a base to work from, hiring people to go out looking for new quests etc. They could earn a negative rep and become an underground of mercenary like adventurers, taking on quests to assassinate people or steal things, not advertising themselves but being known to criminal groups, or they could build a good rep and start to earn the trust of the city guard and high lords, doing quests in a positive way. I have a rep system figured out, it goes up or down based on the type of job and how they do it (ie tasked to stop bandits on a road. Do they arrest them (+2 rep)? Kill them(0 rep)? or tell them to go to another road near a different city (-2 rep)?
This setup would allow me to grab adventures from various modules, and one week they could be sneaking into a mansion in the city, the next week in a jungle fighting dinosaurs, then off to a desert to fight mummies. Not being limited by a set theme, overarching story, or the feeling of impending doom therefore we must keep doing this quest, I feel would give me more flexibility and variety.
My concern with this approach however, will players after a while start to question the point of what they are doing? The campaign goal is to achieve what they want to; is it to earn 100,000 gold to be set up for life and retire, or build an empire with their own adventuring guild. Does anyone have experience with running a campaign that doesn't have a defined beginning, middle and end? Or do I find out what their goals are and structure that so we have those steps, ie beginning - The Struggle: the players are low level with no money. No one knows of them, they need to make their name known and presence felt middle - The start of a Guild: the players have acquired a base and reputation, they use this to build staff, generate passive income end - not sure what this would be
Summary: is it a bad idea to run a campaign with non-connected adventures and no BBE or overarching conflict? Think of it as playing Theme Park World in sandbox mode rather than Command and Conquer on campaign mode
You can do something super simple like an an Infinite Staircase model - one over arcing theme but diffrent modules that can span between 1-3-6 sessions.
I have used this in the past and it works very well.
The most important thing is buy in from the players. Throw the idea out in session 0 and see what happens.
But I find when I’ve done things like this in the past, a plot just kind of seems to emerge. You don’t plan for a BBEG, but then the bandit leader escapes and now they have a grudge against the party. So maybe they’re not a world-ending demon cultist, but a more grounded recurring villain. Or to use the OP’s example, if they try and build an adventuring guild and build an empire, they’re bound to make a number of enemies and friends along the way, and a plot sort of evolves from that.
When something really gets started, you can also always go with the TV show model; you run a module when you don’t have much prep time, and want to do a villain of the week, and then if you do have prep time, you bring in that bandit leader causing trouble again.
This is literally how the entire game was designed up until 3rd edition. Campaigns weren't a thing until then. You would string together modules (adventures) in whatever haphazard way you wished, although there were a few that went together (Slavers series, Giants series, Dragonlance) or rolled your own.
Personally, if I was playing in a campaign like this, I would find it to be quite boring. Icespire is made of a bunch of mostly unrelated quests, and it was not particularly fun. With no BBEG or threat, there aren't really any stakes, so there's little point in adventuring.
It's totally possible to run a campaign of street-level heroes dealing with Defenders-level threats (as opposed to Avengers-level threats). It helps extra if you encourage your players to find something in the world to care about and/or build up for themselves, to occupy the space the connective BBEG thread would ordinarily occupy.
Well the idea is that the overarching “plot” is for them to build a guild, hire people, and securing reputation. The quests would all be varied and would level as per a standard campaign. CharlesThePlant, that’s what they would have to care about, growing this build and making it known, making themselves the go to guys for any problems. I would initially have some NPCs that would laugh in their face, only later to have them come crawling and begging for help.
maruntoryx, I get what you’re saying if you’re just adventuring for adventuring sake, the idea here tho isn’t you do the mundane bits a couple of times like kill the wolf that is attacking farms, stopping the bandits on the road, then your rep has built up and opens higher up people, like a lord who might want the party to then identify a group who is threatening the city overall.so altho the quests aren’t connected, the motivation and rewards will be.
James bard, yea that’s what I was thinking, each thing they do might be a 1 session quest, or multi session adventure, with rewards and rep earned scaling to what they have achieved.
My main fear with this is not having that story driven conflict or BBE that means the campaign starts to get boring as their is not end goal and visible progress towards it.As was said above tho, recurring enemies and grudges naturally happen over the coarse of a campaign, and I have a group that latch on to certain NPCs I create and they make up in their mind what or who they really are. For example, they decide a high lord is a vampire after only meeting them once, even tho he’s supposed to be a good guy, or they get suspicious of the captain for a boat that they are purely using to ferry them to an island. I do then make that happen, they enjoy the “see, I knew I was right!” moments
Personally, if I was playing in a campaign like this, I would find it to be quite boring. Icespire is made of a bunch of mostly unrelated quests, and it was not particularly fun. With no BBEG or threat, there aren't really any stakes, so there's little point in adventuring.
I've done both and sometimes I prefer to NOT have the "end of the world" at stake for every campaign. Sometimes saving the princess is enough.
Well the idea is that the overarching “plot” is for them to build a guild, hire people, and securing reputation.
I would be wary of 'accumulate wealth and power' as the core theme, because it encourages grinding rather than exploring; you want to be able to throw out plot seeds that are interesting or heroic without being obviously profitable and not have the PCs just ignore them (this doesn't mean they shouldn't accumulate wealth and fame, it should just be a byproduct rather than a primary objective).
However, no grand arc is a perfectly viable type of campaign, there's a fairly significant body of episodic fiction to draw on for inspiration, though most examples I can think of aren't fantasy. The most common types are probably problem solvers for hire (think detective genre; you have an office and people come and hire you to deal with whatever weird problem they have), problem solvers on a contract (rather than people coming to you, you have a boss who tells you what to deal with), and explorers (think Star Trek or Stargate: you have a plot device of some sort that takes you to places where stuff is happening).
maruntoryx, I get what you’re saying if you’re just adventuring for adventuring sake, the idea here tho isn’t you do the mundane bits a couple of times like kill the wolf that is attacking farms, stopping the bandits on the road, then your rep has built up and opens higher up people, like a lord who might want the party to then identify a group who is threatening the city overall.so altho the quests aren’t connected, the motivation and rewards will be.
Even if the motivation is connected, that doesn't mean the adventures will feel connected. Going back to Icespire as an example, basically all of the quests are related to dealing with the dragon or protecting people from the dragon, but it still feels very disconnected and meaningless. Could have been due to DM presentation though. We were all quite new at that point.
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Our group is wrapping up our second campaign, each of them have taken 2 years. Skip this bit if you don't want background. Our first story was a large campaign spanning Faerun as a whole, trying to stop BBE from taking over the region. The second campaign they have a BBE trying to get Zariel to break free from the first layer of hell and devastate Faerun. Having these big epic stories has run a bit dry with the group so we now want to scale it back and hit the roots of D&D, exploration, variety of quests and locations, exploring all types of fantasy.
So I have an idea to not have a main conflict or BBE. Instead, the party are crap adventurers with the aspiration of becoming great and well known. They do this by looking at the quest board, earning money and reputation, upgrading their gear, buying a base to work from, hiring people to go out looking for new quests etc. They could earn a negative rep and become an underground of mercenary like adventurers, taking on quests to assassinate people or steal things, not advertising themselves but being known to criminal groups, or they could build a good rep and start to earn the trust of the city guard and high lords, doing quests in a positive way. I have a rep system figured out, it goes up or down based on the type of job and how they do it (ie tasked to stop bandits on a road. Do they arrest them (+2 rep)? Kill them(0 rep)? or tell them to go to another road near a different city (-2 rep)?
This setup would allow me to grab adventures from various modules, and one week they could be sneaking into a mansion in the city, the next week in a jungle fighting dinosaurs, then off to a desert to fight mummies. Not being limited by a set theme, overarching story, or the feeling of impending doom therefore we must keep doing this quest, I feel would give me more flexibility and variety.
My concern with this approach however, will players after a while start to question the point of what they are doing? The campaign goal is to achieve what they want to; is it to earn 100,000 gold to be set up for life and retire, or build an empire with their own adventuring guild. Does anyone have experience with running a campaign that doesn't have a defined beginning, middle and end? Or do I find out what their goals are and structure that so we have those steps,
ie beginning - The Struggle: the players are low level with no money. No one knows of them, they need to make their name known and presence felt
middle - The start of a Guild: the players have acquired a base and reputation, they use this to build staff, generate passive income
end - not sure what this would be
Summary: is it a bad idea to run a campaign with non-connected adventures and no BBE or overarching conflict? Think of it as playing Theme Park World in sandbox mode rather than Command and Conquer on campaign mode
It's nice to have links to pull the PCs from one adventure to another, but a series of mini-arcs can work.
You can do something super simple like an an Infinite Staircase model - one over arcing theme but diffrent modules that can span between 1-3-6 sessions.
I have used this in the past and it works very well.
The most important thing is buy in from the players. Throw the idea out in session 0 and see what happens.
But I find when I’ve done things like this in the past, a plot just kind of seems to emerge. You don’t plan for a BBEG, but then the bandit leader escapes and now they have a grudge against the party. So maybe they’re not a world-ending demon cultist, but a more grounded recurring villain. Or to use the OP’s example, if they try and build an adventuring guild and build an empire, they’re bound to make a number of enemies and friends along the way, and a plot sort of evolves from that.
When something really gets started, you can also always go with the TV show model; you run a module when you don’t have much prep time, and want to do a villain of the week, and then if you do have prep time, you bring in that bandit leader causing trouble again.
This is literally how the entire game was designed up until 3rd edition. Campaigns weren't a thing until then. You would string together modules (adventures) in whatever haphazard way you wished, although there were a few that went together (Slavers series, Giants series, Dragonlance) or rolled your own.
Personally, if I was playing in a campaign like this, I would find it to be quite boring. Icespire is made of a bunch of mostly unrelated quests, and it was not particularly fun. With no BBEG or threat, there aren't really any stakes, so there's little point in adventuring.
It's totally possible to run a campaign of street-level heroes dealing with Defenders-level threats (as opposed to Avengers-level threats). It helps extra if you encourage your players to find something in the world to care about and/or build up for themselves, to occupy the space the connective BBEG thread would ordinarily occupy.
Well the idea is that the overarching “plot” is for them to build a guild, hire people, and securing reputation. The quests would all be varied and would level as per a standard campaign. CharlesThePlant, that’s what they would have to care about, growing this build and making it known, making themselves the go to guys for any problems. I would initially have some NPCs that would laugh in their face, only later to have them come crawling and begging for help.
maruntoryx, I get what you’re saying if you’re just adventuring for adventuring sake, the idea here tho isn’t you do the mundane bits a couple of times like kill the wolf that is attacking farms, stopping the bandits on the road, then your rep has built up and opens higher up people, like a lord who might want the party to then identify a group who is threatening the city overall.so altho the quests aren’t connected, the motivation and rewards will be.
James bard, yea that’s what I was thinking, each thing they do might be a 1 session quest, or multi session adventure, with rewards and rep earned scaling to what they have achieved.
My main fear with this is not having that story driven conflict or BBE that means the campaign starts to get boring as their is not end goal and visible progress towards it.As was said above tho, recurring enemies and grudges naturally happen over the coarse of a campaign, and I have a group that latch on to certain NPCs I create and they make up in their mind what or who they really are. For example, they decide a high lord is a vampire after only meeting them once, even tho he’s supposed to be a good guy, or they get suspicious of the captain for a boat that they are purely using to ferry them to an island. I do then make that happen, they enjoy the “see, I knew I was right!” moments
I've done both and sometimes I prefer to NOT have the "end of the world" at stake for every campaign. Sometimes saving the princess is enough.
I would be wary of 'accumulate wealth and power' as the core theme, because it encourages grinding rather than exploring; you want to be able to throw out plot seeds that are interesting or heroic without being obviously profitable and not have the PCs just ignore them (this doesn't mean they shouldn't accumulate wealth and fame, it should just be a byproduct rather than a primary objective).
However, no grand arc is a perfectly viable type of campaign, there's a fairly significant body of episodic fiction to draw on for inspiration, though most examples I can think of aren't fantasy. The most common types are probably problem solvers for hire (think detective genre; you have an office and people come and hire you to deal with whatever weird problem they have), problem solvers on a contract (rather than people coming to you, you have a boss who tells you what to deal with), and explorers (think Star Trek or Stargate: you have a plot device of some sort that takes you to places where stuff is happening).
Even if the motivation is connected, that doesn't mean the adventures will feel connected. Going back to Icespire as an example, basically all of the quests are related to dealing with the dragon or protecting people from the dragon, but it still feels very disconnected and meaningless. Could have been due to DM presentation though. We were all quite new at that point.