I've played in two sessions and have been DMing this group for about 8 months. We've played through Sunless Citadel and are through one level of Forge of Fury (we're all adults with FT jobs who meet when we can, and 4/6 of us are new to the game). Between the two, we had a bit of transition play to flesh out characters and have some fun. When they wrote their characters, I came up with some ideas about how to incorporate personal stories into the campaign. However, in discussing it with the players a bit, I get the feeling the party needs to separate for a while so each PC can pursue their own agenda for a while after Forge of Fury (a barbarian wants to go to school, the sorcerer has family obligations, ditto for the bard, etc.). Then they can reunite to move forward in the campaign. I've also created a storyline for the player who barely thought out her ranger character's history at all (congratulations, you were created by a beholder!).
This is just MY feeling as the DM, however. I don't want to railroad them into splitting up, even with the promise of reuniting. I want it to feel like a natural progression. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can present it positively? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to manage it if they choose NOT to separate no matter what?
I still have to see how I"m going to do it myself but my previous dm did a great job at connecting the players together. Most of us had blanks in our history which he used to connect us together. This way the personal stories became important and engaging for all of us. So my advice would be to either connect personal stories or to find ways in which the players care deeply about the personal growth of other characters.
As long as the players want these characters to reunite, I don’t see any reason you can’t write a time jump into the campaign.
The barbarian spent 4 years at school, and now has a new language, a bump to either INT or WIS, and maybe prof. in history or religion, or whatever they went to school for.
The sorcerer and bard spent those 4 years with their families. The sorcerer started a business (and you roll for business profitability according to the PHB rules on downtime.) and maybe spent much of that crafting an heirloom magic item.
The bard also rolls on the Running a Business table for his performing career, and maybe rolls on the carousing table to see how well his rock star lifestyle squares with his family life.
Maybe either of their families left them, or they suffered the adventurer’s trope and they all died, making picking adventuring back up an easy choice.
The ranger spent years looking Into her foggy past, found her creator, and maybe got him to create a new beast companion for her. Maybe she gets a new feat for her solo adventuring.
I don’t know what your plans were for her beholder creator, but he could become a party patron of sorts. Sending the ranger out to track down her old party to address a new threat. If anyone needs a week off from the game, the rest of them are spending that week trying to get to the one not there. Once they are back together, they continue on.
First of all, don't tell them to split up... let them tell you what they want to do. If that sounds like splitting up, you can then say something like "It sounds like you guys want to have some downtime while you split up to take care of personal things. Is that what you want to do?" If they say yes, then go ahead and allow it.
Assuming they do want to (it seems like they probably will), then you can do this several ways. You could have sessions one-on-one w/ each of them. This will take a huge amount of your time. Also you run the risk if this goes on too long that your players get out of the habit of meeting regularly and start making other plans and the group falls apart... so I wouldn't let this go on for very long.
You could do it over the phone or skype or something in between sessions. Like, if you normally only meet first Thursday of every month you could schedule skype sessions during the following month with each player to do one-on-one. (You could technically do this in person also but that would be much harder to set up for most people.)
You could do it over email, which may be the easiest. Start a thread with each person and just go back and forth with them over what they do, writing out dialogue for NPCs etc. This might work the best, as it can be done asynchronously in between sessions, and even if you play every couple of weeks you should have time to get a "downtime" email session done with each player. Then when they get back together they can tell each other what happened (if they want to, or else keep it secret).
I would not do this at the table, where you have several people sitting around for a couple of hours watching one person RPing with the DM. That will bore even the most dedicated RPers.
Also this...
I've also created a storyline for the player who barely thought out her ranger character's history at all (congratulations, you were created by a beholder!).
I would not do this, unless you are 100,000% sure (that's not a typo) that the player will love it. Here's why:
First of all, whether she fleshed out her backstory to you or not, this is her character, not yours. Unless she specifically requested that you flesh the character out for you AND indicated that she's OK with something like being the spawn of evil, as a DM, it is poor form to create something in a character's backstory that the player may not even like.
Second of all, it's like you are punishing her for not having a backstory by giving her one you think she will hate (based on the wording there at the end: "congratulations, you were made by a beholder"). You should not harm a character to punish a player. While we're on the subject, you shouldn't be punishing your players at all. If you want her to make more backstory, talk to her -- but don't punish her for not writing one that satisfies you.
We had this happen in our Champions game back in the day, when we were too young and stupid to know better. All of us but one player rotated GMs, and that guy, Alvin, just played. Alvin had a female psionic character named Psiana. He had not really fleshed out her background much (she was just a "mutant" born with her powers). In the first adventure, the first guy to GM the group had a powerful villain named Mind Wave who was the BBEG for that scenario. In the final boss fight, Mind Wave monologued (as villains do) and he "revealed" to us that he was Psiana's father.
I have to tell you, Alvin was majorly P-O'ed. He did not want a supervillain for his character's father. Although he had written nothing down, and maybe not really thought about it until that moment, in his mind, Psiana was born to normal parents and just had mutant powers. She had not inherited them from some evil mastermind.
But as I say we were young and stupid, and instead of the rest of us just forcing the GM to retcon that (as essentially co-GMs, we could have out-voted him, the way we did things back then), we had the idiot rule that "if it happens in character, it cannot be retconned". So this ridiculous bit of "lore" stayed with us until the final adventure we had with that group. Then Alvin came to me (I was GMing that last session) and asked if I could have it revealed that my uber-villain, Overlord, was actually her father, rather than Mind Wave. He had written up a whole thing about it, and I did him a favor and incorporated it into the story. This was like 2 years later... and it shows you that Alvin still held a grudge about this GM-wand-waved background feature after all those years (even though it had never really come up in gameplay afterwards, mostly because we all knew he hated it).
My point here is, don't do what that first GM did to Alvin and spring an evil boss as your parent/creator/etc on a player unless you know she will love it.
I'd add, why would they split up? Don't split the party is, like, one of the top 10 rules of D&D. Maybe they'll want to go together. For example, the sorcerer has family business, and the rest of the party goes along to help their friend, now you've got a hook for a nice multi-session arc. The Barbarian wants to go to school, maybe the bard tutors him, but they really need this one particular book, so there's a couple sessions finding it, etc.
And if the ranger doesn't want a backstory, that's fine. Why force it on her? Some players don't like making backstories, they just want to play and see where things take them. Maybe they'll see what you do with the characters who do have backstories, and that will inspire her to develop one in the next campaign so she gets the same sort of attention. Or maybe she won't ever because she just wants to hang out and roll some dice and isn't really into character development. It's a perfectly valid way to play.
I would suggest a time skip. If handled carefully, it's a really cool story device that allows players to reinvent themselves a bit and play out some good roleplaying opportunities. It's as if the players get to introduce themselves all over again.
As for how to connect them; the easiest thing I can think of is that it is part of the villains plan. Maybe they each have a villain's agent in their past. Maybe he needs them to activate some spell, or wants them all in one place to kill them. Maybe he wants to turn them to his side (and, knowing how players act, they might even accept).
Another option is that a neutral NPC is out there and heard of their previous work and wants to hire them as a group.
A more difficult (but probably more story rich) idea is that something in a past adventure set in motion a chain of events that lead to them teaming up again. Maybe a character they killed had a family member who has sworn to kill them all. Maybe they tripped some sort of magical ritual with severe consequences now and they are all required to stop it. This is probably the most difficult (as it requires some clever story work and good notes), but it is the most organic and will make the players feel like they have an effect on the world around them.
As long as the players want these characters to reunite, I don’t see any reason you can’t write a time jump into the campaign.
They absolutely will want to reunite. As a storyteller, to me the party split feels like a natural progression as they each have different obligations coming up at the end of "Forge of Fury," but they may not feel that way.
I don’t know what your plans were for her beholder creator, but he could become a party patron of sorts. Sending the ranger out to track down her old party to address a new threat. If anyone needs a week off from the game, the rest of them are spending that week trying to get to the one not there. Once they are back together, they continue on.
The beholder is not benevolent. It had a nightmare and dreamt of destroying a tiefling village, creating the ranger's character in the process. The player only wrote that she was the sole survivor of a village massacre. If/when she discovers she is the creation of a beholder, she'll have a set of choices to make about how to involve her team. I've been given permission to play with everyone's histories, but I promised not to contradict anything they created.
First of all, don't tell them to split up... let them tell you what they want to do. If that sounds like splitting up, you can then say something like "It sounds like you guys want to have some downtime while you split up to take care of personal things. Is that what you want to do?" If they say yes, then go ahead and allow it.
That's the plan. If they don't split up, I'm going to ask them to prioritize their obligations. The bard has a treaty to work out between his family and a distant, impatient mining town. The barbarian has to find a mentor/teacher and spend at least 250 days learning her new craft. The sorcerer has to return home to Neverwinter to answer to her noble family for her crimes committed in Waterdeep ("It was barely a felony!"). The ranger may have to deal with the revelation of her creation. The cleric is the only one who has specifically told me "eh, I'm happy to just bop around."
First of all, whether she fleshed out her backstory to you or not, this is her character, not yours. Unless she specifically requested that you flesh the character out for you AND indicated that she's OK with something like being the spawn of evil, as a DM, it is poor form to create something in a character's backstory that the player may not even like.
Excellent point, and thank you for the enlightening story. I'll talk it out with her and one of the veteran players separately.
I'd add, why would they split up? Don't split the party is, like, one of the top 10 rules of D&D. Maybe they'll want to go together. For example, the sorcerer has family business, and the rest of the party goes along to help their friend, now you've got a hook for a nice multi-session arc.
Gods above, I hope not. If only because it took us 7 months to get through "Sunless Citadel." If I have to run this campaign on the fly making it all up, we'll be at this for literal years. But I am working on a separate plan if they decide to stick together. It involves a lot of me huddled in the corner crying.
I would suggest a time skip. If handled carefully, it's a really cool story device that allows players to reinvent themselves a bit and play out some good roleplaying opportunities. It's as if the players get to introduce themselves all over again.
That's kind of the big idea with the barbarian, primarily. For her to learn this craft, I had to create an entirely homebrew mechanic, but I'm using the "learning a trade" rules in the DMG to manage it a bit (she has to spend 250 days with her teacher). In the process, I developed some dramatic hooks for her to play out, and that's what started this whole idea of splitting the party to handle personal business. After the teenage sorcerer has had a taste of actions having consequences, maybe she won't be so impulsive. After having to sort out a treaty (and finagle his way out of taking a throne he really doesn't want), maybe the bard will be less naive and daydreamy. After the ranger discovers she never had a real family, she'll come to appreciate and treat better the family that has adopted her.
Thanks for all the advice.
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I've played in two sessions and have been DMing this group for about 8 months. We've played through Sunless Citadel and are through one level of Forge of Fury (we're all adults with FT jobs who meet when we can, and 4/6 of us are new to the game). Between the two, we had a bit of transition play to flesh out characters and have some fun. When they wrote their characters, I came up with some ideas about how to incorporate personal stories into the campaign. However, in discussing it with the players a bit, I get the feeling the party needs to separate for a while so each PC can pursue their own agenda for a while after Forge of Fury (a barbarian wants to go to school, the sorcerer has family obligations, ditto for the bard, etc.). Then they can reunite to move forward in the campaign. I've also created a storyline for the player who barely thought out her ranger character's history at all (congratulations, you were created by a beholder!).
This is just MY feeling as the DM, however. I don't want to railroad them into splitting up, even with the promise of reuniting. I want it to feel like a natural progression. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can present it positively? Does anyone have any suggestions on how to manage it if they choose NOT to separate no matter what?
Carrion
I still have to see how I"m going to do it myself but my previous dm did a great job at connecting the players together. Most of us had blanks in our history which he used to connect us together. This way the personal stories became important and engaging for all of us. So my advice would be to either connect personal stories or to find ways in which the players care deeply about the personal growth of other characters.
As long as the players want these characters to reunite, I don’t see any reason you can’t write a time jump into the campaign.
The barbarian spent 4 years at school, and now has a new language, a bump to either INT or WIS, and maybe prof. in history or religion, or whatever they went to school for.
The sorcerer and bard spent those 4 years with their families. The sorcerer started a business (and you roll for business profitability according to the PHB rules on downtime.) and maybe spent much of that crafting an heirloom magic item.
The bard also rolls on the Running a Business table for his performing career, and maybe rolls on the carousing table to see how well his rock star lifestyle squares with his family life.
Maybe either of their families left them, or they suffered the adventurer’s trope and they all died, making picking adventuring back up an easy choice.
The ranger spent years looking Into her foggy past, found her creator, and maybe got him to create a new beast companion for her. Maybe she gets a new feat for her solo adventuring.
I don’t know what your plans were for her beholder creator, but he could become a party patron of sorts. Sending the ranger out to track down her old party to address a new threat. If anyone needs a week off from the game, the rest of them are spending that week trying to get to the one not there. Once they are back together, they continue on.
First of all, don't tell them to split up... let them tell you what they want to do. If that sounds like splitting up, you can then say something like "It sounds like you guys want to have some downtime while you split up to take care of personal things. Is that what you want to do?" If they say yes, then go ahead and allow it.
Assuming they do want to (it seems like they probably will), then you can do this several ways. You could have sessions one-on-one w/ each of them. This will take a huge amount of your time. Also you run the risk if this goes on too long that your players get out of the habit of meeting regularly and start making other plans and the group falls apart... so I wouldn't let this go on for very long.
You could do it over the phone or skype or something in between sessions. Like, if you normally only meet first Thursday of every month you could schedule skype sessions during the following month with each player to do one-on-one. (You could technically do this in person also but that would be much harder to set up for most people.)
You could do it over email, which may be the easiest. Start a thread with each person and just go back and forth with them over what they do, writing out dialogue for NPCs etc. This might work the best, as it can be done asynchronously in between sessions, and even if you play every couple of weeks you should have time to get a "downtime" email session done with each player. Then when they get back together they can tell each other what happened (if they want to, or else keep it secret).
I would not do this at the table, where you have several people sitting around for a couple of hours watching one person RPing with the DM. That will bore even the most dedicated RPers.
Also this...
I would not do this, unless you are 100,000% sure (that's not a typo) that the player will love it. Here's why:
First of all, whether she fleshed out her backstory to you or not, this is her character, not yours. Unless she specifically requested that you flesh the character out for you AND indicated that she's OK with something like being the spawn of evil, as a DM, it is poor form to create something in a character's backstory that the player may not even like.
Second of all, it's like you are punishing her for not having a backstory by giving her one you think she will hate (based on the wording there at the end: "congratulations, you were made by a beholder"). You should not harm a character to punish a player. While we're on the subject, you shouldn't be punishing your players at all. If you want her to make more backstory, talk to her -- but don't punish her for not writing one that satisfies you.
We had this happen in our Champions game back in the day, when we were too young and stupid to know better. All of us but one player rotated GMs, and that guy, Alvin, just played. Alvin had a female psionic character named Psiana. He had not really fleshed out her background much (she was just a "mutant" born with her powers). In the first adventure, the first guy to GM the group had a powerful villain named Mind Wave who was the BBEG for that scenario. In the final boss fight, Mind Wave monologued (as villains do) and he "revealed" to us that he was Psiana's father.
I have to tell you, Alvin was majorly P-O'ed. He did not want a supervillain for his character's father. Although he had written nothing down, and maybe not really thought about it until that moment, in his mind, Psiana was born to normal parents and just had mutant powers. She had not inherited them from some evil mastermind.
But as I say we were young and stupid, and instead of the rest of us just forcing the GM to retcon that (as essentially co-GMs, we could have out-voted him, the way we did things back then), we had the idiot rule that "if it happens in character, it cannot be retconned". So this ridiculous bit of "lore" stayed with us until the final adventure we had with that group. Then Alvin came to me (I was GMing that last session) and asked if I could have it revealed that my uber-villain, Overlord, was actually her father, rather than Mind Wave. He had written up a whole thing about it, and I did him a favor and incorporated it into the story. This was like 2 years later... and it shows you that Alvin still held a grudge about this GM-wand-waved background feature after all those years (even though it had never really come up in gameplay afterwards, mostly because we all knew he hated it).
My point here is, don't do what that first GM did to Alvin and spring an evil boss as your parent/creator/etc on a player unless you know she will love it.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I second everything biowizard said.
I'd add, why would they split up? Don't split the party is, like, one of the top 10 rules of D&D. Maybe they'll want to go together. For example, the sorcerer has family business, and the rest of the party goes along to help their friend, now you've got a hook for a nice multi-session arc. The Barbarian wants to go to school, maybe the bard tutors him, but they really need this one particular book, so there's a couple sessions finding it, etc.
And if the ranger doesn't want a backstory, that's fine. Why force it on her? Some players don't like making backstories, they just want to play and see where things take them. Maybe they'll see what you do with the characters who do have backstories, and that will inspire her to develop one in the next campaign so she gets the same sort of attention. Or maybe she won't ever because she just wants to hang out and roll some dice and isn't really into character development. It's a perfectly valid way to play.
I would suggest a time skip. If handled carefully, it's a really cool story device that allows players to reinvent themselves a bit and play out some good roleplaying opportunities. It's as if the players get to introduce themselves all over again.
As for how to connect them; the easiest thing I can think of is that it is part of the villains plan. Maybe they each have a villain's agent in their past. Maybe he needs them to activate some spell, or wants them all in one place to kill them. Maybe he wants to turn them to his side (and, knowing how players act, they might even accept).
Another option is that a neutral NPC is out there and heard of their previous work and wants to hire them as a group.
A more difficult (but probably more story rich) idea is that something in a past adventure set in motion a chain of events that lead to them teaming up again. Maybe a character they killed had a family member who has sworn to kill them all. Maybe they tripped some sort of magical ritual with severe consequences now and they are all required to stop it. This is probably the most difficult (as it requires some clever story work and good notes), but it is the most organic and will make the players feel like they have an effect on the world around them.
They absolutely will want to reunite. As a storyteller, to me the party split feels like a natural progression as they each have different obligations coming up at the end of "Forge of Fury," but they may not feel that way.
The beholder is not benevolent. It had a nightmare and dreamt of destroying a tiefling village, creating the ranger's character in the process. The player only wrote that she was the sole survivor of a village massacre. If/when she discovers she is the creation of a beholder, she'll have a set of choices to make about how to involve her team. I've been given permission to play with everyone's histories, but I promised not to contradict anything they created.
That's the plan. If they don't split up, I'm going to ask them to prioritize their obligations. The bard has a treaty to work out between his family and a distant, impatient mining town. The barbarian has to find a mentor/teacher and spend at least 250 days learning her new craft. The sorcerer has to return home to Neverwinter to answer to her noble family for her crimes committed in Waterdeep ("It was barely a felony!"). The ranger may have to deal with the revelation of her creation. The cleric is the only one who has specifically told me "eh, I'm happy to just bop around."
Excellent point, and thank you for the enlightening story. I'll talk it out with her and one of the veteran players separately.
Gods above, I hope not. If only because it took us 7 months to get through "Sunless Citadel." If I have to run this campaign on the fly making it all up, we'll be at this for literal years. But I am working on a separate plan if they decide to stick together. It involves a lot of me huddled in the corner crying.
That's kind of the big idea with the barbarian, primarily. For her to learn this craft, I had to create an entirely homebrew mechanic, but I'm using the "learning a trade" rules in the DMG to manage it a bit (she has to spend 250 days with her teacher). In the process, I developed some dramatic hooks for her to play out, and that's what started this whole idea of splitting the party to handle personal business. After the teenage sorcerer has had a taste of actions having consequences, maybe she won't be so impulsive. After having to sort out a treaty (and finagle his way out of taking a throne he really doesn't want), maybe the bard will be less naive and daydreamy. After the ranger discovers she never had a real family, she'll come to appreciate and treat better the family that has adopted her.
Thanks for all the advice.