I've been dming for a good time now, and my players want our next campaign to be a big saga, a full history from lvls x to y. I always dmed episodic style campaigns, where each adventure hardly has anything to do with each other. I have no experience in running big sagas, so can anyone help me understand how to create one?
create flowcharts. In contrast to what you've done where one thing doesn't really tie in to the other, you want tie-ins here. Keep diligent notes after each session, jotting down how they responded to certain events and what promises your NPCs made. If an NPC says, "next time we meet, bring me the XYX armor and we'll talk", remember that. That way, even if it's 4 sessions later, when they see the NPC he'll say, "so, do you have the armor I asked for?"
Flowcharts help for things like this. Have one bullet point lead to another. Think choose your own adventure style. If they choose A over B, what good came from choosing A and what bad came from them not choosing B. As you start to extend off the bullet points and flow chart bubbles you'll start to create rhyme, reason, and consequence.
I've been dming for a good time now, and my players want our next campaign to be a big saga, a full history from lvls x to y. I always dmed episodic style campaigns, where each adventure hardly has anything to do with each other. I have no experience in running big sagas, so can anyone help me understand how to create one?
I've made a recent couple of videos on such things on my channel - notably this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2kBYkaNiME
But, here's a few thoughts:
create flowcharts. In contrast to what you've done where one thing doesn't really tie in to the other, you want tie-ins here. Keep diligent notes after each session, jotting down how they responded to certain events and what promises your NPCs made. If an NPC says, "next time we meet, bring me the XYX armor and we'll talk", remember that. That way, even if it's 4 sessions later, when they see the NPC he'll say, "so, do you have the armor I asked for?"
Flowcharts help for things like this. Have one bullet point lead to another. Think choose your own adventure style. If they choose A over B, what good came from choosing A and what bad came from them not choosing B. As you start to extend off the bullet points and flow chart bubbles you'll start to create rhyme, reason, and consequence.
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