I was re-reading the logs of the first few sessions of the Northern Marches campaign. This was the frst D&D 3rd edition campaign we ran, back in 2000-2002. It was our longest running campaign and bore some looking at.
The review reminded me of several important features of that campaign. I feel that it had a good atmosphere because the environment had a natural flow to it. The NPC's didn't come into existence and then immediately disappear. The Master of Ludwig, the way-station between the major barony and the town of Baltburg, had his own agenda, the people in Ludwig all had names and characters. Sir Malcom, their first patron, didn't just disappear after the mission he sent them on. One of the players crossed Tobar, who was leader of the sell-swords guild and couldn't hire mercenaries himself thereafter.
The enemy plot was on a timeline, and if the players didn't act, the enemy didn't wait for them to bust in at a convenient moment. There wasn't a fixed solution to stopping the plot. There wasn't a "boss fight", the evil steward Morvik was kind of a wimp anyway who they killed by stealth.
As a player, I'm happiest when I feel like a "dude on an adventure" rather than a "character on a show." That's the kind of experience I'm shooting for as a DM, as a result. The two keys for getting that for me are permanence of surrounding and attention to time passage.
My old DM ran a couple of campaigns where he pulled a couple of snazzy tricks that made it seem more enthralling.
ReplyDeleteFirst, was a campaign that I only managed to make it to the first session of, playing a bard. After I stopped playing for several months, I came back and found out he had carried on with my character as an NPC. He turned my old bard into a recurring foil for the players. Not a violent enemy, more one that took credit for their deeds. The DM did it all fairly, giving the players plenty of chances to notice the guy during fights and on the road, but they never quite managed it. Finally the entire party agreed to spend one session pursuing this bard, to put him down for stealing their thunder. As I understand it, the players believed they had dealt with him permanently, but the DM assured me the man somehow managed to escape.
The other thing he did in another campaign is he strongly encouraged us to get our characters involved in this town we were basing ourselves out of. The town had survived a siege, so there was plenty of open space, and half demolished buildings, for us to take over for our own purposes. It was funny watching a group of basically hack and slashers suddenly try to be civil engineers. We had our homes built, and got so worked up we ended up spending most of our loot improving the town. It was weird how suddenly we were much more attached to the town when we got had a vested interest in it.