Don't you people ever die?! A DMing thread

[Julford Hajime]

Originally Posted by Meister

On another forum I read about a way to start off campaigns once that struck me as excellent and well off the beaten path. Describe a situation - say, a busy marketplace in a small town, where an execution is about to be held. The delinquent stands on the scaffold, guarded by some watchmen, and a small crowd of locals and travellers has gathered to watch. Then let the players decide who their characters are in that situation. A Fighter might say he's a watchman, here to oversee that everything goes well; a Rogue might say he's mingling with the crowd, looking for easy marks, or he might actually be the delinquent; another player might say he's a messenger who has just arrived to stop the execution because new evidence has turned up, or he's simply just arrived in town and surprised at what's going on, and so on.

Basically come up with a situation, paint it in broad strokes, and let the players decide who they are in the context of that situation. If there's no readily apparent way they might find together as an adventuring party, prepare some sort of outside event that disrupts the situation that they can react to. It's a good way to introduce early interpersonal dynamic, it gives everyone a general idea of who everyone else is, and they can still all say "I'm in a tavern somewhere, the execution (or whatever) doesn't really interest me."

Originally Posted by Terex4

If you have proactive players, let them create the villain. The best example of this is my DM with his previous group rolled on the random encounter table and got Mage with Golem. The party was just starting out and he knew they couldn't handle such an encounter, so he improvised.

The encounter was a mage lying on the ground after a forced teleport by his associates with an inactive golem next to him. The mage was a red wizard of Thay who had fallen out with his peers as well as a master golem maker.

The party, seeing a red wizard and being the typical cutthroat players that they were, decided to steal all his stuff and throw him off a cliff. He survived the fall and started chasing the party. They found more of his stashes and continued to rob him. The party could have gotten rid of him by simply returning what they had stolen, but instead decided he needed to die.

Needless to say the villain pulled some seriously fucked up things on the party and they ultimately died to a lich they decided to rob to get magic items to kill the wizard.

Highlight of the game:
The party's sponsor was the mother of one of the members. While they were off plane, the wizard murdered her, reanimated her as a flesh golem, and married her becoming the owner of the adventuring company as a result.

These are both REALLY nice ideas. Definately gonna use the execution site as a start; I know that one of my players just LOVES to play the neutral evil type, and between the two of us we can figure out how he's in this situation, while all of the others have been hired to break his stupid ass out.

As for the other suggestion, I'm going to keep this one in mind. Usually the sponsor of our group is some sort of noble hiring out our company, and I'm thinking instead make it the neutral evil characters' mother/father. They pay the group to get the hell out of town with their son, and we meet this villain sometime shortly thereafter.

Our group tends to gravitate more towards neutral with a hint of good in them. For example, if they were to be sent out to obtain some sort of relic or artifact, the group may decide it's a better idea to never return to town and instead pawn off the relic in a nearby city/country for more money than they would've been paid otherwise; we've ended a few campaigns by obtaining a very high-end relic of some sort, pawning it, and then with that cash retiring in some far-off nation like NevadaGeorgia (LONG story).

HOWEVER, if the party decides to do just that and run off with the relic, the killing/reanimating/marrying of the NE characters parents would be a pretty ultimate FUCK YOU to the players, and one we would laugh about for years to come.