My normal DM is taking a little hiatus at the end of the summer, and has offered to let me run a game during that time. I, as a rule, let players choose what we are doing. The 2 campaigns I have prepped are most accurately described as this:
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A Hunter: the Reckoning game set in my hometown. The party is playing as normal people with normal lives who hunt the things that lurk in the night on their off time. There is a turf war between angels and demons brewing downtown, Amazon is trapping and brainwashing werewolves in the national park, and the local Autism Mom group has recently started to try and cure their children through more sadistic means than normal. In the background, the secret alien invasion is about to get much worse, and the New World Order has sold us out. Have fun!
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DnD as I wish I could play it. Open world, homebrew setting that I ran a 5e campaign in during Covid, using Knave. If you want cool abilities, you get those by finding magic items in the dungeons. Outside of that, tell me what interests you and we will do that. You want to do cleric stuff? A local priory has lost their sacred relic. Want political intrigue? The Marquis just to the north has a reputation of being horrific to his peasants, so get evidence, kidnap him, and drag him before the king to face judgement. There’s a big world to explore.
Now, the thing that frustrates me is I have, on average, one sentence to convince each of my burned-out 20-something friends to do each game. If I send them anything longer than that, they will not read it. So, “monster hunting in the rust belt” is competing against “Open world where you can do whatever you want”. I dont think that is fair.
I miss dungeon-crawls. But it’s so hard to pitch them! Like, when I play a wizard, I want to go into dungeons, find spell scrolls for the DM’s cool homebrew spells, copy them into my spellbook, and become the most versatile mage in the world; but when we play, we never even set foot in a dungeon because none of the other classes yearn for the mines at all! It just doesn’t seem fair to me that the option I think is just as cool as Alien Invasion in Conspiracy Clown World, and the option I prefer, won’t seem as cool to my players.
Edit:
Just to clarify, I am also excited to run Conspiracy Clown World. It was listed first because when I first heard I might get a shot to run something, that’s what I started working on first. My reticence to run it, though, mainly stems from 2 problems that I think only I am having:
First, our current campaign is a morally grey, politically complex, character-driven campaign. The good guys are not winning, and that’s 100% our fault; i might even go so far as to call it grimdark. Conspiracy Clown World, despite taking place in a giant funhouse painted to look like the real world, will be a morally grey, politically complex, character driven campaign in a grimdark setting with no good guys. It’s more of the same. Maybe they will find it to be a pallette cleanser, but probably not me.
Second, I know from experience that I am going to feel like if I don’t run Conspiracy Clown World for at least a year, I will not feel like the campaign has properly run its course. I don’t think Dungeon World will be like that.
These are, from my perspective, selfish concerns. If the players want to hunt monsters in Conspiracy Clown World, thats what they are getting.
TTRPGs are group games and everyone involved should have fun (both the players and the DM).
Instead of doing a sales pitch, talk sincerely with your players about what you want to do, and try to be receptive of what they expect from next campaign. If you want to run a dungeon crawl that badly, tell them so!
“Since this is a short campaign during the summer hiatus, it’s a great time to try something new instead of the usual open world sandbox. I’ve been itching for a long time to play an old school dungeon crawl and have prepped a short campaign about etc etc…”.
If they really don’t care about that kind of play, then don’t push it. If they are willing to try, then go for it.
That was very indicating to hear. But I can’t judge my friends for being hollowed-out husks of themselves after a long workday in addition to college. Also, they are good players once the session starts.
Reading the old school D&D subreddit, I also came to realize that dungeons can be reskinned to pretty much any setting, so long as you keep the basic tenets:
- something that the party is running out of, so that they need to go back home to resupply
- an escalating reward for pushing on,
- unforeseen risks that make travel risky
So the setting could be the old West, a spacecraft, dungeons, a wilderness, a post-apocalyptic wasteland, etc.
And not everybody likes sandboxes. I tried to get my group to play a sandbox adventure and about half of them lost interest. Sometimes people want a nice predictable plot to pull them along.
OP, I highly recommend you give this video a watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGAC-gBoX9k
It proposes an alternative mechanism for running a campaign which keeps the worldbuilding and adventure design in the hands of the GM, but moves the onus of being proactive in playing the game onto the players.
He pitches it as a sandbox hex crawl, but I think you could massage the same concept into a dungeon crawl without too much effort.
This is actually the plan, and that video inspired my last DnD campaign. My issue is purely that “sandbox hex crawl” is waaay less interesting than “monster hunting in Conspiracy Clown World”.
My current plan is comparing the sandbox game to Frieren Beyond Journeys End.
I see. Is there a reason you need to offer them a choice at all? It sounds like you have a preference here, and there’s no harm in just doing the one that you want.
Or, is there a reason that it needs to be such a remote process? Like if you don’t think they’ll read the campaign pitches in a text format, can you just verbally give them the elevator pitch next time you’re all together (like before or after your next session)?
Come up with a plot you will voice, and a plot you won’t.
For the first, something that would change the whole political or religious landscape of all of the nearby nations/known world.
For the second, something that could actually destroy the planet, and will ultimately interrupt or make meaningless the change in political landscape.
“Find your way in an open world. Leave your mark, and try to withstand the winds of change.”
The key is that both plots happen whether or not the players get involved.
Every session, roll for the advancement of the plots. Make sure things trickle down and impact the players. Subtle early, vicious late.
