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prospectus conundrum
Nov. 13th, 2007 07:27 pmI'm giving another pass to my upcoming prospectus and ran into a problem. The goal of this prospectus is to shake things up a bit, since my groups will already be shaken up by babies in both groups in January 08. Thus an open voting that might well slot the players into different groups for 6-7 months of entirely episodic games before we settle back to our original groups (once the babies are older and their parents are likely getting more sleep).
I planned on 10-12 options, but as I read over them I find that many rely a lot on player input - more setting ideas than fleshed out campaigns. for example, the prospectus entry for Blood Red Sand says PCs are settlers on Castle Falkentein's martian desert, but the game changes a lot if they're Civil War veterans looking for a fresh start , or if they're an Irish family tying to make a place for themselves and their celtic magic, or if one PC is a mad scientist looking for a place where his experiments will go unnoticed while another is a Prussian agent mapping the landscape for conquest.
Sometimes this works fine and the player ideas gel into what sort of plot I'll develop. Other times they don't gel and the campaign fails early, even when everyone is abiding by the same initial concept. I'd hate to have an already episodic short term campaign fail, because I don't know where I'd go from there for those players.
Does anyone have suggestions? Should I trust that this work work? should I force shared PC creation sessions (and somehow use mind control to keep the players from developing PC concepts in advance of that)? Or should I tighten up the campaign premises, making them more sturdy while denying myself the energy that a clever PC concept or two might add to the mix?
I planned on 10-12 options, but as I read over them I find that many rely a lot on player input - more setting ideas than fleshed out campaigns. for example, the prospectus entry for Blood Red Sand says PCs are settlers on Castle Falkentein's martian desert, but the game changes a lot if they're Civil War veterans looking for a fresh start , or if they're an Irish family tying to make a place for themselves and their celtic magic, or if one PC is a mad scientist looking for a place where his experiments will go unnoticed while another is a Prussian agent mapping the landscape for conquest.
Sometimes this works fine and the player ideas gel into what sort of plot I'll develop. Other times they don't gel and the campaign fails early, even when everyone is abiding by the same initial concept. I'd hate to have an already episodic short term campaign fail, because I don't know where I'd go from there for those players.
Does anyone have suggestions? Should I trust that this work work? should I force shared PC creation sessions (and somehow use mind control to keep the players from developing PC concepts in advance of that)? Or should I tighten up the campaign premises, making them more sturdy while denying myself the energy that a clever PC concept or two might add to the mix?
