D&D General The campaign you will never get to run

[Li Shenron]

I’ve done that, and it was both fun and frustrating.

Every once in a while, one of the player-DMs (we all did double duty) would forget that some resource, spell or other MacGuffin was unique to one of their OWN characters, and the adventure would stall out because of a bottleneck that requried it.

Ah but I always use the "fade to background" approach for an absent player, so in such case you could always have the MacGuffin or key spell in case of a bottleneck

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Doesn’t work so well when you’re in a high level adventure* and the party is in a situation where there’s no possibility for said party members to re-emerge.

Especially if/when the setup explicitly excluded their participation!

(If I’m honest, the frustration was momentary, and quickly metamorphosized into humor.)

One guy was the most common offender. His highest level PC was the group’s most powerful wizard. Therefore he A) always picked the best spells for himself (logical) and B) always refused to share those spells with any of the other casters in the party (illogical). That meant a few spells were the purview of his and ONLY his mage, despite there being maybe 2-3 other casters who could have used them, even if not as well.

So there were a few times when he’d hoist the party on his own petard.

(No, he never changed across editions or campaigns.)


* and it was ALWAYS the high level adventures!

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

I want to run a primitive world exploration game. The players are all from a human tribe, the classes are restricted to "early man/tribal" classes (no wizard, instead sorcerer and warlock. No shining knight paladin, instead restricted to barbarian, fighter, ranger; druids instead of clerics, etc.). As they explore the world, they may run into new races like elves and dwarves. As they explore the world, the players discover they aren't in a primitive world, rather they are in a post apocalyptic world and as they leave their valley to learn more about the world they find ancient ruins and skeletal remains of a people that look a lot like them. Suddenly it changes from primitive exploration to what happened to our ancestors.

I'd play that.

 

[Shiroiken]

I don't have any campaign Ideas that I'll absolutely never run... but I have far more ideas that I'll ever be able to DM

 

[Oofta]

An all dwarf campaign ultimately leading to search for a kingdom lost to dragons.

Pretty straightforward, right? Sure, except I always have at least one player who refused to play a dwarf. Which doesn't really work, because one of the things I want to do is take advantage of long lifetime and stretch the campaign over a century or more.

Float a similar idea about an all elven party and every player is already writing up a PC before I finish my sentence

Darn racist (speciest?) players.

 

[atanakar]

I have a little black book that dates back decades with many campaign ideas that will never be a thing. To many ideas not enough time.

 

[mrpopstar]

I ran a campaign where the PCs were characters in a history book, brought to life.

The gimmick was that, unbeknownst to the PCs, the world basically ended when the demon lord Baphomet conquered the whole plane. His savage presence causes text in books to turn to gibberish, and only one library bastion survived. In it was a copy of The Book of Lorem, which is the textual and physical manifestation of the Word of God.

A librarian wanted to see if it was possible to save the world, and found a history book about the group who initially found Baphomet's prison and inadvertently released him. She unbound that book, and spliced a section of the text into the Book of Lorem, which technically made the events in the history book Word of God. So the PCs, despite being long dead, were alive in the text, and could, like, learn things that were known at the time but had since been lost, and they could report back to the librarian, who would devise a way to fix things.

The first half of the campaign went well. The party, with the aid of a librarian, figured out how to fight back against Baphomet when he was released, and they banished him. But when I had the group learn that they were in a book, the players lost interest in my Inception-style plan to use a copy of the Book of Lorem inside their own book to go deeper, eventually finding God Himself and doing some weird stuff to rewrite canon.

Love this! -- When UA Sidekicks specifically called out librarians as experts who might join the party in adventures, my heart exploded.

 

[J-H]

Something involving the party having to find an inscription giving the party's Arcane caster the ability to cast Teleport Through Time.

 

[Blue]

I always wanted to be a dm+player in a campaign that lasts decades of real time where the levelling up pace is progressively slow, to the point of taking tens of quests to gain the next level, and the PCs growing old with the players.

You just inspired a new campaign idea that I'll likely never get to play.

Like you, I've wanted to try a campaign with years of downtime. I was just thinking about that and about keeping the characters to stay together-ish when I had an idea.

The players are actually Ancenstor Spirits / Genius Loci / some sort of local area benevolent spirits. They have class, background, skills/feats and mental abilities only. Probably starting at 3rd or 4th.

Every so often, could be years, could be decades, there is an dire threat to the community that they protect. Zombie apocholypse, magical drought, dragons, etc. I hand out a bunch people the spirits could possess, who already have race/class and physical abilities. Plus position, from a mayor to a locked up criminal. More than there are players.

The players' spirits possess the bodies, becoming multiclassed characters. They deal with whatever threat is out there. If they die, they will possess one of the others - you can raise the body but not put the spirit back in it.

After the threat, they go back to being spirits until years later the next crisis hits. They levelled their spirit side, and they have different hosts. Or maybe not all different. The town has grown and changed. There are likely legends of them from last time, though if those are good or not is up to what they did.

It would be a short campaign, say five adventures with the spirit leveling up 1-2 between each, and the stakes getting progressively higher, but also how the settlement prospers or not is a big result of how they did, so that's the real indicator of success or failure in the campaign.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Our long-running campaign actually had several subgroups within it. We played high level, mid level and even low level stuff within the same campaign setting. Sometimes, there were crossover effects as the efforts of one party or the other had permanent, large scale ramifications.

it would be cool to do another shared world like that, but maybe without the idea that the PCs would be used for anything beyond one-shots.