Colaborative Campaign Building

I read the Dungeon Master’s Guide 2 a couple of weeks ago and realized something about my campaigns. I always made them thinking about myself, what I wanted it to be like, who I wanted the players to fight against, where I wanted to adventures to happen and so forth. By doing this I may have created good adventures, but with the help of my players I could have built greater ones that would relate to them more easily and they would remember it for years.

The book suggests that you should get input from your players about what they want in the campaign. What kind of campaign they you like to play? What enemies they want to face? Do they prefer combat encounters or interaction encounters?

All these and other questions help you build a campaign that your players will want to play. They will be excited to venture to the locations they were eager to explore. They will want to defeat the villains they always wanted to face. And, in the end, you might create something you would never be able to create by yourself. It’s true when they say that two minds think faster than one.

Another thing the book suggests is asking questions about the player’s characters. Questions like: What’s their goal? How did they acquire their powers? Did they have a mentor? How is their relationship with each other? And so on.

These questions not only help you know the characters in your campaign, but it also helps you build the campaign around them. Remember that the player’s characters are the star of the show. Their background mean something, and people they knew can, and should, appear as they explore the world. You could use an old enemy come back asking for help against a bigger foe that threatens them all. A loved one could disappear and the characters would want to find what happened to them.

In the end, knowing what both what the players and the characters want will help you build better campaigns and adventures. You can learn a lot from them, and together you could create things you never would have thought by yourself.

In the link below you can find a PDF I made to hand out to my player’s with the questions I will use to create my next campaign. I tried to ask only important questions, trying to reduce the time they will need to spend to answer them.

Colaborative Camapign Building Question Sheet