Designing a Campaign from Player Suggestions

Essentially every campaign I have run for the last ten years starts the same way: by asking players for suggestions. My commitment is to build entire campaigns from the starting point of player ideas. I do this because I think it's truer to the player's real role in TRPGs--players really provide the majority of the input that decides how a campaign goes, so I think they should have a voice in how the campaign is shaped. And it's easy enough to do that I think most GMs would benefit from the ways player input forms the foundation of a campaign. 

I'll start with the basic steps for building a campaign this way and then give a few examples, including the mystery campaign I've been chronicling here. The steps are simple, and the examples will show you how far-reaching the results are. 

The first step is questioning your players. Doing this live in real time can be a good way to get all the players to collaborate: when one player suggests something, the others can bounce off those ideas and refine/expand the range you're working with. But some players are not going to have ideas right off the bat. So sending out questionnaires can be helpful--you want your players to have the appropriate time and space to imagine what they really want to do in the game. Of course, the pitfall of this method is that players are unlikely to suggest things that align, and you'll end up with a lot of different ideas. This isn't an unstoppable problem, but it can create issues. (If it does happen, push yourself to come up with unexpected links between the ideas--more about that in the examples.) The best path here is actually a combination of the two. Sit down with your players in a conversational context and establish your big ideas, then have players write down details to expand that main concept separately. You get the best of both worlds that way, and players get two chances to contribute to the story and world.

The kinds of questions you ask are up to you, but I find that certain questions can really spark players' imaginations. Here are my favorites, along with why they're worth asking about:

• Emphasis of the campaign: Are you combat-heavy, story-heavy, a hybrid, a social game, or what? Answers from players on this question can get to the bottom of what kind of game suits everyone's needs as well as push you to combine certain experiences. Any big picture idea of what a player wants is always useful. 
• Genre: Is it going to be tales of valor, a dark mystery, hijinks and nonsense, a disturbing tale of horror, stories of humanity in the face of destruction, or something else entirely? Players have preferences for genre just like they have taste in any other element of a story, and a genre that suits most or all of your players is just as important as getting the format right. Asking for genre can be helpful, but so can asking for specific movies/novels/games as inspiration is more approachable for many players. 
• Style and Challenge: What does the story actually look like? This can be a continuation of genre in that horror stories have a distinct style which is different from heroic deeds, but it can also be defined as the way that your characters interact with the world. Is it a struggle to survive? Are the players going to be powerful compared to the world around them? Some players want to be overwhelmed by the world, and others want to rule over it. Figure out where that balance lies for your players. 
• Story Ideas: What happens in the story? Be open to hooks from players--anything that gets them started and has a bit of intrigue is great. But be wary of players suggesting endings. No one has fun knowing everything from the outset. If your players have ideas for middle- and end-game story points, adopt them in part but keep them guessing. Nevertheless, having player-inspired starting points is a great way to involve everyone (and keep you on your toes).
• Special Rules: What additions can you make to the rules to spice things up? Maybe your campaign has a particular detail that changes the campaign. One example of this that I'll turn to is the chaos storms in the mystery campaign. My players wanted something that kept the gameworld chaotic, so I reintroduced the Wild Surge table I made for Gerald in the other campaign I've documented here as effects of the chaos storms. The 50-foot limit on movement from that campaign is another example of special rules that characterize a campaign. Don't be intimidated by coming up with details like this; it's easy enough to make the changes you want without compromising the system's rules. 

You don't have to limit your questions for players to these questions, but they are a great start. Once you've gathered the input you need, it's time to start crafting your campaign. I'll illustrate using a campaign I ran a few years ago: 

• Emphasis of the campaign: My players were interested in a largely silly campaign, somewhere that they could joke around and be heroic without much of a grind. 
• Genre: The players didn't have many ideas about this. Once I noticed they weren't offering anything in this vein, I offered a suggestion. Running off the hijinks-type adventure, I offered a particular setting I had worked on previously but not really gotten to use--an island where D&D tropes meet the Old West. Gunfighters were replaced by quickdraw crossbow-wielders, horses were common in traversing the desert landscape, and there was a load of Wild West terminology. The players agreed that this would be suitable for hijinks but didn't seem into the Old West setting as a serious backdrop, so I used the changes to the D&D aesthetic but kept things light. 
• Style and Challenge: My players were interested in being big bad heroes, so I made a note to keep challenges light and allow them to be as much the deciders of the campaign as possible. I don't think any of the members of the party so much as fell unconscious during the whole campaign, and they seemed to like it that way. 
• Story Ideas: My players were especially reticent to suggest anything for story ideas. One player asked for the inclusion of vampires, which caused another to ask for werewolves. As a result, I wrote notes on a war between vampires and werewolves, and indeed the players encountered many people involved in this conflict. I made the vampires pretty uniformly evil (they had wanted unambiguous heroics, after all) and the werewolves misunderstood victims of fate (which led to the party finding an enclave of hermit-like werewolves who had learned to control their lycanthropy). These additions were fun, but I was curious still if the players had any suggestions for an overarching plot in addition to the lycanthrope stuff. Meekly, one player suggested as inspiration the movie National Treasure starring Nicolas Cage. (Cage is a fascination among much of the party, so it was a natural suggestion.) Everyone seemed on-board with this, so I set to work watching the movie and its sequel to compile a list of notes. From this list came the plot: a treasure hunter (basically me doing a Nic Cage impression) wanted to track down an ancient artifact via a list of clues on hidden artifacts across the desert island. Yes, I literally did turn National Treasure into a campaign, and my players loved it. Each appearance by the Cage stand-in killed, every clue sparked the whole party's curiosity, and every reference to the movies was appreciated. Had I walked into the first session having already decided on the wacky adventure based on National Treasure, I'm sure it would have been well-received. But my players had chosen it, and the payoff was that much greater. 
• Special Rules: Because all but two of my players (in a group of six) were new to D&D (and those two experienced with the game had only played one-shots), I had a lot of teaching to do in order to get the game going. We didn't need any special rules to spice things up. 

This was a relatively simple campaign to prepare for. I dumped the players in the gameworld and quickly introduced the Cage stand-in, who told them about the artifacts. I provided clues when the party wanted to track down the artifacts and distractions whenever they wanted those (which was very, very often--we played for about two years in order to progress through three artifacts to get to the ending). The distractions were composed of lycanthrope tidbits (their suggestion), ridiculous shenanigans (their preference), and in-jokes from the movies (their suggestion). You can see that everything I presented the players with was directly from the brainstorming session where they had suggested things. One nice side effect of this was that if the players ever did get too far away from the main storyline (which, again, was very, very often), all I had to do was keep some element of their suggestions involved, and they would be able to link their experience to their requests as players. It took very little effort on my part--I prepared a few potential directions for each session as well as a small handful of clues for the artifacts, and all I really had to do aside from that was improvise hijinks for the party to get into and out of.  And the end result was a campaign that accurately reflected everything the party wanted from the experience. 

Let's consider another example for a custom campaign: the mystery campaign I've been sharing. 

• Emphasis of the campaign: I like to run games with very little combat--as I've said before, lots of systems can handle combat, but only TRPGs can handle complex storytelling and roleplay. So I asked my players if they were okay with a low-combat game, and they agreed. Multiple players were interested in a mystery game, which lends itself to roleplay and storytelling, so the lack of combat was not out-of-place. 
• Genre: My players requested a mystery which would range from down-to-earth storytelling to high fantasy tales with lots of magic. They specifically asked for dragons and societal changes based on the magic involved. I've kept the magic to a dull roar so far, but it will be coming more to the forefront as sessions develop. There will be a dragon. And the societal changes would be reflected by another suggestion made by a player: a city divided into lower and upper classes. This is where I was inspired to create a city with the Above and the Below. The whole city of Yamseth is defined by its class structure, all related to the magic chaos storms that affect the city. 
• Style and Challenge: The players wanted a difficult mystery rather than one they could solve in a session or two, so I created the system of clues that lead from the corpse of Hildy to something much larger (something that involves a dragon). The players wanted to be powerful in their own rights, so I started them at level 8, which is enough to be as powerful as Legolas but not be able to just exert their will on the gameworld. This calibration--which level to start players--can be tricky, but I generally give my players a choice between levels 1 and 10; rate the difficulty you want on a scale of 1 to 10 and you're ready to go. 8 fits this story because they're heroic but not overpowered. 
• Story Ideas: One of my players suggested a recurring storm which ravages the city. I adapted this into a chaos storm for three reasons. (1) Chaos would be more fun and interesting that a mundane storm, (2) this group previously used the Wild Surge table I expanded for Gerald's use in the Eastweald campaign and loved it, so it was easy to adapt, and (3) the chaos storm satisfies a storyline I wanted to include. So from the suggestion of a storm, we were able to improve the game in three ways. 
• Special Rules: In addition to the Wild Surge table, as I have mentioned, I wanted to players to be stuck with each other. So Portia cast the 50-foot spell on them, not allowing them to be truly separate from one another. This functions to make the players cooperate and keep solo activities to a minimum. I also introduced the secret-keeping mechanic and Dirk St. Patrick, both of which put pressure on players to keep their secrets close to the chest. You'll notice that where the National Treasure campaign needed no special rules, this group has three. This is partially because I'm dealing with more practiced roleplayers, as well as more practiced players of D&D in general, and partially because the mystery format calls for a few tweaks to the system. D&D is not built for mysteries--that's normally the realm of Call of Cthulhu or similar games. But I liked the idea of using a system the players were already familiar with and which doesn't tax sanity or anything like that, so we stuck with D&D, thus necessitating the tweaks. 

So far, these measures have been largely successful. Three sessions in, there has been no combat but instead a steady stream of clues and complications. The mystery is slowly unfolding, and the players are doing everything they can to stay ahead of the clues. The intrigue from the divided city affects every moment and decision. The difficulty of checks and surviving is balanced given what the players wanted. The Wild Surge table, repurposed as the Chaos Storm, has increased the randomness of the campaign and created a portrait of how the poor really live. And the party is learning to work as a team, even though the three characters couldn't be more different from one another. It's still in progress but very much a success. And all I had to do was ask my players questions and then listen to their answers. 

If you're liking the idea of trying this with your players but you're daunted by the undertaking, don't worry. When one of my players asked for a one-shot based on movie musical Cats (2019), I was pretty certain I would mess it up. But I put in the effort to create a game that would give the players the experience they wanted. I added in-jokes about the movie (for instance, the jokes about Mister Mistofelees being the obvious Jellicle Choice were adapted from that player's insistence that the movie had gone wrong by picking Grizabella instead). I got into the weirdness of the movie (the changing sizes of items was a fun detail to use and subvert with Vlad). I tried to make something that would entertain my friends. And even though I'm a terrible singer, and even though the one-shot is kind off a hot mess, we had fun. You'll be surprised by how much more your players will get into a session if they can tell you're doing it for them. Plus, you'll grow as a GM--nothing will improve your skills faster than trying to create something specific for your players. It's well worth the challenge. 

So get to work with your players and make something special. You'll have more fun than you realize. Next time, notes on session three of the mystery campaign, the session wherein the players were so self-directed that they didn't even touch the clues. I'll address what to do with sessions like these and how to stay afloat when you're improvising entire scenes instead of following your outline. 

Coming soon: how to deal with critical rolls, how to create in-game documents, and how to design a dungeon. Until next time, happy gaming!

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