Game inspiration?

[Admiral Squish]

So, here be my question. How do you come up with your game ideas? Are they months of careful planning and designing? Are they smooshing a collection of ideas you've saved up together into a single, vaguely coherent concept? Do you shoot purely from the hip? Do you simply make a world and let the players rampage freely through it? Do these campaigns come to you in dreams? How is it done?

[The Rose Dragon]

Months of careful planning and designing?

I mean, I've done all of the others, but that one just gets to me. How do you do that? How do you have months of free time for research and planning?

[Zach J.]

I imagine that you have to do just that. Spend your free time researching and planning. On the rare occasions I do DM I usually just make it up as I go along. I think that may be a reason that my games don't usually last very long...

[WeeFreeMen]

Well for me, its a rather sacred ritual.
First, Ill ask my players what they would like to see/experience in the future.
(I do this in my current campaign)
Then, Ill see if any of my past campaigns [12 in total] can have some kind of historical tie in.
(Players love seeing older versions of themselves swaying the tides of destiny in their new world)
Then, Ill take a stroll down to Comic Coliseum. Pick up a random Comic, and take 3 plot points from its story. Ill do this till I hae about 20 workable plot points.
(Not ripping off the story, just organizing a turn of events, the more unrelated they are, often the more fun the adventure has been.) IE: Barack the Barbarian + Green Arrow Arc. [Yes thats a real comic..]
Finaly, as a last resort for inspiration, Ill watch several animes that my players watch and love. Pulling [very loosely] some character archetypes and plot hooks.
[However, the TTGL-esk campaign for D20 modern was amoung the best we ever had]

And thats how we do. ;]

[shadow_archmagi]

There's a vineyard near my house. I take the dog for a walk through it and my route takes me about 30 minutes and that usually gives me time to think of two or three things.

[krossbow]

i spend my bored time at work working out various campaigns in my head.

[The Rose Dragon]

I imagine that you have to do just that. Spend your free time researching and planning. On the rare occasions I do DM I usually just make it up as I go along. I think that may be a reason that my games don't usually last very long...

Well, even assuming a bare minimum of two months, that's 59 days (February and a neighboring month on a non-leap year). 1440 minutes per day times 60 seconds per minute means 5097600 seconds of researching and planning. Since you also have to sleep, eat, work and stuff, I envy the person who can put that much time to a single setting.

[Vitruviansquid]

Read Beowulf.

[shadow_archmagi]

So, here be my question. How do you come up with your game ideas?

Answered in above post


Are they months of careful planning and designing?

Lord no


Are they smooshing a collection of ideas you've saved up together into a single, vaguely coherent concept?

That's more like it.


Do you shoot purely from the hip?

I wouldn't say COMPLETELY PURELY. But by the large, yes.


Do you simply make a world and let the players rampage freely through it?

I would love to but to be honest that means making the entire world ahead of time and worlds are really, really big.


Do these campaigns come to you in dreams? How is it done?

I am not above looting my dreams for ideas.

The other night, I dreamt
I was in this huge underground prison made of sandstone, and it in this wierd energy dome, and then on top of the energy dome was the ocean. When ships sank and landed in the dome by chance, the people who hadn't drowned yet became the citizens of the city.

The prison cells were made of the same dull brown stone as everything else except they had one small round blue window at head height. The prisoners didn't seem to need feeding or everything and they were all supervillain levels of powerful and evil.

There were like these ancient Egyptian tiles on the wall sealed in unbreakable glowing blue energy but this little girl just walked up and plucked them out like nothing and started assembling them and I knew that if she put them into the right order they'd summon an enormous scarab twice as tall as a house.

I took off running to try to find the guards and call them on her but before I got there I woke up.

[Kiren]

Cool dream, I rarely remember my own, when I do they are strange and cryptic, it gives me something to think about, usually enjoyable.

My ideas come to me at random, mostly when I am bored, usually I make things up as I go along.... doesn't go very well.

[Zeta Kai]

Take a popular piece of media that you like.
Replace the protagonist(s) with the PCs.
Change all the names to ones that would fit in your setting.
Add a few more fights.
Fix the parts of the story that bugged you in the original.
Add a few more fights.
Change the details to fit your setting better.
Add a few more fights.
Emphasize some story trope that you like/dislike, so you can later twist/subvert it.
Set up the final battle with the antagonist(s) to be as long & epic as possible, knowing that your work will be for naught when the players exploit some weakness that you failed to foresee.
???
Profit.

[Zach J.]

Well, even assuming a bare minimum of two months, that's 59 days (February and a neighboring month on a non-leap year). 1440 minutes per day times 60 seconds per minute means 5097600 seconds of researching and planning. Since you also have to sleep, eat, work and stuff, I envy the person who can put that much time to a single setting.

True. That is a lot of time, but I don't think most people realize just how much time they waste during a day. Waste is the wrong word. I don't think people realize how much time they use during a day. I think that it's pretty fair to say that most people have at least an hour per day that they're using in order to watch TV, read the newspaper, do nothing, etc. It's feasible that if they chose to do so they could use that hour to plan for a game instead. If you planned a campaign a minimum of an hour a day for two months I think you'd be surprised with how much material you had to work with.

Edit: I think I'll actually try to do this myself. Maybe I'll enjoy DMing more if I have things planned out in advance.

[Admiral Squish]

See, I actually asked this because I had two dreams that make me want to do campaigns. One about being made into a kickass commando werewolf and having to disarm a bomb under my baby cousin's bed. The other one involved me and a team having to take down the 'queen' of the Filth Party, a teen group trying to make a Noah's bunker for all the animals, then nuke the world and once the winter was over, they release the beasts into the human-free world.

[valadil]

Are they smooshing a collection of ideas you've saved up together into a single, vaguely coherent concept?

This, exactly. I have a wiki. When I come up with random game ideas they get dumped into the wiki. Sometimes I read through the ideas. If I can lasso enough of them together into a single game, they become that game.

The game doesn't always stick with those ideas though. I have a few plots and challenges in my wiki that haven't been played even though they've been selected for 3 or 4 different games. I like to throw these ideas into a game when they seem appropriate and just haven't managed to point the game close enough to these scenarios.

[tahu88810]

I give my players an ECL to start at. They make their characters, and I make a setting and campaign story that fits the characters.
A half-elf noble, warforged artificer, ghoul fighter, and hippy sloth druid led to a Steampunk Setting revolving around a war with an evil necromancer. With a twist.

[Zach J.]

A half-elf noble, warforged artificer, ghoul fighter, and hippy sloth druid led to a Steampunk Setting revolving around a war with an evil necromancer.

Best. Party. Ever. :)

[Swooper]

There's a vineyard near my house. I take the dog for a walk through it and my route takes me about 30 minutes and that usually gives me time to think of two or three things.
I take it you play Dogs in the Vineyard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogs_in_the_Vineyard)? :smallamused:

[Emmerask]

Months of careful planning and designing?

I mean, I've done all of the others, but that one just gets to me. How do you do that? How do you have months of free time for research and planning?


Months is a bit much but it took me about 2 weeks of planning and designing my current campaign, creating a map, background story and especially writing a prophecy was a pain in the ... and took about 10 hours alone :smallsmile:

[Private-Prinny]

I usually start with the BBEG. I ask myself, "Who is he, what are his goals, and how would he go about making that happen?" From there, I have the main focal point of the entire campaign, which still ends up perfectly adaptable if the players start going off the rails.

The second part is the hardest. I have to come up with a variety of different cities, allies, and encounters so everything can stay fresh. Contingency planning has worked very well for me.

Then, I just come up with an entry point for the PCs. A little girl saw her cat scurry off into a conveniently placed cave, for example. Once the minor sidequest is out of the way, I can place 3 or 4 plot hooks that all play into what I'm trying to set up.

[AslanCross]

Let me answer this bit by bit.


So, here be my question. How do you come up with your game ideas?

Reading and other media. I get inspiration from so many other sources---sometimes from just talking to friends.


Are they months of careful planning and designing?

Yes. I plan and plan obsessively. I try to think up of responses to all things I can predict my players doing.


Are they smooshing a collection of ideas you've saved up together into a single, vaguely coherent concept?

Sometimes the ideas form vaguely at first and only become concrete when I'm on the verge of applying them.


Do you shoot purely from the hip?

Dialogue is usually improvised, but numerical things are planned.


Do you simply make a world and let the players rampage freely through it?

Not at all. I don't like the lack of structure in sandboxing. I don't think it's fair to me as a DM; I do a lot of work putting things together and players either don't appreciate it or try to blow it up/kill/steal/maim it.


Do these campaigns come to you in dreams?

I wish.

[Gralamin]

Take a popular piece of media that you like.
Replace the protagonist(s) with the PCs.
Change all the names to ones that would fit in your setting.
Add a few more fights.
Fix the parts of the story that bugged you in the original.
Add a few more fights.
Change the details to fit your setting better.
Add a few more fights.
Emphasize some story trope that you like/dislike, so you can later twist/subvert it.
Set up the final battle with the antagonist(s) to be as long & epic as possible, knowing that your work will be for naught when the players exploit some weakness that you failed to foresee.
???
Profit.


Zeta-Kai has the right idea. Once the players start catching on, add in more and more games, fusing together plots until it sounds like it came from the Wild Mass Guessing section of TVtropes, and only the most insane will be able to guess what happens next.

[ApeofLight]

I like it when the game is fun and sometimes unpredictable. Free world is a bad thing sometimes because then you just get a bunch of PC's sitting around wondering what to do. And that's when meteors start to fall out of the sky and a strange castle/fortress appears. True story.