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View Full Version : DM Help Running an online game where everyone can join or leave as they please



Yora
2016-08-03, 04:59 AM
I've heard some people having good experiences with this. The idea is that you run a campaign on a regular schedule two or four times per month and it will be played with whoever shows up. I used to run campaigns that mostly followed some storyline, but way back in the mid 2000s I was playing on a Neverwinter Nights server where we really did pretty much just that: It ran all the time and you showed up when you pleased and then went out to one of the adventure sites with some of the other people who happened to be in the hub town. And we had a lot of fun without there being any quests. Just exploring the areas and hauling back loot to sell for always very scarce money.

I would really like to give it a try to run something similar on Roll20 or something like that. But I've never done it or seen it in action and so I'd like to start this discussion about how to set up and run such a game.

Obviously you can only play when a GM is present and so you need to have a fixed schedule. Always the same date at the same time allows people to schedule any other plans they might have around that.

If you let players show up at a session unannounced you also have to have a game system that is really easy to learn and fast to teach and has very quick character generation. I think this makes the various versions of Basic D&D an exceptionally good choice (though I would use the d20 system method of rolling attack rolls). Pick class, roll six ability scores, and done. Also the vast majority of videogame RPG systems are evolutions of the basic D&D framework so you have a very good chance that completely new players will easily grasp the basics of ability scores, hit points, armor class, attack bonuses, variable weapon damage, and experience points. If you expect to have first time players showing up right at the start of a session, I think that's the way to go. It also works quite well if you play with characters of widely different levels.
How is D&D 5th edition in that regard?

The first problem you might run into is that more people show up than you expect to be able to handle. Usually I don't like to have more than 6 players but think I might be able to handle 8. If it's nine players I wouldn't kick out just one guy on principle but at some point you have to make a cutoff point and not everyone gets to play. What would be a good method to decide who is going to play this session?

But now to the real meat of the topic: How would you set up adventures when you don't know what players will show up for each session?
I think it would really have to be something without a plot. Not only would it get somewhat implausible if the team going on a long adventure constantly keeps changing, I would expect that you also end up with having a few regular who know the whole story so far and what they are trying to do, and some irregulars who never have more than the barest clue what's going on. That's not much fun for the people who end up mostly watching the whole thing from the sidelines.
What would probably work much better is to go to a place, do some stuff there, and then return back to the main base and divide treasure and give out XP. One ideas, based on my old NWN days, would be to have a central hub town with some kind of big warrior hall (or adventurer guild if such a thing suits your campaign) and then have a number of prepared adventure sites in the nearby surrounding area. Each one of these uses Angry GM's Project Slaughterhouse (http://theangrygm.com/schrodinger-chekhov-samus/) system in which factions of enemies repopulate between sessions if the players caused them only minor losses, but will stop repopulating once the players managed to destroy or rout half their forces, and permanently disappear if brought below 20% of their original strength. This will be more interesting than either resetting the whole site each session or leaving it just the way it was left the last time.
The benefit of this is that you can have different sites of different difficulties. If one session you have six players with 7th level characters but the next time only two of them are back and the rest is all 1st and 2nd level characters, then it's probably not a good idea to go back to the same dungeon and take an easier location instead. But since the slaughterhouse system repopulates locations depending on what happened previously it won't be that the players who have been there before will know what exactly they will be encountering.

A related issue to this is setting. If you just want to go dungeon crawling without any greater context that's fine. But if you want to have the game set in some greater world with which the players will be interacting, you need a setup that supports the kind of gameplay in which changing groups of adventurers go to dangerous nearby places every week.
One interesting option would be to have a main town that is a new settlement in a mostly unexplored area. The leader of the town hired a large number of adventurers to explore and patrol the surrounding wilderness and eventually secure the area for further settlement.
Another one would be some kind of fortress in a land recently overrun by monsters. The players are given the task attack and weaken the enemies that have set up camp in various sites in the nearby area.

That's some ideas I've had so far. Any advice or other ideas for making such a game work?

thedanster7000
2016-08-03, 05:41 AM
You'd definitley need a player limit, especially if they're splitting off into teams, one solution is to have more than one DM. Maybe have a set number of in-world events each session that equals the number of DMs; like you could put up before the game: 'Running *name of undead dungeon* and *name of kingdom's tournament*.

D&D 5e is definitley simple enough for new players to pick up quickly.

Even though most of the adventures would be literally just raiding stuff, there should be an overachring plot/story/world that allows other PCs' actions to affect other PCs. Like, the king could hold a tournament for some special gear and any PCs that went there would have to face each other. Or advertise a reward for the defeat of a monster that only high-level PCs can defeat. Or the PCs could open up a new base for other PCs by clearing it out which would have different/better shops/NPCs/access to different locations.

World-affecting quests should be level-dependant as well, like maybe after a group reaches a certain level and/or upsets a certain army/very big monster, everyone that session would have to defend the city.

The cool aspect of the lack of every-player teams in these sort of things is only cool if the PCs still interact and one party's play affects others'.