#RPGaDAY2015 – Day 15 – Longest campaign played: Donigor. I put 13 major game influences the title below. Can you recognize them?
Donigor, from the name of the city that is now central in the campaign. I joined the campaign around 1998, but it has already been live for a couple of years. Donigor has known more than 50 players. I played four major PC, a bunch of minor PC and some NPC. I GMed it also. It started as an ADD/ADD2 hybrid and went through many system changes and hacks along the years. It went to sleep uglily in 2013 as the second divorce in the core gaming group shattered the game. We’re talking about reviving it in the near future. And, as you can guess, I can talk about it for hours.
Sounds a lot like the AD&D meta-campaign we played in college. Except it didn't have a name and the only link between adventures was the Forgotten Realms and the fact that most high level characters knew each other.
RépondreSupprimerHow was Donigor organised?
I don't recognize the second title there, or the sixth.
RépondreSupprimerEric Nieudan you weren't supposed to call out my bluff about being able to talk about it for hours!
RépondreSupprimer(I'll try to answer later today, that will give me time to gather my thoughts while I clean up the home.)
P T They're both from the French RPG magazine Casus Belli (in it's first and most famous run of existence, as the title was re-launched 3 times by different teams after each death of the magazine).
RépondreSupprimerSo the second is no 36, in which they introduce Laeltih, a medfan city which had enough success to have several follow-ups, a special issue and another one 20 years later (titled "Laelith, 20 years later"). You can learn more about Laelith (in French) here: http://www.donjondudragon.fr/univers/laelith.html
The sixth is the SimulacreS special issue no 1 of Casus Belli,. SimulacreS is an "universal" RPG system by Pierre Rosenthal. SimulacreS was succesful enough, as this was the third time the game was published. After that there were four different games published that used the system and a new special issue with a new edition. Today, you can get SimulacreS (in French) for free here: http://roliste.free.fr/.
Both were influential enough to still have their fans and their own French Wikipedia page.
And what is the last pic, with the eye?
RépondreSupprimerFrom left to right (→) :
RépondreSupprimerD – ADD Dungeon Master Guide; Casus Belli 36 (« Laelith »)
O – Rêve de Dragon (translated in English as The Dream Orobouros); ADD2 DMG
N – Ars Magica (French edition, Jeux Descartes); SimulacreS (Casus Belli, HS 1)
I – _Encyclopédie Galactique_ (from the French RPG Empire Galactique)
G – Mage l’Ascension (Mage The Awakening, French edition); Mega’’’
O – _DD3 DMG_; Heroquest
R – _Pendragon_ (French edition, Oriflam); Fear Itself
Eric Nieudan, how was it organised?
I don’t know for the first couple of years, I wasn’t there, and of course it evolved a bit during long life, but here is how it generally went.
It was a very open table. We invited everybody who might have been interested. From people we met in games – rpgs, larps or mmorpg, forum rpg, non-rpg, … – to people the original GM just met (he has a real gift for binding with people).
We have a very relaxed attitude around the game. All the game I put in the banner are influences, but the result is rather free-form.
The playing style is very dependent on the players present around the table, most of the core players being very flexible. So with new gamer-newbies, we usually sticked to the rules at their beginning in Donigor and getting more free-form with time. And with non-gamer-newbies, we usually went with “just invent somebody, we’ll stat it some other time” and getting a bit less free-form with time.
What is played is also very dependent on who is playing. Dungeon crawling, all-thiefs and larceny, politics, war, strategic fights, saving-the-world, family life, discovering the history and secrets of the world, trade, moral questions, priests, gods and religion, romance, … We do railroading (because some players require it to have fun) as much as sandbox, but always with hooks leading to different interesting things. We could probably have done with more bangs!
To incorporate new players / characters into the setting and the game, we usually try to make them interesting, useful or necessary to older characters. We try to achieve this by proposing some options to the new player (but not necessarily reveal the positive implications), by adding something to the character that the player will discover and/or by composing the setting. (We also give every character one unique specificity, known to him or not.) Then we aim the characters to meet.
The first rule of the campaign is: everybody is responsible for everybody’s fun. Think of the others. Play to create play. Your actions should enrich the game, never impoverish it.
So, older players know that when new players come, they should play a bit meta, meet them, play with them.
You can guess all this gets chaotic rather quickly. The players around the table can be very different from game to game. And we always have characters engaged in middle and long terms actions. Or being miles and miles away. To be able to play nonetheless, we had no qualms about jumping in time (“OK, let’s say you just came back from your two month expedition in the ghost city’s necropolis”), leaving things that had logically already happened in the game world unclear and untold, waiting to be played later (what happened in the necropolis). We sometime have to retcon, but it generally works quite nicely. The other solution being creating a new PC or playing an NPC. Temporary PC or NPC sometime became a players’ main character, if they wished so.
So the more experienced Donigor players often begin by asking “who and when are we playing?”
Another rule of the campaign is: secrets are made to be discovered. This includes PC secrets. New characters are generally brought up-to-speed on the setting’s secret in one or two sessions, both by the old characters (because they need the new character to know) and by the GM agency. (It sometimes had been frustrating for old hands to see that new players got “important secrets” just by being there while they had to fight long to discover them.)
RépondreSupprimerI guess this paint a rather chaotic picture of what we did… All this was generally ad hoc and wasn’t always successful. At all. But it generally worked well enough. We had much fun and some of my best rpg memories are from Donigor.
Questions ?
(PS: told ya, for hours)
Sounds less chaotic than some games I've seen :) It's very interesting though. How were plotlines shared between GMs? Was there only one at a time?
RépondreSupprimerThe roles of the two GM varied through times. But at times, yes, we were both GMing at the same time. Sometimes we were GMing together at the same table, sharing GM funcitons and NPCs. Sometimes each at his own time and table for the same players/characters couples. Sometimes one GM for the other with other players. Sometimes for different players or characters, or with only a common subset of players. We did share most elements (plotlines, GM and NPC intentions, states of the world, what the players did or said, …) through regular communication (face to face, phone (often while doing dishes), IM, mails, forum, wiki, depending of our availabilities and what caught our fancy at the time). Sometimes we called dibs on some elements, to be able to surprise the other GM. So, at times, we outlined some elements that were temporarily our preserve: an NPC, a region, a place, … It really isn’t very difficult and it is very fun. (I also wrote a short text about my experience with co-gming, in French http://www.lacellule.net/2014/05/double-master-ii-le-retour-de-phlippe.html)
RépondreSupprimerTwo GMs doesn't seem like too much trouble, but it's a achievement to make it work for several years. I'll check out the article, thanks for the link!
RépondreSupprimerIt's much easier than it looks. What is difficult is being available. It was easy for us at the time.
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