Dynastic Roleplaying

[Deleted]

Hi all,

I am looking to run a longer campaign, again, and the players are interested in some sort of big, cross-generational epic.

As in, first you play the fathers, then you play the kids, and so on.

Do any of you have any experience with similar games?

Thanks,

Rafe

[Finarvyn]

I've played in such a game, but it's been a long time. I remember drawing out a family tree and when characters retired being able to pass an item off to another character in the tree. One character I ran went on to retire and I played his son and his son's son. I think one of the secrets to this was to force characters to retire early, say at "name level" so that limits the time you have with each.

You might look into the Pendragon game. It's a game of King Arthur and knights and mythic England. One of the books is a campaign book that lists historical events for several hundred years (I believe) and has rules for transferring from one character to another as the years pass. I think that the base game has the notion that there is a "questing season" and knights only go out for one quest per year, which helps speed things along a little. The campaign book continues this pattern to help the years pass by more quickly.

[makofan]

The D&D time scale does not really lend itself to this. As @finarvyn said, Pendragon has dynastic rules built in, as each session is supposed to represent 1 year of game time. Even at that scale, the knight has to get married, and be lucky enough to have a son live to majority. Since a D&D session usually represents a week to a month or so, you are looking at 300+ sessions before you get to the kids.

Anyway, I have been DMing Pendragon (it is my favourite game system) for almost 40 years so feel free to ask me any questions about it

[Scott Anderson]

-With the advent of easy online communications, it's not all that difficult to play a lot of the stuff off-screen between face to face meetings.

-You don't need to play one adventure piled up next to the next one. At our table, even when we do work on a proper campaign and not just episodic troupe-style treasure hunting, we usually build in an arbitrarily long period between adventures. Weeks, even months.

-Retiring at 4th or 5th level is a good option in a very deadly game like old D. It leaves time to have a family.

-skipping ahead 20 years isn't the worst thing in the world.

[Deleted]

Thanks, guys! Yeah, I am definitely looking into something Pendragon-esque, here.

As to how I'll proceed, I am not sure yet - right now, the scnearios connect more in a way that has the characters aging considerably between each adventure:

Have you ever had something similar in your campaigns? My personal impression is that D&D characters usually go very "super-hero" given off-time,
and that kind of worries me a bit, considering I want to keep the game small and gritty.

[tkdco2]

I started doing that sort of thing with my MERP game. The current characters are the children of the surviving characters in the old campaign.

[Finarvyn]

I had the notion once of tying our actual calendar to a game calendar. Not as a one-for-one thing, but maybe each day could be a week of game time. So, if you played each Saturday afternoon it would be like your characters adventuring every seven weeks.

Using a more Pendragon-esque scale, you could say that a week of the real world was a year in game world so that if you wanted to adventure twice in that year you would have to play twice that week.

Or let a month of the real world be a year in the game world, which would advance the plotline by 12 "years" each real year -- enough time to have a kid in January and be ready to play him as a character March of the next year. (That seems slow to me, particular if you have a lot of character death in a campaign, but some folks are very patient and play one campaign for years....)

Not totally a new idea, since I think the way Gary and Dave did it was if it took a month for a wizard to make a magic item it was a month of real time before you got it. Gronan can confirm/deny this.

[Scott Anderson]

Another way to keep the time moving is to have just two adventures per game year: a spring campaign and a fall campaign. In medieval Europe, it was common (but not universal) for military campaigns to basically grind to a halt during the winter.

Merely having a calendar is a great way to enforce time. Pandius has great resources for that, including years and years of history in the land of mystara. I wrote a calendar up for Mystara including the holy days and festivals for all of the nations of western Brun. When we play known world games, we use it.

...

Just looked and it appears that our level 7 heroes have been adventuring together for 19 years of mystara time. We started in the year 990 and now it's the year 1008. So, calendars help.

[maxvale76]

Hey there!

It's not exactly D&D-esque; but I'm running a sci-fi/post-apocalyptic game right now and the campaign will eventually cover 30+ years (with the major plot-points per-determined....but subject to change based off of character action) so I have each character have a designated heir (a backup character in case the current one gets killed; which is a possibility in the game we're running) and a chance for characters to have relationships, which can lead to children at the end of each session; which is usually a stretch of 4 months in my game.

As others have brought up; much of this is based off of the Pendragon model; though the exact amount of time differs depending on the situation. For example; the game started with a war starting.....and each session has covered 1 third of a year (about 4 months); so that we just wrapped up the 5th session and about a year and a half has passed. However, the war is winding down....so for the next couple of sessions, each one will actually take about a year as the next major plot point will be reached in year 5 of my time-line. Then they'll probably go back to being a few months at a stretch.

The designated heirs by the way, don't have to be family; they can be close friends....the main idea being that there's a 'connection' between all characters that come into play.

Just my 2 cents and best of luck in your game!

[Scott Anderson]

The B/X Blackrazor blogger whose name escapes me is writing about this topic now. Go look back at the last few posts.

[grodog]

You might also check out Ars Magica, which is a bit "quicker" in that you play on a seasonal basis rather than an annual one (which is how I understand Pendragon goes; I've not played it myself).

[Deleted]

Hmmm. Very interesting. Obviously, I already have pondered a few campaign models, but I have not decided fully yet,
given that this is more a problem of the framework and the general narrative structure, than of the regular in-game action.

About the real-time pacing, I think we will rather do time jumps than trying to find a correlation:

My personal experience is that the games I put the most thought into were the games my players enjoyed the least;
so I am inclined to find a simple before a (much more interesting) more complicated approach.

[Scott Anderson]

There's thought, and then there's thought.

Do have answers to common questions (what is the name of the country, what's the weather like)

Don't plan on how it will end.

[havard]

I am involved in a game not unlike this right now. It is not exactly generation/family based. However, the campaign is divided into chapters. Whenever a chapter ends, new PCs are rolled up. The next chapter takes place a decade or more later in the same Kingdom. Many chapters have had a significant impact on the history of the Kingdom. AFAIK there is no great master plan to the game. Different chapters may have different foci, but we usually end up working for the greater good of the realm. I am a player, not the GM of this campaign, but I have taken it upon myself to be a kind of Campaign Chronicler. My chronicles now detail a history of over a century of the setting spread across 6 chapters. It has been great fun. I do think having a Chronicler write down key events from each session has been vital to the success of this campaign. I love making small connections to previous Chapters in the new one and often ask the DM if a certain NPC might be related to someone from an earlier chapter or what happened to the town that was razed to the ground 50 years ago etc. The DM has been really cool about allowing me to insert a bunch of ideas like this, although he has the final say of course.

-Havard

[cooper]

Torchbearer RPG (a modern design, but specifically modeled after Moldvay B/X) puts it at 3 dungeons crawls per year, with 1 "turn" of the calendar being the "winter" stage that is done in town, with 4 seasons total.

[Deleted]

Thank you, guys. Really, this one, quite the heaadscratcher - in that I have to "open the setting" in a way that I never did before:

Bridging many years between adventures also means a lot of player influence on the overall course of history.
I know that my players take that part of our game pretty seriously, so we're into something in here.

I think "Red Aegis" - another of those funded, but abandoned kickstarter projects - attempted to provide rules for similar long-term timeline progression.
It would have been interesting to see how that game really fared.

For the moment, I am pretty amused at how my game's world, thought up with lofty concepts in mind, is slowly turning back into the D&D that we all know and love.
Picking tavern names, and all.

[Deleted]

Apr 2, 2015 2:33:49 GMT -6 @rafael said:

Hi all,

I am looking to run a longer campaign, again, and the players are interested in some sort of big, cross-generational epic.

As in, first you play the fathers, then you play the kids, and so on.

Do any of you have any experience with similar games?

Thanks,

Rafe

This is what I have always wanted to do; however I have never had the opportunity. I can tell you that bitd a single weekend (2-game sessions of 10-14 hours each) could cover as little as 2-3 days or as long as 6-8 months. If you were in a temperate climate and the PCs took the winters off and spent about 40% of each game year sitting by the fire - eating, drinking and swapping lies - that would also move the time frame along. I am going to cross post this question over on my forum or you could come post it yourself , we seem to have a few people who are not on here.

Also note that in a place and time where perhaps average life spans are shorter and people marry younger some of these PCs may already have a sweetheart or in some circumstances even a wife (and kids) - desperate men (and women) do desperate things.

[Deleted]

Okay, wrapping up two weeks of occasionally working on the campaign concept in my off-time.
I can say, it's going to go under a certain twicely loaded name: "Mordred: The New Shadow."

DUN DUN DUN.

[Dave L]

Oh no, not ... 'The Shadow!'

No need to point me over here Rafe, I was already reading this thread with interest.

[Deleted]

Hehehe. I called this one three years ago.

Actually, one of the reasons why I went online to vent about it was, this is quite the emo moment for me:

After our epic Blackmoor adventure, I thought I was completely done with heroic fantasy in a gaming environment.
Like, fantasy, in general, of course not, but with the proverbial and somewhat clichéed, dungeons and dragons, I thought I would be.

Well, seems like I was wrong.

[Deleted]

On topic. though - I wonder, how have you guys let your characters handle urban development, aka classic "castle building" over longer periods of time in your campaigns?

My idea - small spoiler here - was to have the group help building part of the setting, right from the start of the game.

[havard]

Apr 8, 2015 1:06:50 GMT -6 @rafael said:

On topic. though - I wonder, how have you guys let your characters handle urban development, aka classic "castle building" over longer periods of time in your campaigns?

My idea - small spoiler here - was to have the group help building part of the setting, right from the start of the game.

I have used the Castle Building Rules and Dominion Rules from the BECMI/RC sets mostly. We toyed with the AD&D 2nd edition rules for building castles (Castles book?), but I found them too detailed for my tastes.

-Havard

[Deleted]

Thanks, pal! I was thinking along the same lines, but I'd rather use the worlbuilding strategy suggested in the Pathfinder/Kingmaker adventure path by Paizo, if simply because the "Book of the River Kingdoms" is an easy, one-volume solution for the topic.

My question would be focused more around the social component, though - what were your experiences with handling family development *within the town/castle/city that you built* over longer periods of time?

[greentongue]

You may want to look at "An Echo Resounding".
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?614076-Sine-Nomine-Publishing-An-Echo-Resounding-now-out-for-Labyrinth-Lord
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