How Do You Pitch a Role-Playing Campaign Change?
This weekend I pitched a new campaign to my regular gaming group. Haaldaar runs a great 4th Edition undead-focused campaign in the Shadowfell for me and four other players. He has been running for the better part of a year and I offered to run something to give him a break. Since I am not a 4th Edition fan, I went looking for another game option. After some research, I decided to go with “Alpha Omega,” a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting from Mind Storm Labs.
I discussed it with Haaldaar and he agreed to let me pitch a different campaign. I prepared a short introduction to the world, the reasons behind the change and packed all of the books to game night. The pitch went well and I lent out my books to the players for review. I have not heard back yet if I was successful, but the initial feedback was “cautiously interested.” I will let you know how it goes.
I know that many long-term game groups cycle between campaigns and I wonder what “campaign pitch” approaches work for other groups. Is it formal and organized or organic and the change just happens? I am curious how other groups handle it.
Trask, The Last Tyromancer
I too thought the pitch went well. And this will be the first time I will have gone through an “organized” method of game change (if it is successful). Game changes for me in the past involved the current game crashing and burning. And the new game having to rise from the ashes.
My group has a number of games we rotate through. We generally have a ‘main’ game running once a week or two main games, run either on alternate weeks or one on Friday another on Saturday or Sunday, plus several back-burner games that can get rotated in, like my girlfriend’s Serenity game, or one friend’s VtR Elders, or my Requiem for Rome. There are also a number of games that are on indefinite hiatus, like In Nomine demons, one WoD Asylum game, a Fading Suns game, Babylon 5, and Wheel of Time. Some of our games have an intended endpoint, or we decide to bring the campaign to a close. Some games just go for a few sessions and burn out, like one d20 Mafia game, or are just short term, like a WoD Innocents game that we don’t talk about except in whispers and with backward glances. Right now, the main games are my two DnD campaigns (one with a different group) and our Dark Heresy game. On some occasions a game will outright crash and burn, like our first Mutants and Masterminds game, but that’s rare, and then we’ve got several games to switch to.
As for pitches, we just go ‘Ooh, I have a great idea for game X, can we work it in?’ and we figure out when we can try it out, if everyone seems to be interested. If it goes well, it goes in the rotation. If it goes very well, one of the current games takes a break while we play the new one. There are also a bunch of games we’d like to play ‘someday’ like Mouseguard and Song of Ice and Fire. Finally, we’ve got ‘special occasion’ games, like my GF’s Geist game she’s planning for Halloween.
Heh. After writing that, I remembered a bunch more games on hiatus, several more ‘someday’ games, and a stack of ‘I bought it, should actually play it’ games. Maybe we have problems 😀
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For us it is a matter of edition and DMs. When 4e hit the group was in the midst of a really high level 3.5 elemental campaign. The DM for that game wanted to try to convert our characters over, which mostly worked. The game fizzled mostly because that DM had more conflicts with getting together –fiance takes priority (as she should).
So then we were trying to finish one other 3.5 game that the group hadn’t played in more than a year while alternating with a 4e scales of war game that my husband was DMing. We finished the 3.5 and shortly after that the plot for the 4e game came to a finish. Another player volunteered to DM because he wanted to check it out in 4e and my husband wanted to rollup another character. I guess the whole transition was pretty organic and just happened. One of our staunch 3.5ers was able to find a new job that kept him in our area so he’s going to be Dming our 3.5 game in the next month or so. We basically begged him to because he hadn’t run a game in a while and we wanted him to hang out. So he agreed.
In our group there are several players that simply have a difficult time with change whether it is edition, or campaign. So we try to transition respectfully whenever we can. Little issues pop up sometimes but are usually dealt with quickly.