Lately I’ve been wanting to start a proper campaign with friends again, but it’s become increasingly challenging to get people bought in to want to keep a consistent game going until the end. Simultaneously, I was seeing some interesting ideas coming out of the release of Daggerheart. This system, coming from the creators of Critical Role, emphasizes an interesting mix of detail-oriented game mechanics, and complex player choice and input typically only seen in indie games. This focus on player choice made me consider ”how could I get buy-in for a campaign from the start?”
Campaign Frames
I stumbled on this video from Ginny Di that laid clear a simply way to pitch a campaign to a group of players. As someone who loves creating worlds, Campaign Frames sounded like the perfect template to quickly establish what makes a specific world so compelling. I think even before starting a Session Zero this concept of a pitching a number of different ideas seemed appealing to me.
Campaign Frames offer the first place for players to collaborate with the GM in a structured way to curate the experience we all have. GMs and players can have discussions about different touchstones to add or remove, and it even makes it clear up front to the players the kind of tone and feel that should be shared between GM and player.
I’ve shared a few quick ideas for Campaigns here.