I have the day off but it rains. Should I go out for a run or not? I can’t decide and so I recorded a podcast episode and spent time on Reddit. Oh noes!
/u/spiderqueengm asked: “Do people see/play many cross-campaign characters?”
Here’s what I wrote:
I’m playing in a German multi-referee game using AD&D 1st ed in Greyhawk. Each referee runs a region and characters can cross over from one region to the other. In practice, as a player, I’ve found it easier to just create a character for every region I want to play in because time records are strictly kept and yet time drifts between the regions. Currently my region is one month “ahead” of a neighbouring region, for example.
I’m also playing in a mostly German and some English multi-referee game using H&H where we all have characters in a starting town and each referee runs an adjacent region or a nearby dungeon. We have Stonehell and Barrowmaze as well as two wildness hex-maps.
As it turns out, this makes the time sync and cross-over much easier. The only problem I’ve noticed here is that the group that ran off to the far end of one of the regions just never comes back and so the two localities have less and less to do with each other.
For references, I keep my notes on Elredd and my notes on Stonehell on a wiki.
#RPG
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When I was running multiple groups (we call ’em “teams”) in my tag(boatmode) campaign, my idea was always that when we wanted to sync up time we have plenty of downtime rules and tables to roll on to fast-forward the lagging group. But we never needed to use them, the two teams wound take turns being ahead. With our playstyle sometimes there’s several sessions for just a few diegetic hours, other times a session will span several diegetic weeks. (Typically underground time runs slow and overland time runs fast.)
– Sandra 2023-03-25 10:22 UTC
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Perhaps you being the one person who runs all the games influence this in subtle ways? I suspect the Greyhawk campaigns are drifting apart because of multiple factors:
The last point in particular made an appearance in my game a few days ago: as soon as travel from one referee’s region to another referee’s region involves checking local time in this Discord channel, checking local time in the other Discord channel, translating both Greyhawk dates into a something akin to our regular calendar, estimating travel times, and thinking about whether the character needs to be back in the original region for follow-up adventures – we ended up creating a new character instead.
The net effect of that last point is that players create characters in every region, so in effect travel is reduced even further and synchronisation of the campaign regions is only necessary when there’s a bit battle somewhere … or not at all.
Effectively, it’s only the “potential” that is exciting. In actuality, the multi-referee campaign is simply multiple referees running their weakly linked campaigns close to each other in the common campaign world.
– Alex 2023-03-25 11:00 UTC
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Huh, yeah, we haven’t been crossing characters over between the separate teams, not as full PCs. (Some characters have appeared as quest-giving “NPCs” (not quite NPCs because they were controlled by their original players) but that’s the exent of it. It’s currently Nau 22nd, year 1394 in our campaign. At 1030 in the morning, and the moon (probably better known as weeping Selan) is in the last quarter about to wane into a crescent. We’ve played for several years but less than one year has passed diegetically. Two wars have started and a city has been decimated by poisoned water supply.
– Sandra 2023-03-26 20:32 UTC
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Yeah, both of the setups I mentioned are open tables, so there’s an always a different subset of characters in sessions.
– Alex 2023-03-27 07:28 UTC