Vampire: The Masquerade
Contest of Will
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Creating Your Own Adventures
Between the Contest of Will task list items and the Grapevine Quests, there will be plenty of adventures to choose from. But, you may be intrigued by something else that isn't on the list that you want to explore. Or you may have an idea for a quest that you think would be fun. The way to go about initiating this is to write up the adventure concept and email it to me, the Storyteller Alan at alzatkow@aol.com
If I like the adventure concept and think it will work in the environment, I will add it to the list of Possible Adventures. If I think it needs to be tweaked I may just tweak it myself to fit the campaign setting. If I don't like it for whatever reason, we will talk about it. I try not to dismiss any ideas that come from my players, but also, there are a lot of secret things going on in the campaign world and your concept might be a fun idea, but it might not work in the campaign setting that exists. All of the NPC's have vast secrets that, until you uncover them, will affect the game environment secretly. I may reject your concept out of hand simply because something is already happening that can't also happen if your suggestion is happening.
Remember also, the entire player base gets to vote on what adventure the PCs will be doing next. Your cool adventure, once approved, is not guaranteed to be picked by the player base. But it is now on the list and available to be developed for the next session so you can lobby for it oocly all you like.
And that's it. Pretty simple.
The Voting process for the next adventure session
We will be using the program Doodle to schedule game sessions. Once a session is booked, I need to craft the adventure for that session. Because there are lots of possibilities for what you can do ICly, it would be a nightmare if we started a game session and I said "Okay, gang where are you going this time?" It would force me to have to pre-craft ALL the potential adventures which would force me to then abandon my career and become a hermit because I wouldn't have time for a social life either. I would just spend 10 hours a day 7 days a week crafting adventures for this campaign!
Or just wing it! Which might be great or might be a total disaster. Most of the time, its the latter, in my experience both as a player and game master.
What most game masters do is, they craft an adventure or two, and then force the players to have to do that. Now, there will be big events that happen that will supersede other events in the game. I mean, if werewolves are angered and decide to come back for seconds, you aren't going to do a fun-time task while the city is trying to defend itself. Every now and again, big ticket story items will occur and I will make those announcements and you'll know coming into the session -- something big is about to happen in it.
But, for the most part, you'll want to compete in the Contest of Will. Some of the adventures possible are cooperative, and some are competitive. So, the way this works is I will announce that we are playing on Thursday October 4th, from 5 PM to 9 PM EST and according to Doodle, 5 players can make it. Those players are (names all 5). Anyone else who can move their schedule around is welcome.
At that point in time, those players should all go to the Possible Adventures Section and do an email or live chat (I prefer this) conversation where the adventure is selected by the end of the conversation. You can relate which adventure you want me to build and I will then spend enough time making that adventure great, and then when we get to the game session it will be ready and I expect we will all have a terrific time.
Does this ruin the element of surprise about what the context of the game session will be about? Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. But, the adventure itself will usually have lots of twists and turns along the way. I always try and throw in some unexpected curve balls that may be character-based or it may be plot based. At any rate, this is the best system for building a great game that everyone will enjoy playing.