How do you come up with DM ideas?

[ubernoob]

What I'm doing for my players right now is just picking a theme for next week's session at the end of each session and running basically joke sessions (2-3 hours total). We've currently done SWAT team, super mario bros, and this week we're going to do zombie horror.

I cannot for the life of me give a shit enough to actually plan out a plot. The players seem to be enjoying the game so far though.

[Koumei]

I often plan out some vague thing ahead of time, but it's often decided based on whim and what I've been immersing myself in recently. So for instance, as much as I'd love to use that "Etna wants a Magical Tea Party, deliver invites" plotline, if I were to run a game now it would likely be based on Rosario to Vampire - pretty girl vampires, succubi, loli witches, ice maidens and possibly in a high school (so... Sigil Prep).

Or it would be set inside Carceri or whatever the prison plane is (see: Oz) or be about beating down on the lower planes and the low-lifes that reside there with no chance of change or redemption, trying to spy on Pit Fiends trading illegal souls to snort (see: The Wire).

[Fuchs]

I steal from books, movies, and the net. More characters and their motivations and goals than finished pltos though.

[Wageslave]

theres a web comic that I've been reading, called dead winter http://deadwinter.cc/ might give you some ideas

[the_taken]

I have a similar method to ubernoob, though I plan for a couple of weeks in advance. That said, I do have some themes that I keep revisiting, like a PbP game I just started.

Most of my groups don't like my games, though, preferring store bought adventures. I don't run 4e games, so I only have a single group now.

[MGuy]

I gather as much information about my player's characters before hand. I ask them to give me details about their characters well ahead of actually running, plan out story arcs for each one. Then I stick them together, if not through background, then through some hooks that have something to do with their backgrounds. I don't come up with an overarching plot until a few levels into the game after I've gotten the character's motivations and behavior down.

[Utterfail]

I usually only substitue DM, and that means one to two session adventures. So I just come up with some silly off the cuff situation and then make it more serious.

One example was that a few sessions ago they had to stage an assault on the moon because it was going to crash into the planet because of tractor beams someone on the moon had set up. So they were attacked my moon dragons and lycantropes planetside, and when they got to the moon (in a giant cannon) they fought all sorts of weird shit. Turns out the moon was the border between the material plane and the far realms.

The basic idea I started with though was just "BLOW UP THE MOON"

[Zinegata]

One could also roll a d1000 and consult a plot hooks table.

[Crissa]

My spouse writes ideas from movies and books out on strips of paper, then puts them in a jar.

-Crissa

[K]

The method that works the best always seems to be:

1. Start with a villain.

2. Ask: what is he going to do to increase his own power/pleasure at the expense of others.

3. Then ask the players: WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT?


Fetch or carry or escort quests are fine, but everyone know that they are filler for a real plot.

[Kaelik]

The method that works the best always seems to be:

1. Start with a villain.

2. Ask: what is he going to do to increase his own power/pleasure at the expense of others.

3. Then ask the players: WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT?

That's a perfect summary of the only campaigns I've DMed that didn't suck.

[the_taken]

The method that works the best always seems to be:

1. Start with a villain.

2. Ask: what is he going to do to increase his own power/pleasure at the expense of others.

3. Then ask the players: WHATCHA GONNA DO ABOUT IT?


Fetch or carry or escort quests are fine, but everyone know that they are filler for a real plot.

Funny, that's how I wanted to play...

[Danchild]

I get inspiration from a variety of sources. TV and movie plotlines, books, console and computer games, new items, websites and many other places. I have also aceess to a small collection of old RPG's, so updating a 2e box set adventure is not that hard. Ripping off an idea from White Wolf games, SR or Runequest is not that hard, but can take a bit of work to convert it to 'sword and sorcery'fantasy. If you like themed games, then tvtropes is a great website. A half hour surfing links there and you are garuanteed to have a plot or two you can work with.

[Username17]

There should be a supplement series called "What Are You Gonna Do About It?" Each is just a series of villains and a list of events that will happen if someone doesn't stop them. Like the Elder Evils books, but not so fucking useless.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

I gather as much information about my player's characters before hand. I ask them to give me details about their characters well ahead of actually running, plan out story arcs for each one. Then I stick them together, if not through background, then through some hooks that have something to do with their backgrounds. I don't come up with an overarching plot until a few levels into the game after I've gotten the character's motivations and behavior down.

This can be a handy resource. So long as the players cooperate and have enough of a backstory/goals to give suggestions, you can easily get several sessions per character.

Sometimes I write their goals into the plot, or sometimes they're their own plot.

[hogarth]

What I'm doing for my players right now is just picking a theme for next week's session at the end of each session and running basically joke sessions (2-3 hours total). We've currently done SWAT team, super mario bros, and this week we're going to do zombie horror.

I cannot for the life of me give a shit enough to actually plan out a plot. The players seem to be enjoying the game so far though.

That's what we used to do for Call of Cthulhu. Having disposable characters made the game way more fun, and there are quite a few horror genre tropes to play around with.

[violence in the media]

I sometimes mine music, poetry, and song lyrics for ideas. Sometimes I'll get an impression for a location, or an encounter, or a character, or a plot. If I have the proper set up (and time, and motivation...) I'll occassionally queue up a musical score or sound effects for the game, though it's been a pretty long time since I've done that.

[TheFlatline]

There should be a supplement series called "What Are You Gonna Do About It?" Each is just a series of villains and a list of events that will happen if someone doesn't stop them. Like the Elder Evils books, but not so fucking useless.

-Username17

That would also probably be one of the most entertaining books to write. Traveller has a book called like 500 patrons or something like that which is full of similar stuff. I'm surprised Shadowrun hasn't released an ebook filled with like 50 Mr Johnsons and their agendas.

As for where I get my DM ideas? It varies. I have no television (not even an antenna), but even when I did I never got too many ideas from the boob tube.

I do read a lot though. I pour through news and books and just about anything that perks my interest. On rare occasion a movie will give me an idea, and music occasionally gives me ideas, but more often gives me moods and themes to work with.

My best games usually start with me imagining a scene. I'll walk through Dark Heresy as an example.

Dark Heresy started with me imagining a scene where the players kill off hundreds of innocent people in a cruel, painful manner, in order to stop one heretic, and they're praised for it. That set the tone of the opening of the game right there. From there I wrote backwards, creating an introduction in media res (forgive me for invoking IMR), where the players stop an assassination attempt and end the scenario in the manner I had originally thought of. The followup was easy: Hunt down the conspiracy.

While developing this initial story, I wanted to lay down the groundwork for the overall campaign. I had been reading Carl Jung at the time, and had been a fan of the Tim Powers book Last Call, and decided to run with those two things together. I introduced an odd variant on poker into the game, and had it turn up where the conspiracy dead-ended. It doesn't turn up often (it's only come up 3 times in maybe a dozen sessions), but it's served the purpose of providing the edges of a vast conspiracy.

In the mean time, I wrote down a time line of everything and everyone involved in the assassination conspiracy, along with a timeline of what *will* happen if the PCs don't do anything. I picked one of the elements of the timeline and fed it to them as their starting point, and they were off. They uncovered the conspiracy out of order, and had to put it together without any help. It was actually a straight up mystery, and one of the easier stories I had ever ran.

The future of the story has to deal with Jungian psychology & archetypes, the tarot deck, poker, the fisher king, the Grail cycle, and Warhammer 40k's backstory being significantly different than what really happened.

I've also, very intentionally, set the story up as a parallel to Joseph Campbell's monomyth/hero's journey, since the characters are delving deep into mythology and the "hero" cycle of both the emperor and themselves. I'm not such a slave to the concept that you can predict the story, but for those who enjoy the monomyth and Campbell's writings, it provides another layer of cohesion to what is a really strange plot.

Not all of my plots are this elaborate. This is shaping up to sort of be an opus of mine, since I have incredibly capable roleplayers as my PCs, who are reveling in the story. I've run successful games based on "let's play Diablo in D&D", and done a 20 level, completely random dungeon with the barest of a plot connecting it all together.

If you're having trouble coming up with ideas other than 1-shots, maybe you need a break from DMing. Burnout is something that inevitably happens.

[mean_liar]

I generally find a cool or abusive mechanical combo, or hole in the rules, or something else tangibly interesting and then work from there.

I'm currently running a whole campaign and setting basically based on the reason why Deities and Demigods has no deities with access to Epic powers or spells, but mortals apparently can. Explaining why, and then involving the players in caring why, and then letting them explore that theme and it's constituent secrets and components in the world... it's a lot of fun. The players feel a resonance between mechanics and fluff that gives the game a greater and immediately-graspable context.

[Blicero]

I like to borrow from history. For example, I'm currently running a campaign segment that's similar to the various revolutions of 1848 in Eberron.

It's also fun to take classic tropes and find some way to subvert them.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

There should be a supplement series called "What Are You Gonna Do About It?" Each is just a series of villains and a list of events that will happen if someone doesn't stop them. Like the Elder Evils books, but not so fucking useless.

-Username17

Sounds like Exemplars of Evil a bit. I liked to read that book when I was killing time at the bookstore but I never bought it.

[ubernoob]

There should be a supplement series called "What Are You Gonna Do About It?" Each is just a series of villains and a list of events that will happen if someone doesn't stop them. Like the Elder Evils books, but not so fucking useless.

-Username17

I would buy that.