I am planning to run a D&D campaign through a blog. Yes, like the one at dndblog. My plan is to mimic that blog, while adopting some policies that I hope will make the new blog exciting and accessible to more people, who might not be as diehard as the dndblog folks. This will be an experiment, and if some ideas really don't work as well as I'd hoped, I'll fall back on the way Scott does things in the dndblog.

And while I was thinking about all the cool stuff I hoped to do, and thought about how I should arrange it, it occurred to me that if I don't get people on board to play it, it won't much matter whether I think it's cool or not.

So, before my creative attempts spiral out of control, I'd like to hear from you what you'd like in a D&D campaign run over the web.

I'm assuming that players will want a game that delivers a lot of entertainment and only a small time commitment on their part. I'm also trying to offer a game with a different experience than, say, playing Everquest, since players could do that instead if they wanted to. I'd like to use the advantages of the online blog format, and minimize the effect of the disadvantages.

Here are the key ideas of the blog I was thinking about:

Gameplay Structure

• Every day in real life, a D&D turn goes by. So everybody has a day to post what their character does, and they can be confident that when they check the website the next day, they'll be able to see the results of their last post and post again. (Obviously, there will be hiatuses, when the DM [me] is on vacation or something like that. But this is the normal scheme of things.)
  
• If a player doesn't post during that day, the DM will assume their character behaves typically for that turn, and will role-play that character as appropriately as he can.
  
• A player doesn't need to know the D&D rules at all. If you want to give me a description of what you want your character to be like, I'll generate stats for such a character. If you describe the feats of derring-do your character takes each turn, I'll interpret them in game terms in order to decide the result. (This option requires faith that the DM is interpreting the rules fairly and consistently.)
  
• I would like to provide the opportunity for less-active players (or players that don't want to be tied down to one character) to play "bit parts" and other characters that would otherwise be NPCs. The adventuring party doesn't know, when they run into a goblin king, if the DM or someone else is running him. (In these situations, the DM can step out of the action, and simply referee the interaction between characters.)
  

These are ideas about the structure of the game, and they're designed to make the "burden" of playing the game as light as possible. If you just want to be involved for a week or two, that's fine: you can take over whatever NPCs the party is running into. If you don't want to dig through the books and figure out what the right feat is for you, don't worry about it, and when you describe yourself as hacking and slashing left and right, the DM will make sure you get feats that make you hack and slash most effectively. And regardless, the action of playing the game is simple: every day you check the blog, post what your character does for the next little while, and then you don't have to check the blog again until tomorrow. And if you miss a day or two, no big deal -- your character won't stand there like a dummy.

Campaign Setting

Of course, people will also have opinions about the story and background of the campaign -- is this in some particular setting that they already know about, is it significantly different from the setting described in the D&D books, does the DM hate paladins, etc. I don't want to give the impression that the above ideas are written in stone, but in terms of setting, I'm even more flexible. If some idea here seems stupid or not something you'd be happy with, please let me know, because D&D is in some sense collaborative storytelling, and players won't play their parts if they think the background and descriptions of the world they're in is lame. And who can blame them?

I would like to run a D&D 3.5e campaign, with as few changes to the general background as possible, so all the usual classes, races, spells, etc. are there, and if you see something in the books, you can be pretty sure it's in this campaign. (There may be weird and wonderful stuff later on, but I'm in favor of starting basic first.) I probably can't help tweaking a few things, but it'll be things like making monks less common, not completely eliminating them. That's not to say they'll be insignificant changes (if you're a monk, it'll be harder to find someone to train you to get a new level), but they won't be flat-out "no you can't do that" changes. Unless you're trying to game the system. :)

I'd like to borrow liberally from many sources. If you've played D&D for a long time, you'll find some of the locations eerily familiar ("Here we are, in this Keep, which is on the Borderlands..."), but hopefully not so familiar that you'll know where the traps are. Some of the places and people might remind you of historical figures. Hopefully not hokey "and it turns out that Lisa, the princess you rescued, is posing for a portrait by the royal painter, Leonardo" vignettes. Instead, I hope that sometimes it'll become evident that the moody noble youngster just might be as clever and doomed as Hamlet, or that the Thieves' Guild is operating very much like Al Capone's mob did.

I'd like to be "realistic" (a dangerous word in D&D). By that I mean, if someone asks "what are the dwarves eating, if they live in the mountains?" I want to have an answer. If the characters don't know the answer, they should be able to go find out, and the answer shouldn't be a lame one like "dwarves come from the rock, and get their sustenance magically from being in touch with the stones, except for the dwarf characters, who have to eat like regular people."

I have some more specific ideas, like decentralizing the role of elves and making "halflings" more like hobbits and less like Gypsies. I think I'd like to set everything in Greyhawk, except make the different regions have accents and cultures more closely mimicking the real world. Another background idea I have is that while many settings are set at a sort of "twilight" or "dark ages" period of history (the White Wolf RPGs are particularly end-of-the-world type settings), I'd like to maybe be in more of a "dawn of time" or "renaissance" period, where there's lots to explore, the cultural institutions are still in development, and there's generally a more optimistic feeling.

Also, I'd like to start PCs off at 1st level. I know a lot of experienced players don't like that, but it seems to me that it's easier to come up with PC background if there isn't that much background to come up with, and low-level characters aren't limited to fighting orcs and goblins and giant rats again and again if you're clever about it. But if you're convinced it wouldn't be fun, tell me why you think so.

Look and Feel

Lastly, in between game structure and story setting, is the "dressing": how the webpage looks, what kind of pictures/sounds/etc are part of the story; in other words, what cool stuff do I hope to do to "enhance the experience?"

I'd like to make as much use of multimedia as I can: I've got lots of digital pictures I'd like to edit into game scenes and characters. I'd like to gain enough computer audio stuff to include cool sound effects like a bustling marketplace or the buzz of conversations in a tavern. But I plan to develop as I go -- it doesn't seem practical to me to develop a myriad of sights and sounds until there's actually proof that enough people want to play to make it a workable project.

Here's Where You Come In

So, tell me what you think. Am I way off base? Would you and all your friends come play on my proposed blog, if it weren't for the one-turn-a-day rule? Is a cobbled-together mishmash of a setting too clumsy, or would it be quirky and fun? What ideas are unworkable? Where I've been vague, what specific ideas do you crave? Are there ideas that spun off better ideas in your head?

Enough questions for you? Please give me some feedback, as I really do want to make a D&D blog that you'd love to play on, that you would get your non-D&D friends to look at. And maybe even try out.

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