I’m a big fan of the Arrow television series. That said, (and without major spoilers) it’s obviously shifted gears in tone. What started as a dramatic series about a former castaway completing his father’s mission in a realistic, Nolan-style universe has shifted into a more traditional superhero action series. While I still enjoy it, I do miss the original concept.
There have been many times over my gaming career where I’ve run and played in campaigns that shifted in tone after an initial premise that was working well as-is. Sometimes it was because the campaign was getting stale or the GM was inspired to work in something that didn’t mesh with the original premise. Sometimes it was a complete bait-and-switch; the players were promised one type of campaign only for the GM to reveal a session or two in that they were actually in another type of campaign.
Needless to say, some of these campaigns were more successful than others and some failed entirely, with players crying foul or simply losing interest in the new direction. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to roll things back once the campaign has gone too far in the new direction, forcing a complete scrapping and requiring all-new world-building on the part of the GM to get a new campaign in the popular vein running again.
One way to avoid that is to test the waters.
‘Testing the waters’ means exactly that; you give the players a feel for your new direction and gauge their reaction. If it’s favorable, then you can wade in deeper. If not, then you can easily pull back and continue playing with the original premise. Sometimes, you may even find a third way that satisfies both you and your players.
This works even in a bait-and-switch campaign. I can’t tell you the number of times I ran or played in such a campaign that I realized within a single session how much fun everyone was having, only to have it destroyed when the “switch” appeared. In some cases, I would have loved to have had an “out” to pull it back before the switch went too far.
Here are some examples of testing the waters:
The PCs find themselves confronted with supervillains in what has been up until now a non-superpowered campaign.
One way to test the waters here is to make the “supervillains” merely flashy criminals that use particular trademarks when committing crimes. They may even tease police officers and investigators through the anonymity of the internet using supervillain-ish code names.
If players find this intriguing then you can tread a little deeper. Perhaps the justice system is corrupt and one of the supervillains is let free even with damning evidence against him. Just this once, the PCs need to consider vigilante justice to stop him. If instead they decide to devote themselves to taking down a corrupt judge, then the players probably aren’t biting on the superhero idea.
The PCs are investigating a serial murderer who just may be a vampire.
This one is pretty popular in my gaming circles, as it’s often an attempt to start new PCs “on the ground floor” of a preternatural setting. The players generally start as mundane investigators who are suddenly confronted by something not quite human. As a GM I’ve been guilty of setting an initial tone by having the PCs solve two or three normal cases, just to hit them with a werewolf or vampire on the next one.
One way to test the waters here is to use the Scooby-Doo option. The threat seems preternatural, but turns out to be mundane. A “werewolf” is simply a woman that owns a trained wolf, while a vampire is a man that believes drinking blood will cure him of some ailment. During this adventure you can have the PCs consult experts who believe in the preternatural, and even leave clues that maybe there is something more going on here than normal.
If the players “bite” (pun intended) then you can wade in deeper; if not then you can easily go back to normal crimes. You may even discover a third campaign where PCs enjoy debunking what seems like preternatural threats but turn out to be mundane.
The PCs are mutants in a fantasy setting.
I’ve had this happen a couple of times where the PCs discovered that they had mutant powers in an otherwise traditional fantasy setting. The first time was a lark on the part of a GM that wanted to incorporate Gamma World mutations into an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign; a later similar campaign was due to a GM mixing and matching GURPS books.
One way to test the waters here is to make such powers temporary, most likely gifts from the upper Powers in the campaign. Maybe the gods felt the need to bestow powers on a group of champions to combat a particular threat. Perhaps a rogue archangel wants to build a better mortal. Perhaps the gods are just doing it for a lark.
In any case, if the players aren’t biting then the powers are lost after a session or two. If the players enjoy it you can let them keep the powers – perhaps they weren’t from the gods after all, or the gods have decided to let them keep their gifts.
A word of caution – “It was all a dream!”
It’s tempting to test the waters with a dream sequence, drugged hallucination, virtual fantasy or other such scenarios with ‘magic reset buttons’ at the end. If you do, be sure to compensate the players for it. Dream adventures often feel like a cheat and players are going to at least want XP for it.
In addition, it’s always good to give them some clue during the dream adventure that is useful in the future. Perhaps a PC was the victim of a new drug on the street or the superheroes’ trip into Fantasyland was the result of a dream-inducing supervillain who incapacitated them while he infiltrated their headquarters to steal something. Maybe the PCs unplug from a virtual reality to find real-life victims that were tied to the fates of their avatars.
In any event, the important thing to keep in mind is to build a back door when testing the waters so you can preserve the original campaign. As a GM I know it’s tough when I lose a campaign’s worth of material because of an ill-fated tonal shift. Hopefully by testing the waters first you can avoid that fate.
Have you ever ‘tested the waters’ and successfully recovered? Has a tonal shift ever torched a good campaign because you lacked a back door? Has a test ever been positive and improved your campaign?
Interesting article, Walt.
I’ve shifted gears in my own long-running campaign as new editions of the game system rules have come out. We began with D&D back in the 2ed days. I created a ton of house rules to extend, improve, and/or fill in the gaps of the system.
One of the things I did with house rules in 2ed that really flavored the campaign was limiting the types of spells various priesthoods had access to. This gave clerics of different faiths fairly unique capabilities. For example, few faiths had more than minor healing. One faith had no healing magic but did have strong summoning and command powers. When the party had to fight NPCs (a lot of my game was conflict between hominid races) it truly mattered to both the nature of the fight and the outcome which faith supported each side.
When the time came for us to move to D&D 3.0 this house rule (along with many others) got swept aside. The new system just didn’t have the hooks that the old one did. And the new system also had so many more mechanics that were fleshed out that replacing them with home rules would be doubly difficult. I did resist moving to 3.0 for a while because of this but ultimately I decided that the good outweighed the bad– that what I’d gain from an overall better system outweighed the few really nice things I’d have to give up.
This was a decision that we made more or less as a team, BTW. My players were clamoring for the new rules, understanding that there’d be a discontinuity in the campaign setting. It’s interesting how they look back on it now, years later. They remember fondly the stories that the old setting enabled. They acknowledge, “Then the world changed…” but they don’t spend time trying to explain it. They just accept it as a continuity shift.
I’ve done the switch with full player buy in on the switch. We started off in a Rogue Trader campaign but I limited the game to a single system at the beginning. The group had gotten stuck there by a warp storm for centuries. The group was the descendants of the original crew. Once they did the one thing they needed to get out, we’d explored 90% of the rule system and gotten a grasp on everything. Then I let them go…
And the game… died! Suddenly people weren’t having fun as much. Nobody was really excited to show up anymore. One of the players dropped out silently.
Apparently, people just didn’t enjoy things as much when they were the ones plotting the course of the campaign than when I was running a scripted storyline. It was weird.
For a very long time my old group had a default campaign we used to “test the waters” on new settings, that of Dr. Who.
Using the default “Hop in a Tardis and go see what’s out there” premise, it made things relatively simple for my group to check out specific campaign settings on a temporary basis, with an easy out already built right into the game setting (return to the Tardis)upon the adventures conclusion.
While it wasn’t quite so useful in exploring genre variants (I.e the afore mentioned regular investigators .vs supernatural ones) it did let the group poke around various post apocalypse, fantasy, and sci-fi settings without needing to roll up new chars with new backgrounds every time.
After a adventure had drawn to its close (which usually took 2-3 game sessions) we’d sit down in a group and discuss the interest in a campaign within that setting and if such a game was a go the I (as GM) could often readily use some of the NPC’s and locations the Dr. Who group had already interacted with as part of the first few adventures, saving me some work.
On the plus side playing a few sessions of Dr Who here and there, or when a campaign wrapped up/died) was a nice change of pace, and in the event one or two of the players couldn’t make it to the next session I could always throw together a mini Dr. Who adventure for that night and still get to game.