High School D&D Club needs some help

The second year of the D&D club at Lakeland has begun and I'm happy to say the club is growing. 12 students showed up today, where last year we had 8 regulars. However, this has presented me with a problem--too many PCs for one campaign. I at first thought I could simply have two campaigns run simultaneously, but then I realized that that would create division within the club. Half of the members would never really speak with the other half. That's not what I'm looking to do.

So, the only good solution that I can think of is to create a Living D&D game, just like Living Greyhawk and now 4E's Living Forgotten Realms. However, I don't want to do an official RPGA sanctioned thing, I want this to be isolated to Lakeland. In that respect, I was thinking about letting the students be the DMs and then let them create the events in the living world. I'll adapt my campaign world to a living world. That way students could rotate in between tables and they play in the same world.

Sounds great right? Now here's my problem--how the hell do I do this? I've never created a living world before and I only played Living Greyhawk once, six years ago. Does anyone have any insight into how a living world is created? Any help would be really appreciated!

I have no idea how a living campaign world works, but I may have a couple ideas that could help you. First, were any of those 12 students players from last year? If so, you could ask for 2 volunteers from the experienced players to be DMs for this year. They have to learn some time! Then you could have 2 games going on at the same time. You could be the creator of the campaign, and work closely with those two DMs to keep a consistent world. For example, you come up with all the little details and behind the scenes information that traditionally comes along with the role of DM. Then between sessions you give your 2 assistants enough info to run a session. Adventure seeds, if you will. Supply multiple adventure seeds to the 2 DMs and let them build sessions from them. After the sessions, you get all the info of what happened at each table and you come up with the next set of information to feed the 2 DMs. This way you are still controlling the world, but allowing a couple of the students to get a feel for running sessions. You will have to be highly adaptable if you do this, because those student DMs will be essentially controlling their sessions. You will simply be guiding their direction by controlling information. In order to prevent the division you mentioned, you could maybe create an adventurers guild in game for them all to be a part of. What they do affects the guild, and so indirectly affects the other group of players. I don't know if any of this would work for you, but I figured I would just toss out a few ideas.

Thank you very much for the great ideas. I looked into creating Living campaigns and I think that's what I'm going to do. Essentially, I will design the major events in the campaign world. Then, the PCs have to spend Time Units (TU) when doing certain things, like traveling long distances or creating magic items. The PCs have a limited number of TUs per quarter (half of a school semester). Once a PCs burns all of their TUs for that quarter, they create another character. This keeps the characters experiencing the game in "real time" relative to each other.

I WILL institue an adventuring guild in-game. That's an awesome idea. It will connect both campaigns and allow the students to interact on that level. Thanks for the great idea!

http://4egaming.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/crowd-control-dming-with-a-la/


http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/259167-managing-large-group-players.html

summary:
30 second time limit per turn.

What are the consequences to going over your 30 second time limit? Well, there are two options that I have seen suggested: 1) Anyone going over their limit is assumed to have used the ‘total defense’ action as their standard action and they keep their place in the initiative order, or 2) the player’s turn action counts as a ‘delay’ action and they lose their initiative spot until they decide what to do.

give everyone in the group a job. One person keeps track of monster dmg and conditions. another person could keep track of initiative and say who's next and who's on deck.

"In addition, the healers heal during their end of turn phase (ie the dice rolling and giving the info to the other player).

Based on my experience, the largest time suck during a person's turn that really doesn't matter to everyone else is adjusting HP. It takes time to add/subtract in head, erase and remark the sheet, etc, and really doesn't matter to anyone other than the person doing the healing. Whenever possible, that should move to outside the group focus of the turn."

roll your d20 AND your damage togethe

"If you *must* play with 7 players, then how about adopting a co-DM? Why not have somebody run half the game alongside you, from the tactical perspective. They do half the rolling, half the calculating, but one DM runs the overall story and has ultimate say on how things go. You're already at a party of 8 people, so why not add a 9th and cut the gametime significantly?"

Every player must have their modifiers and damage worked out ahead of time

Thanks for the links to the blogs. I'm subscribing to both of them now. The Newbie DM blog is fantastic; some really good reading.

no problemo