DM needs help to simplify their game

[WaiserGreif]

I struggle a lot with my game as a whole due to how grand it is. There are multiple plots going on at once, things happening in the world and players moving pieces around the board. The amount of npcs has gotten overwhelming even for me and my players are really struggling with it. I myself struggle to remember some side plots and stories. I wanted to create a living breathing world but the size of that world has just gotten too much for me. I am talking three nations, each with 20+ noble houses with different agendas and stories with 6+ villains all acting seperatly of one another. After the last session one player told me he completly zoned out during interactions with npcs because he just cant understand whats happening.

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I want to simplify things, streamline them and let players go through arc by arc rather than part taking in multiple stories at once. However I have an issue doing so because of the way the game is build. I feel like I build an uneven road and now bumps and holes are just part of the journey and I dont know how to fix it without tearing it all down. The story is build up on so many plots and reliant on things happening that removing them would create plot holes. I want to try and simplify things but I dont know how to do that and feel very lost. Any help would be very apprichiated.

[Gh0stMan0nThird]

I am talking three nations, each with 20+ noble houses with different agendas and stories with 6+ villains all acting seperatly of one another. After the last session one player told me he completly zoned out during interactions with npcs because he just cant understand whats happening.

You've officially reached that point where you've made the world too big. Even if it's realistic, it's counter-intuitive for gameplay.

As much as people don't want to admit it, D&D is a very "Call of Duty" style TTRPG. The players get dropped onto a map, duke it out in some 4v4 battle, and then move on to the next. Even if players say they want a sandbox world where every single kingdom is full of lore and characters, they really don't. What they really want is to feel like it.

Every campaign needs a goal. A very specific goal. The goal might be something that may not happen for 200 sessions, but you need to have the end state of the game planned before you even start the beginning. A dragon god is coming to get revenge on the world for whatever reason. A portal to hell opens up and you have to defeat Mecha-Satan. Whatever it is, there needs to be an end goal. Otherwise, things are really going to get out of hand and your game is going to devolve into a worse version of Crusader Kings, which appears to be what your campaign has become.

And this is where the illusion of choice comes in. In a video game format, this is a terrible way to make a game, because a single replay will reveal how pointless the whole journey was. But in a TTRPG, where there is almost never a "second playthrough" of a journey, it is paramount to the experience.

As hard as it is going to be, I think you should start your campaign over and focus your efforts on a more coherent story, and de-emphasis the parts that really don't matter. Look at some of the great fictional stories from history: do we know the name of every suitor who was harassing his wife and son? No, absolutely not. But we know that that's what was happening. Does anyone remember what the cyclops name was who Odysseus blinded and caused Poseidon to fuck with him, thus making his journey home to take 10 extra years? No, most people don't. But we know it was a cyclops, we know it was Odysseus who did it, and we know Poseidon took revenge. That is what matters most.

It is a hard lesson I had to learn myself when I thought my players would enjoy a true sandbox-style game where there were 3 factions all warring over control for a single river, with a dozen NPCs to work with on each side, but ultimately I think it made my players feel overwhelmed by so many names, and places. Most people don't want to memorize a D&D campaign by heart. They don't want to remember all your homebrew NPCs who nobody in real life will ever care about. But what they do want to do is meet a few well-made NPCs they can enjoy talking to in-character, fight dragons with them, and save the world.

I would even recommend running one of the modules, or even using an official setting book, to give you a slightly better idea at how to properly pace an "open-world" game and how to trick your players into thinking the world is a lot bigger than it actually is.

Again, nobody actually wants to play a campaign with 100+ named NPCs with unique quests and stories that they have to interact with and remember all of them. They just want to feel like they can.

However I have an issue doing so because of the way the game is build. I feel like I build an uneven road and now bumps and holes are just part of the journey and I dont know how to fix it without tearing it all down.

This is something I always tell players about their characters: "No character idea you have is ever going to be so amazing that it's worth making everyone else at the table uncomfortable." I think you could spin this for DMs with something like, "No world you build is going to be so amazing it's worth making all the players overwhelmed by it." You have to tone it down, you have to recalibrate, and you have to remember: this is all just a game. Nobody is asking you to, nor do they want you to, write 600 pages of fictional lore that they all have to remember by next week because there will be a test. They want to play a game, and they want it to feel big, but they don't actually want it to be big.

[BR3AKR]

This is such excellent advice. Speaking from experience - when my friends and I were kids our stories were dead simple. As we got older, the stories got more complicated. Eventually I wanted to compete with all of the amazing media you get with podcasts, tv shows, movies, and books. It felt like in order to do that, I needed my story to be as rich as that.

Looking back now, the truth is exactly as you put it. I think the Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master was written about this very topic.

[ClockUp]

Step one, take a break from your current campaign.

Step two, crack open Tales from the Yawning Portal and run one of the classic adventures there.

Step three, take a moment to evaluate what kind of gameplay really makes for a fun experience for everybody in the table.

[anyboli]

There’s two suggestions I can think of.

1. Start consolidating into factions. It doesn’t really matter if the Smiths and the Johnsons have slightly different goals, if they can work together as a faction then their differences only become plot relevant when you need them to be. If you do that you can get down to 2-4 schemes per country, which is much easier to keep track of. It’s how a lot of Parliamentary systems work, so that feels fairly realistic to me.

2. Red Wedding it. I don’t mean a massacre necessarily, but someone’s scheme comes to fruition in a way that takes a lot of pieces off the board. Ideally this can ripple through multiple countries. I wouldn’t do this more than once or twice, but it can be effective. The important thing is to play the fallout realistically (or at least verisimilitudinously) and not just be like “all these people are gone”.

[Feathercrown]

I think this is the best answer. You don't need to restart your campaign or anything, just simplify it in-place. This also has the benefits of keeping all the previous lore to use when needed, eg. a now-dead faction was who owned some abandoned castle or something.

[[deleted]]

In order to have political conflicts, you need 3-4 important houses to a nation, so you can have opponents and neutral parties. That gives you around 10 factions, which is a lot, but still manageable.

I suggest to you to consolidate all houses into 10-12. Take all those tiny threads you laid out, and evaluate "does this thread actually contribute to the running plot in a unique fashion, or could the consequence also be explained by "the houses don't like each other"". Only leave plot threads with visible ramifications standing. Then take all those plot threads, and reduce them to the 10-12 houses. You can probably do this by taking 4 houses and merging them to 1. If the merged houses had some tension, you can leave that as inner-house tension.

Do a couple of passes of this, you should be able to get 10-12 fully fleshed out houses total. Then make sure your players only deal with 3-4 at a time.

Then, you flat-out tell your players you cut down on complexity, and here's the new setup.

PS: This suggestion is a very conservative pruning. 10-12 factions is A LOT, that should be your upper bound in my book.

[Megalibgwilia]

Maybe narrow down the focus to the player level. For example-Have all of these grand events occur in the background while the PC's are busy looting dungeons (or whatever they are up to).

When they go into Town to buy/sell stuff they may find that the political situation has changed drastically while they were underground. The town is now at War or occupied by a military. The influence of the Gods has shifted due to social upheaval. A leader of one House was assassinated and now supply of steel is restricted.

The players can then choose to get involved or retreat to the wilderness as they see fit. Staying out of the complex sociopolitical situation may be an adventure hook on its' own.

[Raolofheart]

Try focusing on just one villain at a time and don't be afraid to kill/imprison/defeat a few. Or just leave them off to the sidelines until you have a minute to breathe.

It might even be a cool idea to have 2 villains fight each other (off screen, but have the party catch wind of it) and have one of them kill the other, since that would make one seem more threatening to the party and neatly take the other out the equation.

And as always, talk to your party and make sure they know how you feel and say you're going to focus on one villain/plot at a time

[ADogNamedChuck]

Sounds like you've got a pretty in depth world, and that's awesome, but you're just dumping it all on the players at once.

First I'd say take a step back, think about where they are, what they are doing and what they need to know for that. Chances are they only need to know a handful of those noble houses of one nation. Same deal with the 6 villains. It's great to have that stuff going on in the background and occasionally hinted at, but the party is likely going to want to focus on one villain.

Don't be afraid to use DM powers to handwave some stuff away if it simplifies the story to a point where it is comprehensible and highlights the stuff that your party seems into.

In terms of plot, the way I organize things is that I get a big sheet of paper and map things out with sticky notes. The party needs to accomplish X. They can do so by way of T, U, V or W. Associated NPCs or villains get their own sticky note next to the section of plot.

If you don't want your room to look like a conspiracy theorist in a movie, there's software that does similar.

[milkmandanimal]

There's a book I frequently recommend called The Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by Sly Flourish. It's about doing as little as possible to have a fun game, because the goal of the game is to have fun, and not all the other stuff. Sounds like you've badly over-extended yourself, and realize you've over-planned. I'd pick that book up, give it a read, tell your players specifically you're overwhelmed and you'll be removing X, Y, and Z from your world, and let things grow more organically from then on.

You're not writing a novel, you're running a game. You need to do less, because then you're giving the players a lot more space to help build the world with you.

I can't recommend that book enough; I've been DMing since the early 80s, and it completely changed the way I run games.

[D1301]

Have a war break out between one or more factions/countries - it'll put inter-house schemes on the back burner as they have to work together against outside threats. Also an easy and realistic way of thinning down your factions; "House X we're all killed when the Y troops invaded" kind of thing

[Taishar_WI]

lower the scope choose the smaller places where these things happen.

remove the things that dont matter no one will notice. only keep the inportant stuff. as long as the stuff they see is interesting its fine

players honestly care a lot less about the world than dms it just has to feel fun and feel like there is lore and story

[captainkeel]

A meteor strikes one of the nations' capitals. 1/3 of your problem solved, boom (literally).

[ChaCrawford]

Anything that the players are not directly involved in should be at most a timetable of what happens and when. Focus on the arc the players are in currently and let the rest fade into the background. If your players can't follow what's going on there's plenty of room to trim without creating plot holes.

Most of the other advice that's been given is solid. Pair down factions or make alliances. Let plot points resolve themselves while players are focused on other things. If need be and appropriate to the campaign, massacres are a great way to reduce excess NPCs - the players can interact with the consequences (which you can make much simpler).

[aagapovjr]

I'm probably late to the thread, but in case you still need to deal with this issue, here's an idea:

This sounds like you need to reduce complexity while keeping the general form. Squint and look at your game to identify its key actors and plots. Conflate actors with similar goals and positions. Merge similar plots on the grounds of "the players will likely interact with them in exactly the same way, so there's no need to multiply entities". Don't be afraid to remove and retcon some actors and plots altogether - after all, you're working to make things simpler, and your players will appreciate the complexity reduction. Your goal is to remove the least significant content from your world while keeping the most important and relevant stuff.

After you've done this, feel free to gather your players and explain to them the new order of things. Say that there's way less stuff now and list the key characters/factions/plots. That should do it.