So, I've been planning to write a retrospective of my recent RPG gaming for a while now. I had a draft last December/this January that was... not good. I was in a bad mental state I think. Full of self-recriminations, bitterness; even though I kept trying to edit it out, it just came back in.
Yet there is a lot I can learn from it, and at the very least I feel like I should put out some of my thoughts to work through them.
Campaign Log
Whatever happened to that thing in the first post
Unfortunately, I never did get to do that real-time domain warfare campaign over December 2022. Having prep start IN December was probably a bad sign. No experience of real-time asynchronous GMing was probably another. Then there was the holiday trip... spent the last week of 2022 with a new sickness each day while away from home. Terrible experience, I do not recommend getting sick while on holiday. Pissed me off enough and put enough anxious energy in me to make up for that time that it really pushed me to run my games in the new year, though.
[note: I will be naming the periods of the year according to the university's calendar since all my players and my play locale are from/is there]
There was also mention of a 5e event in this blog's first post- it was surprisingly not teeth-pullingly agonising to run it, though I kind of insisted on just running it the usual way I do, which given it was kind of a 'investigate and run around this area with lots of gifts and goods', it worked. Though when combat started, oh boy, I definitely could feel the cultural divide. I have zero interest in refereeing the kind of video-gamey hard-interface combat combo that 3e and after has. Sadly this also probably means I will be unable to enjoy running or playing LANCER, which I guess is fine, because I spent quite a lot of time this and last year ruminating on whether the fantasy of fiddly vehicular combat (jets, tanks, mechs) can really interface with the kind of open-ended jury-rigged problem solving that I love. And I think no, or rather, either the field of game design or my own brain (definitely the latter) is not sufficiently advanced to create a game that meets both. It might even be a Cursed Problem, idk.
Semester 2 (January-April 2023)
One-shots
I ran a few one-shots to start things off in 2023. On a whim, for one of the games I decided to go with something similar enough to my existing d20 experience, and tried Castles & Crusades for one of the games. It was fine, though I don't think I really used it enough to claim any real familiarity with it. I also ran a one-shot using Mongoose Traveller and two more using my homebrew D6 dice pool system (hereafter referred to as Dii6). That last one was a real blast to run and play, though I'm not sure I can credit the system and myself for that so much as the players that happened to show up for that one... unless...? Stay tuned for a later part of this post
Overall, a good enough start for the semester, though as with most things, I think I was filled with anxiety and second-guessing and kicking myself for forgetting something, or failing to deliver certain parts. The negative memories wash away, though, and now I look at a smoothed, airbrushed memory of those games. It's human nature. Or a self-defense mechanism my addled brain cooked up after many years to deal with failure and disappointment, which is passable for long-term sanity but bad for reflecting and improving on mistakes.
Of the three weekly campaigns I tried to run this semester, one fizzled after the first session, probably due to a confusing and uninteresting first session. It also could be because it was the one I felt required the least work on my part (rule system and setting I knew intimately well) so I started it waaay too late in the semester, around Week 5 of 13. Bad idea. The first few weeks are crucial to get players to sink their commitment into a thing, and any outlier ups and (especially) downs of the mini-campaign would be smoothed out after a few sessions.
It was perhaps good fortune that ended that campaign because as you will eventually see, fate intervened to ensure I did not bite off more than I could chew (this is called foreshadowing, a thing I don't do enough in my games). For the campaigns I did run:
Crown
Ran using Castles & Crusades on the surface, but with heavy boatloads of rules and additions and removals. Off the top of my head I added a spellcasting check for spells, randomised spells using Maze Rats (I think?), and other stuff. Started off the campaign at the junction between mid and low levels (I think it was Level 4),
One unfortunate issue I had in this campaign was a baaaaad bout of Mental Curdling for a couple weeks- I have decided to excise the details from my original draft. Simply put, minor frustrations and annoyances Curdled in my brain in the days between sessions into bottled up anger. Which was stupid because I had zero problems with the players both on and off the table. So all that stress was for nothing.
Reading my original draft of this part of the blog post, I realised I've completely forgotten those bad feelings that existed entirely in my head. As well as the bad feelings I had about it. Probably not a good idea to read the draft again lol, because I know this stuff can stick in my head for too long.
The sheer ironic tragedy is that the players whose inocuous comments caused me stress ended up unable to show up for later sessions due to work commitments, and by then I was genuinely sad they couldn't come. Well, too little too late. Always I am unable to appreciate when they're here, only able to miss when someone is gone.
On the bright side- each session was generally 'meaty', fun, kept things moving, and ended with a great finale.
Crisis
Mongoose Traveller with a key change- I do not remember at all which version of Traveller I got this idea from (I think it's an optional rule from T5?) but I decided on 2d6+Attribute+Skill > 12 + DM for the skill checks. Using the attribute number itself was one less thing to keep track for players, but it definitely changed the relative importance of Skill levels.
I also did not use the unskilled -4 penalty used in virtually all Traveller editions, and that was also not a good call. It's there for a reason! For niche protection and simulating a totally untrained user of a skill. I think I removed it because it did not make much sense that certain things, if untrained, incur a -4, but oh well, that'll be yet another thing to agonise about if I play MgT again (which I likely will).
While I think the players had a great time, I still think I failed in my overall goal when starting this mini-campaign: the way the sector was laid out with descriptions and small snippets was meant to encourage more open sandbox play, but ultimately due to the starting mission and the nature of it, it dominated the campaign and was mostly about chasing down its whereabouts. Another lesson learned: goals drive actions and if I had wanted to nudge players into classic Traveller style play I should've used, y'know, the tools in Traveller already- the classic one is having to pay off the ship's mortgage, which means making money, which means Travelling TM and getting into all sorts of seedy and suspicious missions, chasing down rumours, running scams and heists, taking bounties etc. You know, Adventure!
And for long-term campaigns, hopefully by the time they pay off the mortgage the players already have other things they care about and their own self-directed goals built off of that and to work towards. I always think of how Baldur's Gate 2 pulls this trick in the first part of the game to get players to go explore and get into trouble, but somehow I always fail to implement it.
This is not to say the campaign was not fun for them or myself- I did manage to be as flexible as I could to ensure that even on weeks where not all players could show up, I could use the chance to shift the "POV" to other PCs separated from the party and link things that would otherwise just be a throwaway background comment by NPCs. By some miracle I think that part succeeded. (I have since forgotten what I meant when I first wrote this paragraph months ago)
An intrusion into the chronology to gripe about Grandfather Time
I think the limitations of the Semester Campaign are what give me this kind of psychic damage when I think I fail to run a good campaign even when the players say they had fun (which I want to believe, and do, and hope). 8 weekly sessions is NOT enough to
1. gel together a group
2. finish the inciting dungeon/mission and go beyond more than one strand of events
3. have time to just wander the campaign world and get up to their own trouble
4. and then have time to build off the hooks that grow out of the first set of adventures that feed back into each other.
There is no space and time at the table and away from it (since it's IN the semester) for playful exploration and fiddling and poking at the imagined world. And of course, there's probably a cultural side to it to- people where I'm from are generally far more goal and rewards-oriented. "Following the main plot" and "don't get sidetracked by Fun Stuff" and "optimise your skills" isn't just ""brain damage"" (as some might say) from vidya gaems or WotC era D&D- in my case it's also the kind of mindset hammered into us by our society. Even more so if they're uni students, which my players are.
[There is of course the extremely high chance that this is all Cope and Mald on my part and instead of blaming society I should blame my bad campaign setup.]
I have decided to add to my original draft in this section: it's definitely also largely my fault. Which is a good lesson- have reasonable expectations. In this case, I know my players have only a couple months and most are new to RPGs in general. Hence, a more trad-style 'story arc' isn't so bad. Now, as I'm writing this in August 2024 I've had more experience and I think I'm slowly converging to a solution that suits the kinda game I like and the practical limitations of play. Which feeds into a lesson I've taken to heart since I've heard it in the rpg blogosphere: there is no substitute to doing. Planning, reading blogs, discussing has benefits, but nothing beats putting the idea to the test and where the rubber meets the road.
More broadly, this also applies to getting better at running RPGs (in the sense of 'increasing the chance your game doesn't suck). Just start doing. A failed or even incomplete 'doing' is infinitely more valuable than thinking about doing. And of course, completing the full process is infinitely more valuable than incomplete project. Which means, yes, ending a campaign early is always preferable to dragging it out beyond the point circumstances force a game to spitter out. I feel pretty strongly about this- this happened once in 2020, partly in February 2023 (closer to a False Start), and as you'll later see, in the second half of 2023.
This is probably the best advice (well, part of a paired series of advice) I've gotten from someone online- to go from not doing a thing to the first step is the key to starting anything. And that a million fizzled out half-done projects is less valuable than one finished project.
This intrusion has gone long enough!
Holiday (May-August 2023)
One-shot
I ran a Star Wars D6 (REUP edition) one-shot for Star Wars day in May. I originally intended to run two, but couldn't find players for a second. It was fun, but again I scrambled to make my prep actually work, and again my time management of the game was terrible and I had to play out the last scene on the way back from school. Embarrassing.
Holiday Campaign
Probably the most positive I've felt about any of my games- though I'm not sure how much of it is a balance between recency bias and 'long enough ago that I've forgotten the bad bits'. I should have finished this post months ago because I'd have more to talk about. Instead I've forgotten much of it. Revisiting that statement in August 2024 and it's still true. Heck yeah, sandbox campaign vindicated, patriots in control.
What I do remember is [d6 table of advice]
1. The power of good random tables. Whether due to my writing style or whatever, seeding ideas from good random tables really helps accelerate my prep process and sends me down idea-paths that I would otherwise never have considered on my own staring at an empty sheet. So much of the campaign
2. It's okay to be lazy. Especially once you get past the first few sessions, if you seed enough random one-off ideas in descriptions and NPC comments, and your players are active, you'll have more idea threads and adventure ideas than you know what to deal with. For most sessions my prep was far more than actually played at the table that session, and the inverse was easily remedied with things like d4caltrops' 100 random hexes or pulling half-formed ideas I'd been thinking of for weeks and slapping it on the table. Over-preperation also led to instances where I felt the need to keep players on a timetable to 'not waste my prep' and while keeping things moving is always good, it can sometimes stumble into light railroading.
[I've stretched this principle beyond breaking point as you'll see later. And it still works. A campaign if constructed with certain design principles is self-perpetuating and self-generative. Adventure and wonder begets adventure and wonder. And if you need to inject more fuel- literally just put in the most recent Other Media you read this week into the next session.
I love RPGs]
3. Listen to the players. They'll tell you what things they like. Encourage them to tell you what they want to do next. Then prep that stuff. Saves on a lot of wasted effort from point 2.
4. Downtime is king, and really helps to expand the verisimilitude of the world beyond what's at the table. Not sure about the chicken and egg relation of this, but the most invested players also did the most downtime texting with me. I feel I could have done a better job doing truncated downtime with the players that were more passive then, but oh well.
5. It seems orthodoxy exists for a reason- B/X is actually quite great lmao, when used for the kind of game it's best suited for. Though I did not fully get to do the hexcrawl procedures in the way they're meant (I went the opposite of giving players too little map info- i gave them too much and they stuck to the 'visible' parts of the map).
I MIGHT have rectified this somewhat by playing the B/X procedures solo many months later and I've got the hang of it too, so hopefully this works better in the future? At least, I now know what it's doing. Speaking of that:
6. West Marches advice is correct- refrain from putting adventures or loot in town. Otherwise players will stay in town where all their allies are resources are. Stupid of me to shoot myself in the foot immediately by having rumour table entries set in town already, but oh well. I guess in the end it was fun, but it definitely discouraged wilderness stuff.
(Update from present me- I think this explains B2's police state. Maybe it's a manifestation of gygax's american cop-brain, but I think it really stems from "emergency button on players staying in town forever and doing their shenanigans there only". Of course, I still don't like the Keep's airtight laws. it's BORING. and also no verisimilitude for me. and also who doesn't like a good urban adventure? But I think I get how it might have been downstream of a band-aid solution. nothing as permanent as a temporary fix.)
Semester 1 (August-December 2023)
so my original draft for this time period was a mess. Full of self recrimination, depression. I'm trying not to even look at it right now- but it was the lowest I felt about my DMing since I started. Hell, probably worse. My first adventure back in 2019 went great.
I am no longer as depressed about it as I was in February and January 2024, but I do still wince thinking about it. And the worst part is that I don't think I've learnt much from it, despite ruminating on it so much. Hopefully I may have accidentally adjusted myself to prevent the same pitfalls, but who knows at this point
I did do a ranking of my games (based on how successful I think they were) just this week and interestingly, the games in this period rank higher than the campaigns I ran in later half of 2022 in my return to RPGs. So I guess it really was like a negative recency bias. Anyway, the draft has been reworked to be more useful.
So what exactly went wrong?
Let's start with trying to run FOUR GAMES A WEEK. You can tell I'm a Middling Engineer because I did not realise that 4 games a week isn't just 2x the workload of 2 games/week- it's around 3.33x the intensity. 4 games/3 free days compared to 2 games/5 free days.
Half a day to prep + remaining free days/campaigns. That's 1.25 'workdays' per game compared to 3, giving around 2.4x less 'worktime'. Add on inefficiency losses from lack of decompression days + 'switching gears' (something I already knew I'd get)... yeah. It was bad. Interestingly, I never did get to literally run four games in a single week, it was always 3 out of 4 games being available in a given week. Don't know if that made it better or worse (worse cos my staccato brain has trouble shifting gears, a problem I still have running more than one game. Throwing a wrench into an already rapidly changing system...)
Of the four games
1. Ended early (actually the best one of the bunch. It basically was a good 4 session adventure wrapped up [accidentally >:)]nicely.)
2. Sputtered out (meant to be a sequel campaign- completely whiffed, players also couldn't get schedules aligned, epic fail)
3. Sputtered out (this one hurts. Every session was fun, surprising, and the players were a joy to play with (if I remember right). But I could not wrap it up, too many missed session from exams, and then final exams came and... yeah)
4. Completed- but with many missteps and missed opportunities on my part
One of which was wasting 15 minutes each session on bookkeeping(??) Somehow this wasnt an issue during the Holiday Campaign which had way more shit, but man keeping track off XP somehow became a chore? Even though it was so little stuff. Maybe I was just tired idk.
I'm really not sure what else to write here. Creatively and in terms of adventure prep I think everything went fine? I made great use of d4caltrops' wilderness hex for one session, I got to run two small dungeons, but the ending felt a little bit of a mess.
Also note to self- don't have PCs make more than 1 PC for the semester campaigns. Or maybe 2 at most? IDFK. At the least, one player plays one character at a time, all reserves stay away doing sometbing. It didn't actually impact much as players stuck to one pretty quickly, but it did suck away XP which I can easily rectify in the future.
My motivation was totally burnt after this period. I just felt like I did a piss-poor job of it all. Maybe there were personal factors too- no idea really. At least some players had mixed reactions to the campaign.
Well, ya live and learn.
Oh yeah one shots. Had a lot of new players for the club, most joined just for a few one shots early in the semester. I ran like 6 games (all fully booked with 6 players!!) in two weeks. It was roughly 50% success rate for me (in terms of "did I think the players had fun") - the homebrew d6 dice pool game rocked again- so now I know the ruleset and scenarios I used work for at least the use case of one-shots. I still need to tweak numbers for sure.
I also ran Black Sword Hack twice- both times did not feel right, but fear not for I finally 'got it' in the next semester.
Oh yeah also I used skerples' d50 mercenary missions for three of the games. Great seeds for adventures.
December holiday
Among other stuff: Solo Chainmail and OD&D. did not amount to actual OD&D play even though i wanted to do one in 2024 for 50th anniversary.
Also got to have pizza party with my old RPG club friends from 2018. First I attended since end of 2019 before The Plague. It felt good to bookend this period in my life, I think.
Semester 2 & Holiday (January-July 2024)
Ran a one-shot again to kick off the semester, then dived straight into campaigns in week 3.
Now here's where I made sure to learn from my mistakes: I gave myself a hard limit of two campaigns a week, an amount that I knew worked. Also with less players this semester I didn't feel the 'obligation' to take on as many players as possible. And there weren't as many anyway!
Tried to join the Jacquays Memorial Game Jam but couldn't complete my entry in time :( same with a couple other jams I think. I did half-finish my LEGOJAM submission as you can see in this blog and did submit it.
So I ran one that was essentially the same core premise as the Crown campaign waaaay above in Januray 2023. Used basically B/X this time with a hella lot of blogosphere extensions, no pretensions of being C&C this time. I made a hexmap 4x bigger than we needed too.
In any case, it went well! The 14 session campaign actually rolled into the first weeks of summer holiday in May. Neatly, it ended up self-segmenting into a few 'arcs' of several sessions that each focussed on a small region of the map, wrapped up by a final session.
The other campaign which I will call Champions also went well. Ran it with Black Sword Hack and it was fun. The players of course were a major contributing factor- always angling for out of the box solutions and pushing their luck. This one ended up with 19 sessions, ending near the end of the holiday period. This meant no summer campaign but honestly I think the break was fine. It would have been nice to get back into the form of that long holiday campaign in 2023, but fate decided I needed to Do Less this time.
Some hiccups with the middle part of Champions I think dragged a bit due to me just not keeping things moving and allowing a lot of meandering, coupled with players busy with exams. And the last part was stretched over many weeks of being unable to coordinate schedules and a real fear from me that we may not be able to end the campaign with the amount of time we had left in the summer.
Yet! We had many memorable sessions, a great finale, some really standout moments and players that despite meandering were always doing things and had actual goals. I think it really helps if each group has a couple experienced players who already have experience (and also like playing) with the way I give players lots of goal autonomy. Either that or players who really love setting their own goals and working *with* the GM and others at the table instead of against them (on a meta level of "what's the fun option").
Does this mean I need to seed my previous players into my new player groups? I don't know.
Well-seeded maps, good powder keg set-ups, and the campaigns basically ran themselves as the players chased their objectives and bumped into things that bumped back at them. An unstable situation collapsing into a new equilibrium. In fact, this second round of Crown I think overall ran better, and Champions despite its hiccups was less difficult to run than I thought. Also totally reversed my mixed experience with the one-shots.
Also a good chunk of sessions were again just me inserting [most recent Other Media I've Been Interacting With] into a blender and layering it with the basic notes I already had for the neext session. So the approach works.
Oh I'm caught up now
So what next?
New academic year, new wave of players for the club, and so new campaigns. I have a huge list of campaign pitches though this time I don't feel the same excitement for some ideas- may have to cycle them out of the list then.
It'll be a few weeks until the one shots, then the campaigns start after. Once again I face the bane of 'there's probably not enough time to do the stuff you want' so I'll need to aim small again and focus in- which usually works out, tbh. Maybe string together a couple of module-sized stuff? Almost always, you end up prepping more than you need.
So yeah, happy gaming everyone, I hope I can keep things fun for my players. I'm missing out a lot of analysis and ideas I want to explore in this post- maybe I'll come back to it next time.
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