Natural 7

Summer Campaign Reflections

Between June 1st and September 1st I had the good fortune to experience 120 hours of roleplaying games! Only 10% of that time was spent as a player versus as a GM. It was a lot, but it was fun for the most part, and I learned quite a bit from the experience.

I started and finished two new weekly games this summer: one for Shadowdark and one for D&D 2024. My primary weekly campaign using Ultraviolet Grasslands was also active every week. This means I was running 9-12 hours of games every week.

Last summer I did the same thing, starting two mini campaigns that lasted the duration of the summer. For those campaigns I ran Mythic Bastionland and Trespasser.

Let's Talk Shadowdark

OK, so I've run a reasonable amount of Shadowdark now that this campaign is over. Shadowdark is one of my favorite games to run single-session adventures with, maybe a little bit more favorite than Mythic Bastionland or FIST.

I like Shadowdark. It works well for the stories I like to tell.

My friends don't all like Shadowdark. It doesn't work very well for the stories they want to tell.

For the majority of the campaign we were a bit at odds with the rules vs. the storyline of the game. Folks said they enjoyed the plot threads they were following, but we all recognized moments where the rules of the game were getting in our way. I think this reveals a piece of advice that I chose not to follow (perhaps to my game's detriment):

It's alright to change your game system mid-campaign.

I think I should have rotated Shadowdark out for another game that better aligned with my players' tastes. We would have needed a discussion about it, but I'm certain there was a better game out there. Maybe it was D&D 2024, maybe it was Cairn, maybe it was Songbirds, I'm not entirely sure.

Now, was system the entire source of the problems? No, I don't think so. My players knew they were signing up for a big dungeon delve adventure, but I think the reality of dungeon delving didn't really catch up to them until we actually started playing. This leads to the next piece of advice:

Dungeon delving takes a lot of energy; find ways to modify the pacing of the game and session to help everyone stay energized.

Focusing on room descriptions, sitting through dungeon turns, praying your character survives a round of combat, deciding which door to go through (the one marked by claws, or the one with a plaque reading: "Blood Pool"), and so on can really takes its toll on mental bandwidth.

Adding in mid-session breaks and incorporating small positive events into random encounters or respites probably would have helped a lot to keep everyone excited and ready to make the next decision. I've found that when folks get too tired of these decisions, the table can get awkwardly quiet, which isn't any fun for anyone.

It's also especially important to, as a player, try to be engaged with the rest of the table! Invite other players into roleplay situations, vocalize concerns with suggested activity, communicate your questions to other players or the GM, and generally participate. The fewer people who invest themselves with the game world, the worse off the entire table is. I've talked about this sort of thing before in [[Show You Care|a previous post]].

Another way to keep folks excited is to provide better respites between dungeon delves.

This means presenting a mostly safe haven for characters to return to and relax in. A haven which changes based on the choices of the players is even better. If you aren't sure what I mean, consider these examples from some video games:

Baldur's Gate 3: At the end of every adventuring day you can retreat to camp, talk with your companions, and fear no incoming dangers in the night.

Baldur's Gate 2: You have control of a stronghold in this game, a place based on your class, and can retreat there to talk with NPCs and manage your noble affairs.

Pillars of Eternity 1: Like BG2, you have control of a stronghold, Cad Nua. This time though, the stronghold is something you can interact with and repair (it also does get into a fair bit of danger). The cool part here is the dungeon beneath the stronghold. To get your respite all you have to do is climb the stairs!

Darkest Dungeon: Not really a "happy" safe haven, but nonetheless there is nothing inherently dangerous about the hamlet when you return between adventures. This is a chance to repair your broken minds and gather new heroes for the next quest in the dark. A great opportunity to just breathe. Also, there are town events!

The D&D Game

This weekly game was a sub-in for the Dolmenwood game I've been a player for. We took a few weeks to play D&D while our standard GM was doing archaeology in Italy (and digging up lots of cool rocks). The swap to D&D 2024 from Dolmenwood was a pretty sweet breath of fresh air for my players. I think everybody was happy for a bit more power in their punches.

In general, this game was awesome. It is my favorite short campaign I've ever run. I was super happy with how the worldbuilding turned out, the pacing of the adventure, and all the antics my players got into. It looked like my players had a good time, though probably not as good a time as me. Except in our first session. That one was stellar for everybody.

The core premise was to time travel back to the stone age to retrieve a MacGuffin before the MacGuffin was destroyed by a meteor impact. Yes, there were dinosaurs. To get the MacGuffin, I intended for a short wilderness point-crawl followed by a ziggurat heist. This left lots of space for player creativity.

On to my reflections:

Utilize player-focused worldbuilding questions!

What do I mean: In our final session, I presented a group of time thieves and explained one PC knew all of them. The PC then gave a fantastic explanation of how each one of those time thieves had scorned their character in the past. One of the thieves, Luke Nightrain, gained a brother named Puke Nightrain because of this.

These types of loose narrative questions can help strengthen the table's opinions on the world and its characters. When you're struggling to come up with something, or have a moment in the narrative when it makes sense, ask your players to present an answer to a question they themselves might have!

Separating the party sucks.

There were very good fictional reasons why the party got split up during one and a half sessions of this game. One player was captured by guards while everyone else went to talk to other people. The captured player had plenty of capability to escape on their own, while the rest of the party attempted to save them. This led to some chaos in the streets, but a lot of dead time for most of the party while the imprisoned player wandered around a building searching for information.

If I could redo those 5 hours of our time, I would opt to have sealed the entire collection of scenes into one or two dice rolls, Monster of the Week style with "Investigate a Mystery".

Have the imprisoned player describe how they get out of prison, then what they do to learn more about the heist location (from within the heist location). Make a dice roll. Depending on quality of success, give them information (likely including a partially complete map of the location).

Consider having the rest of the party make a group dice roll to learn more about the heist location at the same time. They could learn about entrances, exits, guard routines, and structural instabilities. Also some other weird magic stuff.

That would have saved at least 4 hours of our time, and brought the party back together so that they could back the next decision as a team. Instead, we played through a very entertaining series of encounters for the imprisoned player, while the rest of the party futilely fought guards with a spinosaurus for a few hours.

This goes back to a piece of advice I first heard while listening to Sly Flourish's podcast: sometimes a 4-hour session will only feel like 15 minutes of fun (paraphrased). Knowing this is true (I still feel like I play in these kinds of sessions, and I know I can mistakenly run them too) I feel like I should have recognized a better solution than to keep the party split for hours.

Even between sessions, my only idea for solving the problem was to psychically link the party with telepathy. This was a really cool encounter, I think, but ultimately I don't think it was satisfying. Just getting telepathy without having made the choices to attain it? That's pretty lame.

Lean on your safety tools

A situation came up during play that I should have leaned heavier on my safety tools for. The situation wasn't something I wanted to actually include, and came about because of an improvised scene. I should have used my safety tools to pause for a second, collect my thoughts, and redact what I had improvised for something different.

In the end, I didn't do that, and described the situation in a way that was weird and kind of funny but not in a way that changed what was happening in the subtext. It left a sour taste in my mouth, and I plan to be better about using my safety tools to correct those kinds of mistakes in the future.

Final Thoughts

Big long post about two of my games which wrapped-up at the end of summer. We looked at some lessons I took away from the games. Those lessons revolved around trusting yourself, trusting your players, trusting the tools available to you, and presenting opportunities to develop a living world around the characters.

Thanks for reading!

Things on my radar: