Lessons from a Campaign Ended

I ended Is This Foul? on Friday. The gang still got together and hung out, we just played Apples to Apples and 1000 Blank White Cards instead. (Note to those interested: Captain Kirk makes any 1000 Blank White Cards game 243% more awesome. Especially when people start thinking up cool ways to steal him.) We've got plans to get together next week, and I'll probably run a little megadungeon. But that campaign wasn't working.

The exact reasons behind that are probably beyond my powers of analysis. Mostly, it just never quite clicked. But I learned a couple things from it that I'm pretty sure will improve my chances with future campaigns. At the very least, it can't hurt.

Don't overload a short campaign. In a game with an indefinite time-span, sure, I can throw in as many plot threads as I want. The players will pick up on some, ignore others, and invent their own. They've got time. But in a game like this, with a definite end-date? My attempts at giving the players "choice" just ended up bogging them down with option-overload. They had too much stuff to get done, and too many looming loose ends. A short game doesn't need a whole lot of choice, because it's short. There's not as much chance of people getting bored, and they can get their self-determination kicks from figuring out how to handled whatever handful of problems I do present to them.

Don't mix old characters with new. This is an issue that's pretty specific to sequel games, and maybe even specific to the structure of this game in general. (More on that in a minute.) In hindsight, I should have had them all make new characters, and kept the old guard around as helpful-but-distant NPCs. Instead, I was running a party that included three well-connected, politically powerful masters-of-the-city with a lot of shared history, and a couple of people who had just kind of shown up. The latter two had their own reasons for being in the game, and interesting stuff to do on their own, but they didn't have a whole lot of reason to hang around or help out the first three. That caused a few problems.

Don't run two vastly different but interconnected parties. The idea of having one group of high-level city leaders and ambassadors, and another of their mid-level children and minions, sounded cool on paper. In practice, it created situations where one character would suddenly stop talking because his player's other, much more important character had just entered the room, and generally caused a lot of "who's talking now?" type confusion. Add to that the massive player/character knowledge problems that started when people's characters started to align themselves on opposite political sides (Which, I'll add, my players handled masterfully, but it's still something that's better to avoid when you can.) and this idea was just a whole lot more trouble than it's worth.

Don't run a game that I'm not completely sure I want to run. I'd mentioned the idea, and thought it sounded kind of cool. My players loved the last campaign, and were way excited about the idea of another like it, which is always awesome. I knew there were some neat political shenanigans I could try, and it'd be an opportunity to play around with some ideas I hadn't used before. But I wasn't sure I could handle the system. I worried that it wouldn't measure up to the last campaign. And I didn't know if this was really the game that I wanted to run. DMing is hard enough even when it's a game that I am consistently, 100% committed to. This campaign couldn't quite make that standard.

Edited the last paragraph for clarity.

Fun with Death & Doom

(And frost, too, come to think of it.)

Last Friday's session of Is This Foul? was pretty combat heavy. Beyond a little exploration and the usual scenery chewing, two fights took up almost the entire five hour period. In retrospect, I probably it was probably too combat laden; I set up said combats mostly because I was curious about how they'd play out, forgetting that at least one player has very little interest in combat, and the rest do fine without it.

On the whole, though, it worked out rather well. We had a guest with us, running an NPC, so the combat-focus was probably good for keeping her from getting too lost in references to backstory and the ever-more convoluted plot. And, of course, I had the always antic-prone Halden to keep things interesting, by nearly getting himself killed and attacking his brother (one of the PCs) at slow moments.

I was fairly pleased with how the fights themselves turned out, too. Both were interesting, and quite different from each other. The first involved three high speed "grave wolves" zipping around outside the radius of their (single) light source, based very loosely on the harrier class from Iron Heroes. Though well within their capabilities, it was tough enough to put Halden into serious danger, prompting some amusing attempts to protect him from his own idiocy by the more responsible members of the party.

The second was one of the most interesting pure combats in 3.5 that I've ever run. (I've run plenty of combats that were interesting for plot or character reasons, but it's unusual for me to engineer something that holds my attention just on tactics.) I set an ice golem, from Frostburn, in front of a stone door -- thus, a fairly likely candidate for the "vaults" they're looking for in the tunnels they were exploring -- and the PCs on a ledge across the ice cave from it. Normally, this critter is CR 9, but I cranked up its HD into the territory where CR calculations for such things get a little wonky. Suffice to say, it was well out of their league, even with five level 10 PCs and a level 13 NPC along for the ride.

Luckily, it didn't take them long to figure that out. Kheriim, their mage blade, summoned a fire elemental, and when it smashed that in one hit they became very cautious about engaging it directly. Which was smart, because a few of the lower-hp characters could have very well died after but a single lucky hit, and even Ax (level 13 and a warmain to boot) could only handle a few rounds next to it.

Instead, they figured out a bunch of ways to fight it without getting close to it. Tricks with runes, the aforementioned fire elementals, a dancing-sword type spell, alchemist's fire, and running away really fast were the order of the day. There was also some talk about pulling it away from the door long enough to try to get through it, though they were lucky enough to take it out just as they'd decided to pull back and regroup. In short, they sat down and started thinking, a much better result than I've ever gotten out of all of the "level appropriate" fights I've thrown at them over the years.

The Case For World Mastery

I'm having fun running Is This Foul? I've got a good handle on my notes and prep, the players are contributing, and there's plenty at-the-table banter so the actual sessions are always a good time. I don't want to create the impression that I'm not having fun.

But like most things do, it's gotten me thinking. See, 3e D&D, and Arcana Evolved after its example, has a big emphasis on rules mastery. Pretty much everyone who's played it knows that: there's a lot of options, and some of them are better than others. It's an intentional part of the game's design. So I shouldn't be surprised when it takes over five hours to build two characters. Nor should I be surprised when the first thing most of the players do, when presented with a problem, is to start going through the book.

It's not that these things are bad. Mastery is fun. Learning a system, figuring out how to exploit it and the optimal solutions, are things I enjoy, too. More importantly, getting better at something is all kinds of fun. I get that.

But these days, this isn't the only D&D I know. I'm also playing in a (hacked) game of Labyrinth Lord, and I've been running a bit of Swords & Wizardry here and there, when the opportunity strikes.

Those games have mastery, too. A different kind of mastery, but there's still a lot to learn and get better at, and a lot that players can do to improve and expand their control over the game world. (Because that's fundamentally what "rules mastery" rewards you with: the ability to alter the game world more significantly and determine outcomes more efficiently.) A big part of what makes that ever-present threat of death satisfying, rather than frustrating, is it's something I can learn how to deal with. I may not be great at it now, but every time I deal with (or fail to deal with) a challenge, I learn something.

I've been growing to prefer world mastery to rules mastery. (Or perhaps inductive mastery to deductive mastery? One involves introducing fundamentally novel ideas to a pre-defined (but malleable) system, the other requires searching for pre-existing but undiscovered solutions within a rigorously defined (and perhaps, but not always, malleable) system.) For one thing, exercising rules mastery requires breaking immersion, and immersion is, I'm discovering, kind of a big deal for me. I'd much rather base my decisions on purely in-world data, when at all possible; the conditions of the environment, my character's personality, the effect an action might have on various NPCs, and other such factors are much more interesting to me than which feats I've got.

Likewise, as a Dungeon Master, I'd rather have my players pay attention to me than the rules. A bit selfish, but true: part of why the "pause to look up something in the book" response bugs me is simple jealousy. But I also prefer to reward the kinds of behavior involved in world mastery over the behavior required for rules mastery. I largely don't care how much time a player spends outside of game reading the rulebooks and thinking up new builds, but it very much matters to me how involved they are with the world.

Most importantly, world mastery, and games that emphasize it, are much easier for the new players I've introduced to roleplaying to get the hang of. The few people I've tried to introduce 3.5 D&D to since high school have hated it; there's a definite sense that you'll make the wrong choices, and it's hard to figure out just what the right choices are without a fairly good grasp of the system. (Especially in feats. Skills and classes are fairly descriptive, but feats suffer from excessive proliferation and a certain arcaneness in their effects and phrasing.) By contrast, they love Swords & Wizardry, and it didn't take them long to realize that equipment list is there to facilitate MacGuyver-like shenanigans.

Secrecy in the Early Game

The new campaign kicked off Friday. All in all, it was a success. Lots of fun character moments, plenty of antics, and fairly neat ending, with the lower level group all packaged up into a team and kicked out the door to go do some quest-type things. So next time won't have as much "which character am I playing right now?" type confusion; we'll be able to cut between the two groups rather than managing the whole gang all in one place.

It also had three private, out-of-the-room conversations between me and one or two players, lots of note passing, and a bit of attempted blackmail. Which is pretty much par for course for a new game of mine. The last two major campaigns I've run all started out with a lot of intra-party intrigue. Secret agendas, spying for outside (and possibly hostile) powers, and sneaking off for one's own mysterious purposes is typical behavior in the first few sessions, and while it tends to calm down once everyone gets settled, sometimes it comes back to explode later down the line.

It's partly my fault. Even when I don't start the campaign by handing each player a secret piece of information, as I did in this game, I sometimes start up the note passing, and I'll suggest the private conversations. Although I'm sure that at some point this kind of thing will go terribly wrong, in a player-vs-player kind of way, for the most part I think it's a good way to get a new party used to each other, it gets players thinking about their characters backgrounds, and it encourages PC-on-PC roleplaying. (Though I'm usually careful to apply a bit of outside pressure; a dangerous common enemy works well to keep even characters who don't like each other together.) And this campaign has a lot of political considerations going on, so I'm quite pleased at the level of player involvement and interest in that aspect of the game.

But it strikes me as peculiar that this always happens. While I intended for Is This Foul? to have a conspiratorial tone, the intrigue that's infected the Traveller game was largely my players doing. Certainly I've encouraged it, since they seem to enjoy the note-passing and discovering each others secrets, but I wasn't the one who said "I want my character to work for the people Duke Burris is trying to overthrow, because they've captured her fiancé."

It could be just the kind of players I attract. But it also occurs to me that, if given the opportunity, players have some pretty powerful incentives to give their characters a bit of secret agenda. It gets them more one-on-one attention from me, and it gets them more attention from the other players, both in the "what's that person up to?" stage, and when they finally orchestrate their big reveal. Once one person starts doing it, everyone wants to do it, because they see that other player getting more spotlight.

So is a certain amount of secrecy a fairly common attribute in player-dom? Does anyone else have these note-passing kinds of early games? And has anyone ever had secrecy go horribly, terribly wrong?

Round-Robin Worldbuilding

So on Saturday we finished doing set-up for the summer game. (Minus character creation for a player who was in the original game but may or may not be in this one; I'm going to see about getting him to come over and do that sometime this week.) We even set up a campaign blog, complete with title: Is This Foul? Is It?

There was a bit of grumbling from some of the players, since no actual roleplaying occurred during the session, but I was fairly pleased with how it went. We have a decent idea of a starting point for next week's session, and a good level of player excitement and involvement. (Maggienotmegan wrote up everything that's currently on the blog, with no input from me! Go player involvement! I need to come up with a good reward scheme for that kind of thing, whether it's XP, "brownie points," or just more in-game story stuff.)

Most importantly, I've now got a surprisingly good idea of what the local area looks like, thanks to a neat trick I pulled. I worked out all the major locations, and wrote each one's name at the top of a sheet of notebook paper, along with few brief details. Then I passed out one for each of the players, and they each added a detail to theirs and passed it to the next player. This continued until each page was filled. As I told them, I won't use everything they listed (though that was mostly to spur creativity by keeping them from worrying about messing up the setting) but I've got a decent starting point.

And it was a lot of fun. The players enjoyed it, and it built investment in the world and the game. There's now a number of little details scattered about the setting that they'll enjoy interacting with, because they're responsible for them. (Like fire toads!) I enjoyed it, both because I participated to keep the ideas going and because it gave me a lot less work to do.

I liked it so much that I might try it again. It strikes me as a good session warm-up activity, and I've got a number of places that might benefit from the same manner of detailing. The main overland map, the nine cities, and even the five cantons of Xanadu itself would all take well to the technique.

A Rough Homecoming

So on Friday we did character creation for the Is This Fair sequel that we're playing this summer. Or, I should say, started character creation. Spent five hours and no one's done.

Now, part of that is that the characters the players are making are fairly complex. We're using Arcana Evolved plus a couple skill tweaks from Iron Heroes and items from the Magic Item Compendium, and everyone's running one 10th level character and one 20th level character. About half the group already has a lower level version of their 20th done, but even if the idea's cooked up they've still got all the numbers and fiddling to do. One guy finished his 20th level while on site, but everyone else is still partway through one or both characters; those without pre-existing characters from the last game haven't even started their 10th levels.

Some of the player's really dig the complexity. That's why I decided on 20th level in the first place: one or two of them have been bugging me to run "epic" for a while. Others get kind of lost. They're not as experienced with the system, and what's fairly and simple and fun for the ones into rules-tweakery (and I go into that category; I'm not much of an optimizer but I do enjoy building characters) becomes an ordeal.

Which is what it was. Five hours, and we still weren't halfway done. I've been running Traveller and Swords & Wizardry for the past year, and playing Labyrinth Lord, and it kind of blew my mind. I'd forgetten how much of a pain it can be, wrangling all the skills and feats and everything. Until now, I hadn't fully appreciated just how fast early edition D&D is, compared to 3e. And while Traveller's not quite that fast, at least it's fun, and no one gets lost. You're discovering your character as it goes along, and all the decisions are fairly simple and come one at a time. There's no math, no calculation, no flipping through books and figuring out how much all your magic items cost.

The worst part, though, is that we spent those five hours figuring out stuff I fundamentally don't care about. Fancy combat tricks, largely. Arcana Evolved is not nearly so bad about that as 3.5 D&D proper, and not all of it was combat, but even in the non-combat area, there's a level of calculated codification that, I've realize, I neither want nor need.

What I care about, with these characters, is where they're from and what they're doing in Xanadu. I care about their goals, their enemies, and (for some of them) how they feel about their parents. I care about what they're good at, what they're bad at, what they like doing and what they'd rather avoid. I don't need to know all the situations where they get a +1 bonus to whatever to know any of that, but that's what we spent those five hours figuring out.

I still feel pretty fondly towards the system, and I'm sure things will get better once I'm actually running it, once we can focus on the things that matter and I'm back to running the system I know better than anything. (Though that's another thing that bugged me on Friday. I don't know the system as well as I once did, and what's easily handled if you know it well isn't necessarily so forgiving to someone who's knowledge is a little rusty.) And if we were starting out at 1st level, or somewhere in that neighborhood, I doubt I'd mind at all. But this? This has me just about ready to swear off the high-powered end of the game, at least as a starting point. I doubt the compensations will be worth the trouble.

Pirate + Rum + 20 Years = Instant Troupe Play!

As previously discussed, I'm considering running a sequel to a campaign I ran a few years ago as this year's summer game. I haven't fully committed to it (and likely won't until late April) but it's one of the possibilities I've been turning over in my mind.

The idea presents some significant advantages. First and foremost, I'd get a huge level of buy-in from my two most active players, who have wanted me to run this ever since the first campaign ended. A secondary consideration to that is that this may be the last time for a while that one of them is here for the summer, so this summer may be my last chance to do this. On a different note, I've been thinking about running d20 again for a while now, and Arcana Evolved in particular is a ruleset I'd like to go back to.

Leaving aside outright disadvantages (i.e., the campaign might implode under the weight of player expectation) which I've given careful and sufficient thought to, the campaign also presents some significant challenges. One of the reason the players are interested in the idea is that they'd like to play, at least briefly, their old characters at high level. The last campaign ended around 10th level, and there's been a sufficient span of time in between to more than justify them now being 15th, or even 20th level. However, for various reasons those characters are now largely restricted to the city that they dredged up from the bottom of the ocean: in addition to some mystical business with an NPC they're strongly involved with, they're trying to found their own country/empire/thing, and managing and defending it keeps them busy.

I don't want to run "let's defend this crazy city." Not exclusively, anyway. I think that game could be interesting for a while, but the group has enough power there that I want to be able to force them out of it occasionally, to go deal with some problem or another that's still relevant to the city, but outside the range of their various massive advantages. I've considered putting a weird underground complex of some kind underneath the city, for exploration and as a source of danger, but I don't think it's a particularly good fit for the ruleset, and I don't think it can fully support the rest of the ideas I have in mind.

Oh, and I also don't want to have to deal with high level characters all the time. Even if their capabilities prove more interesting than frustrating, I don't want to be wedded to the math, and the attendent hours-long combats. I'm curious about what such a game would be like, but I've heard enough about it to be wary.

The rather obvious solution to all this is to give the players each at least one additional character, lower in level than the original group and likely tied to the main characters in some way. Create a group of lieutenants, essentially, as a strike team to handle any off-island problems that may arise, and to deal with things that the main group just doesn't have time for. Furthermore, if this secondary group are really the main actors in the game, with the old characters coming on for occasional cameos, I have a lot more freedom to add new players to the game, which I'll probably have to do. Much more reasonable to add a new lieutenant than a new 20th level master of the city. (Though I have some ideas in that area, if it comes to that.)

To make things more interesting, I'm considering a twist: each player has to run the protege of a different character. So if, say, a long-lost illegitimate kid of Blank's shows up, Blank's player doesn't run him and the kid. Someone else runs the kid, and then they can have heartfelt family conversations without descending into schizophrenia.

I like this idea, since I think it'll mix things up a bit, but my players may have other ideas. I still haven't ironed out the details yet; still need to figure out how involved the old characters will really be, and I haven't ruled out true troupe play, with more than just two characters per player. (Especially as my current scheme will leave the new players who will undoubtedly join the campaign with just one character. Maybe I'll figure out something special for them.) For the most part, though, I'm trying to avoid any too serious planning until closer to launch time, in the hopes that I won't lose all interest in the idea before then.

Top Five D&D Classes of the Moment

Never one to pass up a decent meme, I've compiled a list of my own top five D&D classes. I'm pulling from 3.5 (and related third party supplements) because that's the edition I've got the most experience with, as a player and a DM. These are more or less in low-to-high order, though the specifics would likely shift if I did this again in a couple days.

5. Cleric For nostalgia's sake, more than anything else. I've played a lot of clerics; it was kind of my spot in the first group, and I still tend to pick them, just out of habit. I tend to play them slightly loopy -- my crowning achievement being the Unitarian Universalist cleric (dedicated to a cause, of course) who had a nervous terror of pitchforks and torches.

4. Oathsworn And now, we get into the territory of "things I've never played, but would like to some day." I don't play much. But if I did, Oathsworn (from Arcana Evolved) would be close to the top of my list. I dig the whole oath/loyalty thing, and while that's not enough to hang a character on (as I learned in a short-lived Risus campaign) combined with some actually functional unarmed combat mechanics, you've got yourself a fun time.

3. Shadowcaster I'm mostly just all over the flavor on this one. Dark, shadowy, and creepy, without descending into the angst-fest that is the Warlock. These guys chose their powers. Add in all the extra goodness in the shadow magic section of the Tome of Magic, and you've got a class that I'd seriously consider using on the other side of the screen, as a villain or unreliable ally.

2. Psychic Warrior I dearly love the 3.5 psionics system, so much so that I'd consider running a campaign with it as the major power source, little or no magic. And I particularly dig the psychic feat trees -- they open up a whole bunch of fighter-type powers, but with a supernatural flair.

1. Champion I like Arcana Evolved. A lot. Champions, in particular, always struck me as an interesting and playable twist on the paladin -- a class I dearly love, but that has caused me more headaches than anything else. Champions are not one class, but several, each devoted to a different cause. ("Freedom," "Life," "Justice," "Death" and so on.) Lots of room for new material, and lots of room to tweak a concept that's not quite working, since switching causes is fairly easy, up to a point. (Like if you're running a Champion of Justice, and the rest of the group decides they want to be pirates . . .) Add in a lot of really interesting different powers for each cause, and no requirements for your companions behavior besides "help me fight these people who don't like my cause," and you've got a class that's great in theory and in execution.

Questions Regarding Sequel Campaigns

One of the possibilities for the summer campaign is a sequel to an Arcana Evolved game I ran two years ago. (Others top contenders include high level 4th Edition D&D and Vampire: the Requiem. I'm not running the megadungeon, mostly for player compatibility reasons, but I plan on running it on an ad hoc basis both before then and during that time.) We've been talking about it for a while; two of the players have desperately wanted to play it again pretty much since the thing ended. I decided against running it last summer because one of those two players was out of town, and because I was too psyched about 4e to want to run something d20-derived.

This year, both of those problems have been have been (more or less) resolved. Both players will be here for the whole summer -- and this might be the last summer that this is true. And while I'm not as off of 4th Edition as I was six months ago (and my interests of late have been turned towards the old ways) I'd be more than happy to spend a few months back in the d20 world. Especially with Arcana Evolved, one of my favorite books from that era.

But I'm wary. That game was good, yeah, but it was also a product of a very specific set of influences. We'll have at least two players who weren't in the original game, and we'll be missing one or two who were. I won't have the same over-riding desire to "fix" the Oblivion ending that gave me a very strong but flexible structure to hang the plot of the game on. We might have the same characters (I'm considering a couple of different approaches to that) but we'll also all be two years older, with different concerns than produced that particular party.

The setting won't even be the same. One of the things we've established, in our post-game discussions, is that the end of that campaign produced some serious changes to the status quo of the setting. And I've never been completely happy with a lot of the details, both geographical and historical, that I established for that game, so I'd probably go back and clean some of that up, if I was going to spend another four months with it.

My players must know this. I've mentioned it to them, they agree, and it's all fairly obvious anyway. Which leaves me wondering why it is that they want to play this sequel game so badly. There wasn't anything magical about that campaign; the only substantial difference, in my perspective, between a sequel and wholely new endeavor would be that the sequel would invite a lot of comparisons with the old game, most of them unfavorable.

But I have to admit, I'm intrigued. It'd need to be shaken up a little bit, but the new status quo is certainly interesting -- they're in charge of the ancient, recently un-sunken city that housed the nexus of its fallen empire's magical power. I could do something with that set-up.

Hence, the post. Has anyone else out there run a sequel like this? Or considered it? How'd it go? Any overwhelming arguments against such an endeavor that I'm missing? Or are there any benefits that I haven't considered? And those players of mine who read the blog, why does the idea attract you so powerfully?