of Dice and Dragons

So far I’ve covered the good, and the bad so now I’m going to cover the ugly. These are the things that I felt went from bad to worse and on some level I think contributed to the ending of the campaign. These are also the items that seemed to come up time and again when the group would discuss the campaign as issues detracting from their enjoyment and let’s face it, if it isn’t fun no one wants to play.

1. Encounter levels

One of the items I truly struggled with as the campaign matured was encounter levels. The campaign was played using 3.5 D&D rules and for the most part things went as expected for the first five or six character levels. I was a “good GM” and followed the charts and tables in the books for determining the level and number of creatures to encounter and managed to keep it all within the flavor of campaign I had designed.

But then it went wrong, horribly wrong.

The campaign initially started out as a low magic, high roleplay campaign and it worked really well and everyone truly enjoyed it. The issue came to light as the party advanced in levels and we started to have more combat encounters - I advanced the opponents but neglected to take into account the lack of magic in the party. I’m not talking just spell casters here I’m talking about there were few magic weapons, armor or items to help with these more powerfully opponents and things got out of hand rapidly. I was suddenly dealing with the need to fudge not only attack rolls but also damage rolls to keep characters alive (a draw back of having character prophecies but we’ll leave that for another time) and more than once the “big baddie” bowed out of a combat for some trumped up reason as opposed to just finishing off the party. Before I even started this campaign the players’ had dubbed it “Scot’s Campaign of PC Death” and it was starting to resemble that.

I’d like to say I figured out a way to fix this issue but the reality is that the campaign ended before the balance could be found again. The players had started to correct this issue by asking to create new characters and as those characters came in they were more “magically enhanced” than their predecessors which made the encounters easier.

Lesson learned - pay attention to the relative strength of the party. Most systems give you guidelines for building either high level PCs or NPCs which show you what the system is expecting them to have for gear, ignore this and the party will not be at the right “power level” for what you’re planning.

2. Pace

Ever pick up a book and find that you’re drawn into it and just can’t put it down? That’s the way I think a campaign should be, it draws the players in with a strong storyline and builds on that with timely combat and challenges.

I’d like to think that The Realms started off that way, everyone seemed engaged with the storylines, liked the amount of combat we were having and even enjoyed the puzzles and non-combat challenges presented to them (ok maybe not the mazes). Over the course of time however things started to slow down and eventually stopped. There were a number of factors that led to this and while I’d like to put my finger on one I just can’t.

Some of the factors were external to the game itself, things such as work schedules and family events - we had more that a couple of additions to the extended group during the campaign run. When you couple those with the changing player and character rosters it made it difficult to maintain a consistent schedule which slows down plot progression.

I think the single biggest item that comes to mind from the perspective of slowing things down was combat. This is an area I think that a lot of groups struggle with as it seems that the higher in level the group goes, the longer it takes to get combat resolved. I’m not talking game terms here, I’m talking about real time. The Realms was a D&D campaign and while a number of combats only took a few rounds (less than a minute in game) they lasted for hours in real time. Things like pre-rolling, standardized actions and timers helped but when you spend most of an evening with a single combat it slows things way down.

Lesson learned - keep an eye on fast things are moving. When planning out your campaign try to build in ways to speed things up - is there a scene you can cut? Everyone likes combat but do you really need it this session and if so is there a way you can speed it up? Can things be done via email between sessions (something our groups’ current GM is doing)? Are you getting bogged down at the table with rule lookups? Taking some time to identify those areas where things are slowing moving is the first step in trying to improve them - be sure to get your groups’ input as they may see issues where you don’t.

3. Campaign Died

Looking back over the other items both in this post and the previous one I find that this one item not only contributed to the overall lack of enjoyment of the campaign but is also the result of all the others. A lot of folks will think that statement is a bit strange as since the campaign wasn’t enjoyable it should end and I would agree but unlike the campaign endings mentioned at Treasure Tables or at the Musings of a Chatty DM the Realms didn’t really end, it died on the vine.

To continue the analogy the fruit was there, ready to be picked, great plots, colorful characters and interesting places to visit and explore - trouble was there was too much of it. I know that like my statement above that will sound odd to some but when you have more plot lines than you can count on both hands, a list of named (and potentially important) NPCs that went into triple digits and locations that spanned a continent and two time lines (did I mention I introduced time travel?) it was impossible to handle and became stagnant. My group was great through this, offering suggestions and letting plot lines drop by the wayside but in the end with all the elements, power level and pacing issues it was unsalvageable - not even an attempt at a campaign reboot could save it.

In the end we just stopped playing the game - I even thought foolishly that we would go back to it for a while - and the Realms faded. We still talk about it, I have all the newsletters in a single PDF that I distributed, all my notes (which I should scan) are still intact and there are many things I can use from it for other campaigns in the future - but we never really ended it.

Lesson learned - watch your scope and plan ahead. I know that’s advice that been often quoted and not just in the RPG arena but it rings all too true. Planning out a large scale setting with a lot of elements is great if you use them and they supplement what your group wants but when those elements begin to take all of your creative energies to maintain instead of designing good, solid, interesting and fun sessions it’s time to scale back.

This took a lot longer that I expected to finish and while there were a number of external factors to it I also found that really taking a look at what went on in the campaign and how those parts were related took a fair amount of time as well. I think that’s true of a lot of things, when you’re in the thick of it you miss the cues that something is not going right and only afterwards are you able to see it (that saying “you can’t see the forest through the trees” comes to mind). I hope that you gained at least a few nuggets of value from this short series I know the reflection has helped me.

May your dice roll well.

In case you missed the previous posts:
Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem
Realms of Rylon - The Good
Realms of Rylon - The Bad

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In my last posting Realms of Rylon Post-Mortem - The Good I covered those things that I thought went well or were well received by the players in my campaign. This time around I’m going to focus on those things that went bad. These are the things that with a few minor tweaks along the way would have been in “the good” category but just missed the boat.

As I wrote this I noticed a pattern, many of the items I listed as “good” also came up as “bad.” I realize that for a lot of folks this would seem a bit strange but on reflection it seemed logical. The Realms of Rylon had a five year run, saw many character changes, player departures and returns, new players added, scheduling issues and a few additions to the extended family (some of us had kids) so what started out well and with good intentions over time slipped down a few notches and ended up here.

1. Newsletter

While I did list this among those items that were “good” I also have to list it here as well. Despite the fact that it was well received and provided a lot of valuable information it became difficult to maintain a consistent schedule of publishing for a variety of reasons. Here’s another spot where a really good lesson can be learned - keep it simple! My newsletter included among other things a full listing of NPCs the party had met, not too difficult to maintain early on but as the list approached 100 it started to become a bit too much. The listing only had the NPC’s name and a brief tidbit about them but as the plot lines unfolded the list became inaccurate and less useful and I eventually removed it, a blessing because I didn’t have to maintain it but a curse as I still needed that information and it wasn’t all in one place anymore.

The other major item that contributed to the newsletter being placed here was the time factor. The newsletter only took an hour or two to compile and put out which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small, but when you factor in that I was working for a high-tech startup and in the process of become a father to a set of twins finding that hour or two does become a challenge so there were some weeks (or longer) where the newsletter just wasn’t published.

Lesson learned - keep it short, simple and easy to publish.

2. Plot lines

This is another item that I listed as “good” but it also has to be included in “the bad.” Why, you may ask? The answer is relatively simple, there were too many.

I started off with a basic plot line and then began to add, and add, and add. There were multiple plot lines for each character, red herrings, ideas that sounded good at the time, NPC plot lines, and the grand daddy of them all, I dropped a war in as a backdrop. The more plot lines I added the greater the depth of the campaign but it also meant the amount of work on my part and the players’ part went up as we tried to keep all of it in check and on track.

The result of all the extra plot lines was a campaign that became stagnant and at times lost focus. We had some really good plot lines run their course but also had many that were introduced and after a session or two got lost in the shuffle, never to be heard from again. The bigger issue was that with all these plot lines the main storyline, the driver for the campaign, became stagnant which ultimately contributed to the downfall of the campaign.

Lessons learned - keep the number of plot lines down and keep them moving.

3. Notes

This is the last item I’ll mention that falls into both the “good” and “bad” column. I think just about every GM out there knows the value of taking and keeping notes about your gaming sessions and I started off well but over the course of time I didn’t do as well. Initially I started out following the three part system I wrote about in my posting, A Guide to Session Notes. I had detailed pre-session notes typed up and available to me during the game complete with plot hooks, NPC and creature stats, trap and treasure information. My in-session notes had all the usual combat related items (opponents, round by round checkoffs, hit point tracking, etc.), results of interactions with the various NPCs, plot hooks picked up and any plot ideas that were generated out of the session - players are great for helping generate ideas if you listen to them. After each session I tried to get a read on the session from the players, note what items I hadn’t used yet that could be used later and the repercussions if any of the characters actions.

As I said above, things started out well but over time my session note taking dropped off. There were sessions where the extent of my notes was a comment about the monsters met and the round tracking - that doesn’t leave a lot to work from in the future and certainly contributed to the challenges with the campaign newsletter. In others there was little to no movement on plot lines so nothing was noted and in still other sessions I just didn’t put the effort in. I also started to rely heavily on my memory as opposed to writing things down as I was always thinking about the campaign - fine when you’re playing 3-4 weeks a month, not so good when you take 1-2 months off.

Looking back on things now I think a fair amount of the issue was actually GM-burnout. I liked the campaign, I liked running it, I liked the way the characters were developing but I think “the grind” of being the GM was wearing on me. I’m sure many of you can relate to the issue, the more something seems to drag on you the less enthustiastic you become about doing it. I’ll leave this topic alone for now and save it for a future post.

4. Improvisation

This one may seem a bit strange to see here as I think most would think that being able to improvise is a good thing, and I would agree with you, until you start to improvise and rolayly mess things up.

I’m sure some of players are reading this and I’m sure they will remember the encounters towards the end of the campaign. There were a number of them that were just too lopsided for the group to handle and I had to fudge some things, call off an attack or have an NPC save the day - none are good for the players and was a result of my running things off the cuff. A number of these encounters were to satisfy the group’s desire for combat but were poorly planned (easy to do in a low magic campaign) which is no one’s fault but my own and I hope to avoid this pitfall in the future.

The other major issue that I had with improvisation at the table was that I had a tendency to introduce things early without the necessary prep, or in my opinion even worse, before the characters were ready for it. The war for example was introduced a lot earlier than I had originally intended. As we were gaming things were going along well but had started slowing down so I decided to spice things up by introducing the war element - it was a good plot line to introduce and was well received but created logistic issues and impacted other plot line far more than I had intended.

The result was a campaign that became more than I could effectively manage and keep track of. The result was more improvisation sessions as I just couldn’t keep up - another sign I was burning out but didn’t see it.

Lesson - improvisation is a good thing, as long as you keep it in check and don’t go overboard.

I think that covers the major points I wanted to bring up, I’m sure there are others but these are the ones that stick out in my mind. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post most of these were originally items that were well received but over the course of time fell short; a classic example of starting out with good intentions. The main take away here is to pay attention to how things are going and how the GM is doing because as you can see, when GM-burnout starts to set in things start to slip.

That’s all for now, next up - The Relams of Rylon Port-Mortem - The Ugly.

May your dice roll well.

Be sure to check out the rest of the series:
Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Good
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Ugly

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This is the second post in my series - be sure to check out the first post Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem.

When most folks start out reviewing something they’ve done there seems to be an instinctive need to focus on those aspects that might seem negative or needing improvement so I’ve decided to start with those things that went well for the campaign.

1. Newsletter

One of the things I’ve learned throughout life is that communication seems to be one of the things we do absolutely horribly more often than not so I set out to change that a bit by introducing a newsletter for my campaign - The Rylon Reader.

The idea was simple, provide information about the campaign and some group information at the same time. The latter worked as I was not only the GM at his point but also the host for all games.

For group information I included a schedule of upcoming sessions and if we were planning a non-game night (like a BBQ which we try to do at least once a year) what the plan was including who was bringing what.

For gaming information I included a short recap of the session and any notable NPCs that they may have encountered, common knowledge the group had learned (like monsters and magic items). I used this section of the newsletter to convey information concerning the campaign prior to its actual start by including rumors, interesting locations the party may want to check out.

The newsletter was well received by the group and it is often referred to, not just for the content but as an item that everyone enjoyed getting.

2. NPCs

Most campaigns are about the combat and while there was more than a little of it in Rylon there was also a lot of interaction with the citizens of the realm which lead to a need for NPCs.

The goal was simple, add three dimensional characters to the world who had their own motivations and goals - the trick to this is thinking story and not stats. I’ve mentioned this in the past (see Build Characters not Stats) and I’m sure I’ll bring it up again in the future - don’t stat your NPCs until you need to. To make believable and memorable NPCs you need to focus on who they are, why they’re in your campaign and how they’ll interact with the party - when you figure out those items the NPC will become something more that a simple list of stats.

How do you know you’ve accomplished this? When your group continues to talk about the NPCs long after they’ve been introduced. Some of the major NPCs from Rylon are still mentioned to this day long after the campaign folded.

3. Campaign World

This is an area where most GMs (myself included on more than one occasion) fall short - the world they create looks good on paper but then the group enters it, the world maintains the same two dimensional quality that the paper has.

With Rylon I spent some significant time figuring out what was going to happen in the world before we even started. I created a backdrop for the campaign, a war. What this allowed me to do was inject world events which had a common thread and were interconnected. The fall of cities, spread of rumors, slave lords, prisoners of war, displaced communities, were all brought into the campaign and all occurred without the party’s direct interaction. It also gave me the opportunity to bring back NPCs which would normally be tied to one location but due to the city they lived in being destroyed so now could be found anywhere in the realm.

I also took the opportunity to get input from the players here and one of them came up with an entire kobold clan (he wanted to run a kobold as a PC) complete with a diagram of the underground city they lived in, major NPCs, religion and history. I consider myself fortunate for this as it gave me a lot of fertile ground to pull from and also gave birth to a dwarven city which may not have existed otherwise. The city was unlike anything the group had encountered in our previous campaigns (dwarves not being a particular favorite for PC race) so it was enjoyed by all.

The lesson here is to create new places that your group hasn’t been to. While you can create whole new cities as we did in Rylon with the kobolds and dwarves you could decide to keep things fairly simple, just chance a custom or two, the style of government or even expected laws (what do you mean no magic in city limits?).

4. Plot Lines

So, you’ve got PCs, you’ve got a campaign world, now what? That’s were plot comes into play. The plot or storyline of the campaign needs to be thought out and be loose enough to be worked with. In the case of Rylon I created a central storyline to draw from and then pulled information for subplots from the discussions during character generation and gaming sessions.

A good lesson here is that when your players start talking, starting listening (and take notes if you need to). You’ll be amazed at how much story information you can glean from a simple side conversation and the players will enjoy their gaming time that much more when they see things they’ve thought about come up in the in the course of play.

The important thing here is to make sure they are seeds - you want the party to make the choice to follow the storyline on their own and not be forced into it. Trust me on this one as I’ve made the mistake in the past, make the choice tempting enough and the party will follow, force them and soon no one wants to play the campaign anymore.

The final item I would mention about plot lines is try and make some of them character specific. Some will respond to this and others won’t but by making the effort to find story lines for specific characters those players will feel good and those that aren’t getting story lines you can speak to about working up some additional material to pull future story lines specific to their character from.

5. Notes

There is nothing that will derail an ongoing campaign faster than the, “okay where did we leave of last week?” question from the GM. This was a trap I was determined not to fall into so I started right out of the gate taking notes.

Each week I would record the session number, the real world date of the session, the campaign dates for the session and then any notes associated with the session. I learned right away the benefit of these notes. With them I had a history to work from, places the characters had been, people they had met, monsters defeated and magic collected or experienced.

The notes I took also gave me the information for my campaign newsletter which I mentioned above. I didn’t need to sit down and think about the last session to write up the summary, I can the highlights already in my notes.

For more information about note taking check out my posting, A Guide to Session Notes.

So there you have “The Good” - the list of the top things I think worked well for my campaign or that the others at the table thought were the highlights for them. In the next installment of this series I’m going to look at “The Bad” - the things that could have used a tweak or two to put them in “The Good” category.

May your dice roll well.

Be sure to check out the rest of the series:
Realms of Rylon - The Postmortem
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Bad
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Ugly

Comments(2)

I mentioned in my post on September 14 Prepping for a New Game that instead of starting by diving right into the creation process for my next campaign I was going to do a postmortem, or review, of my last campaign The Realms of Rylon or Rylon for short. Here we are three months later so I figured I better get this postmortem started.

Here are the points I’m going to hit during this process:

• What was the original campaign idea?
• The good - what was well received, done well or enjoyed by all
• The bad - what could have been done better, could have been good if handled differently
• The ugly - what hurt the campaign and the players/GM’s enjoyment

Will that cover everything? Probably not but it does force me to focus on where I can improve things for my next campaign and also remember what worked well so I can continue to use it.

Let’s start at the top, what was the original campaign idea?

The original campaign idea for Rylon centered around an artifact called The Keystone. According to legend about 400 years prior to the start of the campaign the Keystone was broken into four pieces to seal off the city of Tangarth and it was the goal of the party to collect the four pieces and return them to their employer.

While I had the above in mind and some preliminary notes put together I didn’t initially put this to my group as I didn’t want to railroad them into it, so I did a soft sell. I did this by writing up an initial adventure during which their future employer was looking to select a group of adventures to complete some task. The adventure allowed the group to bond together by giving them some common experiences and set the stage for a number of role-playing sessions during which the players agreed on terms with their employer and started their quest.

Was the idea good? In a lot of respects it was as it gave a lot of room for creativity and also provided some themes for different aspects of the campaign as I eventually linked each piece of the keystone to a base element, earth, fire, water and air. The theme idea I’ll admit has been done almost to death but it did work well for this.

I also decided that I wanted this campaign to take the group of characters to epic level (for those not familiar with 3.5 D&D that’s above level 20), which translated to five levels per part of the keystone. Here was the first mistake I made and the first lesson I learned - you shouldn’t plan out your campaign based level advancement.

Why not? What happens with the party doesn’t advance in levels? The plot can stagnate. What happens when the party goes off on a side trip? Advancement stagnates. Both situations make it difficult on everyone to enjoy the game.

Lesson learned - don’t tie major plots to character advancement make the two independent of each other.

In the next part of this series of articles I take a look at what worked well in the campaign. I promise it won’t take another three months!

May your dice roll well.

Be sure to check out the rest of the series:
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Good
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Bad
Realms of Rylon Postmortem - The Ugly

Comments(2)

After posting my last article Establish a Rules Policy - Part 2 a comment was left by Ooklamok which included a few questions about what do you do if the ruling you are discussing would kill a PC.

From his comments:

If the outcome of a rule “discussion” is going to effect something major (i.e. a PC might die), should you allow more time for arguments to be made? Should you err on the side of letting the PC live? What if you make a ruling that kills the PC and find out later you were wrong?

As for allowing more time for discussions of important matters, as long as the discussion is being productive and constructive I would allow it to continue for a few extra minutes. It’s still a good idea to set limits as to how long you’ll allow it to continue as you don’t want it to consume the entire session. A suggestion is to allow each person that would like to speak to the rule in question three minutes to speak and then move onto the next person (I use a three minute timer, hence that time limit).

The remainder of his comments fall within the bounds of player character death and what to do about it. The hardest part about this area is that every group is different so unfortunately there is not hard and fast rules to follow. As with many of my suggestions on how to handle issues that arise in a gaming group the key is communication and planning.

When looking at this I tend to see groups become a blending of one of two categories, those that protect the characters and those that don’t.

1. Protect the PCs

This is more often than not the default (especially with new GMs) and while your initial thought may be that there is nothing wrong with playing in this mode there are a couple of items you should keep in mind.

First, it puts a lot more responsibility on the GM. I know that it’s the GM’s responsibility to run the game but now you’re expecting them to make sure the PCs don’t die - not just from an opponent’s attack but also from the fall off the building, the missed saving throw or ability check. The bookkeeping for this type of environment is much higher than your standard game and a mistake in math will cause heartache.

The second item is a result of the first. In the course of gaming the characters will no doubt dig themselves a hole they cannot get out of without help - GM to the rescue! Whether it be a timely miss by an opponent, a critical hit that by some miracle only does the minimum amount of damage or (one that I’ve used in the past) a powerful ally shows up and saves the group the result is the same - the group knows they misstepped and had to be bailed out. For some groups this isn’t an issue but for others they don’t care for deux ex machina and know when it happens and it kills their sense of disbelief.

2. Let the dice fall where they may

This is one is far easier to manage, if the dice are going to kill the character - then the character falls. This is a bit hardcore for most groups and depending on the GM can result in a lot of characters being created. If your group is into more realism than fantasy and have a good supply of ideas for characters and can can play those characters with a bit of detach this environment may well suit your group - just be careful here as over time a lot of characters may start to resemble each other (same stats, skills, feats - you get the idea).

Now, those two categories are at the extreme ends and while a fair number of groups will fall into the first category (especially since fantasy novels seem to protect the main characters) a lot will blend the two which gives us choice number three and the best suggestion on how to handle rules that deal with PC death.

3. Let the player decide

This style of play requires a lot of communication on the part of everyone at the table. Most of us have played in groups where there’s a player (typically fairly new or who did a lot of background work) that just does not want to let the PC die. If this information is out in the open then the GM can plan for it.

The same holds true for those players that see their characters as just another part of the story and are willing to let them go. It may be that they’re just interested in playing something different or they may see that by their character dieing the story becomes a bit stronger.

So discuss how exactly the group wants to deal with things (nurish or perish) and it will make dealing with rules a bit easier.

Having said the above what do you do about the ruling?

First, if the player is ok with PC dieing you can take that factor out of the equation and decide based on your understanding rules. If you’re proved wrong after the session you can amend your house rules and continue on from there. Remember the player involved has already agreed that if a circumstance arises that would kill the character they would be ok with it.

Second, if the player is not ok with the PC dieing then rule accordingly giving the PC the benefit of the doubt. I would be surprised if anyone comes back and says, “oops, my character really should have died, here’s my new PC.” As in all cases dealing with the rules be sure to document it and put it in your house rules.

So how do you handle rulings dealing with PC death? Does your group nurture PCs or do you play it a bit more realistic?

May your dice roll well.

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