A Campaign Post-Mortem
Three months ago I put my Die Trying campaign to bed; this is a reflection on that campaign. The campaign was created over winter break of my final year at university in 2021, and was run until August 2022 with intermittent hiatuses. I ran the game both in person and online on alternating weeks, with an open-table and one-to-one time. The ruleset was Spwack’s Die Trying embedded like a jewel within a shambling mound of procedures and homebrew rules I added on top of it. Characters were simply adventurers in a homebrew world combining my typical attempts at the dying earth genre with the weird kitchen sink implied by the rules. Everything kicked off in a grassy undead-plauged region known as the Graveflower Fields.
The Inverted Pyramid and the Session of Doom
The most important lessons to be learned come from the events which killed the campaign. Ultimately I shut down the campaign due to my own perfectionism, a crime I am often guilty of. My players were still largely having a good time, though we had suffered heavy player attrition due to collective graduation and the major life changes that entails. Perhaps this also contributed to my willingness to give the game up. However, more broadly applicable lessons can learned as my willingness to give up stemmed almost entirely from a single botched session. Previously, one party came to a logging town with a giant inverted pyramid hovering ominously over it. The thing had only been there for a few days, allowing a contingent of nearby Rust Monks to come in and examine it. Now, this was intended to pique player interest towards the local Rust Monk observatory and the Spire where the extraterrestrials riding about in the pyramid were trading with humans. However, due to an unexpected Scroll of Elevation (allowing the user to go up one dungeon level), the players managed to hitch a ride on the ship. I was able to pause the session and put together an improvised dungeon crawl which was surprisingly good despite the circumstances. This initial map gave us a few decent dungeon crawl sessions, but the rest of the ship was an issue. It was meant to be massive, and a dungeon crawl through the lower maintenance was fine but not suitable for the larger structure. I created some vague areas and their connections, but as there was nothing outside of the prepared region I sealed it up with locked bulkheads. I did a second pass on the dungeon map, deciding that it was a totally abandoned area of the ship controlled by a rogue AI. Throughout the time the players were wandering the dungeon, I had also insisted that they could not speak the alien language. Eventually the session of doom came around. The players were able to explore the prepared dungeon enough to encounter the locked doors, were unable to decipher my hints as to why they were locked, and proceeded to get obviously frustrated. At this point I triggered events in an attempt to point out methods of escape such as the large batteries keeping the rogue AI powered. This was not successful and only led to more frustration. Their frustration was entirely valid, as I had basically turned the session into a game of “guess what the GM was thinking”. If the players are confused about how the world works, it’s a pretty clear indication that you should have provided more information. Ultimately, I gave up and had NPCs from the greater ship break in and capture the PCs. I improvised my ass off, but in doing so removed any agency the PCs had and spewed gallons of BS lore into canon. Lore which I regret making up as it broke my internal view of the setting and led to me wanting to move on.
Ultimately, the mistakes made were:
- Failing to properly prepare the ship early enough, especially giving it proper motivations and considering its contents. This had been a problem from the time the ship was introduced even before the session of doom.
- Failing to communicate the reason the doors were locked to the players. I think a particularly problematic issue was the touch pads I placed by the doors as set dressing when combined with the unintelligible alien language. The players believed they were supposed to open the doors by manipulating the (decorative in game terms) touch pads as if they were a puzzle.
- Once I had to bail the players out, not pausing to come up with a scenario which allowed them agency or which quickly removed them from the compromised ship. In doing so I ended up infodumping in order to keep them entertained. Which ended with ripping off my limited understanding of the lategame lore of Caves of Qud (and by proxy Gene Wolfe) in a way which did not mesh with the rest of the established setting.
So, here’s what I would want to have done instead.
- Prepare the ship. More importantly than the exact contents was the why of the ship, because this would have informed any improv in a way which would not have been as disastrous. There was already some ideas floating around about alien traders observing the logging town to oversee wood production (wood logically being a luxury in space), but a little more time thinking up an alien species and how their technology worked would have saved me a lot of grief. In fairness I did have the challenge of welding it to the random mess I stocked the initial dungeon with, but I would have preferred to have left the aliens as, well alien rather than the Humans But In Space I ass-pulled. If I had been able to achieve this, I think a depthcrawl would have been the way forward for the greater ship as it would have allowed the players to progress into a space ordered in a confusing and alien manner while still being easy to run.
- Even keeping the restrictions of the players not speaking the language and the touch pads as prepared in the original dungeon asspull, there were ways to communicate the AI was keeping the doors shut. I might have put up signs in the alien language, and called out a word or glyph flashing on the doors as matching the signs pointing towards the AI core. Followed up by having big obvious cables leading towards the battery bay. Even having the AI core pop up on screens and screech at them in the alien language would have been an improvement. Ultimately, I think that having to stop and come up with a dungeon on the fly was totally fine though not ideal. I think I handled that challenge well, but failed to extend it further. Which is why I’m focusing on actions past that point. But there were reasons for having to come up with a dungeon on the spot, relating to the next section.
Thoughts on the Open Table and One-to-One Time
This was not my first attempt at an open table, but was my first attempt at one-to-one time. While I love the idea of both techniques and will likely continue using them, I will be keeping a closer eye on how they impact the game. My players have stated some frustration with the open table concept in the past. Part of this is a mismatch between the ideal open table and the reality of the group I have. I’ve always loved the idea of running D&D as an analogue sandbox MMORPG, but instead I am lucky enough to have a small group of dedicated RPG players. This means that the primary benefit of adopting the open table has been to provide a more casual experience and allow players to be in and out less disruptively. My player’s gripes with the open table have mainly focused around the need to return to town at the end of sessions. This likely stems from the large size of my dungeons combined with forcing players to move at dungeon crawl speeds when exiting and re-entering the dungeon. My best piece of advice probably in this entire post is DON’T DO THIS. It’s perfectly fine to let players leave the way they came without quizzing them about what path they took to get there. The players need to be able to quickly exit the dungeon to allow getting to the fun adventuring part of the session. It is also important to consider the characters’ experience of the game world when compared to the players. The characters actually live in the world, but the players are limited by the information passing through the GM. The caveat I would add here is to not necessarily let them leave for free. Walking through cleared areas shouldn’t take up any time, but leaving a goblin warband on the exit route ought to ensure a !!FUN!! time seeing the light of day again. Passing through previously explored areas should be handled the same way, though there are some extra things to consider such as changes to the dungeon and new players experiencing it for the first time. These justify a slower pace to describe and interact. Aside from self-inflicted friction with the open table, the multiple parties coming with one-to-one time caused additional problems for preparing things. Because one-to-one time means that characters are sometimes unavailable due adventuring concurrently with the date of the session, extra characters are used to keep play going. This caused some friction with the old method of prepping the sandbox campaign one step ahead of the party. As it turns out this becomes difficult when you have three parties going in three different directions! (with overlapping players to boot). This was exacerbated by my encouraging players to lean into it and simply create new temporary parties when players were missing. As a result, for the session of doom there were at least two different parties the players could have chosen to go with. Having multiple parties also caused a few players to drop out or avoid getting involved due to the confusion about what exactly was going on. Another issue was that a player wasn’t present for the session where the players boarded the pyramid, and strict adherence to the open table and one-to-one left their character stranded in the logging town. Which was a terrible experience for them. There were still a lot of concrete benefits to this method of play. First, it allowed me to run one world with multiple parties in it. While this was a mixed blessing, it did allow me to play both in-person and online with various people while not hugely increasing the amount of prep which needed doing. It also allowed for downtime actions, which were a huge hit despite my lackluster discipline in resolving them. There were some benefits we never saw due to the circumstances of our group. For one, we never really had the player-scheduled sessions of the open table. We also didn’t have any ancillary players using the one-to-one time to run factions in the game world in real time. To be honest, I don’t think I know anyone that hardcore and that sort of play-by-post gaming has never been sustainable for me to run. I will use this campaign setup again. I think that by having a more lenient stance on moving through cleared areas and not having players make new characters unless absolutely necessary I can avoid a lot of the issues I saw here. I also think that improving the design of my hexcrawl will help to alleviate the issues with multiple parties going off in different directions.
Hexcrawl Design
A major factor in the prep fatigue I was experiencing came from the way I designed my hexcrawl. I was trying to make it far too large by not putting a “soft” border on the game area. I have often worried about players wandering off into the wild blue yonder and testing the limits of my prep, but in reality I was the one doing this to myself. Even in a sandbox campaign in my experience players only go to locations they know about. Which should have been really obvious. I was frequently pointing players to far-off locations I hadn’t prepped causing me to panic and have to spend a lot of time between sessions preparing. This even includes giving them a fetch quest to a location weeks away at the start of the campaign, which is terrible for several reasons. After all, if the first thing you do in the game is have the players go somewhere else for adventure, then why didn’t you put them there in the first place? This more than one-to-one time led to the multiple parties stretching my prep between multiple fronts. The other big learning moment was the realization that a hexcrawl is basically just a pointcrawl. It has some advantages I like, such as a fixed scale between points allowing for internally consistent distances between locations. But I wasn’t thinking of it like a pointcrawl and this was a mistake. Generally, the next time I do a hexcrawl it will be smaller, more content-dense, and designed more intentionally with pointcrawling in mind. Rumors are also an extremely useful tool. I was already doing this, but as mentioned the rumors kept sending people way off into the poorly sketched distance. Players will follow roads and rumors, so be smart about how you prepare both.
Misc
I had previously asked players at the end of every session whether there was anything I should start, stop, or continue doing. This never got any responses. Based on advice from the OSR-sphere which I have lost, I now ask players whether they had fun, and what their favorite and least favorite moments were. These questions have led to great conversations which in turn led to modified rules and changes. Player input was hugely helpful in developing the campaign. At one point I created a large random loot table for looting the ever-present graveyards in the setting. Players then proceeded to perform the low-risk task of mundane grave robbing over downtime and I tried to utilize this table by simulating rolling on it several times per player. This resulted in an unearned windfall of gold rings and magic amulets which I had never expecting to dump into the campaign economy in bulk. I let it pass as I abhor retcons, but brought in supply and demand rules from ACKS to prevent it from happening again. As the grave robbing leading to the random loot table is so low-risk, it should have always been a downtime activity. Parts of the table could have been kept to roll for random curious, quest items, and possibly some between session cost such as getting a narsty zombie bite. However, the core result of taking the downtime action should have been a manageable but fixed maximum amount of corpses and mundane weapons. This might look like the same result as before, but corpses and rusted grave goods are less intrinsically useful and still have to be sold off in bulk. Now they’re trade goods!
Conclusions
It’s important to try new things, though it will take time to get those things right. Analyzing your failures is a good way to learn as much as you can from them. I certainly feel as though this campaign has taught me a lot about running a game in this style, and I’m excited to apply these lessons to my next attempt.
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