(Thanks to T'Other One for the catchy title)
Well we've had a final meetup to discuss the campaign with drinks, buffet and (slightly late) Twelfth Night Cake. There was lots of discussion about the campaign and what went right and what could have been better.
One particularly interesting thing, I thought, was where the players roughed out what they thought their characters would be going on to do. I talked about some of the things that were going on behind the scenes, as it were, and ran through some of the plot threads that were still dangling. It's safe to say that there was the potential for plenty more play, if time and circumstances had allowed. Much of the future plans involved smaller groups of the heroes though, so I think it's safe to say that was the end of the Heroes of Dymrak as an adventuring party. I'm sure they regularly met up in the Crock and Bottle in Eltan's Spring for a pint of Eltan's Ale and a pipe of Windchime's Winter Special.
Now we've got over the end of the campaign, and I've given a brief rundown of what happened and some insight into my thoughts and design process, it's time for a few words to sum up.
The campaign went on for a long time, possibly too long. We usually got a bit under two hours actual play once a week or less, while that's a long time over all, there's a lot of recap and things get forgotten between sessions. It was rare for us to finish an encounter in one week, (given the nature of the system at high levels, that's not that surprising) but some big encounters stretched over three or four sessions. Since the game relies on pretty exact positioning of minis and terrain I find my phone tends to fill up with photos of minis on battlemats or similar.
This meant that progress sometimes seemed a bit slow. Towards the end of the campaign I deliberately steered things away from long scenes with little action. Whilst it might be said that the game is a game of action anyway, these slower scenes give a break to the players, and varying the pace is good. We still got through a lot though; if you look back at the write-ups of each tier you'll see that there was a pretty extensive storyline.
I'll run through a few random thoughts about the campaign.
Firstly, it's fair to say that the campaign was never really planned. It just sort of happened. Whilst I hope that it came across as a coherent story from the other side of the DM's screen, from my side it sometimes seemed a bit hazy.
I was very fortunate to have a group of players who liked to experiment with the world around them. Some proved inventive with their use of items, seeing the 4E action system as a guide not a straight-jacket far sooner than I did. Some wanted to make their mark on the world, whether it was founding a business empire or starting a school that trained young wizards to combat threats to the world. One built upon his faith in a very literal way and another wanted to look beyond the limits of the current campaign and try and set up links to a future campaign.
They also proved remarkably sensible in situations such as hostages and negotiation. Reading DM's complaints on t'interweb you might get the impression that all players are bloodthirsty louts with no thought of collateral damage, and a belief that the ends always justify the means. My lot were quite happy to negotiate if they thought it would bring about a result, and on more than one occasion walked away in order to get a hostage released. It probably helped that they were awarded with full XP in these situations.
I also experimented with theming monsters. In Heroic Tier I did this on a macro level by choosing a theme such as shadow, undead, or fey and choosing monsters for an adventure mostly from that list. On a smaller scale, encounters would feature mostly creatures of a specific type, which helped to emphasise a mood. I continued this throughout Paragon Tier, and started deliberately planning rosters of monsters which the heroes could encounter repeatedly. It was rewarding to everyone when the players gradually learnt to defeat various tricky monsters and develop tactics against them.
Regrets? A few of course. It's a huge chunk of my life, and there were situations I wish I had handled differently, suggestions I wish I had listened to, and occasions where I thought I sold the players short. To be fair, there were also times when I struggled to feel I provided a challenge and from my side of the screen the game seemed to be grinding to a halt.
One of the biggest issues, and one that became more of a problem as the campaign went on, was the choice of game system. It increasingly became obvious that 4E has many strengths, but they weren't for the sort of game we wanted to play. It has a very robust combat system, very granular, that rewards tactical thinking. It does become much less balanced at higher levels, and encounter building that provides a real challenge is difficult. I don't have a problem with varying the difficulty level of encounters, but the players genuinely prefered the more challenging ones. As time went on, the easier melees were seen often as a bit of a waste of time.
In fairness to 4E if you play to its strengths (which we often didn't) and design a particular kind of game, it can be great fun. I could run a campaign topping out at level 10 with Essentials build characters and based on short two to five encounter dungeons and I think it would be great fun, but that's not what the majority of us wanted.
What did I do wrong and what lessons have I learned? I could say I kept the campaign going too long using a non optimal game system, but that would be doing a dis service. I did, however, make a few mistakes, that I later corrected, or wish I had the opportunity to put right.
I ditched experience points. About fourth level I decided I knew how I wanted the campaign, or at least Heroic Tier, to go, and at what level I wanted the various adventures to be. (Of course, the
players immediately decided to investigate the Eyes of Traldar in a different order, but I managed that). It seemed sensible to level up the heroes at the end of important adventures and I kept that up for the whole of Paragon Tier as well. It does reduce bookkeeping, but it also robs the players of a way of excelling. The point I raised above about them being rewarded for out thinking the foe rather than out fighting? That is much harder to do when there is no obvious reward. I reintroduced experience for encounters at the start of Epic, but by then we had all got out of the habit of tracking it and it did seem a chore.
I ignored the book for encounter building. As a very old school DM, I know it all; you can't teach me anything about balancing and building encounters. Wrong of course, but I learned the hard way that there is a lot more subtlety around using monster roles in 4E than I was used to in previous editions. Once I started considering this I think my encounters became more challenging and fun. I'm trying to think more along these lines when I design encounters in 5E, monster roles seem to be missing from 5E, but look a bit harder and you can find them; sometimes you might need to tweek the monster stats (often little more than altering equipment). It's more about how you use the monsters than having half a dozen different stat blocks for one encounter.
What next? Well I'm running Call of Cthulhu for some of the Monday night group, and I'm continuing the Thursday night 5E adventure going through the starter set Lost Mine of Phandelver (which is nearly finished).
Looking forward I might try a variety of starter sets and introductory games for different systems for the Monday night gamers, or perhaps move to more tabletop gaming? We'll have a think once we are finished in Arkham, probably in March. The Thursday group will need something too, but I have a yearning to create something from scratch. I think I'll develop some ideas I've had for a new campaign world. There's a lot of water and islands, and its probably not inspired by what you might think.
Well we've had a final meetup to discuss the campaign with drinks, buffet and (slightly late) Twelfth Night Cake. There was lots of discussion about the campaign and what went right and what could have been better.
One particularly interesting thing, I thought, was where the players roughed out what they thought their characters would be going on to do. I talked about some of the things that were going on behind the scenes, as it were, and ran through some of the plot threads that were still dangling. It's safe to say that there was the potential for plenty more play, if time and circumstances had allowed. Much of the future plans involved smaller groups of the heroes though, so I think it's safe to say that was the end of the Heroes of Dymrak as an adventuring party. I'm sure they regularly met up in the Crock and Bottle in Eltan's Spring for a pint of Eltan's Ale and a pipe of Windchime's Winter Special.
Now we've got over the end of the campaign, and I've given a brief rundown of what happened and some insight into my thoughts and design process, it's time for a few words to sum up.
The campaign went on for a long time, possibly too long. We usually got a bit under two hours actual play once a week or less, while that's a long time over all, there's a lot of recap and things get forgotten between sessions. It was rare for us to finish an encounter in one week, (given the nature of the system at high levels, that's not that surprising) but some big encounters stretched over three or four sessions. Since the game relies on pretty exact positioning of minis and terrain I find my phone tends to fill up with photos of minis on battlemats or similar.
This meant that progress sometimes seemed a bit slow. Towards the end of the campaign I deliberately steered things away from long scenes with little action. Whilst it might be said that the game is a game of action anyway, these slower scenes give a break to the players, and varying the pace is good. We still got through a lot though; if you look back at the write-ups of each tier you'll see that there was a pretty extensive storyline.
I'll run through a few random thoughts about the campaign.
Firstly, it's fair to say that the campaign was never really planned. It just sort of happened. Whilst I hope that it came across as a coherent story from the other side of the DM's screen, from my side it sometimes seemed a bit hazy.
I was very fortunate to have a group of players who liked to experiment with the world around them. Some proved inventive with their use of items, seeing the 4E action system as a guide not a straight-jacket far sooner than I did. Some wanted to make their mark on the world, whether it was founding a business empire or starting a school that trained young wizards to combat threats to the world. One built upon his faith in a very literal way and another wanted to look beyond the limits of the current campaign and try and set up links to a future campaign.
They also proved remarkably sensible in situations such as hostages and negotiation. Reading DM's complaints on t'interweb you might get the impression that all players are bloodthirsty louts with no thought of collateral damage, and a belief that the ends always justify the means. My lot were quite happy to negotiate if they thought it would bring about a result, and on more than one occasion walked away in order to get a hostage released. It probably helped that they were awarded with full XP in these situations.
I also experimented with theming monsters. In Heroic Tier I did this on a macro level by choosing a theme such as shadow, undead, or fey and choosing monsters for an adventure mostly from that list. On a smaller scale, encounters would feature mostly creatures of a specific type, which helped to emphasise a mood. I continued this throughout Paragon Tier, and started deliberately planning rosters of monsters which the heroes could encounter repeatedly. It was rewarding to everyone when the players gradually learnt to defeat various tricky monsters and develop tactics against them.
Regrets? A few of course. It's a huge chunk of my life, and there were situations I wish I had handled differently, suggestions I wish I had listened to, and occasions where I thought I sold the players short. To be fair, there were also times when I struggled to feel I provided a challenge and from my side of the screen the game seemed to be grinding to a halt.
One of the biggest issues, and one that became more of a problem as the campaign went on, was the choice of game system. It increasingly became obvious that 4E has many strengths, but they weren't for the sort of game we wanted to play. It has a very robust combat system, very granular, that rewards tactical thinking. It does become much less balanced at higher levels, and encounter building that provides a real challenge is difficult. I don't have a problem with varying the difficulty level of encounters, but the players genuinely prefered the more challenging ones. As time went on, the easier melees were seen often as a bit of a waste of time.
In fairness to 4E if you play to its strengths (which we often didn't) and design a particular kind of game, it can be great fun. I could run a campaign topping out at level 10 with Essentials build characters and based on short two to five encounter dungeons and I think it would be great fun, but that's not what the majority of us wanted.
What did I do wrong and what lessons have I learned? I could say I kept the campaign going too long using a non optimal game system, but that would be doing a dis service. I did, however, make a few mistakes, that I later corrected, or wish I had the opportunity to put right.
I ditched experience points. About fourth level I decided I knew how I wanted the campaign, or at least Heroic Tier, to go, and at what level I wanted the various adventures to be. (Of course, the
players immediately decided to investigate the Eyes of Traldar in a different order, but I managed that). It seemed sensible to level up the heroes at the end of important adventures and I kept that up for the whole of Paragon Tier as well. It does reduce bookkeeping, but it also robs the players of a way of excelling. The point I raised above about them being rewarded for out thinking the foe rather than out fighting? That is much harder to do when there is no obvious reward. I reintroduced experience for encounters at the start of Epic, but by then we had all got out of the habit of tracking it and it did seem a chore.
I ignored the book for encounter building. As a very old school DM, I know it all; you can't teach me anything about balancing and building encounters. Wrong of course, but I learned the hard way that there is a lot more subtlety around using monster roles in 4E than I was used to in previous editions. Once I started considering this I think my encounters became more challenging and fun. I'm trying to think more along these lines when I design encounters in 5E, monster roles seem to be missing from 5E, but look a bit harder and you can find them; sometimes you might need to tweek the monster stats (often little more than altering equipment). It's more about how you use the monsters than having half a dozen different stat blocks for one encounter.
What next? Well I'm running Call of Cthulhu for some of the Monday night group, and I'm continuing the Thursday night 5E adventure going through the starter set Lost Mine of Phandelver (which is nearly finished).
Looking forward I might try a variety of starter sets and introductory games for different systems for the Monday night gamers, or perhaps move to more tabletop gaming? We'll have a think once we are finished in Arkham, probably in March. The Thursday group will need something too, but I have a yearning to create something from scratch. I think I'll develop some ideas I've had for a new campaign world. There's a lot of water and islands, and its probably not inspired by what you might think.
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