Lessons Learned – Ending One Campaign and Thinking about the Next

Fritz Schwimbeck

Could it be? A post that’s actually about gaming?

A couple months ago, we finished a campaign that I had been DMing since summer of 2019. It lasted about four and a half years. During most of that time we met either weekly or biweekly, though there were a few pauses here and there that took a month or two, mostly when I was scrambling to get the next adventure finished enough to actually play. I’ve had a few campaigns that lasted a decently long time – a couple that went over a year – but I think this was the longest. I’m gearing up to start another campaign with the same group after a half year pause, and I’m looking forward to it. It will be another 5e campaign, this time beginning in the Underdark.

To be honest, I don’t really like 5e. But it’s what this group wants to do, and I’m ok enough with it to run the game even though I’m not a huge fan of the ruleset. Last time around I managed to convert a few OSR adventures into 5e – Deep Carbon Observatory and Maze of the Blue Medusa specifically and I think I managed to make them work ok. My players loved those, anyway. I also ran a number of adventures I created from whole cloth, like Facility Designate 339-19.

The premise this time will be that the PCs have just escaped enslavement by the Illithids, and are lost in the Underdark with nothing but their loincloths. Perhaps one or two of them might have some sort of tool they were given for work – a pick, maybe a hammer or a rope. That’s it.

I wanted to take a little time to reflect on the last campaign and what I learned from it.


Commitment is Important

This might seem self-evident, but in order to have a campaign, you need people who are bought in and committed to showing up. It is *difficult* to get a group of adults together on anything remotely resembling a regular basis. This means that people actually have to make the game a priority. Not priority one, of course, but they have to be willing to forego other things in order to make the game. Everyone is going to have one-off instances where they can’t make it for some reason, and that’s totally fine, but in general, you need people who will show up. I have that with this group, as evidenced by the length of time it lasted and the very regular sessions, and I’m hugely grateful that I do; it’s the main reason I’m willing to compromise on the ruleset.


Plot and Player Agency

I did have a loose “plot” in my last campaign – a trap I think DMs like me who also love fiction fall into very easily - and ultimately, that plot wound up taking over and driving player choice in a way that felt unsatisfying to me. I think this was my single biggest mistake, though I have done similar things in the past without the same results and I really didn’t intend for the PCs to get locked into the “story” the way they did. A weird thing – it felt almost like my players *wanted* to be railroaded a little? Though if asked, I don’t think they would say that I railroaded them at all. Several times, I tried HARD to open things up and let them do whatever their characters wished, but they seemed to kind of stall out when I did so. It really felt as though they were relying on me to provide the impetus for their actions, and wouldn’t do much of anything until I offered the next “plot point” at which time they would glom on to that, even if there were other, very obvious, adventure hooks that had been presented beforehand. And I think this is part of why having a “story” in a campaign is so insidious in the way it begins to supplant both player and DM agency.

I never thought much about DMing before honestly - it was just something I did. Certainly I've heard much more from other DM's previous to this upcoming campaign than any other I have in the past, and I took what they had to say seriously, even though, it is, at the end of the day, just a silly game.  After pondering all of that, I think there are ways to structure play and campaign such that it encourages - almost forces -  the players to drive. I am not going to provide any overarching “plot” or “story” to drive action at all. There will be no apocalypse to avert and there will be no “big bad,” though the PCs might have rivals. For starters at least, the “story” will be one of simple survival - they have to figure out how to get food, water, and shelter, and initially even getting a piece of gear should feel like a big achievement, or at least that is the intention.

But they will be free to decide what to do - they can decide to stay in the Underdark or they can decide they want to try to leave (though if they opt for the latter, the campaign is liable to become the “story” of their journey to the surface world). The problem of survival doesn’t go away, but it may get easier. To begin, I will have a general map of the immediate Underdark area out to maybe 50 miles in every direction, and will create sites of interest on that map. I’ll create the first few encounter areas for the sites of interest but won’t fully flesh those out until they engage with one of them (otherwise the work will be endless). The world will be built out enough that they will immediately have several options among points of interest to engage with, and they get to decide how they want to engage with those points of interest – attack, speak with, sneak by, back off and go elsewhere, etc. Rinse and repeat this as they move through the bowels of the earth. The upshot should be that at each point along the way, it will be a player decision as to broadly what happens next, not a DM decision, while also keeping the amount of prep I have to do to something I can manage.


XP for Gold

In the past I’ve done a straight XP for overcoming encounters system, and that’s what I did last time as well. The “encounter” wasn’t always monsters and my players didn’t necessarily have to overcome the encounter through combat – they simply had to figure out a way to overcome whatever challenge was stopping them from achieving their goals. On a philosophical level, I like this. It has always struck me as kind of realistic – people grow from difficulties and challenges, after all.

I think this time around I’m going to either hybridize that with an XP-for-gold system, or use a pure XP for gold system. Noisms has a number of excellent posts that point out why this system is effective – here’s one that explores a number of other ideas as well and that I think is great reading for anyone considering running a D&D game.


Rolling Dice in the Open

I’m more and more a fan of this, and again noisms has written a couple of posts on why doing this is a good thing. I have gotten very used to and comfortable with the “DM screen” over the course of my “career” as a ref/ DM, and I still think some rolls should be secret – things where the player was not meant to know exactly what the outcome was, like hiding, for example ("Yep, you're pretty sure no one can see you!"), but I will roll anything where the results are immediately relevant in the open where players can see the result.


Combat

I had one guy who was brand new to RPGs and two relative newbies last time, but even so, I was really forgiving in terms of letting the group discuss strategy and ask questions during combat. This wound up having two effects – one of which was that combat felt bogged down (in a game where it’s already rather slow, especially at higher levels) and it also made the PCs more effective than they really should have been. To simulate the stress of combat more effectively I am considering implementing a couple of rules. First, the only person allowed to talk during a PC’s turn is that PC. Second, if you can’t tell me what your PC is doing in ten seconds, I am moving on and will come back to you after whoever is next in initiative order has had their turn. If you can’t tell me what your dude is doing in ten seconds, they aren’t doing anything, they are just goggling at the violence that has exploded around them.

I will not be tailoring encounters to the party’s “power level” – rather, the creatures they encounter will be much more a product of the environment / ecosystem, and if that means they stumble into something incredibly nasty, so be it.


Wandering Monsters

I was also really, really forgiving about wandering monsters last time. Again, I had some really new players, but at this point they know the game pretty well and all of them know going into this campaign that the gloves will be off. Wandering monster rolls are one of the rolls that will be made in the open. Also, similar to the point above about combat, if the characters are not in a secure location and they are conducting an hour long strategy session, I am rolling for wandering monsters. If they are discussing killing the monster in the next room and that monster has a means of hearing or detecting them and getting to them, they will probably be interrupted. I didn’t do this nearly enough.


Character Creation

I’m restricting certain classes, though some of them might be available if they are acquired diegetically (warlock, maybe). Wizards and clerics will be hampered initially by the lack of a holy symbol or spellbook, but everyone will be hampered by lack of gear to begin with. It will be up to them to find and or make the things they need. I’m considering races right now, and I’ll probably restrict those to human, dwarf, elf, gnome, halfling; I might also allow certain underdark races or variants like duergar or grimlock – I haven’t made a final decision. I’m also still vacillating on how I want characters to roll attributes. I am really attracted to the idea of 3d6 in order in a lot of ways. I feel like clever players instinctively use low attribute scores to help create a PC’s personality, and that ultimately this winds up being a more enjoyable experience for them even though many of them resist it. Last, I am seriously considering implementing a character “tree” or stable, ala Dark Sun, as this campaign is likely to be quite deadly.


Other Stuff

Aside from my own ailing mind, I will probably use 3rd edition’s Underdark and Patrick Stuart’s Veins of the Earth as my main sources for monsters, encounter areas, and general weirdness.

From where they start, they will be near a forgotten duergar tomb, a giant web hanging over a bottomless chasm, a beholder lair, a grimlock outpost/village (might use Skychasm or at least parts of it for that – if you are not familiar with it, go have a look, it is seriously good), and a boiling subterranean lake and series of hot springs heated by a magma chamber (kind of a tribute to White Plume Mountain). Some of these could make a decently defensible base of operations, if they want to do that.

I might well implement the alignment-changing resource shortage rules from Dark Sun as well.

Speaking of… I’ll leave on this note I guess: while thinking about all this and thinking about the Dark Sun campaign setting, I had this weird vertiginous moment where it felt like Dark Sun was a through-a-mirror-darkly kind of reflection of our own world. Anyway, it feels weirdly prescient and relevant now in a way that it didn't when it was first released and most D&D settings never do.  I may have to explore this further in future posts.