Campaign Retrospective: Decaying Lands

 After ~5 years and exactly 75 sessions my group has finished our Decaying Lands campaign. This campaign started off the first tabletop RPG I had ever run at the inaugural IntroCONso, with James, Vegas, and Peanut Butter navigating The Trail of Stone and Sorrow (Sugarplum observed). A one-shot turned into a five year campaign. I almost feel like I should just quit running games because I'm not sure how I can even pretend to follow this up. I wanted to talk about what worked and what I could have done better in the hope that some of this is maybe useful. The headers started off on topic but then got less and less focused so don't rely on that too much.

Game Setup / Logistics

I mostly ran around in Google+ RPG circles and read stuff there and on blogs so I ran that first session in Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Art-free editions of things are a great introduction to a game. Raggi / LotFP has guaranteed that I won't make that choice again but from a game perspective I am definitely burned out on B/X in general. There are plenty of other games that embrace a focus on "grant[ing] primacy to the imagined physical space" (Evey NAILED it with that line). For this campaign though using a retroclone was useful in that it enabled a huge amount of general compatibility with stuff I could mine for ideas. Dungeons, classes, monsters, all of it. I don't have a good knowledge of monsters or internalized idea of strength so even something as simple as pulling up a Labyrinth Lord bestiary was a help. And all the wild classes were great! LS writes some of the best ones.

We played on roll20, cycling through various video and chat solutions. Hangouts, despite being the G+ goto, never worked reliably for me on my computer. We did roll20 video for a while (not great), discord video (pretty okay), Zoom when it was available (great video but fuck them), and then finally settled on Jitsi. Jitsi is open source, their FAQ makes me feel good, and their service is pretty solid. Go use Jitsi.

Roll20 is great for me but I also don't use almost anything in its feature list. I scribble maps and hide things on the GM layer. I didn't even think about searching for tokens until a month or two ago. I probably could have made do with just a login-less whiteboard but having the persistence between sessions for maps and characters was really helpful. Half the time we'd forget how to play combat, so roll20 was a good reference.

I setup a player trello board and two private ones, one for my secret notes and another for ideas and "to-do." The player one got some initial use and then was mostly for me to refer to for stats on items we came up with in the game. It was also pretty handy to have a list of cards to point someone at and say "here, that's how you make a paper person, follow those steps." Keeping my notes and inspiration on separate boards was definitely useful though, would recommend that for sure.

I also had a bunch of spreadsheets that I used to help manage information. Maybe halfway through, right before a big hex crawl, I tweaked James Young's inventory sheet (maybe here?) to make it calculate encumbrance more automated and basically took care of everything for the party. I did this because I could (in a spreadsheet I mean), I enjoy automating things, and the session we spent mathing out and planning that expedition was probably one of the worst in the whole five years. I now love games that have "here's 12 slots" for their inventory. The experience tracking spreadsheet was way better though, and more broadly useful. There were google docs for rumors and "prep" too but that second part was almost non-existent. More on that below.

Play(er) Frequency

Since this started as a very intimate one-shot in a high lethality kind of world and system I wanted to schedule so that everyone would be there every session. With four players and one referee it turns out that's pretty challenging. We started at IntroCONso 1 and only played our 7th session by the time of IntroCONso 3, a year and a half later. No good. We decided to change to a fixed, every other week, schedule. To accommodate this we bumped up the number of players in the group and made some rules to work around it.

• Party size 6-7
• As long as 3+ people show up, we run the campaign
• If you can't play, your PC is safe from any harm but cannot assist
• Players can choose to make their PC available for other players, exposing them to harm
• You only get XP for sessions you attend

This last rule about XP was really dumb in practice and it took me WAY too long to change it. The only upside was that I made a fancy spreadsheet to automate XP allocation. The enormous downside was that the pace of the game (and the players) was INCREDIBLY slow. This meant that a PC could participate in multi-session build-ups and preparation for some score and then miss the actual session with all the XP. Awful, not worth it. I could see this kind of XP system working in a game where each session was a self-contained delve where the party MUST end it in safety but ain't nobody got time for those kinds of constraints when you're playing after the kids go to sleep on a weekday.

I can't think of any occasions where an absent player offered up their PC for use by the rest of the party. I think even if they did, given the risk of death I'm not sure the party would have taken them up on it. Not that death actually happened a ton, but it was enough for the possibility to be there. Checking the rolls of the dead, there were only five PCs that died over the course of the game (although substantially more retainers). Will get to that in a moment though.

When a bunch of folks were absent and we didn't get the "3+" I'd still run some kind of pickup game. I think having a set of "emergency dungeons" on hand for these occasions is really helpful and I hope it contributed to the players always feeling like if they showed up, they would get to play something, no matter what. In fact the very first one turned into its own little sub-campaign universe, which I love.

On the flip side, one of my players said that they appreciated that there wasn't any pressure to always show up. If they were having a long day or just weren't feeling it then no big deal, there would still be a game for everyone else. I think that probably helped to contribute to the staying power of the campaign, as well. It's also worth noting that though the group size was consistent at 6-7 players the makeup of that group changed over time as people's availability shifted and changed. In total we had 9 players (with one special guest) as people came in and out of the game. That also kept things fresh and the momentum moving.

In general, I'd count the regular schedule and larger group as incredibly important for the game's success.

Prep / Refereeing

Session Summaries

If you checked the campaign summary link above you may have picked up on a disconnect: 75 sessions in a campaign but summaries died at session 46. What gives? While I did enjoy writing the summaries I would sometimes get behind. I also have a need to be complete and not leave out details. Eventually the summaries got to be this huge mental weight that were not worth the payoff. I didn't write them for views, I wrote them for myself and my players, but it was important to recognize that they were not helping anymore and cut them off. 

On the flip side, the summaries were a handy reference but I was able to trim them down to just be a few sentences of major events on a comment on the "Today is Day 196 / Winter 16" trello card. It served the same purpose (for me) as the summaries but was something I could bang out right after the game session. I still can't believe that 75 sessions played out over the course of only 196 days...

Speaking of days, I think I got this calendar from cecil howe but this helped to keep track of things.

Calendar

• Started campaign on Summer 1
• 90 days per season (3 months of 30 days)
• Season is 9 weeks of 10 days each
• Every 5th day is a rest day
• Moon phases (day of season)
• 1           New Moon (31, 61)
• 2-14     Waxing to Full (32-44, 62-74)
• 15-17   Full Moon (45-47, 75-77)
• 18-30   Waning to New (48-60, 78-90)

Referee Style

My main goal is to give players the freedom to drive the game wherever they want to go and an environment that is interesting enough to facilitate that. I got a lot of mileage out of rumors but the one-shot setup with The Trail of Stone and Sorrow helped to set the stage because the players were invested in saving Polde, a very unfortunate farmer from the adventure. It gave the players a purpose while exposing them to larger portions of the world which I could riff off and build connections from.

I don't push, though. Even that first one-shot setup had a handful of hooks; they could have ignored the trouble with Polde and gone through the town to somewhere else or rambled off into the woods. Since I don't push and the world was pretty dangerous it meant a pretty slow pace. Bertilak le Vert's player joined in the last six months (ish?) and was completely shocked that the highest level PC was only 5. Then after playing for a while, seeing the pace of play, and getting into the swing of things it started to make a lot more sense. This careful play was further encouraged by my removal of Search and Traps as skills, relying solely on telegraphed clues and clever play to discover things.

This slowness caused me a lot of anxious wondering that I was dragging my players down into minutia (like the details in the summaries). So I had to talk to them! A lot! They affirmed that they enjoyed the slow pace because it was caused by their considered interactions with a world that "made sense." This last part I think is the crucial bit. The game was slow because they wanted it to be slow because their choices mattered and would affect the world in "rational", predictable ways. The term for this kind of "making sense" is (I think) Gygaxian naturalism, and it goes all the way back to James M.

This is all getting rambly, so the last bit I wanted to note is that the tendency towards naturalism meant that I didn't have to write down almost anything. I mostly just spent time between sessions (driving, showering, pooping, etc) thinking about how things would make sense and be laid out according to motivations and logic and running it like that. That caused me to miss something the players should have found in a dungeon or two but overall it was a big help in running the game. I don't mean to say that I used any quantum ogres though, just that I didn't write much down beyond vague map scribbles and some key words.

Summary

If I had to pull out some guidelines from my experience, it'd be just as generic as all the other stuff I've seen online. Still, here it is.

1. Keep a larger group of players so that it doesn't matter if someone doesn't show up
2. Set a fixed gaming schedule, set a minimum number of players (e.g. half+) and play with whoever is there
3. Check in with the group and make sure folks are still getting what they want out of the game
4. Don't over-complicate support systems (like encumbrance or XP). Get or make tools for the ones you really care about, especially if the players don't have as much focus for it.
5. Change rules / rulesets if they are not working
6. Be able to recognize if part of your referee process is hurting you and cut it
7. Make incidental things easy for yourself so you don't have to think about them (e.g. calendars, weather)
8. It's okay to give a push in the beginning to get things going and give the world some space to develop.
9. Don't get in your own head too much; TALK to your players and check-in on how everyone is doing, what they like, what they don't.
10. If you make the world function according to consistent logic you don't have to remember or think about nearly as many things.
11. Put more treasure in, especially for a game where you advance with treasure...

What's Next?

Decaying Lands ended last Thursday and I've already sent out the invite for next Thursday's session. I'm going to run A Rasp Of Sand from Dave Cox as a palette-cleansing interlude campaign. Everyone got a short summary of the situation of a the flooded world and the d12 list of possible family careers which is all they really need to know. We'll see what happens this coming Thursday!

After that, going to run a sort of sci-fi / fantasy game. Party thaws out on a space ship / station orbiting a planet, thing is falling apart, computer cores are damaged and the AI can't explain much. They'll need to go down to the planet using a sort of pod that can be picked up with a balloon when the ship / station comes round again. I've got some ideas, will post them up if I get a chance. Trying REAL hard to not get stuck in posts needing to be actually fleshed out but I am doubtful I can actually manage that.