Friday, February 5, 2021

Forgotten Realms Campaign - Start to Finish

This is probably going to be a long post. It's also the last post about this campaign so it will talk about the game itself and then have GM commentary at the end. If you've read the posts where I did my best to spin each session into a chapter of a story then some of this will be familiar to you. If not then you get the whole shebang here.

Campaign Summary

The campaign lasted for just over a year and 20 sessions. We were scheduled to play every other week and we kept pretty well to that. I'm surprised. I didn't do the math. However, in game we covered under 30 days.

Over the course of 10 days a wizard, a cleric, a rogue, and a ranger meet up, decide to become an adventuring party, and head out of town towards some ruins they heard were lootable. Traveling with a caravan they find out the road is dangerous even reasonably close to a city before turning off onto a lesser road toward the mountains with the ruins.

While staying over in what amounts to a fantasy world truck stop village (forever named TruckStopVille) they discover some stuff that seems to tie that village to the Underdark. They move on towards the mountains and meet up with another rogue along the way.

While exploring the mountains they find more things that not only imply an Underdark connection but a blocked passage that's supposed to go to the Underdark. They rescue and befriend a goblin tribe at this time. The cleric prevents the ranger from slaughtering them since he has a special hate-on for goblins.

Not finding much they move to a different place in the mountains and find access to the ruins they heard about. The ranger is carried off by a peryton (very crabby bird-stag combo) to an unknown fate. The smaller party explores the ruins, has some trouble with minor Underdark based beasts, and finds an abandoned but ancient hideaway. Maps and design lead them deeper into the mountains.

They find an underground river with boats. The map seemed to imply that upstream was a bad way to go and downstream would get them out. Being an adventuring party they start to go upstream but are turned away by the threat of death by undead. They grudgingly go downstream.

A stopover finds them releasing a demon that had been trapped there and driving the people in the area insane. After releasing the demon they take what they find and the no-longer-insane people help them leave the mountain. They're returning to the village that the party had just left, help them leave the mountain, and go on their way.

With the plan to go back to the big city to follow up on some other possible stuff to do they follow the no-longer-insane people and find the empty wagon. Following footprints they go into the woods next to the road to see what happened. After a spot of trouble they find the people again and a couple of rough campsites. Gathering up the people they head back. The wizard is starting to get a bit stingy on sharing information about stuff they found.

Once back in the big city they try to sell off some stuff, the original rogue is assumed to be part of the large thief's guild in the city due to stuff he had pickpocked before they left the first time, and the wizard is even more reclusive as he does wizard things. They all look for stuff they can do that will line their pockets.

They accept a job guarding a caravan to a nearby city. Along the way they notice some oddness with creatures that seem to be watching them. Once they're in the city they look for more work and settle on a job helping guard a ship making the passage across the big lake so they can get to that area. Abruptly the wizard says he's taking the job, they're not needed, and leaves. The party needs to find other work.

A barbarian attaches herself to the group and they go along with it. There's problems with bandits on the road between this city and the next one so they head out to see what's going on and what they can earn for clearing out a few of them. After a bit of a problem in the city they head out.

There's a bandit hideout back in the woods so they see if they can handle what's there. They can because after some fight the remaining bandits leave the hideout to them. It's a fortified place that has a LOT of loot for them to find, more than they can carry. Rather than leave in the morning they decide to investigate the stairs going down.

They do. They find unused quarters and caverns underneath. They follow the caverns to find some undead and their now deceased owner-cleric who has set up shop by a portal. Investigation shows the portal will take them to another city on the other side of the large lake. They take it an end up in an empty shop but not sure what city they're really in.

The original rogue finds what he was looking for in the form of a new guild to join and leaves them there. He does give them information about a potential bit of larceny on the road into the city in a few days. A young wizard has been trailing them since they got there and after introductions they accept him into the party.

Following the road they do find some excitement in what seems to be the place another ambush was being planned but don't have anyone alive left to question it. The spot is way too perfect for ambushes not to be used on a regular basis.

At this point the story ends. Of the original group only the cleric remains.

GM Commentary

I freely admit this was not my finest hour for being a GM. My pacing was entirely off. My story hooks weren't hooking the players. I didn't have a cohesive story arc for them to follow.

I will say that the group itself never seemed to gel. I gathered them from a MeetUp post and we lost two players after Session Zero which threw things off. We had a lot of discussion about what they wanted out of a game and I tried to give it to them - a mix of role play and combat. However I don't know that everyone was really on that page.

The location of the game moved around. At first we played in the event room of a local craft brewery because that was listed as a place we could play but it turns out they only let one group use it for free. After the uncertainty of that one player offered to let us play at his home. Then that player left and another one offered his place. We played there until for obvious reasons we moved the game online using Discord.

The first player that had to leave (the ranger) had to leave for real life reasons. I'm not sure how sorry people were to see him go since he wasn't really playing as part of the group. He had a character type he seemed locked into regardless of the situation plus he wanted to write a novel about the campaign so he spent a lot of time taking notes. The PCs skills were sorely missed and his character was referenced in future games by the players and by me ("A ranger would sure be handy right about now") which may have contributed to the next player leaving.

That player's spot was filled by a friend of the wizard's player and he chose a rogue as his character. I'm taking the bulk of the blame for his choice since my normal style is to let the player choose the character independent of who else is playing what. He wanted a rogue. He got to play a rogue. Two rogues makes for some challenging GM work.

I tend to have problems balancing treasure per encounter. I need to work on that. It seems to be feast or famine in my games. I do enjoy making magic items tailored to the players and in this case I was trying something new with random time duration items. I prefer to make more low level items that give the players options but they also have to decide if they should use it or not because it takes time to recharge itself. There was the new option of them not knowing how long an effect would last. I'm going to keep that in my pocket for later games if the group is right.

The second player to leave was the wizard. This was after we moved online and he suddenly said he was done in the middle of a session and left. I knew something was wrong and tried to talk to him before it happened but he seemed to have made up his mind and acted on it. The crappy thing is that the first player had to leave because of this guy (real life situation, not personality). It also left the group without any arcane magic.

I adjusted the house rules so that potions could be identified by various PCs based on experience. There was also a magic item they found early (and the wizard was kind enough to leave behind whether he wanted to or not) that let anyone perform the Identify spell. They weren't left in the lurch as much as they could have been.

I was frustrated because every time I tried to pull together a nemesis group to thwart them the group composition changed so I had to start over. The first one had a druid to mess with the ranger but then the ranger left. I was retooling that when things fell apart.

I tried putting together a larger story arc based on their actions and items that they had found along the way. That's when I found out that the group wasn't good at putting together the clues. I tried. Oh how I tried. Finally I realized that I had to spell things out for them if I wanted to get information across. That disappointed me as a GM and made me feel like I was railroading them since they would take the information as gospel and go with it rather than decide what to do on their own.

Another problem for me was the setting itself. Forgotten Realms is great if you're sticking to the Sword Coast where all the Driz'zt books happen. Outside of that it's a brief sketch without much more. Even the locale is mostly empty space. Trying to stick with the setting was more hindrance than help. I had decided to use the locations and make up stuff when it was getting to be more of a burden than I wanted to carry.

I wasn't enjoying this game after about the first half of it. When the wizard player left it was a real problem. One player had a decent back story and I started using it to drive the story forward. The rest boiled down to "out for the lulz" which is useless when it comes to trying to incorporate them into a larger story. I know my one page back story rule can be limiting but I expect more effort than that.

The extremely slow pace of the game also frustrated me and probably them. We couldn't get anywhere. Once we were in a city everyone scattered. Trying to run three different story lines meant that the players who weren't involved didn't have anything to do. They even admitted they knew it was a problem but kept doing it. The original rogue really wanted to do a lot of stuff on his own. I could have done that after the session but things he wanted to do would have in game impact.

That player said he would change to a caster and I accepted after making sure he was really good with leaving his other character behind. I think he was bored with having a second rogue around so a change was good for him. He didn't get much of a chance to show off his magic skills since the game ended soon after the switch.

I knew it was time to end the game when prep time was more of a burden to me than a pleasure. I was tired of having to present them with everything on a platter. I was tired of them splitting the group into splinters that had to be run during the sessions. I was just tired of the group because it never became a party.

Moving online didn't help. I couldn't read body language and people kept talking over each other. Trying to pass information to a player meant me having to stop everyone so I could focus on one thing rather than dashing off a quick note. We got into discussions rather than them accepting what they were given. That slowed things down even more in an already slow game.

What would I have done different? I've really thought about this. At some point I do want to run more games and I'll probably end up in the same situation of a group of strangers from a MeetUp or Facebook group. Here's some of the things I've been considering.

Have more toys in the sandbox. It's great to give the players full control but as someone said if you have a sandbox you need to provide the players with toys. If you don't then they don't know what to do. This game proved it very well.

Find out how much the group likes piecing together what may seem to be random events into a larger whole and then keep an eye on if they can really do it.

Talk about pacing. If they want to spend time in the cities doing role playing things that's great as long as they realize it's going to eat up sessions. I'm fine with as much role play as they want to do, as long as everyone wants to do it.

Talk quite seriously about splitting the party in role playing situations, especially when what they want to do has game impact. There's only one of me so taking a large portion of my time isn't fair to the rest of the players. I'm fine with setting up time outside of the game to take care of business, as long as it doesn't invalidate things that happened in the previous session.

Treasure. I need to get much better about the party finding the appropriate amount of treasure per encounter. I also need to stop making up magic items that can be easily abused to unbalance encounters. I had several of those in this game and it caused me headaches.

Party composition. I don't like forcing people to play characters they don't like but having two rogues showed me just how much of a problem it can be when there's a non-standard group. Losing the wizard was a real eye opener for everyone. I had to tailor encounters both to handle the extra rogue but also take out most magic from their opponents since they had no way to counter it. That brought high fantasy down to low fantasy.

I like the 3.5 rules. I really do. We could have moved the game to Fantasy Grounds and used the OSR except for the Forgotten Realms setting. That was never licensed out. Changing mid-game would have meant losing feats and equipment that the PCs already had. It wouldn't have been fair to expect them to lower their abilities when we had the other option of using a camera and Discord. It wasn't great on the whole but to me it was better than the alternative.

Online vs in-person. Had this game started out online it may have been different. Moving from one format to another was difficult for everyone. We did our best.

Did I fail as a GM? Yes. Did they fail as a group? Yes.

I think we had a decent start and then it began to fall apart when the first of the story arcs I tried to include came into being. That's when I found out the players weren't good or weren't interested in the long game. I started looking for modules I could adapt to run over a couple of sessions that were interesting to me and allowed for them to be challenged. Either I'm very choosy or there aren't many of those. I did find some publishers I like a lot for that kind of thing so that's good for the future.

Had the game continued it would have been a series of module adventures strung together with some of my own ideas to keep them into a cohesive story. I know I would have still had problems with the role play/combat balance just based on their reactions to events. Maybe not problems so much as adjustments to the balance.

I know real life had a big impact on everyone's mood. Abruptly losing a player was also a blow since I think I was the only one who saw it coming and that's because it's part of my job to monitor the player satisfaction. We wanted to escape the stuff in the real world but we also carried it with us. That made games more frenetic and more focused than prior. Losing the physical proximity didn't help keep the group together either.

I don't know when in person gaming will start up again. I also don't know where we can game. The local store where I used to try to game moved to another storefront and there's no good place to run role playing games. Other stores may have them but I think the setup is the same - they've got tables for playing MtG and some wargaming but nothing that will work well for RPGs. We'd have to take two of the tables and find a way to be heard over anything else going on in the store. Plus make sure there's space for us.

I've been debating the idea of running one shots with pre-gens online. I want to learn the system so I can run longer games there as well as find out if I can enjoy running online. For all that I'm antisocial I think I need the energy that comes from a gaming group. If I can get and give some of that online then it may work. Maybe having the program handle all the mechanics is the key there.

I don't miss this gaming group like I do the previous ones. I was friends with most of those groups. I didn't become friends with this group. That may be another problem I had with engaging them or at least wanting to engage with them. At least I know that there's far less chance of it happening with an online only group and can adjust my expectations accordingly.

Summary

This game was mostly a failure for a number of reasons. As the GM I can take on a lot of those reasons but not all of them. I'm not going to hang that around my neck. I've learned from it and will hopefully bring those lessons into the next games I run. I also know now that I can't force the necessary creativity to run good games. When that happens I need to talk it out with the group and see what can be done, if anything. That's another burden I can't take on myself.

I may have to give up on 3.5 Forgotten Realms as a setting. 5e is so prevalent now that I'm coming to terms with the fact that may be the version I have to run. I do have books and online books for it. I may find I enjoy it as I get used to it. Having cut my teeth on 3.5 it's a downgrade to go to 5e, especially with the latest changes to races or whatever they're calling them these days. Political correctness has been wiping a lot of the things I liked about the game and I know I can't tell people to ignore those changes, even though it's my prerogative as the GM to make those decisions. I'm not that stupid.

I wanted to give people reading this some kind of conclusion to the campaign since I started writing about it. I felt it was only fair. I didn't get the chance to do that with the group since after our last session and my email telling them I was ending the game I haven't heard from any of them. That was another tick mark in the "wasn't a tight group" column.

Finally, I never truly felt appreciated as a GM. I know that sounds petty. It's how I feel. They said all the right things at the right times, I'll give them that. Their actions showed me more. I'm not expecting banners and huge amounts of praise. It would have been nice to not have to chip in for the food I didn't get a chance to eat since I was running the game. And it would have been nice to get at least one token of appreciation from them for the work I did. Not knowing if that's petty or not doesn't help either.

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