My D&D campaign ended last week. After two years of play, several thrwarted rituals, at least one romance, a masquerade ball, two destroyed cities, and 4 player character deaths, we finally reached a point where we were all comfortable closing the book on these characters. It's tempting to look through and create a highlight reel in my mind of my favorite moments. (Allying with Felkrash, the Marjorie revelation, trashing Jasper Skellig's casino, the rescue of Lady Emilia, Olgo and Simsy, disaster in the Crimson Bat's lair, the trial of Lennoc, the time-warped dungeons of Fort Vaux, Salty becoming the Champion of Aquilas, Zahida tearing Dragon King Ezra's throat open from the inside, Freesia incinerating her own eyeball to prevent the apocalypse...)
But overall it's been an amazing game. I found it incredibly freeing as the game went on and I found out more and more of my ideas were enjoyable and brought out more and more creativity in the players. As time went on I became relaxed, abandoning historical accuracy, tonal consistency, and game balance in favor of a more sprawling and adventurous world. The PCs constantly surprised me and I was always surprising myself with random rolls, little emergent moments, etc. I owe a great deal of this to my discovery of the Old School Renaissance, whose brilliant, imaginative, and freeing ideas have inspired and improved my game.
But there are always lessons to be learned, so let's begin.
1. Structure is painful and not desirable.
I believe now that D&D is firmly unsuited to telling a dramatic 3 arc story complete with fully-fledged character arcs and main plots, primarily because of the fickle nature of players and secondarily because the core loop of typical D&D is not suited to one long adventure but rather a series of problems that demand creative solutions that likely produce more problems.
In a lot of ways, I was very fond of the 'central' plot of the game. At the conclusion, this central plot seems to have been largely about impossible decisions, family, love, loss, and personal transformation. These themes were not primarily decided by me, but rather arose out of me and my player's shared interests and fascinations. The central plot did end up dealing with an apocalyptic scenario that the heroes did have to deal with (or in their case, postpone and indirectly recreate), but that was more or less because I felt like I was stuck in that from the get-go.
My conclusion at the end was that I did not enjoy the world-ending terror of a traumatized queen and her cosmically doomed sons as much as I enjoyed, say, the romantic tension between one secretary and a rockstar, the tension of saving loved ones from a terrible dungeon, or the solemn task of returning a traitorous and mad centaur to be judged by his bretheren.
The stories that I enjoyed running the most were the ones that resisted structure or grand-ness. I like a scrappy story and I like a human story. No matter how much human drama was present in Queen Rosaria and the moral weight she shouldered, the scale of it was less relatable to me and less enjoyable to run. (Though it still was amazing and broke my heart)
In the future, I think shapelessness will be the way to go. No need for world-ending plots when the adventures can be driven by the player characters and the people they encounter on their journeys, and the problems they face. I would rather the characters win a Golden Mask and battle a mad cleric for the fate of a Duke's soul than have them Wrestle With Fate Itself In A Dramatic Battle For The Fate Of Mankind. In real life, there is no finality or climax, just a series of interconnected tales that cumulatively mean everything.
Another negative trait of focused structure was that this campaign often stressed me out unreasonably. I am already prone to nervous fits over the slightest thing, but I did not need nervous fits about "will we finish this adventure in time" or "what if everyone hates me because it took a long time to get to their big ending oh god" and any game structure that prevents that is better in my eyes.
2. 5e characters (even when you ignore and change several rules) develop rapidly, which can alter the game just as rapidly
Character advancement in our game was based on milestone (mistake).
Milestone leveling sounds fine if you're trying to run a game in which 'story' is first and foremost, or if you don't want to add up XP, but either way, it at least requires a clearly set upon definition of a milestone. Otherwise, all level gains feel arbitrary. At least twice, I threw levels to the players for completing tremendous tasks even though it didn't technically mark a major conflict resolution. At one point, I think the players leveled twice in a month, and then didn't level up again for several months. That's all on me, considering I was responsible for it altogether. In the future, I think I will have to either use XP or at least stick to my guns on levels.
By the end of the game, players were between levels 8 and 12. Many 5e DMs will be shocked to hear that a player joining at a time when almost all players were level 9 started at level 4. But this is part of my commitment to creating a dynamic and challenging world that feels real and threatening. In the end, level gaps were present but (in my view) not terribly significant due to the complexity and broad scope of the threats faced. 100HP is a good number, but it can't solve puzzles or negotiate with NPCs. You have a +5 million attack bonus? That's cool, but when the threats you face are so monumentally powerful, it's going to take more creativity and lateral thinking than it is going to take numbers. I believe that a 7th level player character coming up with the perfect solution to kill a CR 20+ Ancient Dragon and executing that plan perfectly is definitive proof that balance is not terribly meaningful.
However, advancement is bound to change the tone and the game and the behavior of player characters, often for the worse. The minute your PCs gain Fireball and magical armor, they start to wade into battle with confidence that they can probably win by attrition, which is ultimately negative in my opinion. The most satisfying battles are ones where the players have a brilliant plan and execute it effectively and quickly. The least satisfying battles are ones where each side expends all their resources in a head-on firefight that lasts until one side collapses.
A lone ambush the party endured at the hands of a Mind Flayer (which killed 2/3 of the party) did make them behave differently, of course, and the fear of that moment hovered over the rest of the game, but part of the players becoming superheroic means that truly terrible threats can appear meaningless. A sufficiently beefy man with a warhammer should be threatening at any level, in my opinion, and in the future I think I'll be searching for a system that allows for that.
Additionally, and this is a smaller beast, higher-leveled players can result in some social problems. One player feels unstoppable and behaves recklessly or cruelly to the discomfort of other players. It can (infrequently) result in a situation where a player behaves in an antisocial or narcissistic way due to feeling entitled to their strength. Fortunately, we never seemed to run into a situation where the majority of players felt so empowered by their 5th level spells that they stopped caring about human drama or started stabbing world leaders with 1d6 HP just because they were kind of dickheads, but power creep and poor behavior can be a problem.
3. I like old school playstyles and mindsets.
Even though I'm still rather young, my first D&D game was B/X D&D, which is now my favorite edition of the World's Most Popular RPG. Its simplicity, directness, sparse beauty, and elegance are so broadly applicable to fantasy gaming that I frequently fell back on many of those rules and rulings when running my 5e game. By the end, the players and I had torn apart and reconstructed enough of 5th edition's rules and cultural assumptions that it's difficult to say we were even playing the same game anymore. (Me least of all. Even though I used the same fundamental math for attack, damage, saving throws, DCs, and etc., I have barely looked at the books in at least a year.)
By old school I don't necessarily mean evoking the exact rules or culture surrounding B/X or OD&D from the 70s, but rather the following principles laid out by beloved game designer and critic Ben Milton, who described old school play as involving high lethality, an open world, a lack of pre-written plot, an emphasis on creative problem solving, an exploration-centered reward system, a disregard for "encounter balance", the use of randomness to generate world elements that surprise both the players and dungeon masters, and a very strong DO-IT-YOURSELF attitude.
I think that my players would agree that these things became more and more apparent in our game as we went on, and I think that I felt more and more at home when these things were at the front of my mind. These standards (and the creativity of others in the Old School scene) helped me feel more creatively liberated. And by the way the players gradually began behaving and acting, this increased their creativity, engagement, wonder, and sense of accomplishment when they achieved the impossible and meaningfully changed the world.
And to close...
THINGS I AM GOOD AT
1) Tone (the Deep, the World Below, and Concord most notably)
2) Horror (All I have to do is invoke the Alhoon or include a naked person covered in blood)
3) Coming up with weird magic items (I have written enough index cards with weird gonzo spells and items on them for at least two more years of play)
4) Making NPCs that players develop affection for (Marjorie, Rakim, Candaci, Set)
5) People-oriented conflicts (Especially ones wherein nobody is truly evil and the nonviolent solutions are possible)
6) Foreshadowing and reincorporation (Pretty much everything was accidentally or purposely foreshadowed, owing to my own obsession with daydreaming and irony.)
7) Consequences to player's actions (The industrialization of Orlane being the cumulative effect of Thunderclan's action, Ianus' abandonment resulting in a chaotic Hamlet, the resurgent threats of the Redhood thieves when the group failed to deal with them, the way resentment between Vander Coil and Thunderclan insistently grew, how Freesia eclipsed the Monarch, etc.)
THINGS I AM BAD AT
1) Economy stuff and treasure with monetary value ("Uh, it's like a bag of gems? Probably worth about 100 gold. In fact, just put 100 gold on your character sheet, we'll just assume you trade it in when you get back to town.")
2) Shutting up and letting players figure things out by themselves ("Guys, before you talk in circles for too long: [blatant hint or answer to the pressing question]")
3) Ending sessions (I really need to start saying "till next time!" as soon as I start to burn out, but aforementioned anxiety about time pressure contributed to this...) (It has become an embarrassing joke that I can't finish a game within 4 hours)
4) Killing player characters (I blame power creep and the fact that it took a while for me to really develop a death-friendly attitude towards RPGs, mainly because I am a soft-hearted crybaby who wants everyone to get along)
I loved this game. It was brilliant, exciting, inspiring, unforgettable, and I'm so glad that the first years-long campaign I ran happened now at this point in my life, where my own demons threatened to swallow me whole (and no, I'm not talking about Orcus). Thank you to the writers of unforgettable modules and the bloggers of the Old School Renaissance for all the advice, assistance, and inspiration. Thank you to all the players, past and present, for your companionship, for gifting me wine, and for believing in this world as deeply as I did. The thunder rolls on into the distance, but the clan is forever.
