Hey folks, yesterday I told about one of the players wanting to change our campaign’s system to D&D after we tried it on a one-shot. So I started talking with all the players (personally and as a group) and we’ve clearified some very important things:
The end of the year is coming, our vacations are almost over and we are soon getting back to college, by then we will definitely have way less time to play (we play online so it will be a more time constraint than anything else), so we concluded that it would be best If we tried to “rush” to finish the campaign before getting back to studying and whatnot, and this is key to understand the problem.
Our last session felt very, very rushed, and it was far away from being the best one. Even though the story was really pushed forward, as the villains took their biggest step towards their goal (which is bringing an ancient god to the mortal realm, where it would feast on mortal souls) it was kinda of a boring session, we had some very bland encounters, as I was more focused in bringing the story forward, I didn’t put much effort in trying to bring up cool descriptions and being creative when using the monsters, while the players weren’t very creative on their side either.
So this last session left a bad taste in our mouths, and we didn’t notice that it was purely our fault. With that said, our most engaged player was preciptioulsly thinking that maybe If we change the game system we would have better sessions again, but after sitting down and talking we concluded that we had screwed up with Dungeon World, and not the contrary.
I think that this became very clear after our D&D one shot, as most of us didn’t really saw much of a change: yes, the rules were different, yes the combat was more tactical, but the experience in itself wasn’t better, we were just doing the same thing we always did in a different manner.
In the end, we all agreed that playing more is not the same as playing better, and agreed with staying on Dungeon World, taking a more careful aproach, even If we get to play it less beacuse of college. I’m very thankful for all your great responses, guys, you are awesome.
Never rush play, you can bypass sections or shorten campaigns, but rushing play means skipping narrative.
Tommy Rayburn Yeah, I guess we learned this lesson the hard way. This is our first Dungeon World campaign, and for some of the players it is their first time with tabletop RPGs, so I guess we would eventually make msitakes as we played. On the other hand, I feel that the group got stronger in the end, everybody seems much more engaged and commited to our next session.
You know, whenever your move fails you mark XP, right?
Why did you feel the need to rush? I know you’re all heading off to school but (1) you can continue online, and (2) are you trying to get to a particular part of the story?
Damian Jankowski
We felt the rush to finish it because when we get back we’ll spend most our time studying, making tests and whatnot (engineering is hard, you know), and we wouldn’t have much time to play, so we thought that it would be best to finish the campaign soon.
Jason Cordova always talks about how a good RPG should play like a movie, so take that same type of care and pacing when playing out your story.
Instead of rushing narration how about deciding which front is the main one in your campaign and reduce grim portents from others? The orcs try to invade a nearby village to get an artifact to do something? Realize that they already got the artifact and now they’re using it. Perhaps it would make it feel less rush and more like making threats more immediate.
Pakkaphon Sae-Chiew Based on how things played out last session I think this have already happened, one of the fronts is way ahead now
Back when I had a regular group of players that all had to play together regardless of what was on offer, when the game felt stale, we would just play some other RPG, preferably in a different genre, until we were ready to resume the earlier campaign with fresh minds and ideas.
Back when I was in school, our group rarely played during semesters. But what we did was end on a cliffhanger.
Any games played during the school year were usually one-offs, though sometimes we would play through backstory or side quests with the same characters.