Roleplaying: Plot developments and pacing
Jun. 8th, 2019 10:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackPLOT DEVELOPMENTS
Both groups learned some significant facts about the background of the world. The way the labyrinth sometimes connects different places in time, and the kobold legion they encountered had taken advantage of this to flee a post-apocalyptic future into the past, in the hopes of setting up an endlessly looping permanent kobold civilisation without the "and then the world expires and all is blackness until the beginning comes round again" bit.
And which gods think approve of this and which don't.
And both had some more extended contact with the kobolds (in reluctant negotiations or capture-and-interrogate ways). And both found some of the macguffins they'd been looking for.
PACING
The last couple of sessions have been pretty fun and satisfying (a few previously-mentioned frustrations aside), but I feel like, not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. The one with the "investigating how the fungus creatures got in to massacre the mines" I think was still the best, I think because it had a lot of intermediate goals, but the more recent sessions have all been reasonably good, even if not perfect.
This is my first longer campaign, really. I wrote myself into a corner a bit. I originally hoped the players would just find hooks and challenges in the labyrinth, and explore off their own bat, finding new areas and getting money and levelling up being the rewards. But it didn't work out like that.
I naturally built up the things that were going well and sidelined the things that weren't clicking, so that made the game go a lot better. But that meant a lot more NPCs, plot, etc than I originally intended. Which is good, because it went well. And has mostly settled down to needing "not much prep". But partly it means that I'm crafting more of a story and less of a sandbox, which the original design is less suited to.
And partly, it means we've got lots of different story hooks or goals and not enough clear player-bought-into goals. If I did this again, I'd try to find a way to make clear progress towards goals (either with explicit missions with subgoals like "follow the clues" or "search areas to find", or with explicit goals for exploration like "level up when you find X thousand gold pieces").
Both groups learned some significant facts about the background of the world. The way the labyrinth sometimes connects different places in time, and the kobold legion they encountered had taken advantage of this to flee a post-apocalyptic future into the past, in the hopes of setting up an endlessly looping permanent kobold civilisation without the "and then the world expires and all is blackness until the beginning comes round again" bit.
And which gods think approve of this and which don't.
And both had some more extended contact with the kobolds (in reluctant negotiations or capture-and-interrogate ways). And both found some of the macguffins they'd been looking for.
PACING
The last couple of sessions have been pretty fun and satisfying (a few previously-mentioned frustrations aside), but I feel like, not quite as satisfying as I'd hoped. The one with the "investigating how the fungus creatures got in to massacre the mines" I think was still the best, I think because it had a lot of intermediate goals, but the more recent sessions have all been reasonably good, even if not perfect.
This is my first longer campaign, really. I wrote myself into a corner a bit. I originally hoped the players would just find hooks and challenges in the labyrinth, and explore off their own bat, finding new areas and getting money and levelling up being the rewards. But it didn't work out like that.
I naturally built up the things that were going well and sidelined the things that weren't clicking, so that made the game go a lot better. But that meant a lot more NPCs, plot, etc than I originally intended. Which is good, because it went well. And has mostly settled down to needing "not much prep". But partly it means that I'm crafting more of a story and less of a sandbox, which the original design is less suited to.
And partly, it means we've got lots of different story hooks or goals and not enough clear player-bought-into goals. If I did this again, I'd try to find a way to make clear progress towards goals (either with explicit missions with subgoals like "follow the clues" or "search areas to find", or with explicit goals for exploration like "level up when you find X thousand gold pieces").