Minicampaign Postmortem: the Spellscarred Isles

So, my first minicampaign ended a couple of weeks ago, and I'm thinking about what to do next. First, let me explain -- our group has two DMs, and we're taking turns DMing. I ran a campaign that lasted through levels 1-5; the other DM has just taken over at level 6 and will run until the party hits 11, when I will take over again. We play for about 6 hours every other sunday, so I figure I have about 4-5 months until I'll be taking over the group again.

So, with some time to really think, it seems like a good idea to spend a little time looking over what was working for me early on, and where I really want to make some changes. What follows is some notes, in no particular order, just when they cropped up . . .

Skill Challenges.

I've been very interested and excited by skill challenges since I got the books this summer -- our group were playtesters, but the playtest material we had to work with didn't include much along the lines of skill challenges, just combat encounters, so that was when I first got a chance to take a look at the game. But these are one of my favorite new things about 4e. That said, I think ti's clear that there are good ways and bad ways to run skill challenges. I do have an earlier blog post about skill challenges, but I think some ideas bear repeating.

For one thing, skill challenges are best when they are not just about rolling dice anymore than combat is just about rolling dice. I've run plenty of this sort of skill challenge, and they can be workable in small situations. For instance, there's no reason to get too worked up about a skill challenge to disarm a trap that a single PC will be trying to complete while the rest of the party is fighting the monsters in the room. But if the skill challenge is going to be the scene, it needs to be much more involved. I'm sure I'll be writing more and more about skill challenges in the future, so I'll stop for now. I'm reading the recent articles about skill challenges -- and a lot of the other posts and discussions about them in the forums, and my ideas are sort of evolving. I'm also in the process of trying to write one as a contribution for an adventure a friend is trying to coordinate for a sort of mini-D&D Championship at a local convention, and it's really making me think about what makes sense in that context, too.

Too Much Story

Wait! Don't Shoot me yet! Let me explain!

Here's the deal. I had a grand idea for what I was going to do with the PCs in this minicampaign. I figured I had 10 sessions, and I had a grand plot for that arc, as well as episodic story going on along the way. The story I ended up trying to tell was just too much -- too big and grand for the time I had, and in the end the whole thing seemed to be a bit of a rush. So, even as I look towards a paragon tier adventure, I want to think in terms of telling a smaller story -- few places, less variety in opponents, etc.

For example, one session in the previous minicampaign took place in a desolate, war-torn and winter-locked city occupied by skirmishing factions of the Fey army that had conquered the city decades before. There was a unicorn-led all-female group of eladrin, a lycanthrope and shifter band, a group of cyclopses, and an enclave of dryads, eladrin, and gnomes, all in different quarters of the shattered city, waiting for their collective mistress, the queen of winter (eladrin cold wizard) who was all wrapped up in some jilted lover crap that left the various factions in the city leaderless and very much up to their own devices.

That setting could have been the home of a rich and detailed series of adventure settings -- if not the whole minicampaign. But, instead, it was just a single session's stop along the way. There's detail and development I did for that city that the players will never see -- and even more that would have been developed if we were going to spend any real time there at all.

There were many other settings where the players could have spent a lot of time. Instead . . . well . . . they got to have 6 encounters. I need to make sure that I try to tell smaller stories -- tell them with more detail and get the PCs involved in the story in a more meaningful way -- but I need to do that by lingering in a single place for much more than a single session, if not for the whole 8-10 sessions of the minicampaign.

I'm sure I'll be posting more soon . . . and I want to blog more about whipping up my own monsters, too . . .so much to rant about, so little time . . .

-j