Sadras
Legend
Since last year September I have been running a part-time Storm King's Thunder campaign meeting up as the playgroup becomes available. We haven't played for a while but we decided to start playing bi-weekly online. The party is deep into Chapter 3 The Savage Frontier and we had our first session in months this Tuesday evening.
I very much enjoyed the session and am having fun planning the adventures because it is heavy in exploration pillar with a fair bit of roleplaying - so I'm very much relying on the DMG weather rules, NPC reactions tables, narrative travel montages for each day, coming up with fairly interesting encounters taking into account the locations and the geopolitical situation (ToD background too), sprinkled with bites of lore on the various settlements, guilds and people. So the pacing is slow and the chapter involves many fetch quests. It has been 25 days (in-game) since Chapter 2 and they are travelling by foot so there is plenty room for the social and exploration pillars. After the session I was concerned that perhaps I was running things too slowly and that the players would be bored by the fetch quests especially since two of them are veteran rpgers.
So I asked my players if their player expectations were being met or should I rather skip the mundane and the various fetch quests, remove filler combat and provide narrative montage for much more of the travel/sights&sounds and instead fast-forward to scene framing IT encounters, levelling them up as appropriate to the storyline and move to a more player-driven part of the campaign.
Well surprisingly, they all seemed to enjoy the granular / immersive approach, stating more rp possibilities the better even if various tangents go nowhere and that sitting in the comfort of their homes surprisingly actually does well for this style of play.
It felt a little jarring running two very different styled campaigns.
Have any of you experienced something similar, when running con-current campaigns of the same game with different approaches? And I'm not referring to running for kids and adults, noobs and veterans...etc In those instances the style change is necessitated by the players' abilities.
I very much enjoyed the session and am having fun planning the adventures because it is heavy in exploration pillar with a fair bit of roleplaying - so I'm very much relying on the DMG weather rules, NPC reactions tables, narrative travel montages for each day, coming up with fairly interesting encounters taking into account the locations and the geopolitical situation (ToD background too), sprinkled with bites of lore on the various settlements, guilds and people. So the pacing is slow and the chapter involves many fetch quests. It has been 25 days (in-game) since Chapter 2 and they are travelling by foot so there is plenty room for the social and exploration pillars. After the session I was concerned that perhaps I was running things too slowly and that the players would be bored by the fetch quests especially since two of them are veteran rpgers.
So I asked my players if their player expectations were being met or should I rather skip the mundane and the various fetch quests, remove filler combat and provide narrative montage for much more of the travel/sights&sounds and instead fast-forward to scene framing IT encounters, levelling them up as appropriate to the storyline and move to a more player-driven part of the campaign.
Well surprisingly, they all seemed to enjoy the granular / immersive approach, stating more rp possibilities the better even if various tangents go nowhere and that sitting in the comfort of their homes surprisingly actually does well for this style of play.
It felt a little jarring running two very different styled campaigns.
Have any of you experienced something similar, when running con-current campaigns of the same game with different approaches? And I'm not referring to running for kids and adults, noobs and veterans...etc In those instances the style change is necessitated by the players' abilities.
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