Campaign regrets

Do you, as a GM, ever regret not doing something cool, and then come up with an idea after it's too late? That's a rhetorical question, of course you do.

That's been bugging me a lot lately. As a working adult (as many of us are), I struggle to find the time to just flesh out one adventure after the next - and my party only meets every other week. Still, it's a struggle. But I keep thinking back to events and plotlines and can't help but think that I could have done so much more with certain characters or locations. At the very least, I keep thinking to myself, if I ever run the campaign again with new players, I'll have an opportunity to fill in those gaps. I understand now why some GMs just run the same campaign over and over (with new players), because presumably it gets better every time.

In my campaign, the characters discovered a woman in temporal stasis in a bag of holding in a hidden room in a cave. Turns out, she's the last of a royal bloodline from 500 years ago. Having nowhere to go, she's joined the party as an NPC bard, and I intend to use her to color in interesting details about events from the past. But it occurs to me that I could have done so much more with this - with her knowledge of past histories, she could literally apply a brand new dimension to the campaign setting by revealing all kinds of events that happened which set into motion the current state of affairs. Perhaps she knows the locations of things now lost, for example. And - woe, if only I had the time to detail all that.

Alas.

Anyone else suffer from this affliction?

There will always be things I didn’t get around to exploring, things that I could have done better. Some get filed away for later re-use. No matter what, I try to learn from them and do better the next time.

When 5e came out, I had what I thought was a great idea for a campaign – a fantasy version of Renaissance Venice, with everyone playing members of the nobility. I had so many ideas, including a big reveal towards the end that the world was the same one as our last campaign, with the timeline advanced. But the campaign ended up tanking for a number of reasons, and all those ideas were left unexplored.

Also, the thread title reminds me of this:

Bwuh. Finishing the first arc in the first home brew campaign I’d ever run for 5e a few years back: the characters found out that their ally- who had just betrayed them by secretly working for the crimeboss they just took down- was the daughter of one of the masters of the adventuring guild they had just joined. My characters asked her, under Zone of Truth, why she turned against the organization, and I basically played it out as a sort of “F*** you, dad!” sort of deal. The players took everything she said about her “awful dad” to heart, and immediately started plotting ways of taking down the guild...
I immediately panicked, thinking my huge and world shaking main quest line is in serious jeopardy if they turn against the guild, and start spouting things off like, “Their true identities are well guarded secrets,” and “Of the thirteen guild masters, no two of them are ever in the same city at once,” but of course this is just stoking the fire and getting them excited for the challenge. Eventually one of the more experienced players could tell I was flailing, and coralled the rest of the party into sleeping on it. We ended the session, and I flat out told the players that “wasn’t the story I had planned for the game.”
Looking back, it’s my greatest failure as a GM. The players had found a story line they found compelling, organically, and were excited to tackle it! That’s the holy grail! But I was too taken with “My Precious Story Syndrome”, and denied them the opportunity to explore a sweet campaign in favour of getting them back on the rails of the story I had originally intended. Today, I try to be way more flexible, and always listen to my players. My GM philosophy nowadays can be boiled down to this: prepare the setting, prepare a dozen plot hooks and important NPC’s, but above all else let the PC’s dictate the course of the campaign.

Sure. But being a DM means being willing to never use 70-80% of what you've prepared. Preparing things in broad strokes and working on improving your improv skills will go a long way toward helping you get past post-session remorse. Still, for some of us it is hard. I have trouble with improv and know even in the sense of live acting improv, I would go nuts kicking myself over missed opportunities.

I think your bard from 500 years ago is a great idea. It fits very well into D&D, which is a game strongly focused on finding relics from the past. You're right though it's one of those ideas that demands a lot of work because now you have to detail the past.

Something similar I experienced was running a Mutants & Masterminds game where the PCs travelled to another dimension. I was running weekly and felt I had to cancel a session and take two weeks off to do the idea justice. In the event I think it was the right decision.

As to regrets, virtually every game I ran before the age of about 30 suffered from me simply not putting in enough prep work. Many of my PCs have suffered from the same problem - not enough work put into the idea.

As a DM no regrets. Every bad experience or mistake is a chance to learn and develop.

That said, I do wish I’d got into new groups sooner. I’ve been playing with the same group of four for a long session monthly for the last 10 years. A few years back I started a second group for a similar long day a month. Then created a weekly game with a brand new group a few weeks back. The two extra groups play totally differently to the first and have really got me to broaden my horizons.

Second thing that was a shame... we took on a new player in the long running group, a friend of a friend. However he was much younger and coming from totally different reference points than us. He wanted to play the d&d equivalent of the avengers, and we wanted to pay a gritty fantasy pirate campaign. Because expectations were so different things got very tense quickly and he didn’t work out which was a shame. In my defence we’d communicated the campaign style and rules in a campaign guide before we started. I still wish I’d done more though.

Thombolism said:

I immediately panicked, thinking my huge and world shaking main quest line is in serious jeopardy if they turn against the guild, and start spouting things off like, “Their true identities are well guarded secrets,” and “Of the thirteen guild masters, no two of them are ever in the same city at once,” but of course this is just stoking the fire and getting them excited for the challenge. Eventually one of the more experienced players could tell I was flailing, and coralled the rest of the party into sleeping on it. We ended the session, and I flat out told the players that “wasn’t the story I had planned for the game.”

Click to expand...

OMG, I think we have the same players. I just felt your pain sitting in the GM chair right there. I had something similar happen this weekend. The party has 4 unicorn horns. It was a personal quest of the druid to find the horses they belong to, and they finally found the 1st one. I described how, rather unceremoniously, the horn attached itself when placed on the head. Then the PCs were like "We have so many questions." "Yea, maybe it can tell us who took the horns", etc., etc. I had no answers. So, the unicorn immediately teleported!

I felt like a bit of a failure at that moment, but I do plan on having it return, and I'll make up a story that the unicorn was scared, and was "reawakened" upon getting its horn back, and so became self-aware at that moment - in a strange place, surrounded by strange people - and yea, I'll fill in all those details once I come up with suitable answers for all of them.

As [MENTION=6879661]TheSword[/MENTION] so neatly put it just above, every regret is also a lesson.

I'm still learning...

I don't have regrets often. Sometimes I may regret not making the encounters in the session harder or more interesting, I always try to improve as a DM. But as far as the story and adventures, I'm usually happy with my choices, since my players seem to enjoy it all.

But there was one particular session where I had prepared the island of Witchclaw. I had specifically prepared a lot of random encounters for the uncharted area of the island, the Garden of the Dead, where many undead wander. I had two plot hooks that would take the players into this area, but even with those plot hooks chased by the players, not a whole lot of the island was explored. It was genuinely one of the areas that I was looking forward the most.

But fortunately a session or two later, the players decided that they wanted to craft a special kind of gem. So I quickly jumped on this opportunity to send them on a quest to the other side of the island, to have the gem created. It turned into one of the more memorable moments of the campaign, where the players agreed never to speak of how the gem was made (it was quite a horrific and morally dubious process).

Sure, it can't be helped. There's one DM, 3-5 players and a dozen NPCs to run at any given moment, eventually something slips out or gets forgotten. You realize a session or two later that you forgot it and now you're just outta luck.