Failed Campaigns

[Reynard]

So my reply is irrelevant?

Well, it's off topic at least. But hey, once you set a thread free into the wild, you have little control over how it develops.

Kind of like a campaign.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I tried to run an Underdark campaign multiple times, starting back in 2e, and it always fizzled out. Maybe because it was just too alien, too far-removed from standard fantasy. The one time, it assuredly because it was late and we were all tired and unable to muster the appropriate verve. Finally got to do an Underdark campaign in full when Out of the Abyss came out...

Recently I've been in a couple failed campaigns. Two of my friends both decided last year that with the pandemic and not being able to go anywhere that they should run games online. One started The Sunless Citadel, one Descent into Avernus. Both of them overestimated the amount of effort it takes to run a weekly game (and to be fair, they were both busy enough with other things) and both campaigns fizzled far before completion. I almost never get to play, so I was bummed.

 

[John R Davis]

The only recent one was Descent into Avernus that just didn't work for us. The path of stuff was the game killer in the end

 

[Grendel_Khan]

In high school I was very promiscuous with GURPS. Used it to try out all kinds of ill-advised or shortsighted campaigns that were essentially one- or two-night stands. That's one of the things I loved about it, at the time--you could gamify whatever comic (Hard-Boiled) or movie franchise (Aliens) you were currently obsessed with. None of these campaigns set in established settings worked for me, though. I'd lose interest after a session or two. The definition of failed campaigns.

What's interesting to me is seeing how well some of the more recent games capture the tone and themes of established settings without making you feel like the world is bounded by those movies/books/comics, or like you're an extra in some NPC's grand story. The One Ring and the Alien RPGs, for example, do a great job of that. Compare those to MERP or the first, little-known and less-played Aliens-set RPG, and I think you see how far game design has come. If those games had been out when I was a compulsively-GM-ing teen I might have still dropped them quickly, but I have a feeling those campaigns would have lasted at least a few more sessions.

 

[Marc_C]

Curse of Strand 5e. The DM tried really hard. He had props and cool models and a perfect Eastern Europe accent. We just didn't buy into it. We stopped after two sessions.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

My best campaign ever was a supers game using HERO set in the Space:1889 world + other appropriate sources, circa 1900. I ran that for 3 years.

Many years later, I tried to run an updated version of the campaign in a different city for a different group. I used M&M 2nd because it was closest to that group’s system preferences. It was a flop for many reasons- I made mistakes, players didn’t grasp the setting, the system itself had some unpopular mechanics. It only made a half dozen sessions or so.

 

[Einar Stormcrow]

This happened very recently actually. In fact is kinda still in the process of happening.

I'm running Conan 2d20 for a few friends of mine on the opposite coast. We all gave it a look and liked what we saw. The problems are all on my end.

-It's a brand new system for everyone involved. And it's kinda fiddly and weird in places. Which I could work with except...
-Almost all of my experience in running anything is D&D, so everything is new.
-All of that experience is from at least four years ago, most of it much, much farther back, so I'm extremely rusty.
-I have practically no experience with running games online.

All of that together makes a pretty stressful situation for me. Though we're two sessions in, and everyone else seems to be having fun. I could keep it going, except for the one big one looming over everything...I start a new job Monday, which is when we played, which is throwing everything off as far as group availability. We'll see if we can work it out, but I'm not super confident. If I do something like this in the future, I might start with a system I'm more familiar with like D&D, or something much, much simpler, like Vaesen perhaps. And maybe get some practice running for my home group. It was just the combination of all those factors, all at once, that was just anxiety-inducing.

 

[Reynard]

This happened very recently actually. In fact is kinda still in the process of happening.

I'm running Conan 2d20 for a few friends of mine on the opposite coast. We all gave it a look and liked what we saw. The problems are all on my end.

-It's a brand new system for everyone involved. And it's kinda fiddly and weird in places. Which I could work with except...
-Almost all of my experience in running anything is D&D, so everything is new.
-All of that experience is from at least four years ago, most of it much, much farther back, so I'm extremely rusty.
-I have practically no experience with running games online.

All of that together makes a pretty stressful situation for me. Though we're two sessions in, and everyone else seems to be having fun. I could keep it going, except for the one big one looming over everything...I start a new job Monday, which is when we played, which is throwing everything off as far as group availability. We'll see if we can work it out, but I'm not super confident. If I do something like this in the future, I might start with a system I'm more familiar with like D&D, or something much, much simpler, like Vaesen perhaps. And maybe get some practice running for my home group. It was just the combination of all those factors, all at once, that was just anxiety-inducing.

That sucks. Sorry. One piece of general advice: when learning to run a game that is totally new, ease in. You don't have to allow all options or try and engage every sub system right off the bat. 2d20 is a great game, but Conan is probably the crunchiest iteration. Maybe run a short John Carter game first to get a handle on the core mechanics, then try Conan? Modiphius' quickstart guides are really good and free so it shouldn't cost you anything.

Good luck!

 

[Grendel_Khan]

That sucks. Sorry. One piece of general advice: when learning to run a game that is totally new, ease in. You don't have to allow all options or try and engage every sub system right off the bat. 2d20 is a great game, but Conan is probably the crunchiest iteration. Maybe run a short John Carter game first to get a handle on the core mechanics, then try Conan? Modiphius' quickstart guides are really good and free so it shouldn't cost you anything.

Good luck!

@Einar Stormcrow Only thing I'd add to @Reynard 's excellent advice is to keep in mind that, at its heart, 2d20 is designed to be very flexible, especially in service of pulpy settings like Conan and John Carter. So maybe discuss with everyone that it's ok to not worry about strict rules-as-written stuff. Hell, you can burn a point of Fortune to "introduce a fact or add a detail to the current scene." It's practically begging you to not sweat the details.

 

[Ath-kethin]

Dunno if it counts as a failed campaign, but I was running an adventure in a Basic D&D game wherein the goal was to find an Apparatus of Kwalish. I decided fairly quickly that the module itself was not ideal for accomplishing this goal and just told the group at the start of the next session that they'd searched that temple top to bottom and found only a journal entry that led them to an ancient temple in the middle of nowhere (which conveniently was the site of the adventure I'd decided to run instead).

Then we decided as a group to take a side trek and play a a bit of Dungeon Crawl Classics, and that's been so enjoyable/popular that we've found little enthusiasm for resuming the search for the Apparatus.