How do you like to start a campaign

[hawkeyefan]

I'm at 60 sessions now and probably wrapping somewhere between 65 and 70, which bi-weekly would likely be nearly 3 years! But not a "12 years with the same characters" thing.

(we're talking about taking a break to play something else for a bit and then starting again a generation in the future, since there's so much left to improve in the village and so much more of the north to see)

Yeah, the game I GMed went for probably about that number of sessions. It was every other week for just over two years. We wound up adding a second group of PCs when the first group spent a good deal of time away from town.

We had two PC deaths… one that took the Thrall playbook and another that stepped through the Last Door. We also had two PCs “retire” with their major goals feeling complete, though one of them returned for the final couple of sessions.

How do you find the town improvement element of the game? I admit to thinking it’s a great idea and one of the things that makes the game appealing. But I’m not sure that component of the game is as integrated into play as strongly as it could be. Most of the improvements seem like they’d take years of in game time, which would be fine… but most threats seem to build much more quickly than that pace would allow.

It just seems (to me) that those two different parts of the game are not in synch. We adjusted the improvements a but to allow for this… and still found it to be an issue.

I’m curious about your thoughts on this and what you may have done to address it (if anything).

 

[zakael19]

We had two PC deaths… one that took the Thrall playbook and another that stepped through the Last Door. We also had two PCs “retire” with their major goals feeling complete, though one of them returned for the final couple of sessions.

We've had one death (went through TLD feeling like he'd done a good job setting the next generation up, and the player had pre-written and kept updated "in case of death" letters for all the other PCs) and one death/rebirth/retire lol.

How do you find the town improvement element of the game? I admit to thinking it’s a great idea and one of the things that makes the game appealing. But I’m not sure that component of the game is as integrated into play as strongly as it could be. Most of the improvements seem like they’d take years of in game time, which would be fine… but most threats seem to build much more quickly than that pace would allow.

Yeah so I've come to realize that Jeremy writing "The Game Ongoing" as one of the last chapters kinda hurt my first campaign's paradigm a bit! We had way too many expeditions in too short a temporal time. It's pretty clear that the game intends for a single major expedition a season-ish, with a lot of in-world time spent fulfilling your obligations around town. It's easy to let that part slide I think, but the game works better if not.

To quote from his draft:

Stonetop tends to be slower-paced than many RPGs. It has its moments of drama and intense action. But it also encourages
you to dwell in the details of daily life and to spend time chewing the scenery. Finding the right pace and rhythm for your group is important...
...Stonetop often has you gloss over stretches of time. You might cover days, weeks, or
months of travel or downtime with little more than a brief description and few questions for the PCs.

So I'm pushing my second game into more of that space, focusing on letting things breathe and the fact that a subsistence level agricultural settlement needs its people doing their jobs. Table time will mainly be spent on conflict and expeditions etc, but notional time should go by.

 

[zarionofarabel]

IMO it has nothing to do with the game system. It has to do with the GM and their willingness to adapt a campaign idea to the party. I've played and run D&D games of all clerics, all rogues, no melee, no tanks, no casters, all minotaurs. Almost all of those got that way because the players got to chose whatever character they wanted.

It never adversely impacted the campaign, and often added to to uniqueness. IMO, no campaign should require any give role/capability/spell/class etc.

In my way back when times I ran a few D&D games that didn't have all of the niche roles filled. It is a running joke, or cliche, that one poor sap gets railroaded into playing a healer for a reason though, because it happens often enough that it's become part of the zeitgeist. That's why I said one of the advantages of systems that don't have niche roles to be filled don't provide any reason for players to feel pressured to fulfill a niche, because there aren't any. At least, I'm not aware of any PC creation cliches that are associated with skill based TTRPGs the way they are with D&D and similar systems.

 

[hawkeyefan]

We've had one death (went through TLD feeling like he'd done a good job setting the next generation up, and the player had pre-written and kept updated "in case of death" letters for all the other PCs) and one death/rebirth/retire lol.



Yeah so I've come to realize that Jeremy writing "The Game Ongoing" as one of the last chapters kinda hurt my first campaign's paradigm a bit! We had way too many expeditions in too short a temporal time. It's pretty clear that the game intends for a single major expedition a season-ish, with a lot of in-world time spent fulfilling your obligations around town. It's easy to let that part slide I think, but the game works better if not.

To quote from his draft:



So I'm pushing my second game into more of that space, focusing on letting things breathe and the fact that a subsistence level agricultural settlement needs its people doing their jobs. Table time will mainly be spent on conflict and expeditions etc, but notional time should go by.

Yeah, I got the impression that more time is meant to pass between major excursions and the like… but that seems to assume that threats either really bide their time, or that they’re generally resolved quickly. Many of the threats that came to face the town in our game were persistent and tended to linger a while. I suppose I could have tried to adjust this, but I was doing what seemed to make sense based on what we’d established in play.

I also feel the XP accrues a bit too quickly. One way we handled that was that I allowed the players to Burn Brightly any time they had XP points at all, not just when they had an excess beyond what was needed to level. We put this house rule into place well into the game and it helped slow progression a bit, which allowed us to move things along at a more leisurely pace.

 

[zakael19]

I also feel the XP accrues a bit too quickly. One way we handled that was that I allowed the players to Burn Brightly any time they had XP points at all, not just when they had an excess beyond what was needed to level. We put this house rule into place well into the game and it helped slow progression a bit, which allowed us to move things along at a more leisurely pace.

Yup, that's one of the suggestions (among others) he's got in that chapter about slowing things down. I've also encouraged players to Burn Brightly to use a not-unlocked ability that they'll commit to taking as their next advance, kinda using it in the moment to show that breakthrough.

but that seems to assume that threats either really bide their time, or that they’re generally resolved quickly.

Or if you're gone on an expedition for a while, you can set the town to Pull Together and such to work on stuff while you're away, which was not something I was encouraging for a long time! We've also had quite a bit of discussion that a move on a 6- should not always be escalate / manifest a new threat. Maybe you just show rising tensions back home, dial in the obligations, have a loved one come have a tense conversation, etc.

I've tried to make more of a distinction between Threats that are like big deal ongoing things (eg: a Thing Below whose attention has focused in on Stonetop due to actions of the PCs), and then the still dangerous or looming but smaller scale threats that something like that might manifest.

Also, not all Threats maybe need to have "Stonetop dies" as a Doom.

...maybe we need a Stonetop thread . It might even be content complete by the end of the month!

Edit: made a thread to stop diverting this one.

 

[Stemner]

("Judge, when the last kid went missing from town, what made you finally call off the search?"); and then the hook based on the session 0 tensions and threats they had created. Pre-bitten for convenience.

I want to say that this was such a good opener and it made my groups' night

 

[LordEntrails]

In my way back when times I ran a few D&D games that didn't have all of the niche roles filled. It is a running joke, or cliche, that one poor sap gets railroaded into playing a healer for a reason though, because it happens often enough that it's become part of the zeitgeist.

Sure, it happens often enough. But it doesn't have to be. It's a choice the table makes due to some external social pressure they perceive to be real. But yea, we don't need to go there more than to say people should be able to chose whether or not they let such "norms" impact them.

That's why I said one of the advantages of systems that don't have niche roles to be filled don't provide any reason for players to feel pressured to fulfill a niche, because there aren't any. At least, I'm not aware of any PC creation cliches that are associated with skill based TTRPGs the way they are with D&D and similar systems.

Ah, but I see it in classless skill based games regularly. "Oh, no one has medical skills? Who's going to take a couple points? What about face? Who got the face skills?" My most recent experiences with this is Cyberpunk Red, and FrontierSpace and Star Frontiers. Those are the only classless systems I've played in the last decade, but I remember the same thing with Runequest back int he 80's.

My experience "it" happens in every system. Where "it" is the feeling that the party has to be well rounded. And their are advantages to that. But, a party does not have to be well rounded, and it can be fun to play a campaign where the party has to be creative because they are not.

 

[Distracted DM]

What tools do y'all have for establishing connections between PCs at session 0?

 

[prabe]

What tools do y'all have for establishing connections between PCs at session 0?

I usually go around the table (or down the user list) asking each player how their character knows the character of the player to their ... left (say). Then I ask that player if they're OK with that (if they're not we negotiate, but that hasn't been necessary). I also have a tendency to just tell the players something on the lines of "Y'all's characters all know each other by face and name--nodding acquaintances--at the start." There's no conflict, here: The question/answer thing is about knowing someone better than that.

That said, I'm running D&D 5e/Tales of the Valiant. There are other games that have more structured approaches written into their text.

 

[zakael19]

What tools do y'all have for establishing connections between PCs at session 0?

As @prabe noted, many games provide for this in their toolkit. Beyond the Wall does it during the life path character building, with a lot of "turn to the player sitting here and ask.." that you could easily incorporate into other games. Others provide background questions that may or may not be somewhat provocative. Eg: Daggerheart has teh following Connection questions for the rogue to ask others:

• What did I recently convince you to do that got us both in trouble?
• What have I discovered about your past that I hold secret from the others?
• Who do you know from my past, and how have they influenced your feelings about me?

His Majesty the Worm mechanizes "Bonds" between Guild members (the dungeon delving party is formalized as a chartered Guild in the framing of that game), which include things like "Big/Little" or "Best Friend."

Apocalypse World's Sword and Sorcery hack "Warriors of the World Ablaze" has questions on playbooks like:

• Have any of you fought shoulder to shoulder beside me?
• Do any of you truly depend on me for protection?
• I admire practical power. Are any of you, more interested in abstract, mystical, or otherworldly power instead?