Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Darth Shoju" data-source="post: 3298819" data-attributes="member: 11397">I'd agree with pretty much everything listed above. However, the story of the beginning of the second campaign I'd ever run was a blueprint for disaster. It was a homebrew world where I had put a fair amount of work into. I decided the main country was a kingdom comprised of 7 powerful clans. Unfortunately my group was very into the card game Legend of the Five Rings at the time. For any of you that aren't familiar with that game, it features seven great clans. However, it is based in a fantasy amalgamation of Japanese and Chinese culture. My campaign was a slightly odd mix of Scottish and Eastern European cultures (don't ask). None the less, comparisons were made from the beginning of the first session. They even wrote "Shadowlands" on an area of the map handout I gave them. To make things worse, most of my friends had sworn off D&D at this point (this was 1998). Only three of us (myself included) still played D&D and only one of the others was playing in this campaign. The other two players mostly played CCGs or Call of Cthulhu (I played those as well). To try and lure them in I promised it wouldn't be a very D&D-like game. I invented some homebrew rules system from scratch that was poorly thought-out at best. 3 sessions in we switched to 2nd Ed AD&D (there was less resistance to this than I thought there would be). Eventually this would result in arguments about the balance between the classes and the different XP tables. Back to the first session. I endured the L5R comparisons and soldiered on. The 3 players seemed to be enjoying themselves. However, halfway through the session one of our other friends stopped by for no apparent reason and started playing L5R by himself at the end of the table. This ended up drawing the attention of one of the players. I basically finished the session with the attention of two players.By the 4th session I had managed to gather three more players and lose two (both were well-known to be unreliable). That session I introduced one of the main humanoid races of the campaign. I had told my players that the typical D&D humanoids wouldn't be in the campaign (at least not recognizably) so I didn't give the creatures a name, just a description. One of my players (the one that was distracted by the L5R game in the first session) decided that they resembled intelligent orcs. He said that in Spelljammer there were intelligent orcs called "scro". They dubbed the humanoids in my game the scro and quickly determined their commander was the "scroju" (another L5R reference). One of them hit upon the idea that their general would be called "the scro-tum" (ha-ha  :\ ). The general amusement that ensued derailed the game for at least 2 hours. In subsequent sessions they would come to refer to every un-named humanoids as "scro-x" (eg. scrogre for what they felt resembled ogres). One of the guys created what he called the "scrocabulary" where he would go through every monster in the Monster Manual and attach the preface of scro. The funny-sounding ones he wrote down and trotted out every once in while. Whenever they did it would bring everything to a halt for at least 30-45 mins. I should probably mention we were all in our early to mid twenties at the time.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" /> The campaign somehow survived several player shuffles (although two of the 3 present at the original session played right through to the end-one was the guy disctracted by L5R), the inability of the players to decide what they wanted to do to investigate the storyline hooks I tossed out (thus resulting in some railroading on my part to keep things moving), the ill-advised introduction of an NPC that traveled with the party (and was often forgotten and occasionally pulled the party's bacon out of the fire-yes I learned my lesson), and several player-to-player arguments. Overall it went for 3 years and was ultimately really enjoyable for all involved. But any one of the above elements came a hair away from ruining the whole thing.</blockquote>

Verification