I've been running three games - continuing the Ducal House 3.5e home campaign that has been running since 2020 and starting up a series of planar one-shots (5e Planescape: Splinters of Hope) and a 2-shot-turned-into-campaign 5e Spelljammer game (Interstellar Whaling becoming The King Beyond The Clouds).
I got to play a bunch of things too
- lots of hours onto finishing out the Out of the Abyss campaign
- started playing through Tyranny of Dragons
- played some old-school Scarlet Heroes sessions
- attended my local Adventurers League for a few sessions twixt lockdowns
- played in the Empyrean Dynasty online FKR game
The big shift has been the arrival of the smallest householder which has meant that game slots have regularised at 'after she goes to bed, before I do' which has driven my average session down from 4.6 hrs to 3.9 hrs. I am becoming a convert of the focussed short session. We just had one where due to a sick child we got ~ 1hr played of a 3 hr slot, but there was useful scheming, a critical skill roll and the start of a cliff-hanger combat. Worth doing, no question, even if not a lot of progress was made.
Taking a look at thoughts / lessons learned from the stuff I have run:
Home Campaign - hardest hit by the shortening of sessions, combined with changing work schedules and study moves, it has drifted from a weekly game to a fortnightly one. Only half as many sessions running more than an hour shorter. Positive aspects of this is that the back-log of content generated is being worked through slowly, making it lower prep this year than last. In a point of personal growth I have tried to shift from frustration at not being able to put as much time in on this as I would like to viewing the calendar gaps as opportunities for one-shots that may well include some of the same folk in other combinations. Even all this said, the cumulative hours on this campaign just pushed it into the longest campaign I have ever run, beating out my teenage AD&D Katharsis kitchen sink campaign in just the past month.
Planescape: Splinters - one-shots, a personal challenge on capturing the flavour of an outer plane in a single session and also in the logistics of rounding up a table to do this. On the first aspect; medium success with three different planes visited so far - Mechanus, the Beastlands and Acheron. I have hit a bit of a wall in getting the next ones of these written, but I hope to get another 2-3 done - Gehenna, Pandemonium and maybe another upper plane. These have been a great learning experience in driving a table to the clock, pacing and enough-but-not-too-much flavour. Particularly interesting for me has been running each of these sessions 3 times - once with the in-house testing team and twice with tables assembled from doodle polls. Doodles and batching tables has proved effective when given a long enough lead time.
Spelljammer - originally a 2-shot tester for a bunch of us to test out the 5e Spelljammer rules, after the two sessions of Interstellar Whaling, it was decided that more fantasy space adventures would be good. This has become an exercise for me in running an adventure from the book - the Light of Xaryxis - adapted to the wild randomness and sometimes paranoid tactical noses of the players. Just running them along the 'suddenly, neogi' path of the adventure would not fly so it has been fun so far collaging the set pieces and encounters from the adventure into a new structure which gives the players better motivations. It is beneficial to me also as some challenges and encounters get tripped where I would have hand-waved things along by instinct - so it makes things a bit more unpredictable and interesting. Looks like settling into a 1-2 a month rhythm.
Adventurers League - should get an honourable mention as I did run some of the Spelljammer Academy adventure - only two sessions before COVID and scheduling issues blocked me again but it was a nice exercise to grab a structured adventure and then maneuver players through it on a limited time. Part Two of the Spelljammer Academy was a lot of fun, with some good ship-fights, the players enjoyed themselves.
As a wrap - this is the first year in multiple decades where I have had multiple things running in parallel and it is working only because I have relaxed my world-building instincts and focused on 'just enough' to get gaming. Definitely it has proven to me the benefits of focusing on getting in time at table, even if a session or two is squeaky, compared to over-crafting perfect games that run only when the stars align.
Logistically all this has been helped by the revolution in online playing tools and peoples attitude to same - the vast majority of all these are online or hybrid format.
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