Spelljammer: Light Of Xaryxis (2023-24)
What it was:
- Follow on from 5e Spelljammer rules test two-shot which were a pure systems test of the Spelljammer 5e rules. People liked that enough that it continued.
- My first attempt to run a 5e campaign off book - which was heavily remixed as described here
- My first 'formal' VTT campaign with battlemaps, tokens, getting the scales right and all that jazz
- 26 sessions from Oct 2022 to April 2024 with a slow burn start of getting in a session a month then a pause through April 23 after struggling to schedule sessions. We finally settled onto a base assumption of 'every second Monday night' which ran relatively smoothly through 2023. After smallest house-holders sleeping pattern fell apart that put a hard crimp on things as both I and the in-house test team were in this one. So we had a couple of chunky gaps for what was nominally a bi-weekly game - Jan-April 2023 and Jan-Feb 2024. The 'finite' nature of the campaign helped get things restarted in the sense that this was not an infinite committment.
What worked:
- Bonkers planets (toroid world, mindflayers) generated using the AD&D Spelljammer box set
- Getting to deploy to table my ancient Spelljammer folder, vintage ~1993
- Sandbox-ing remix worked well with with players creating their own plan/sequence to deal with things
- Player choices mattered - about 20% of the sessions being pure 'sandbox' adventuring
- Just enough Roll20 to get by
- "Great Projects" with game time invested into madcap schemes for one-shot spectacular effects
- Impromptu NPC romance based of cute NPC token
- Juicing a published book to run a campaign
What didn't:
- 'Back-to-back' scheduling when this initially ran on the 'off week' of a different campaign with high but not complete player overlap - leading to cancellations, uncertainty on when/if the game was running and generally a layer of stress
- Some players felt they came off the plot - which is the hazard of open world - but also the big hook motivation of 'why are we here again' rattled a bit loose as scheduling left some long gaps between sessions
- Hard meta-gaming 'what kind of session do we want to have tonight - ship combat or roleplaying' was not fun for me as a DM
- My personal note-keeping for this one went to hell. Bad DM, no biscuit.
- Squeaky early Roll20, harder to be flexible in face of choices as you might not have the available map or tokens or have the battlemap set up with both of those.
- Fully utilizing adversaries - getting the layers and other buttons on Roll20 to work meant I was not playing things to their tactical utmost
- Long-haul travel was streamlined - we did not lean into the interesting potential of multi-month Spelljammer journeys for crew tension, monsters-on-board, supply shortages or any of that good stuff
Lessons learned:
Have to think through potential encounters - considering what tokens and maps to have handy - and set them out fully in Roll20 beforehand. It takes too long to patch those things together on the fly and that kills momentum. An option would be to call a bio-break for everyone else and set things up but still that is dumping energy and requiring a spin back up afterward.
Getting fluent with the Roll20 system is troublesome and even with familiarity there are a lot of buttons to mash to 'trigger' an encounter which leaves lots of room for error in getting things spun up - so I kept things simple and for-went potential fun stuff because of its complexity to execute on VTT
Spelljammer campaigns run on ship-battlemaps, keeping those combats fresh because a challenge once you hit the fifth fight on the 'same' terrain. Different foes on board and greater use of the whole of the ship map can help.
Players appreciated being able to follow their whims, even where sometimes that left them with brief decision paralysis. On balance the momentary stall outs were forgotten while the freedom to roam wherever they wanted is more remembered.
The stuff that got the most 'wow' were things brought in from AD&D Spelljammer - weird planets - and exploration of implications like the mix of instantaneous communications (sending) with very long travel times.
I ended up having to stop after a dozen or so sessions and go back and re-do everything to put the stuff I was continuously look up on some digest pages. The key things I needed to pull out - where were the milestones for levelling / what level were people supposed to be for which encounters; ship names and sequence things were supposed to have happened in; what chapter different encounters were from.
NPC use was a mixed bag - I feel I could have used them more but also did not want them to just be 'quest-givers' - I think a happy medium might have been making them more useful in a fight but then it would have been one more thing to juggle on the battlemap.
Ship travel - I feel both that an opportunity was missed to make long-haul Spelljamming travel feel more weighty but also that this was not necessarily what the table would have wanted. We did not have super long sessions so I think further monkeying around with just getting to the places where they wanted to do stuff would have been friction not fun. So I think it was the right call.
Using a published campaign as opposed to writing my own was novel for me - most of my tables are very open-world gamers and the work involved in trying to steer them to a plot is more than I can be bothered with. I might follow this approach of stripping a campaign for parts again in future.
No comments:
Post a Comment