Reflections on a 5 Year Campaign

This past week marked the 5-year mark for my Tidelock D&D 5e campaign. I didn't realize this until a player shared a memory on Facebook about making her character five years ago. It's still going strong (stronger, perhaps, when the pandemic suddenly made scheduling much easier), so I figured I'd reflect on what worked and what didn't.

Source

Just some fun facts first:

• Campaign started in September 2015. Began with myself and three Players.
• Scheduling App Used: when2meet (at least until the pandemic, when we adopted a regular weekly schedule.)
• Average Sessions per Month: 2-3 (~130 total sessions done to date)
• Total # of Unique Player Participants: 18
• Present # of Players: 4
• Campaign "Archs" Completed: 14-16
• Major House Rules Changes: 3+
• For about a year I was running two groups simultaneously within the same campaign world. Later, when Players dropped out, those two groups were combined.
• Player-Character Stat Generation Method: Point Buy
• Maximum Player-Character Level: 13
• Player-Character Deaths: 3-4 (This is despite the Players having no access to resurrection... Yet.)
• Forbidden Magics Discovered: 1 out of 4.
• After the first year all opponents and monsters used custom statistics. (see below)
• The most powerful campaign-changing magic item to have existed yet within the game was destroyed by a Player-Character willingly and without coercion for 'Reasons of Philosophy'. I did not remotely see this coming and I loved it.
• The name of this blog: Goodberry Monthly, was determined by my early players of this campaign by vote.

And now, some lessons learned from a long term campaign.

To Slay the Scheduling Demon

Ahh... The bane of all campaigns. The great foe: the Scheduling Demon. How to get all your busy adults with their adult lives and responsibilities able to get together on the same day is a problem with virtually no easy solutions. It's just a fact of Tabletop. There's nothing that can avoid this: expect casualties due to the Demon.

Though, shifting from a scheduling poll to a regular weekly game (and also in-person to Discord-only) did help a lot with participation. It lowered the threshold of effort required to play significantly. This was helped, though, by things largely being within the Theatre of Mind, instead of grid and setpiece-based exploration/combat.

Make Tools, Not Plots

Though, sometimes you do need to plot. It's unavoidable, even in a sandbox like Tidelock. Just try not to make a habit of it - it's exhausting and the Players will frequently surprise you.

Regardless, I cannot stress this enough: MAKE CAMPAIGN TOOLS. City and NPC generators, random tables, treasure troves. Embrace the DIY! Some of these tools I've made for the Campaign have continually paid dividends even years after creation. It's saved me hours upon hours of preparation time and largely rescued me from DM Burnout. Make Tools. Make Tools. Make Tools!

Don't Take Drop-Outs Personally

As you can see by the above statistic: 14/18 (77.7%!) people who participated in this campaign dropped out due to various reasons. For some scheduling became impossible. Others moved, or became disinterested. I imagine more than half of them expected the campaign to be more like Critical Role or your more traditional fantasy (instead of Planescape-style gonzo craziness that it ended up being). It took like 3 years for a stable group to form. Attrition is inevitable.

Save Unused Material. Be a Hoarder.

Use it later on, or for other campaigns or one-shots. Don't throw it out. Throw it up on the Cloud, index it, and remember it exists.

Make Use of Published Stuff. Curate!

Seriously. Swallow your pride and use published material.

That said, you must be a Curator. You must curate. You don't need to use every bit of published material you have. Decide what's appropriate or possible for the campaign, then adjust to make it work. Have a few dungeons or adventures you really like on the shelf that you can insert to supplement your homebrew material.

System Changes are Unavoidable. Embrace the DIY.

Unless you want to have the very specific campaign that a system describes. You probably don't. You probably want to have your own campaign. You're going to need to make some rules changes or additions. That's fine. Just be clear to your players about when this is happening and what's changing. I keep a document of all of the houserulings up on the cloud available to all players.

New PCs Need to be Integrated Into Existing Institutions

I've learned this the hard way. Players putting work into their detailed backstory, generating NPCs and institutions, for me to continually ignore it. See, I still go by the old online roleplayer axiom of over-respecting the creations of players: if a player made it, I can't mess with it without their permission. This works great for the PCs themselves, but when a player expects me to roleplay an NPC that they made, and we then both realize that it's impossible for me to match how they imagined that NPC in their head, the material falls flat. It's not inspired.

I'm guessing this is more just a problem with me than anything else, but I expect I'm not the first nor the last person on earth to have run into this. Don't have players contribute campaign material that you aren't 100% excited about.

Sometimes You Do Need to Say 'No'

It's rare, though. I think I've said outright 'No' to a Player's idea maybe once or twice during the whole campaign. It was a bit agonizing, too, because I really liked their idea. I realized, though, that implementing it would undermine one of the core principles of the campaign. That integrity matters, especially in the long run.

Also, see the previous point. If you're roleplaying something, you need to be comfortable with it.

I Wish I Had an Easy Way of Getting Player Feedback

But there's like... this psychological wall that keeps players from really speaking their mind. Whether it's this fear that they're rocking the boat or they don't want to put in the effort of useful feedback. Players often have trouble knowing what they want, let alone expressing it. On top of that, DMs tend to be a little intimidating, especially when asking about feedback. I haven't figured out how to get around this.

Players will always tell you that you were great and they had fun, even if they didn't. I know, I do this as a player too. Even when playing in games I absolutely hated, I would still say 'yeah, that was good, thanks!', more to end the conversation as quickly as possible than anything else. I don't want to crush a DM's spirit, particularly a new one. Nobody wants to be the "well, actually that sucked" person. Peer pressure afflicts all.

I have, though, discovered a reliable, if difficult method: just good ol' fashion reading the room. You need to know your players. You need to know people. When the players are engaging and putting in effort of their own free will, you know you're on to something. If they're offering compliments to your DMing without prompt (especially in the middle of a session, not at the end (everyone compliments you at the end of a session anyways out of politeness)), you're doing something right. If you see or hear them excited, or sharing campaign anecdotes outside of sessions, or uncontrollably laughing, or rolling like their life savings depend on it, you're probably on the right track.