Thursday, July 12, 2007

the session that wasn't

So last night was supposed to be a session of Beyond Vinland, wherein Our Heroes trap the duergar chieftain inside a barrow mound inhabited by the Union of the Snake, a yuan-ti death cult from the 80's. But the adventure never quite started. I accidentally sent the group off on a 3 hour tangent by attempting to handle some campaign business before we rolled initiative against the first band of snakemen.

As longtime Gameblog readers will recall, the Gestalt PCs in my last Greyhawkesque outing reached 23rd level or so. That got really boggy mechanics-wise towards the end of the campaign. Part of the problem was the sheer awesomosity of Gestalt characters, but the other part of the equation is that D&D at its highest levels bends the system in ways that I just don't plain dig. Prepping games for high level 3.5 seemed less like fun and more like doing homework. And the combats felt like we were swing swords in a sea of molasses.

So I asked the table what an appropriate cut off level for this campaign would be, a place on the advancement chart where we would stop and go play something else. 3.x D&D's structure heavily favors longterm advancement planning, so I thought the players would want to know in advance that their PCs would never advance beyond level X. I felt a group consultation was in order, in case some player was just dying to get a special ability only available at a certain level.

In my mind's eye we would all agree to end the campaign when the PCs reached some level in the low to mid teens. Instead, Doug said "If you're talking about switching to Star Wars Saga, I say we stop the campaign at level six." The PCs are 6th level right now.

Doug went on to explain that the present campaign was a good time, but that he was eager to play the shiny new Star Wars game. And we had kinda lost campaign momentum with the Sunken Ziggurat module, which I still think is awesome but just doesn't fit my high octane/low attention span style. And losing Jason as a player also took some wind out of the sails of the campaign. Meanwhile, I am also very keen to try out the new Star Wars game. It looks pretty damn sweet.

So we spent the rest of the night talking out the dimensions of a new Star Wars campaign as Stuart and Pat flipped through my copy of the rules. We played my copy of season one of the Clone Wars cartoon, as Stuart hadn't seen it yet and a Clone Wars era game was one of the possibilities we discussed. Although Doug made some very good arguments for a Clone Wars game, we eventually settled on a Rebellion era campaign.

As I see it, a Rebel campaign provides at least three big advantages to a Star Wars GM. First, kicking off adventures is a piece o' cake. Mon Mothma/Princess Leia/General Dodonna/your mom gives the PCs a mission and they fly off to adventure. Or the Empire shows up to wreck everyone's shit. Second, the Rebels are the underdogs, not backed up the resources of the Republic. And third, I get to play Darth Vader once in a while. On the players end, they get to stick it to the Man and any Jedi in play is one of a mysterious handful in the campaign, not part of a stodgy order with 10,000 members and a bunch of stupid rules.

Beyond Vinland is not going away immediately or altogether. In two weeks we'll fight some serpent people as planned. But that session is going to be the end of Season One, so to speak. The plan is to come back to that campaign later, perhaps after retooling it a bit and recruiting a fourth player. But in August we'll be starting Rebel Scum, which will begin just a bit before Episode IV and play out adventures running parallel to and weaving in and out of the Original Trilogy.

The first mission for the PCs: steal some boring technical data to this new space station thingy the Empire is building.

10 comments:

  1. [T]he Union of the Snake, a yuan-ti death cult from the 80's.

    Ten points to Gryffindor!

    Oh, BTW -- good luck on the Star Wars campaign. That setting rocks, and you're right about how easy it is on the GM. I ran a successful campaign about non-aligned swoop racers who ended up joining with the Alliance and spent their time dodging gangsters, foiling Imperials, working diplomatic magic and trying to outrun their pasts.

    Ziinnnng! It was aces.

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  2. Anonymous9:54 AM

    Mmmm.
    Sorry to piss in your cornflakes:
    This is not good news.

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  3. Don't leave me hanging, man! What's the big problem?

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  4. Anonymous10:29 AM

    [I´m well aware I´m totally stretching it, as I don´t know basically nothing about your players or your GMing. But I have some theories about them]

    Well, you guys were freaked all about "Vikings!" and "Awesome!".
    I said, that would peter out after a while, remember?

    So excitement dropped off, the campaign went were it is now.

    Your excitement for Star Wars doesn´t even come close (from what I´ve read) to the excitement for the Beyond Vinland campaign.

    So, the strategic-gonzo-viking approach wasn´t the right recipe for this group, no big deal, it´s a niche interest (strategic hex-based etc.) not everybody cares for.

    I fear, a casually run "blast the stormtroopers" romp will stale after level 6 for this group too.

    I´d say: your group has players in it, that would gladly be taken by the hand on a magic carpet ride through whatever Universe you could agree on. I´d postulate you´ve got people at the table who would dig a low strategy, highly explodey and tactically reactive game, that is held together by an awesome mind boggling story line.

    So if you go the SW route: Get excited yourself, and come up or steal an ultra-awesome plot that unfolds, with the players having to react. If you don´t want or don´t come up with a mind-boggling Dr. Who paced extravaganza as the backdrop and explanation for the explodey stuff, I fear it will not work.

    Hope you know what I´m trying to say. And I´m 100% sure you can pull it off, heck you are the general of mind boggling awesome.

    Is your excitement for Star Wars big enough to channell that awesome, though?
    That´s what I´m asking.

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  5. Okay, now I see where you are coming from. You raise legit points, but I am not particularly concerned by any of them. And here's why:

    1) The shine came off the Beyond Vinland campaign primarily through my mistake of shoehorning the Sunken Ziggurat into the game. In retrospect I should have swiped the best bits and chopped the whole adventure down to 2 to 4 encounters. That's a lesson I'll not soon forget. The players seem to want less big dungeon crawly stuff and more exploration and colonization. In Season Two we'll tackle that head-on. Also: Amazons.

    2) I've been subdued talking about Star Wars for the opposite reason you suspect. I am TOTALLY PSYCHED and ready to do some galactic freak-outs with droids and weird aliens and exploding starships and laser swords and stuff! I've been spending a lot of free time fishing the net for Expanded Universe stuff and general sci-fi tomfoolery to swipe. I've been reading old Star Wars comics, too. The only reason I've been keeping this all on the downlow is that I didn't want to turn into Kills-his-cool-campaign-because-he-fell-in-love-with-a-new-game Guy.

    3) Six sessions of Star Wars fun is still six sessions of fun. If we all felt done at that point I'd cheerily go back to Viking Hyborian America.

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  6. Anonymous11:02 AM

    Now that sounds enthusiastic!

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  7. The first mission for the PCs: steal some boring technical data to this new space station thingy the Empire is building.

    I wonder how many groups of player characters have performed that mission over the years? :)

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  8. When I start running Star Wars (as I think I will when a long-time frined of mine finally moves back to this coast next month) my inclination is toward neither Republic nor Rebellion eras, but rather Old Republic. I like the "Tolkein in space" possibilities there, as groups of Sith lords plan galactic domination, magically devouring the life energies of planets, and small groups of Jedi end up having to make alliances with random local planetary forces to fight off the menace.

    That said, I could go many ways on this. I have a giant-sized collection of Star Wars minis, so I can power out legions of Storm Troopers, tons of Clones, Droids, and Jedi, and even the occasional ancient Sith Lord.

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  9. Anonymous7:04 AM

    Hi Jeff, check the comment i just left on your kid skull blog.

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  10. Jeff, I hope you will forgive me for this faux pas, but I feel I must pimp a blog entry of mine that I hope you will find interesting, entertaining, and relevant to your upcoming Star Wars campaign: The Bothan as unit of measure.

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