Following Up an Awesome Session

[batsofchaos]

So I had an awesome session with my party yesterday, the exact details have been spoilered:

So yesterday my party got trounced by the main antagonist of the first half of the campaign (not the BBEG; but might as well be for the time being), who was angry at them for some stuff they'd been doing but is kinda a live-and-let-live sorta guy and just wanted to beat the crap out of them so he could tell them off and set some ground rules for coexistent living. These included leaving his tribe alone, and most importantly not mining his mountain. He let slip that the weird coins the PC's had found last session were of seemingly vital importance to him and demanded to know where they got the things. He tanked his sense motive check and just assumed they were lying, but they had only a couple of coins and he was convinced they were insignificant to begin with anyway, so he left them in peace.

The party extrapolated that the coins (which were found in a chamber in an underground limestone cave the session before) must be part of a "set" that was somewhere under the mountain that they were just told not to mine on. They decided this warranted further investigation, so they headed back to the caves to where they found the coins. The coins were in a single pool of still water that had a gray ooze hanging out in it. They got back to the spot and lo and behold, there was a new gray ooze there. Dispatching that ooze, they discovered that there was a crack in the floor of the chamber leading off in the general direction of the BBEG's mountain, so they smashed through the rest of the wall. A quick dungeon-crawl through the large, geode-like chambers they hacked their way through more oozes, zombie minotaurs, and zombie monstrous spiders until they got to the final chamber.

The final chamber was the home of a late adult green dragon who, along with the rest of the dungeon, was undeadified when the real BBEG killed her and completed a ritual that released a hell of a lot of negative energy. The party (which was level 6) then fought an adult green dragon skeleton complete with some humanoid skeletons. After nearly dying (multiple times), briefly retreating, hacking and smashing, the paladin lands the killing blow with a smite evil that decapitates the thing. Little bit of exploring and they find the horde, which after taxation and tithing brings them up to a little bit more than the WBL guidelines for 7th level (they leveled from the crawl).

The session rocked. My players were into it, the CR was just perfect for a lot of close-calls but no one died, the monsters invoked fear from the players (which further cemented how mean the mini-BBEG is for taking them out dealing subdual damage, something I wanted to get across), and everyone came out ahead.

Now, how do you follow a session like that? I've got two weeks to plan, but I'm hitting a wall. I have another dungeon-crawl that needs to be done in fairly short-order, but after that last one I think it'll be disappointing (it's got some where-rats, and clues to the plot....is that as cool as undead dragons and piles of gold and jewels?)

But is that a good or a bad thing? Should a rockin' session be followed by a calmer session at the risk of being a little disappointing, or should the action be further ramped-up?

[Valairn]

Well its the middle of the campaign, a calmer session is probably fine. If it was the end though, you would want to ramp it up further :-D!

[Chronicled]

But is that a good or a bad thing? Should a rockin' session be followed by a calmer session at the risk of being a little disappointing, or should the action be further ramped-up?

I'm a fan of having awesome followed by more awesome, but you can only go so far with that before you run out of steam (unless you're someone like SilverClawShift's DM, and then please please teach me). It really depends on where the story is, and how you want the mood. Remember that even action/horror films slow down once in a while.

[batsofchaos]

What's SilverClawShift's DM like? If you could point me towards a thread, I'm curious to see how I match up. :D

I've got misgivings on going for the next dungeon-crawl again, since the mission ended up influencing a lot of things in the campaign-world. The mini-BBEG (who is actually the off-spring of the undead dragon they killed; he was in the only egg that was not destroyed by the undead dragon. He hatched horribly malnourished and sickly. It managed to escape the cave and bond with a gnoll above the surface in a little bit of homebrew creature. The party doesn't know that the gnoll is actually a dragon of sorts, but they know he's not normal.) has been trying to get back into the cave so he could claim the horde for himself, and when he does get in (which without further hindrances will be six months in-game time) and the horde isn't there is going to go nuts. I'm hoping the party leaves him be for now, since that's going to be a climactic battle that they need a couple more levels before they have a chance of winning against just him...and he'd full out attack with an army of gnolls. So for right now barring PC heroics I think he's going to be moved to the background.

The central focus of the campaign is the party was hired to provide help and protection for a brand new colony on a mostly-untouched island. The start had a deep tension throughout since the lord who started it went severely into debt with multiple groups, the largest of which was the church. The dragon horde ended up paying off all the debt and made the colony the richest per-capita town in the empire. The population's going to absolutely explode with people. I'd like to focus on this intense growth, but that sounds to me like a fifteen minute monologue at the start of the next game, not an adventure. I'm sure there's a kernel of an adventure in there somewhere, though...

[Chronicled]

What's SilverClawShift's DM like? If you could point me towards a thread, I'm curious to see how I match up. :D

Here's SilverClawShift's campaign diary (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59107) (you'll have to skim past the suggestions of how to defend the town).

Your campaign sounds like top-notch DMing, from what you've written so far.

[batsofchaos]

I'm going to take that compliment and not give one ounce of complaint over it. :D

From what I've read so far, SilverClawShift's DM has a couple of things up on me: He has a knack for flavor that I can't match, and he's much better at planning than me. That horror campaign is exquisitely detailed down to the little things that I tend to forget about or do at the last minute, and he can run game after game, sometimes two nights in a row. My game runs once every two weeks, and although I usually have an idea of what's going on in the next game a day or two after a session, I'm not ready for that next game until one or two nights away. However, I'd say his general DMing style matches what I do, so although I don't want to sound like I think I'm a big shot I'll describe what I believe are the "methods to success," since you asked for them.

1) Premise is everything. Putting the party into a unique situation gets them interested, and when unique things happen to them they stay interested. This is one of the sections I tend to find lacking in myself, but I work at it and I think I've gotten better. My current campaign is described sketchily above; the PCs embark on a mission to help facilitate the birth of a town on a mostly-untouched island. I settled on this for two reasons: 1) they would be out of the comfort "return to town, buy supplies" element of DnD, since the town is effectively nonexistant to start with, and even the places that are there aren't taking money because there's no exchange rate for it yet. Supplies need to be bartered for, and favors are the biggest form of currency. 2) See section 3.

The premise is the closest thing to a standard plot that a DM should come up with (see section 2 for more details) in a campaign. This step include the campaign world itself if one was create from scratch, but also includes thematic flavor, major players, types of monsters, and BIG over-arching events (like the zombie apocalypse in SilverClawShift's campaign). One can go generic with this, but the least to be done is to come up with the major players, including repeating plot-hook protagonists and the major villain or villains.

2) Plot is the most important element to a well-coordinated campaign, but plot is not a linear storyline. Many DMs get trapped in a linear storyline that makes the players frustrated since they can't seem to do anything outside of the plot. These DMs railroad because they want their stories to stay in tact. The players are basically along for the ride. This is one of the worst things a DM can do, since it takes choices and power out of the characters hands. However, what can be a worse solution is the DM who eschews plot so as to not railroad. What happens then is basically a "sandbox" game with no direction. The PCs can go to site A and fight some monsters, move along to Site C and destroy an Orc encampment, completely skip Site B forever and move right into Site D. The party will level up, get new stuff, fight more things, level up again, and nothing else happens. This can be a death-sentence to long-running games when all the action devolves into new dungeon crawl, tougher monsters.

A better solution, in my opinion, is to change ones concept of plot. After all, life is not scripted in a linear fashion. Except that it is, for each and every individual. NPCs have plans. They have goals, ambitions, and aspirations. When I sit down to figure out my plots, all my plots are is the goals of individuals and what they are doing to achieve those goals over time. The best resource for learning how to do this well is Rich Burlew's article on creating the perfect Big Bad. This formula works for everyone, even the lowliest NPC.

I don't think one should script goals for EVERY character in the game, that would take years to prepare and you'd probably burn out before a single die hit the table. Sometimes groups of people are the best to plan for, if that group has a unified goal that they will work towards together.

Here's a generic example: A tribe of goblins share a small cave system with a tribe of kobolds. The goblins have been having escalated conflict with the kobolds, but are wrapped up in dealing with a power-vacuum within the tribe. The leader has fallen ill, and two luitenants are vying for control. One luitenant is a front-line fighter, and the other is a sneaky rogue.

With no outside influence, the fighter-type will get most of the goblin mooks on his side, and will assume control in a month's time. After that, they will attack the kobolds full-force and clear them out of the caves in an additional month. The goblins will be spread throughout the cave system, but would be fairly thin and sparse in number.

However, if the goblins were to face outside conflict, the rogue-type would use the confusion to assassinate the fighter-type, and attempt to escape with the rest of the tribe. Provided they survive, they will make a pact with the kobolds and come to a shared agreement of the cave system; goblins will help protect the kobolds with guards and muscle, and kobolds will fortify the goblins with cunning traps, effectively making both groups more deadly.

The players might not see all of this, especially not anything from the if/then scenario, but just developing this story can make role-playing any of the goblins that much easier; you know where they're coming from, what they're dealing with at the moment, and what they want. Knowing these things off the cuff will breathe life into them.

3) Let the PCs impact the world. Nothing gets my dander up more than events not having realistic consequences. If the party clears out an abandoned tower filled with monsters for an NPC, they should be able to come back to that tower later and see it repaired and filled with friendly NPCs who are grateful to the PCs. If they kill all of the goblins, then the kobold tribe should take over the rest of the cave.

These impacts are what's important to driving the "plot." The premises developed in section 2 are only brief bios until the PCs come in and gum up the works. This is what makes the whole world come to life. The NPCs react to the party's presense, not only in a direct conflict, but also from subtle changes from far away. Maybe the lizardfolk tribe in the forest is living an idyllic utopia, until the PCs enter their forest to camp and the split opinions about whether to ignore or attack causes the entire society to collapse from in-fighting and back-stabbing.

Enforcing this is one of the hinge-points for my campaign and is one of the reasons why I settled on the premise that I did. I wanted the Players to be invested in this town. They have and will devote days of real-time and months of game-time to protecting and helping. When they arrived on the island, the site of the planned town was a fairly-level field. When the campaign ends (provided things don't go really sour), it will be a bustling city, well on its way to becoming a metropolis. This is down to some of the PCs planning out how the buildings are going to look; I gave all of them a bonus skill point to put into a craft-skill that would make them the "perfect recruits" for going on the mission in the first place. The church, the center of the town, is going to be designed by the cleric and paladin (cleric is a stone mason, paladin is a carpenter). What the PCs do impacts this town immensely and perceptibly, and that's exactly what I want to happen.

4) Plan your rear off. Part of setting up a campaign this way means that sometimes the party isn't interested in the main plot-hook. Not because they think its good role-playing to say they're uninterested, but just because they're aware of other things going on that they want to deal with on game-day instead of the planned events. This can be a headache, but its a sign of success. The party doesn't want to serve as guard-duty for the dwarves, because they'd much rather deal with the mysterious prostitute murders that have taken a sharp increase in the past month. Congratulations DM, you've got your party involved in your campaign beyond "it's a place to kill stuff."

Now, there are two options for dealing with this. The first is to be able to come up with stats, maps, NPC personalities, set descriptions, puzzles, and anything else under the sun that may come up. The second is to have all this preplanned. Now, all preplanned is unrealistic, because that's way too much work for even exceptionally-detailed DMs and can result of pre-game-stall where a name never gets off the ground because it's never "ready" enough for the DM. Best thing to do preplanning for is those immediate intrigues.

I usually have four scenarios planned out at the start of any session in case my players skip the hook. When I say planned, they're not nearly as polished as the intended hook, but their together enough to play. Rough maps, general idea of antagonists and rewards, and some conceptual setting-work done. It's not the best, but it's something that I can comfortably wing if necessary. It's best for each individual DM to determine what level of detail they need in order to comfortably run a session like this.

These are the things I keep in mind when I sit down at the game table. Hope you got something out of that wall of text!

[hylian chozo]

Here's SilverClawShift's campaign diary (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=59107) (you'll have to skim past the suggestions of how to defend the town).

Your campaign sounds like top-notch DMing, from what you've written so far.

Yeah, I've read that. It starts at page 6 and gains awesomeness as it goes on. That DM truly is a genius.

[batsofchaos]

I did a little bit of brainstorming, and I think I've settled on the main premise for the next session, provided my players don't decide to go off in another direction. I've been less than stellar in doing some planning last couple of sessions (read: I've been really lazy), so I've got a little bit of extra work planning for other adventures.

As I mentioned before, the success of the previous mission raised the status of the town tremendously; debts have been paid and it's spread like wildfire that hundreds of thousands of gold-pieces were found on the island. The population is exploding, bringing with it specialists that are going to significantly speed up the town's building process. The church had an estimated time of construction coming in at 10 years. Before the gold, there were roughly 25 stone masons on the island, including one of the PCs. After the gold, there will be around a hundred and fifty, with several of them specialist wizards. Construction times greatly diminish when raw stone can be levitated to the site, mortar can be dried instantaneously, complicated support columns can be magically sculpted, temporary lifts and supports are made of force, the list goes on. With the magical support that wouldn't have been available without money, the church can be built in a fraction of the time. This means more buildings will go up faster.

This also means more wood will be chopped down with increasing regularity.

The PCs are unaware as of yet, but the local tropical forest is home to a large tribe of lizardfolk. By large, I mean around 5000 men, women, and children. They are very insular and have been completely absent from view of the party, but the increasing number of trees being cut down is going to incite some hostilities.

Any additional thoughts?

[Chronicled]

This post is going to be shorter than I'd like since I have to get to class, but I'll have another post up later with a bit more heft to it (and properly fleshed-out thoughts).


From what I've read so far, SilverClawShift's DM has a couple of things up on me: He has a knack for flavor that I can't match, and he's much better at planning than me. That horror campaign is exquisitely detailed down to the little things that I tend to forget about or do at the last minute, and he can run game after game, sometimes two nights in a row.
I gathered the opposite (from that thread and other posts by SilverClawShift) about that DM's planning; he seems to have an incredible ability to improvise, coupled with a laptop for easy reference of NPC stats.


Brilliant advice on DMing
I couldn't agree more. You've described my ideal style of DMing. I think a look at ars ludi's thoughts on Situations, Not Plots (http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/49/situations-not-plots/) complements what you've written pretty well.


Session ideas
Looks wonderful. (Lucky players.)

[batsofchaos]

I believe SCS's DM is indeed a master of flexibility, but I (like to) think I'm pretty flexible myself. However, flexibility only accounts for some of his versatility, and the laptop is just a handy way to refer to the planning, those stats didn't randomly appear there on their own.

I haven't finished the campaign journal thread yet, but his "plot" is planned out as far as I can see. I mean, maybe he's improvising every step of the way, but that would be a feat of epic proportions. It's perfectly possible for him to generate the ideas for the situations as he goes, but DnD stats are hard to come up with on the fly in my experience. When I'm tossed into a stat-corner, I find myself using the generic MM stats, which only works some of the time, and usually on fairly unimportant encounters. I still say planning is important, no matter how great one is at improvising. And SCS's DM is either a mathematical genius, or can plan with greater speed than I, and Occam's Razor says it's probably the planning. Although I won't discount the possibility of mathematical geniusitude (It's a word, I SWEAR.)

I look forward to the longer write-up! If you can't tell, I'm a fan of HUGE BLOCKS OF WRITING. ;)

[Yakk]

Re Silver's DM:
Most of the big battles (ie, wars) happened after a break. So the DM had time to prepare.

Small battles can be "bundles" prebuilt that could happen anywhere, or with generic mooks.

Medium battles where modular pieces. Having a crypt encounter with the chain-demon-thing, the vampire battle, the dancer, the ambush by the wizard, etc: simple encounters that could be built and used in the next campaign if not here, or could occur anywhere in this campaign.

...

So have a bunch of mooks ready, both monsters and civilians. Have some scene-mooks (crypt, temple, cave system, mountain, forest-nest of spiders, etc) pre-built. Ideally with easily ramp up/down opponents.

Then pacing (keeping things going), overall plot, and providing hooks for players to do something...

[batsofchaos]

Prepping a whole bunch of stuff is a great thing to do. You can build up a DM's Idea Notebook, where when super-pressed for time you can do some splicing and come up with a well-thought-out dungeon in ten or fifteen minutes. If you can disguise it with enough little changes -- switch out the mooks, flip the map, and switch from stone mountain dungeon to swampy caverns -- to where you can run the SAME dungeon on the same party without anyone noticing. Great, great resource to have.

However, I don't recommend it as a catch-all solution for actual planning and flexibility. It's great for things on the fly, but too heavily relied on and the campaign can fall flat. I personally don't have that robust of one (haven't been DMing consistently for long enough. I'm building it up, though.) and in addition I like my adventures to be as custom-tailored as possible. Control freak, I guess. Still, all the planning I do goes to one place, where it can be cannibalized later if necessary.

Writing adventures that you don't plan on using "this" campaign, with the thought that it's something to have for a rainy day is okay in moderation; doing it too often can lead to DM burnout, itchy creative fingers, and frustration. When I slave over a cunning dungeon, I want my players to experience it. If I do all that work, and know it's not going to be used for a month, I get antsy and want to share it with the players out of game. That ruins its playability, so I show it to my wife who doesn't game and that staves it off a little. However, slaving over a dungeon that may potentially never see the light of day? I don't know if I could take it, I'd have to share it with SOMEONE who gamed...

[Allis]

Writing adventures that you don't plan on using "this" campaign, with the thought that it's something to have for a rainy day is okay in moderation; doing it too often can lead to DM burnout, itchy creative fingers, and frustration. When I slave over a cunning dungeon, I want my players to experience it. If I do all that work, and know it's not going to be used for a month, I get antsy and want to share it with the players out of game. That ruins its playability, so I show it to my wife who doesn't game and that staves it off a little. However, slaving over a dungeon that may potentially never see the light of day? I don't know if I could take it, I'd have to share it with SOMEONE who gamed...

I think this is a frustration shared by many, many DM's. I'm experiencing this right now, I'm designing a campaign with a rather unique start. i'm planning to DM to small groups of characters, which will ultimately merge (or destroy each other, or who knows...) The thing is, I can't share it, because all my D&Ding friends are in one of the groups.

I could really use some feedback on the ideas, on the NPCs and overall on the whole thing, but i've got no-one to ask...

I like your city-building idea, and was thinking about what might happen if you build a suddenly-rich city like that in real life, what characters it would attract, etc. What is the reason they start this new city? I'd say a new place, so wealthy, would attract all the poor from neighburing locations, especially if there is a harsh regime or if the poverty is wide-spread. Some would beg for a place in this new city, others would use the business for their own gain. You could have boatloads of immigrants arriving everyday. This might couse all kinds of trouble, from stealing to diseases to protests and hunger...

There might be another force on the island which objects to this extensive building. What if a druid has chosen this virgin-island as the best place for his sacred and secluded grove? if I were him, I'd be quite annyed with all the tree-cutting, noise and lack of respect for nature. I might sneak in at night and try to undo as much work as I can. Half-finished buildings will become overgrown with lichen and ivy over a single noght, termites will eat away at the wooden structures, causing scafholding to collapse, etc. The building-site becomes so dangerous, laborers start protesting and lay down the work...

[Allis]

that was a double post, sorry.

also my apologies for my spelling. English is not my native language, and although most things type out fine, some things slip through.

[batsofchaos]

First off: Don't worry too much about your spelling, you've got a great grasp of English! I didn't have any trouble understanding your post, which isn't something I can say for all NATIVE English speakers. :D

I've tried posting my exciting ideas on this board, but I've not gotten very many responses in the past so it's been a somewhat disappointing outlet for me, but you can always give it a shot. It's not as good, even with a hundred replies, as talking in person but it can alleviate the "pain" a little.

The town is still in its infancy, despite being rich now; the only buildings that are complete are the temporary homes of the workers. I don't think the impoverished will arrive until some more work has been completed. That's not to say that they WON'T come; it's a great idea for the future, just not yet. I had previously envisioned the new arrivals as being fortune-seekers and dedicated workers, which works well for the start. Who else wants to go to a foreign island with the knowledge that they're going to have to build themselves a home when they get there, there won't be a market of any sort, and if they want to eat they'll probably have to hunt it themselves?

The whole campaign has a New-World flavor to it, which was definitely cultivated, so it makes sense for the first arrivals to fit the mold of frontiersmen settling the old west. Prospectors, daredevils, workers, and families looking to make it big in a new place. But after the gold was struck and towns were settled the places filled up with vagrants and outlaws, looking to slip away from their law troubles and extort their way to success in the more remote locations. There's no reason this historical extension can lend itself to the fictional world.

I've actually got a couple of villains that when "combined" resemble the hypothetical druid very closely. The lizardfolk (which will probably be introduced next session) don't want their nature reserve forested and will respond with open force, while the BBEG of the campaign has been sabotaging and driving out settlements from the island for several hundred years based on his paranoia of "developed" societies. Heh, I guess no ideas are new, eh?

EDIT: I was working in notepad, and forgot to delete original post after writing my response. Serves me right for goofing off at work!

[Allis]

I've tried posting my exciting ideas on this board, but I've not gotten very many responses in the past so it's been a somewhat disappointing outlet for me, but you can always give it a shot. It's not as good, even with a hundred replies, as talking in person but it can alleviate the "pain" a little.


Same here, I think the board is just too big, so everyone's thinking someone else will be posting a reaction. Hey, we could share ideas, right? At this moment I even have my husband enroled in the game, so I can't even share my ideas with HIM. I'm trying to design a really evil undead king. He will be brought back to life by the actions of eighter one of my adventuring groups. I do need to find something to happen to them if they are really smart and don't use the artifact. Someone-else might come and take it for himself?

I'll go and find the thread in which I've posted the idea. that saves me the trouble of going through it all again, although i don't seem to get tired of talking about it... :smallwink:

[batsofchaos]

Feel free to PM me with it if you're tired of cluttering the boards. I'm always down for that.

[Allis]

The thread about my campaign (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=77240)