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canyonwalkerWe played my D&D game again today. At this point the group completed the original adventure I planned, The Collector's Menagerie, and the encore adventure, Escorting the Caravan. (The latter is involved a hobgoblin ambush, an epic horse chase through the badlands, a moment when the mage almost bought the farm, and meting out harsh frontier justice.) But still the players wanted more! This is turning into a campaign— which is emphatically not what I planned, but as long as everyone's enjoying it I'm willing to go with it.
What's the difference between an adventure and a campaign? Frankly, it's spending a lot of game time on bookkeeping.
For these single adventure games I've done a few strategic things to reduce the propensity to get bogged down in bookkeeping work. D&D is a crunchy mechanics game, so it's an easy trap to fall into. Character sheets have loads of detail. I short-circuited a lot of that decision making up front by providing pre-generated characters for the players. I put thought into preparing those characters, making them all interesting and worth playing. The players all found characters they were happy to play.
To reduce the ongoing drag friction of a crunchy-rules game I do things like hit the "easy" button on encumbrance. In fact I purposefully keep gear lists short, not listing every last coin or piece of chalk people have, to head off getting bogged down in inventory management.
And when the group hits a city and wants to buy and sell items, I short-circuit the literal hours that can be burned trying to roleplay bargaining for the absolute best prices by suggesting they hand off that work to an NPC and we just focus on the narrative rather than the minutiae.
And yet....
By growing from "Adventure" into "Campaign" one of the things that gets added in is Leveling Up.
It's a classic good news, bad news situation. Good news: the characters everyone has enjoyed playing have earned enough experience points to go up a level. Going up a level means more abilities, more bonuses, new spells, etc. Huzzah!
Bad news: Leveling up means lots of bookkeeping. Players have to comb through their character sheets, identifying what needs to be updating, then cross reference with rule books, whether digital or old-fashioned paper— often both!— to research the options and choose from among them. Skills points had to be allocated, added up, and their math rechecked. Feats had to be chosen. New spells had to be selected. Oh, and there there still all the loot from the last adventure that had to be divvied up!
We spent more than half of today's D&D session leveling everyone up. And that's even after I got everyone's buy-in ahead of time that we would work to keep it simple.
Update: Players pointed out to me that the guy in blue is actually the spy the group captured and killed. 😨 I prompted AI to fix the picture. The result is in a new blog about leveling up.
What's the difference between an adventure and a campaign? Frankly, it's spending a lot of game time on bookkeeping.
For these single adventure games I've done a few strategic things to reduce the propensity to get bogged down in bookkeeping work. D&D is a crunchy mechanics game, so it's an easy trap to fall into. Character sheets have loads of detail. I short-circuited a lot of that decision making up front by providing pre-generated characters for the players. I put thought into preparing those characters, making them all interesting and worth playing. The players all found characters they were happy to play.
To reduce the ongoing drag friction of a crunchy-rules game I do things like hit the "easy" button on encumbrance. In fact I purposefully keep gear lists short, not listing every last coin or piece of chalk people have, to head off getting bogged down in inventory management.
And when the group hits a city and wants to buy and sell items, I short-circuit the literal hours that can be burned trying to roleplay bargaining for the absolute best prices by suggesting they hand off that work to an NPC and we just focus on the narrative rather than the minutiae.
And yet....
By growing from "Adventure" into "Campaign" one of the things that gets added in is Leveling Up.
It's a classic good news, bad news situation. Good news: the characters everyone has enjoyed playing have earned enough experience points to go up a level. Going up a level means more abilities, more bonuses, new spells, etc. Huzzah!
Bad news: Leveling up means lots of bookkeeping. Players have to comb through their character sheets, identifying what needs to be updating, then cross reference with rule books, whether digital or old-fashioned paper— often both!— to research the options and choose from among them. Skills points had to be allocated, added up, and their math rechecked. Feats had to be chosen. New spells had to be selected. Oh, and there there still all the loot from the last adventure that had to be divvied up!
We spent more than half of today's D&D session leveling everyone up. And that's even after I got everyone's buy-in ahead of time that we would work to keep it simple.
Update: Players pointed out to me that the guy in blue is actually the spy the group captured and killed. 😨 I prompted AI to fix the picture. The result is in a new blog about leveling up.
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