Lessons from my first Campaign

In 20 days the Nippur Sunnan campaign will be two years old and about to gear up for its 34th session. This is the first long campaign I've ever ran and as such it's taught me a thing or two about running these things. This post is not so much a detailed retrospective as a handful of things I am pleased with, along with other things that, well, live and learn.



So let us begin with the stuff that don't work for me, which may well be called rookie mistakes...

1- Session zero: using it to worldbuild together and mine ideas is all well and good and productive, especially when creating an original setting and houseruling, but the time is probably even better spent discussing playstyle and play expectations with the core group that you know is committed to playing for long. This is the kind of game I want to play. What kind of game do you want to play? is probably the single most important question when putting a table together, unless you know each other for so long that you already know the answer - even then, I'd double check.

2- Railroads are not fun for anyone - including the GM. On that note, if you railroad the party for the first four sessions and suddenly announce you want the adventure to turn into a sandbox starting with session five, expect mixed results - especially if you insist on portraying a GMPC present in most sessions all the way into the teens...

3- Pregens are no good. This is especially true in a campaign.

4- Don't pull punches. I've never pulled one I didn't regret.

5- Milestone XP is not a good idea - especially so if awarded early. It diminishes players' sense of agency about their characters' advancement and robs the game of the fun (and the terror) of playing a low-level character in a potentially deadly world. You only get to be level 1 once per character...

6- Off-game meta-chat about expectations: I underestimated the importance of having this on a continuing basis, especially when putting a new group together. Sometimes things do not happen organically and you need to hash them out.


Before this becomes a new-GM-self-pity-party (queue Bob Seger's "Turn the Page"), let's talk positives.

1- Sandboxes work better... that is, when you only plan ahead for the next session instead of the next couple sessions. The flipside of this is that the party needs to plan long term - but players are perfectly capable of doing that (again, if expectations are shared and clear).

2- Worldbuilding is incredibly fun. This game helped me imagine a land the size of a subcontinent, dotted with city states with distinct personalities. I can see myself returning to this setting after the campaign is over. Mythohistorical Ancient Mesopotamia is fascinating.

3- You don't need ideas if you got a gameable concept put down on a roll table. Instead of carefully hashed out ideas, prepping for a session by making an idea generator that gives you an array of obstacles to drop in front of the party can have really memorable results.

4- I would do anything for love, but I won't do 5E. Running a game for this long has allowed me to put together a small core group of players that I would play almost anything with. And it is pretty sweet to game weekly with a good group of friends.