How To Kill Your D&D Game Without Really Trying

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I’ve ended some campaigns in the past.  My good friend Greg reminded me, right here in the blog, about the now-infamous Winter Court fiasco, for example.  It occurred to me that maybe there is a lesson or two I could share with you all.  Maybe if you could avoid the mistakes I made in that campaign, you can be spared the frustration and anxiety I experienced.

To give you some background, I decided in the fall of 2003 that I was going to start an Oriental Adventures campaign.  Specifically, I decided I was going to start a Rokugan campaign.  See, I’d been exposed to the Legend of the Five Rings settings via the collectible card game at Gen Con, and was truly enamored with the Clan system.  I even bought the Clan Wars miniatures set and painted 40 some-odd samurai figs.  Here was the first problem, though.  Did you see it up there?  *I* decided.

Step #1:  Choose a campaign setting your players aren’t into.

Now, let’s not jump to any conclusions.  I didn’t force-feed them Rokugan.  In fact, I took a good three weeks to poll my players, dig into their collective brains, and try to decide on what campaign setting they wanted.  There wasn’t a true consensus;  there was a slight preference for Colona, my self-designed campaign world, with the Realms coming in a close second.  Rokugan was in the bottom half, although no one outrightly opposed it.  And, they preferred it to Ravenloft.

But they weren’t into it.  See, Rokugan is a tough setting to play if you’re not really into it.  The core classes are different, magic works differently, and you’ve got things like clans, honor and taint to deal with.  And my players are loyal to a fault and willing to try anything, but they didn’t want to spend hours learning all of the intricacies of the world.  So, I wound up with Shugenja casting standard-world spells like flaming sphere, and Samurai with a level of core Ranger so as to get  the two-weapon bonus (this was 3.0, pre-nerfed Ranger).  Mechanically those things work, but they killed the flavor. 

But, that wasn’t the only thing that killed that particular campaign.  See, I really have to give some credit to the only two words my players use today to describe the campaign:  Winter Court.

Step #2:  Force-feed good role-playing

photo credit: saintovbastards

Sometimes, you just can’t move your players.

 Winter Court was a single gaming session that lasted about 5 hours.  During that time, the idea was that the characters had to do just a shit-load of role-playing.  They had a variety of objectives, including solving a murder, courtship, diplomacy and others.  It was, in many ways, the opposite of the Warcraft Miracle Night (I’ll explain that one another time.)

At any rate, there were so many role-playing hooks that I couldn’t seem to present any of them in a way that engaged my players.  Add to that the fact that, at the time, I had a couple of hack-and-slashers as players (No, Greg.  Not you.  I’m talking about Swamp Beast and the Big Red Dog).  That certainly didn’t help things.

The result of that session?  Everyone.  Was.  Bored.  Out.  Of.  Their.  Minds.

Had I stopped right there, we probably could have ended the game and moved on.  But, I was determined.  You see, there were good reasons, both before and after Winter Court, for me to move on.  I completely missed them.

Step #3:  Ignore the warning signs

I remember having to explain honor and taint at least once a session, sometimes twice.  No one was listening.  Not because they were rude (they weren’t, necessarily) but because they weren’t interested.  Explain something once and they get it, that’s great.  Explain it twice, that’s fine too.  Probably a learning curve.  Explain it six times and it must, by definition, be uninteresting and forgettable.

Now, I get that players sometimes have to miss a game.  But with Rokugan, it seemed like we had at least one player gone each session, sometimes two.  Sometimes, that happens.  But not for six sessions in a row.  The fact that people were skipping out on D&D night to go out to dinner with an uncle should have been a sign.  In fact, it was a sign.  I just missed it. 

My players kept trying to back out (individually) due to scheduling reasons.  I kept trying to accommodate them.  That caused yet another problem.

Step #4:  Get off schedule

Randy and I are opposites, in many ways, when it comes to DMing.  Randy is a schedule Nazi.  He plays, every two weeks on Friday, come hell or high water.  And, if you can’t commit to that schedule, don’t even think about joining his campaign.  I, on the other hand, tend to take the “we’ll play whenever” approach.

I really don’t advocate either approach.  I think you have to have a routine, but I also think you need to have some flexibility built into that routine.  How you do that is the topic of another blog post, someday.

Anyways, the result of “we’ll play whenever” became “we’ll play in 4 weeks,” and then “we’ll play in a couple of months,” and then, “Hey.  Anyone want to start a new D&D campaign?  I’m thinking Realms.”

Step #5:  Fizzle out

photo credit: I, Timmy

D&D campaigns rarely die quickly.  I told you before about the big blow-up we had during my wife’s campaign.  That blow-up didn’t end things.  It was a blowout that we patched.  D&D campaigns end more like a slow leak.  To mix metaphors, D&D campaigns don’t get the luxury of decapitation.  They bleed out.  Or better yet, they get a festering sore that starts on the ankle and winds up in a leprous coating over the entire body.

Ew.

Maybe we’ll just say they sort of fizzle out.

And it did.  That’s what happened to my Rokugan game.  What did I learn from the experience?  Like the headline says:  I learned how to kill a D&D game without trying.

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I also learned some important lessons about my group, my own personality, life, and even some lessons about running a small business from this experience, by the way.  See, in any endeavor, especially a business, you can’t ignore your customers’ input.  You can’t force your customers to want your product.  You have to watch for warning signs that something is wrong, because some customers just won’t come out and say it.  And you’ve got to be diligent about deadlines and follow-up, or you’ll never have them as a customer again.

Tagged as: campaigns, D&D, d20, dm, dnd, dragons, dungeon master, dungeons, l5r, oriental adventures, rokugan, rpg