Friday, March 3, 2023

Bronze Anniversary

A constant theme of this blog since I returned to it in 2020 is the need for long campaigns. One of the reasons I've become so fixated on this particular point is my experience refereeing my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, which celebrates its eighth anniversary today. When I posted a call for players on Google+ all those years ago, I had no idea that it would last as long as it has. Nevertheless, I did hope that it might endure, since I do not begin any campaign lightly and indeed have come to be repulsed by the idea of "one shots" and "mini campaigns."

One of the most common topics of the emails I receive from readers concerns the "secret" of the longevity of the House of Worms. I struggle with answering this question, because I'm not sure there is a secret to the campaign's success. However, if pressed, I usually point to three "ingredients" that I genuinely believe have played a big role in keeping the dice rolling each week. The first – and most important in my opinion – are the players. I have seven regular players, each of whom brings something different to our virtual table, thereby helping to make it greater than the sum of its individual parts. One player is a mapmaker extraordinaire, another a wily schemer, and yet another a bold adventurer. I could go on, but my point is quite simple: the House of Worms campaign would be nothing without its players. Their imagination, creativity, skill, and dedication have ensured that we continue to have a lot of fun exploring Tékumel together.

Speaking of dedication, that's the second ingredient. This one is easy to overlook, because it seems so basic as to barely be worthy of comment. Yet, I can't stress enough how vital it is that we all show up each week. While there have been plenty of weeks over the years when we haven't played for one reason or another, we strive to play every week that we have sufficient players to do so (in general, I prefer we have five out of seven players, though we've sometimes played with fewer). The cumulative effect of this is momentum. Each session builds upon the one before it. As weeks become months and months years, the campaign acquires a mass that ensures that it keeps growing and changing – and entertaining us.

That brings us to the third ingredient: change. When the House of Worms began, the player characters were all 1st-level nobodies in the city of Sokátis, bossed around by their elders to do errands for their clan. Now, they are the Imperial-sanctioned rulers of a colonial outpost of Tsolyánu in a far-away land, making momentous decisions for themselves and indeed Tékumel itself. At each step in the characters' journey, the campaign has shifted and changed – from delving in the underworld to wilderness exploration to colonial governance to the present, when the PCs contend with gods and wrestle with the deeper mysteries of the setting. Though there is a strong thread of continuity between March 2015 and March 2023, there is also a great deal of change, which has kept things fresh for both myself and the players.

None of these ingredients alone would suffice to keep the campaign going after eight years. Together they combine in ways that continue to surprise and delight both myself and the players, which is what any good RPG campaign should do. I make no predictions on how long House of Worms will continue. A couple of times in the past I briefly thought the campaign was running low of "fuel" and might finally end, but I was mistaken in this. At the moment, events have shifted toward some new problems and a new phase of the campaign seems to have begun. This has once again injected more energy into our sessions and I don't see an obvious end in sight – but who knows? After eight years, the campaign has a life of its own and it will do what it wishes. I'm simply grateful to be along for the ride, however long it lasts. 

20 comments:

  1. Congrats. I'm no longer a Barker fan but that's still an impressive run. Your table should be handing around some anniversary gifts - supposedly bronze and pottery items are Year Eight fare, but I guess chlen-hide will have to substitute for bronze. :)

    Maybe a trip to Pottery Barn to make some commemorative plaques or cups is in order? Or does your player roster include someone with a home kiln? Ought to do something to celebrate.

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    1. "I'm no longer a Barker fan" - I can't imagine why. :D

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    2. Of my current campaigns, my 5e Wilderlands dates to Jan 2015 (with precursors back to 2009), but there is no PC continuity, and only one continuous player. My Faerun Adventures dates to August 2018, with one PC & 2 players from then still active.

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  2. A major strength of D&D is how its feel can change over time as PCs level up. Recent editions tended to lose sight of this a bit, despite the 'tiers of play'.

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    1. I thought 4e did an excellent job of making its tiers of play distinctly different experiences. And unlike strictly RAW OD&D and its spinoffs, you actually had a chance to survive long enough to experience them all.

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    2. My experience from a 5.5 year 4e campaign was that Heroic & Paragon Tiers worked well, but Epic Tier felt like 'too little butter over too much bread' - http://frloudwater.blogspot.com/2017/04/

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    3. Epic tier did put a lot more work on the GM to coordinate player goals and expectations as they worked toward whatever destiny they were chasing. Might have worked better if they'd condensed that tier to five or even three levels and widened the earlier ones a bit instead. Also helped if you were playing in the post-DMG2/Essentials era when they tweaked the heck out of monster math so stuff wasn't quite so tanky. Some big dumb bags of hit points in Epic before then.

      But really, it's no worse than any edition has been for high-level play, and arguably better than some. IME 3/3.5 were seriously clunky past the low teens even.

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    4. 3/3.5 was definitely the worst for playability!

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    5. Can't really agree with that either. 3.0 was fine up until about 9th level, much better than anything TSR ever produced. Lot to be said for a cohesive design approach and a lot more shared mechanics, which is part of why d20 was such a boom.

      But once you got into double digits it bogged down fast, and by even mid-teens it was just a nightmarish chore to GM. And that only got worse as the edition matured and more and more splatbooks came out from both WotC and 3PP. Went down the same failed path that AD&D 2nd ed had taken, too many poorly thought out options books too fast, but it got even worse even faster as you leveled up.

      3.5 was a bad compromise that suffered from almost all of the same problems 3.0 had accumulated and piled more on top, sadly. If the design team had focused on vigorously streamlining mid-to-high level play rather than the limited patches they did make we might never have even seen 4e - which would have been a shame iMO, but I might not have cared if 3.5 had been done right and gotten d20 D&D back to its relatively slick roots that it briefly had under 3.0.

      If there's one universal truism I'd assert it's that every edition of D&D by anyone has been at their worst at high-level play. Just never gets as much playtesting time during development, and it shows...repeatedly. Which makes really long term campaigns like James is talking about very difficult, although at least with older TSR-era editions progress is very slow indeed when playing RAW. In eight years of regular play EPT (which levels similarly to early D&D) has gotten his PCs to what, average levels of seven or eight? Be a few years yet before they're really at risk of outgrowing the sweet spot of the system - and EPT doesn't "age" as fast as actual OD&D in my limited experience, partly thanks to a lack of endless supplements adding complexity and options.

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    6. "Can't really agree with that either. 3.0 was fine up until about 9th level" I vaguely remember that by 3rd level, 3.0 Clerics totally dominated Fighters with their buff spells like Bull's Strength & Bear's Endurance. I also remember playing Pathfinder 1e Beginner Box and realising I could make a high STR Cleric who did everything better than a Fighter, including fight better. But certainly 3e was worst at high level, I GM'd 3.5 to 19th and it was pretty bad from at least 9th.

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    7. Clerics could be stupidly powerful in 3/3.5 (and arguably in every edition, that's never been wholly fixed - 4e might be the best attempt to date) but it never made much sense to stat-buff yourself if there was an actual fighter or barbarian in the party instead. Even strength-build rogues were decent choices. Bumping their already-excellent strength let the whole party get more benefit out of their offensive feats, and buffing constitution kept them in the fight longer before they needed healing support so the cleric could do more offensive work.

      One of the best tweaks in 3.5 was nerfing the duration of the stat-buff spells. Toned the cleric down a bit while also letting them consider other spells in those slots.

      Of course, a party full of clerics could do melee fine no matter who else was along in any edition. They're just stupidly versatile, even in OD&D. I can remember GMs all the way back in the early 80s house ruling them to d6 hit dice and swapping thieves to d8 just to get the classes to be a little more even.

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    8. Since spell buffs don't stack with item buffs, they were almost never cast after 9th level in our group.

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  3. I was going to ask if you thought the campaign might end when the current PCs go inactive due to old age or death, but then I remembered that the House of Worms are devotees of Sarku; why should death hinder them? :)

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    1. It's funny you should say that because at least one character, Znayáshu, is determined to make his way to the College at the End of Time "the long way" – by becoming an undead that continues to exist for eternity.

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    2. That could make for a very long campaign...

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    3. Time travel into the future one day at a time is a prosaic approach but if you keep it up long enough it's still an impressive feat.

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  4. Congrats! Glad you got past the seven year itch.

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  5. Congratulations. Having a campaign history that deep is indeed a great joy to the DM and players alike. It's a real treat when an NPC resurfaces or the party returns to a location after years (or even a decade!) of absence. Magical really.

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  6. "The first – and most important in my opinion – are the players. I have seven regular players, each of whom brings something different to our virtual table, thereby helping to make it greater than the sum of its individual parts."
    -This. This is it. This is why I'm currently running my own longest game. Because I've lucked into the right group of people. I would posit that the other two factors (at least at my table, YMMV) flow directly from the players. Its their Dedication that keeps them showing up every week, and their Ambition (and mistakes..) that drives most of the change that occurs.

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  7. Couldn't agree with you more. Are weekly OD&D Campaign that has lasted over 5+ years has been an amazing journey with the real Fun of the Campaign coming in at around the year 3 mark, and it was all uphill from there. Kingdoms fell, A Queen was assassinated, the PC's took full control of the major trade routes and established strongholds and supported the creation and funding of a Mercenary nation. Good times.

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