Regrets

I've been writing a lot more about my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign lately – partly because the campaign is, after three years of play, on the verge of seeing the characters return to the USA and partly because I now know that readers actually enjoy periodic updates about the games I'm currently refereeing. I'd already been intending to spend more time writing about games other than Dungeons & Dragons, so this is good. There's quite a lot to talk about when it comes to both Twilight: 2000 more generally and my campaign in particular. 

As Barrett's Raiders prepares to enter a new phase, I found myself reflecting back on what's happened so far. By and large, I'm pretty happy with the result. There have been plenty of ups and downs over the years – what campaign doesn't have those? – but, taken as a whole, I feel as if this has been an enjoyable campaign with lots of memorable moments. It's still a long way from House of Worms in terms of longevity, of course. However, according to my usual metric of judging a campaign's success, namely, whether or not players keep showing up week after week, Barrett's Raiders is a winner. 

That said, I do have one significant regret: I didn't have a Session Zero. 

I've never been a big fan of the whole Session Zero concept. My preferred approach, when starting a new campaign, is simply to do a short write-up for all involved, outlining the kind of campaign I hope to run, as well as its framing, and then let the players go off into their separate corners to generate their characters. If they have questions, I'm happy to answer them, but I don't like to guide the process too much, nor do I want the other players to interfere in each others' character creation process (whatever that might be). 

In the case of Barrett's Raiders, I laid out for the players the basic scenario: the characters were all survivors of the US 5th Mechanized Infantry after the disastrous Battle of Kalisz in July 2000. Their ragtag band's initial mission is simply to survive. If they succeed in doing that, they should attempt to make it back to NATO lines and, theoretically, safety. Beyond that, I didn't say much else, leaving everything up to the players' judgment. As I said, I answered any questions the players asked, like "Is it OK if I player a Russian POW?" Otherwise, though, I was pretty hands-off.

My laissez-faire attitude had a couple of unintended consequences. First, the characters consisted of too many sergeants. Aside from Lt. Col. Orlowski, all the other military characters were sergeants of one grade or another. There were no corporals, privates, or specialists. Neither were there any other officers, not even a lieutenant. While it's true that the characters' unit was a haphazard one made up solely of survivors of the 5th, the odds that so many would be sergeants strains credibility. Consequently, the early days of the campaign saw Orlowski musing aloud, "What I wouldn't give for some privates or even a corporal!" Eventually, this weird imbalance was fixed somewhat, with the introduction of secondary characters (more on that in a future post), but it bedeviled the campaign for a while.

The second unintended consequences concerned the expectations of the players. Some of the players had already played an earlier edition of Twilight: 2000. Others were merely familiar with it. Others still were complete neophytes. Furthermore, my own take on the game, though generally in line with GDW's original vision for it, was somewhat idiosyncratic. For me, T2K is a game about both survival and, more importantly, rebuilding. I wasn't interested in refereeing a campaign about nihilistic carnage in post-apocalyptic Europe (or America). No, I wanted the campaign to be about picking up the pieces after the nukes had already fallen. In a weird way, I was interested in a very idealistic campaign in which people came together to put the world back together after madness had shattered it.

Not everyone in the campaign fully understood this and it took time to get that point across. Despite being a game about playing soldiers, I don't bog sessions down with combat. Combat occurs, of course, but it's not the focus of the campaign. I'm fascinated by more human topics, like dealing with other survivors, navigating the politics of post-war Poland, and the toll all of this takes on everyone involved. Because I didn't make this clear enough early on, there have been some sessions where things didn't go as well as I (or the players) might have liked. Fortunately, we're now all on the same page and these misunderstandings rarely occur anymore.

Could these unintended consequences have been avoided with a Session Zero beforehand? Maybe. I don't know. As I said, I've never been a huge fan of Session Zero as a concept. Some of it is just curmudgeonliness on part, but some of it comes from a deeply held belief that good campaigns aren't planned – they just happen. I don't like to put my fingers on the scale, so to speak, preferring to let things evolve naturally. That doesn't always work and perhaps that speaks to the utility of Session Zero. In the case of Barrett's Raiders, I do think the early months of campaign might have gone more smoothly if I'd been clearer about my intentions. Likewise, if the players had generated their characters together, they might have been a more cohesive unit from the start. 

Live and learn!