My ED4 Campaign Post-Mortem
Posted: Sat Dec 31, 2016 2:18 am
Part 0: Inroduction
A while back I had an idea that I would like to start a campaign with a huge group of players and then reduce that number by half by either killing a bunch of them or having them wander off. I tried this before in a Serenity game, but due to a blizzard, only the people who had signed on to the whole campaign showed. I wanted to try this again with the Earthdawn Fourth Edition campaign I started up two years ago, so I set the initial adventure at The Founding, which seemed like a great opportunity to have some intrigue/tragedy/etc. Unfortunately, this plan didn't work either as the players playing my "guest stars" rapidly became attached to their characters and wanted to keep playing. We struggled with 10 players for a while, then dropped down to 8 for most of the rest of the game. This fall, we started suffering from further player attrition due to life changes, so we ended a little earlier than initially planned. 8, BTW, was way too many. In the future, I'm sticking to six for a campaign, tops.
This post is what I implemented in terms of framework, plot, and game aids.
Part 1: Electronic Game Aids
As mentioned on the old forums, we developed an excel-based character sheet for keeping track of individual character statistics. Normally I despise having computers at the table, especially when playing a fantasy game, but the Players' Guide was not yet out in hardcopy and character sheet rapidly moved away from the card-based toolkit I had wanted to design to something fully cross-referenced and electronic once I let the players get their grubby little hands on it. We used a Google Sheet for a lot of the game infrastructure and a Google Group for player communications. The Sheet had four main tabs and a few others:
1. Scheduling
Each column was a player and each row was a game date. I only run tabletop RPGs on a weekly basis. Anything less frequent than that and I find player apathy takes over before the plot can be resolved. I know it's a big commitment, but due to my acting schedule, I, the GM, was actually the player who canceled most frequently. Players were expected to announce absences 48 hours in advance, barring emergencies. We played for 73 sessions total, and had a full game for 34 of them, almost 50%. For the remaining games, we never played with more than 2 players absent. We missed about 20 sessions due to sudden illnesses, planned vacations, and my dress rehearsals.
2. Legend Totals
In other games I've played or run, we actually went around the table recalling specific exploits of the characters at the session and players were rewarded for things they had done that were especially cool. The GM has to be careful to allot enough time for game wrap, however, and also to be careful to reward players who did important but quite things and also not simply reward high die rolls. I decided to skip that this time due to the increased amount of time many of my players were spending getting to game as well as the unusually large number of players. My plan for future games is to reward players both for remembering exploits and for reenacting them, thus seeking more ways to reward the quieter players for their efforts.
For simplicity, I gave everyone who showed up to a given session the same Legend and everyone who missed it 50% of that amount. The spreadsheet automatically looked up who was in attendance from the previous sheet and calculated how much Legend to give them based on the amount I entered, then totaled up everyone's Lifetime Legend Total accordingly. The game ended with most characters just shy of 1,000,000 Legend, with characters that had stayed to the end all within 90% of the highest total.
3. Demographics
I'd cast a wide net for players for this game and several of them had never met before, so this sheet contained several columns:
Player Name
Email Address
Food Vetos (one or more players often cooked dinner for the game and needed to know about food allergies)
Character Name
Character Race
Character Discipline(s)
Blood Oath (willingness to swear to Travar during the opening adventure)
Other useful details (experience with Earthdawn, etc.)
2 players were experienced Earthdawn GMs, 4 had played Earthdawn before, and 4 were brand-new to Earthdawn. I have a strict rule forbidding multiple characters from having names that start with the same letter after playing in a campaign with a "Kira" and a "Katrina". The mix of characters was (with additional Disciplines in parens) :
Brock Magnetite, Human Warrior (Nethermancer)
Cephalus Mercurius Léon Fowler, Windling Thief (Illusionist)
Elantar Avalon, Elf Scout (Wizard)
Guldurdir, Elf Wizard (Troubadour)
Kit Kellen, Human Swordmaster (Wizard/Air Sailor)
Lindred Cramdrinker, Dwarf Elementalist
Nita Bearkin, Dwarf Cavalryman (Archer), with Arth the War Bear
Qana, Windling Nethermancer
Tyaxha Rukdor, Ork Swordmaster (Weaponsmith)
Y'Rasmus, T'Skrang Weaponsmith
4. House Rules
This was a not quite exhaustive list of all House and Optional Rules we were playing with, as well as a couple of obscure-to-some memes that showed up during play.
Circle Advancement We will be using the "Using All Talents to Advance" optional rule on p. 453. These are the same advancement rules as ED1/2.
Circle Advancement We will also be using the "Specific Training for Talent Options" on p. 454.
Taking an arrow to the knee http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an ... n-the-knee
Map There are different maps with different major terrain features, mostly rivers, in different editions. So far, Greg has not argued with the statement that the ED3 one is canonical.
Sad Trombone http://sadtrombone.com/
Simple Action Simple Actions like Maneuver are used and declared during your turn.
Forged Weapons "Forged weapons will usually cost:
1 75
2 225
3 450
4 750
5 1125
6 1575
7 2100
8 2700
9 3375
10 4125
...steps above 10 are not trivially available commercially."
Dead Fall is a Free Action
Recovery Tests Cannot be used on the dead unless specified.
Aligning Talents and Skills When learning a Talent the character already has as a Skill, they recover the Legend they used on the Skill, but can only use them on Skills.
Inspire Others Provides a +1 bonus per Success (instead of 2).
5. Name Voting
Most games we've played, we've accomplished next to nothing over downtime. This game, we spent several months arguing back and forth over what to use as a Group True Pattern Name. Eventually, "The Resplendent Warriors" was chosen.
The Curse Breakers
The Resplendant Warriors
Barsave's Brave
Barsave's Hope
Barsave's Fortune
The Scourge Survivors
The Existential Explorers
Travar's Troubleshooters
The Lucky Survivors
The Serial Peacemakers
The Above Average Eight(ish)
The Unsure Heroes
The Barsave Blockheads
The Resplendent Researchers
Reckless Endagerment
Barsave's Blight
The Reluctant Fighters
The Above Average Avengers
Wandering Troubleshooters of Barsave
the best dressed travelers
A. Bear and Company
Reckless and stupid
Dangerous and stupid
Crazy and stupid
Eight Namgivers and a Bear
Eight friends and a Bear
Rukdor, Bear, and Associates
Arth's Allies
6. Group Pattern Objects
Some characters had very specific ideas about what their Group Pattern Objects were and meant:
Character Item Meaning
moi GM Screen A Wall of Fear and Ignorance is traditional.
Brock Crystal Buckler
Cephalus Mercurius Léon Fowler Book Jacket Don't judge a book by it's cover
Guldurdir Book (The Adventures of the Resplendant Warriors) An ongoing History of the Group
Kit Leatherworking needle Makes things both pretty and functional, and also can be used to stab people.
Tyaxha Short Sword "Bear Claw"
A while back I had an idea that I would like to start a campaign with a huge group of players and then reduce that number by half by either killing a bunch of them or having them wander off. I tried this before in a Serenity game, but due to a blizzard, only the people who had signed on to the whole campaign showed. I wanted to try this again with the Earthdawn Fourth Edition campaign I started up two years ago, so I set the initial adventure at The Founding, which seemed like a great opportunity to have some intrigue/tragedy/etc. Unfortunately, this plan didn't work either as the players playing my "guest stars" rapidly became attached to their characters and wanted to keep playing. We struggled with 10 players for a while, then dropped down to 8 for most of the rest of the game. This fall, we started suffering from further player attrition due to life changes, so we ended a little earlier than initially planned. 8, BTW, was way too many. In the future, I'm sticking to six for a campaign, tops.
This post is what I implemented in terms of framework, plot, and game aids.
Part 1: Electronic Game Aids
As mentioned on the old forums, we developed an excel-based character sheet for keeping track of individual character statistics. Normally I despise having computers at the table, especially when playing a fantasy game, but the Players' Guide was not yet out in hardcopy and character sheet rapidly moved away from the card-based toolkit I had wanted to design to something fully cross-referenced and electronic once I let the players get their grubby little hands on it. We used a Google Sheet for a lot of the game infrastructure and a Google Group for player communications. The Sheet had four main tabs and a few others:
1. Scheduling
Each column was a player and each row was a game date. I only run tabletop RPGs on a weekly basis. Anything less frequent than that and I find player apathy takes over before the plot can be resolved. I know it's a big commitment, but due to my acting schedule, I, the GM, was actually the player who canceled most frequently. Players were expected to announce absences 48 hours in advance, barring emergencies. We played for 73 sessions total, and had a full game for 34 of them, almost 50%. For the remaining games, we never played with more than 2 players absent. We missed about 20 sessions due to sudden illnesses, planned vacations, and my dress rehearsals.
2. Legend Totals
In other games I've played or run, we actually went around the table recalling specific exploits of the characters at the session and players were rewarded for things they had done that were especially cool. The GM has to be careful to allot enough time for game wrap, however, and also to be careful to reward players who did important but quite things and also not simply reward high die rolls. I decided to skip that this time due to the increased amount of time many of my players were spending getting to game as well as the unusually large number of players. My plan for future games is to reward players both for remembering exploits and for reenacting them, thus seeking more ways to reward the quieter players for their efforts.
For simplicity, I gave everyone who showed up to a given session the same Legend and everyone who missed it 50% of that amount. The spreadsheet automatically looked up who was in attendance from the previous sheet and calculated how much Legend to give them based on the amount I entered, then totaled up everyone's Lifetime Legend Total accordingly. The game ended with most characters just shy of 1,000,000 Legend, with characters that had stayed to the end all within 90% of the highest total.
3. Demographics
I'd cast a wide net for players for this game and several of them had never met before, so this sheet contained several columns:
Player Name
Email Address
Food Vetos (one or more players often cooked dinner for the game and needed to know about food allergies)
Character Name
Character Race
Character Discipline(s)
Blood Oath (willingness to swear to Travar during the opening adventure)
Other useful details (experience with Earthdawn, etc.)
2 players were experienced Earthdawn GMs, 4 had played Earthdawn before, and 4 were brand-new to Earthdawn. I have a strict rule forbidding multiple characters from having names that start with the same letter after playing in a campaign with a "Kira" and a "Katrina". The mix of characters was (with additional Disciplines in parens) :
Brock Magnetite, Human Warrior (Nethermancer)
Cephalus Mercurius Léon Fowler, Windling Thief (Illusionist)
Elantar Avalon, Elf Scout (Wizard)
Guldurdir, Elf Wizard (Troubadour)
Kit Kellen, Human Swordmaster (Wizard/Air Sailor)
Lindred Cramdrinker, Dwarf Elementalist
Nita Bearkin, Dwarf Cavalryman (Archer), with Arth the War Bear
Qana, Windling Nethermancer
Tyaxha Rukdor, Ork Swordmaster (Weaponsmith)
Y'Rasmus, T'Skrang Weaponsmith
4. House Rules
This was a not quite exhaustive list of all House and Optional Rules we were playing with, as well as a couple of obscure-to-some memes that showed up during play.
Circle Advancement We will be using the "Using All Talents to Advance" optional rule on p. 453. These are the same advancement rules as ED1/2.
Circle Advancement We will also be using the "Specific Training for Talent Options" on p. 454.
Taking an arrow to the knee http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-took-an ... n-the-knee
Map There are different maps with different major terrain features, mostly rivers, in different editions. So far, Greg has not argued with the statement that the ED3 one is canonical.
Sad Trombone http://sadtrombone.com/
Simple Action Simple Actions like Maneuver are used and declared during your turn.
Forged Weapons "Forged weapons will usually cost:
1 75
2 225
3 450
4 750
5 1125
6 1575
7 2100
8 2700
9 3375
10 4125
...steps above 10 are not trivially available commercially."
Dead Fall is a Free Action
Recovery Tests Cannot be used on the dead unless specified.
Aligning Talents and Skills When learning a Talent the character already has as a Skill, they recover the Legend they used on the Skill, but can only use them on Skills.
Inspire Others Provides a +1 bonus per Success (instead of 2).
5. Name Voting
Most games we've played, we've accomplished next to nothing over downtime. This game, we spent several months arguing back and forth over what to use as a Group True Pattern Name. Eventually, "The Resplendent Warriors" was chosen.
The Curse Breakers
The Resplendant Warriors
Barsave's Brave
Barsave's Hope
Barsave's Fortune
The Scourge Survivors
The Existential Explorers
Travar's Troubleshooters
The Lucky Survivors
The Serial Peacemakers
The Above Average Eight(ish)
The Unsure Heroes
The Barsave Blockheads
The Resplendent Researchers
Reckless Endagerment
Barsave's Blight
The Reluctant Fighters
The Above Average Avengers
Wandering Troubleshooters of Barsave
the best dressed travelers
A. Bear and Company
Reckless and stupid
Dangerous and stupid
Crazy and stupid
Eight Namgivers and a Bear
Eight friends and a Bear
Rukdor, Bear, and Associates
Arth's Allies
6. Group Pattern Objects
Some characters had very specific ideas about what their Group Pattern Objects were and meant:
Character Item Meaning
moi GM Screen A Wall of Fear and Ignorance is traditional.
Brock Crystal Buckler
Cephalus Mercurius Léon Fowler Book Jacket Don't judge a book by it's cover
Guldurdir Book (The Adventures of the Resplendant Warriors) An ongoing History of the Group
Kit Leatherworking needle Makes things both pretty and functional, and also can be used to stab people.
Tyaxha Short Sword "Bear Claw"