Analysing the Feedback

There were several reasons why I asked my players what they thought of the modules we had played thus far.  Of course, part of it was to gain tangible feedback on how I had DMed them, but also, I wanted to gain an insight into the style of game that each individual player enjoys.  The modules I have selected thus far have been very different in their approach, some have had very focussed plots, others have been weird and wacky, and others have had a more sandboxy approach.  We've had claustrophobic combat in cramped tunnels, wilderness skirmishes, and several very large battles.  In short, I've thrown the whole gamut of gaming at them in the last year or so.

Some of the feedback was quite predictable, but there were several surprises.

The first of the group to fill in his rankings was Jordan.  In play he is the one who seems to get most engrossed in a *story*, preferring a defined direction rather than the freedom of sandbox play. His top 3:

1st Castle Amber
2nd The Gauntlet
3rd equal The Sentinel
3rd equal The Village of Hommlet

Castle Amber featured highly for 3/4 players, so I will discuss that separately.  Of the others, Jordan was the only one to placed The Sentinel and The Gauntlet in the top 3. I believe this is because they have a strong plot that ties the 2 adventures together.  Crucially too their plot is self-contained - it starts with The Sentinel, ends with The Gauntlet, and has little or no impact on the rest of the world.  This means it is a very focussed and compact storyline.  Jordan was the most critical of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, feeling that it was *too* big. Of course, that adventure is a massive sandbox, with only a loose structure laid down representing the enemy motives.

James was the second player to send me his opinions.  He is the youngest member of the group, and revels in comical situations, the dafter the better.  Killing monsters is very much a secondary concern.  And his top 3:

1st Castle Amber
2nd Beyond the Crystal Cave
3rd Temple of Death

The key outlier in his rankings was placing Beyond the Crystal Cave as high as 2nd place.  This is a whimsical scenario with minimal combat, set in a fairytale garden inhabited by Leprechauns, Pixies and Satyrs.  We played it in a single session of about 6 hours, so it was a brief and highly light-hearted interlude, with some amusing (and somewhat risque) moments.  This adventure suited James perfectly. Also quite telling was his placing of the gritty, cerebral Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan down at number 11.

Ritchie was the third of the group to voice his opinions.  A little older than both Jordan and James, he seems to enjoy a fairly direct game, with a leaning towards a combination of puzzle solving and the darker side of fantasy. In his feedback he mentioned it took him a while to adjust to 1E, but has enjoyed it more as his familiarity with it increases. His top 3:

1st Castle Amber
2nd Master of the Desert Nomads
3rd Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

His top 2 were played using 5E rules so that fits in with the rule familiarity issue.  Master of the Desert Nomads is quite heavily scripted in places, and ends at an Abbey occupied by semi-undead Monks - this gave us a highly memorable session of play, and was very much in the vein of the aforementioned 'dark fantasy'. Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is also dark and atmospheric, packed with puzzles, and forces the party to hurry and think quickly.

Finally, Bryan gave me his verdicts, which differed quite wildly from those of the other players.  Bryan invests himself more heavily into his characters, creates rich backgrounds for them, and likes a module's story to be tweaked so as to make it feel relevant for the PCs.  He would probably most enjoy a homebrewed campaign in which the DM wrote material for the group between sessions, based on what occurred in the preceding sessions. His votes:

1st Master of the Desert Nomads
2nd Temple of Death
3rd Eye of the Serpent

With his top 2, I did develop some of the encounters so as to challenge the party members specifically.  I added Bryan's character's brother to the roster at the Temple for example, and the desert Dervishes interrogated his character over his faith. These embellishments clearly appealed to him!  Eye of the Serpent provides a realistic wilderness environment with very little story, but a lot of freedom.  He was the only one to really criticise Castle Amber, saying that Stephen Amber's Tomb felt rushed, as if it was tacked on in a hurry.  I agree with him there.

So, 4 very different players.  None of them are powergamers, none of them are overly tactical in their play, none of them are rules lawyers - for those 3 factors I am very thankful.  But they do have differing playstyles, and mostly they enjoy different types of adventure, and that's the challenge for me as the campaign progresses.  I need to personalise the experience for Bryan, ensure there are puzzles for Ritchie, inject some daftness for James, and ensure rich but logical plots for Jordan....

So why did Castle Amber do so bloody well in the vote?  Well, first we need to examine the material itself.  The module does not have much logic, the Chateau's layout is clearly designed for fun at the expense of any sense of realism, and has a number of monsters living in very close proximity to each other... clearly my players don't care about that.  This is quite an old-school mindset.  The adventure is very much location based - there are very few big 'events', and it gives the party a lot of freedom to roam within the Chateau at their own pace.  Many of these encounter locations lack any real logic, but much of the fantasy manages to be very dark as well as whimsical - a ghostly feast, character possession, hallucinations and the like, combined with traditional trolls under bridges ! There also are a lot of NPCs, each with no more than a few lines of text giving their personality and motives, so it is left up the DM to embellish these.

So I did.  I gave them silly French accents, played up the cross-dressing Ogre, added songs (in French), and tried to inject a real sense of fun.  The module inspired me, which in turn made for a great game.

DMing Castle Amber was hard work, it wore me out, and I was glad when it was all over.  But it was worth it.

(but yes, the module is a bit too long, and Stephen Amber's tomb is crap in comparison with the rest of it)