Wednesday 12 July 2017

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)

Monday 10 July 2017

Player Feedback, and a little experiment...

It's a tricky job being a DM.  You need to know the rules of the game to a decent level, you need to know the adventure material in details, you need to be able to think on your feet, and improvise and adapt when the players do things that are wholly unexpected, while hiding the fact that you are desperately calculating possible outcomes in your head, sometimes panicking inside.  Above all though, you need to keep the players happy while also enjoying the game yourself.  And players are strange animals, they come in all shapes and sizes, with differing wants and needs.

So, in an effort to better understand my group, and to give me yet another opportunity to waffle on here about my favourite subject of modules, I asked each of the 4 players in my group to rank the modules we have played thus far in order.  This has a tangible benefit for me in that I can see where I did stuff right, where I possibly screwed up, but most importantly it gives me insight into the type of game that they want to play.

I gave them each a list of the 12 modules we have played as a group:

L2  - The Assassins Knot - we played this as part of a 5E campaign.  I butchered the setting, and dropped the NPCs into a city applicable to the game were running, while keeping the plot and motives consistent with the original module.

X2 - Castle Amber - The 2nd of my 5E conversions, played almost identically to the original, with lovingly converted monsters and NPCs - that was hard work!

X4/X5 - Master of the Desert Nomads/Temple of Death - 2 more 5E conversions, though I adjusted parts of these to tie them into the backstories of a couple of the party PCs.  The campaign was effectively ended with an epic battle in the Temple itself in which all bar one of the PCs died.

UK5 - The Eye of the Serpent - the opening adventure of our 1st edition AD&D campaign, which I've followed up with:

T1 - The Village of Hommlet

UK2 - The Sentinel

UK4 - When A Star Falls

UK3 - The Gauntlet

UK1 - Beyond the Crystal Cave

I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City

C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan

RESULTS AND FEEDBACK

What should be borne in mind first and foremost is that none of the adventures yet played are bad ones, I have only chosen modules that have some considerable merit, be that in terms of their scope, their plot and/or atmosphere, or maybe just ambition.  TSR produced a lot of duff adventures, mostly in the mid-late 1980s - I have avoided those - yeah I'm looking squarely at you The Forest Oracle, and as for you Dragonlance saga, you can shove your heavy handed railroad squarely where the sun don't shine.  So if the adventure is placed low here, it's akin to a sports-car poll in which a Fiesta ST comes 10th of 10, as it is pitted up against cars from Porsche, Ferrari and Lamborghini....



12th place - UK5 - The Eye of the Serpent.  This result was not unexpected, as it's quite forgettable.  It's not bad, just a little bland.  See my detailed review

11th place - L2 - The Assassins Knot.  Playing it with 5E rules was far from ideal - a whodunnit doesn't work quite so well with 5E's Insight skill and Detect Thoughts both being spammable!

10th - UK3 - The Gauntlet.  Whaaaaaaaaattt!

9th - UK4 - When A Star Falls.  You fools.  Whose stupid idea was it to allow players to have opinions?  Review here

8th - UK2 - The Sentinel.  Gobsmacked this one finished above its more superior siblings UK3 and UK4. Review!

7th - I1 - Dwellers of the Forbidden City.  I expected this to be around here, most placed it towards the middle with just 1 dissenter.

6th - C1 - Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan. As I1.

5th - UK1 - Beyond the Crystal Cave.  1 player *loved* this.  The player who would probably have disliked it was away for the session in which we played it.

4th - T1 - Village of Hommlet.  An expected result, as this has had an enduring impact on our 1E campaign.  My Review tells you why...

3rd - X5 - The Temple of Death.  Slightly confused by this, I thought my conversion was messy, and it all ended with that near TPK.  Nought as strange as folk - apart from RPG players - who are even stranger!

2nd - X4 - Master of the Desert Nomads.  No surprise. This converted really well to 5E, and the set piece nature of the battles worked well with that system.

1st - X2 - Castle Amber.  3 out of 4 players rated this as #1, but was that down to the adventure itself, or was it down to my DMing?  You'll have to wait to see the analysis.... coming soon....

Best laid plans...

With Oasis of the White Palm now complete, and the party restored and intact, we now enter a short break due to outside committments.  This is time for me, as DM to think, and reflect.  I've been sticking very closely to the 1E rules on experience, awarding according to loot found with in the modules, and requiring the traditional payment for training, but this has brought about a problem.  And that problem - Tracy Hickman.  Hickman wrote some excellent adventures - at least he did before he inflicted the Dragonlance series on the gaming fraternity.  These adventures had finely crafted settings, intricate plots, and compelling NPCs - they were hard work for the DM on occasion, but worth the effort as the end result was usually excellent. But now, deep into the epic Desert of Desolation series, we have hit a problem for the second time.  Hickman didn't give a shit about sticking to accepted levels of experience and loot.  Pharaoh was fairly light on monetary treasure, and Oasis of the White Palm has been lighter still.  The final episode of the series has barely any.  If my players' characters are to achieve the levels needed to continue the sequence of modules I have planned for them they need to be considerably richer. Of course I could ignore it, and simply require them to sell some magic items (again!) in order to gain more experience and train, but they've already had to do that once, and is that really fun?

So what is the solution?

The summer holidays are here, I have some time on my hands.... so there will be an interlude, let's label it I4.5, and the title - On the Trail of Thurnas.

 REVIEW I4 - OASIS OF THE WHITE PALM By Philip Meyers and Tracy Hickman Published by TSR in 1983. Oasis of the White Palm was the 2nd advent...