D&D 3.5 – Campaign Postmortem/Player Focus… Again

I just wrapped up a relatively short 50 hour campaign last night. It was a low-magic, anti arcane setting and all around much grittier than standard D&D fare. The DM asked us for honest feedback, and before I dig into what I told him… more DMs should ask their players for honest feedback.

As a player I would sum up my experience in a word as confused. The campaign focused on a set of powerful artifacts, and we didn’t have a clue what any of them did until the very end. Mainly because the DM said, here is what they can do.

Players, especially when there are massive gaps between sessions, have a hard time putting 2 and 2 together unless you say, here’s a second 2 and here’s an addition symbol. And an equals sign. WHAT’S THE ANSWER?

If, as a DM, you have to err on making puzzles/mysteries too easy or too hard then always make them too easy. From a player perspective it sucks to crank away at a problem and have to ask the DM for the answer. I’d rather bypass a challenge too easily than get stumped for forty-five minutes. I am pretending to be a genius wizard after all.

From a DM’s perspective, I’d rather not spend two hours coming up with a complex and intricate set of riddles only to have to spell the answer out for the players.

The DM is not the enemy. If the players beat a challenge too easily the DM hasn’t “lost” just because the players “won.”

Coming back to player focus of a different kind, we as a group were constantly overshadowed by the NPCs around us. They controlled the world and we never had much sway with any of them. We couldn’t trust anyone, and while that can make for an interesting campaign, the players need at least one reliable source of information unless the entire campaign revolves around deception. In a relatively standard campaign they need an ally they can actually trust.

In our post-apocalyptic epic group, that ally was Vecna. That was a fantastic campaign because while we were dealing the demon princes of the Abyss that we knew were actively plotting against us, we also knew we could count on the god of secrets to provide support. Plus, as a god Vecna had a variety of restrictions and thus we, as a group, were important. We could do what no one else could.

In the low magic campaign that just concluded… we ventured into a sphere that rendered all who entered it insane by voluntarily becoming insane ourselves through a potent ritual. After wresting an artifact from a dragon in a most perilous escape we saw one of the NPCs we had been working with simply waltz up to us. Literally right after we left they found an easy way to enter the sphere. They also planned to use the artifact for their own ends. We were basically presented with helping them and getting screwed or helping the dragon and then getting screwed from the other end. We took option C.

There was a group of celestials stranded on the material plane. This artifact could not only restore the planar  connections but restore the balance of magic. We decided to help the celestials and try to restore the balance.

We were summarily trounced. Cue bad ending.

A lot of this is personal preference. I like cinematic endings. I like happy endings. I like heroes. That’s why I play Dungeons and Dragons. My approach, which is not necessarily better, would be to fudge the rolls in the players favor. Let them win. Make it close, but always let them win.

It was really nice to be able to have this conversation with my DM. DMs? Ask your players for feedback. Players? Give your DMs honest feedback.

And everyone? Try to have fun.