Crowmurder essay #3 - Education
Alright, so weāve talked about how I conceived and prepared for Crowmurder, and how that concept and preparation changed during play.
Did that work? Oh yeah, it was a great campaign, both for me and for the players. But that doesnāt mean everything went perfectly, and there are lessons to be learned from what fizzled or didnāt really click.
So refresh your memory about the game if you need to, and then come back for the last GMing essay in this trilogy of posts.
Failure! Itās how we learn!
I do a lot of prep for some games, barely any for others, depending on the system and the groupās style of play. Iāve done more and more for the last few campaigns, and if Iām being honest, much of that is just needing something to do during these interminable lockdown, something that feels creative even if itās ultimately just brainstorming things that only matter to me, a light to briefly push back the dark emptiness threatening to hollow out everything around me.
I did a lot of prep for Crowmurder, and as mentioned, I ended up changing much of it during play. Iām 100% fine with that; a lot of that prep helped me get a strong enough grip on my ideas to be confident changing them on the fly. There were also sections of prep, such as a few NPCs, that never came into play, but thatās just how GMing works; you draw 10 rooms in your dungeon, even though the PCs will probably only visit five or six. What makes that work worthwhile is knowing that they could engage with that prep and enter those rooms.
What I realised, as the campaign ended, was that some aspects of my prep didnāt serve an actual function because there was no way they could come into play. A timeline of backstory events, the alien mindset of the daeva, a set of images about 19th century Mardi Gras in New Orleans... I pinned these (and more) concepts down before we started, but never came up with a way to work them into play, whether at the start or as we continued. These concepts were ultimately worse than wasted efforts, because I had to do additional mental labour to move beyond them to create content I could actually use at the table.
The lesson here is not to do less prep - do whatever amount works for you and that you find useful. Instead, itās to make sure that that prep can actually be used in play (probably by also prepping avenues for introducing it) rather than just sitting in your notes folder and getting in your way.
Respecting ransacking your sources
Adapting other material is a time-honoured tradition in gaming; everyone rips off bits of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, after all, and Iām a big believer in reskinning Shakespeare for your own ends. Adapting/reimagining one gameās adventure into a different setting/system isnāt as common, but itās certainly not unknown. But as with all adaptations, you need to know what to lift and what to leave behind, and I slipped up a couple of times with my Ravenloft homage.
Of all the RL references in the campaign, the weakest was the Tarot reading scene. This was a homage to Madame Evaās card reading, which is a cornerstone of the original module. Here it didnāt serve anywhere near as strong a purpose, it slowed the session down and made it less interesting, and it felt out of place given that the NPC giving it was the head of a drug cartel rather than an ethnic-stereotype fortune-teller. Another iffy inclusion was the zombie fight at the church. This was a hugely fun scene, donāt get me wrong, but as the game progressed it felt increasingly out of place to me, setting up expectations about the gameās feel and tone that didnāt properly pay off.
On the other hand, I wish I hadnāt just handwaved away all of the dungeon-crawl aspects of Ravenloft. The final sessions in the Plantation House felt a bit underwhelming to me, too prosaic and too easy for the big finish. It might have been more fun if Iād populated the House with a few weird dungeon rooms, maybe with shadowy psychodramas and oddball monsters for the PCs to overcome. After all, the one RL castle monster I did keep - theĀ āMeld Monsterā, which became the grotesque Rougarou - became a really compelling part of the game.Ā
The lesson here is kind of like the last one - itās to think about how concepts, especially those drawn from another source, might work and feel in play rather than in a vacuum. Will the tone of this idea match that of other game elements? Will it be cumbersome to unpack for the players? Will its effect be the same as it was in the source material, or pull the game in a different direction? The question of how will this work is at least as important as is this cool.
From conceptual issues, letās move onto mechanical ones, such asĀ the level of cognitive load I felt in busy scenes, specifically fight scenes with multiple opponents.
MoTW doesnāt require much detail for NPCs - harm taken/given for minor enemies, a couple of moves for major ones - but itās tracked separately for each one, and the numbers are granular enough that handwaving them felt unsatisfying.Ā Add to that the various abilities that players/PCs can bring to bear, and the amount of mental effort I had to apply to fight scenes became problematic - especially in an online environment.
The first group fight scene, with zombies and gators and snakes, wasnāt so bad, although I was losing energy by the end of it. The second involved four bikers, four cultists, an undead wizard and a shadow monster, spread across multiple locations, and by the 2/3 mark of the session I was exhausted and couldnāt keep proper track of what was happening. From that point I only ran combats with 1-2 opponents, which made them more manageable but also less interesting.
There were other issues with cognitive load, mostly due to the complexities of managing four players, with four sets of mechanical/narrative abilities and agendas, in sessions run over Zoom where I couldnāt use most of my in-person social and management skills.Ā
The lesson here is that running a game is... not hard or special, sure, but itās demanding in ways that arenāt always obvious. You need to be aware of the mental overheads of both your game system and your play platform, and not develop session plans that push too hard against those parameters.
Adapting for short sessions
Speaking of which, I think weāve all learned by now that online playĀ demands more energy and focus than face-to-face play, although I still struggle to explain why thatās the case. A two-hour Zoom session on a school night can be more challenging than playing for 4-5-6 hours in person - and part of that is working out how to adjust pace, and GMing, and mechanics, and so on. You have to deliver more story beats in a shorter period of time, make sure fights are fast and donāt flow into another session, compress and/or extend scenes to make sure they fill up the right volume... stuff like that.
And in some cases, you need to check mechanics, which I didnāt do. Like most PtBA games, Monster of the Week has start-of-session/end-of-session moves and rules, and I didnāt examine these enough when we started play. Specifically, I didnāt consider that the end-of-session hand-out-experience rules would trigger about twice as often as expected, meaning that the characters quickly became more effective and powerful than I had planned. The final sessions thus lacked tension because the players knew they had enough safety nets and Luck points to be challenged by what I brought to bear. (I compensated by drilling down on emotional beats for the ending, but it was still a little weak.)
The lesson? Session length can have both narrative and mechanical impact on your game, in ways that arenāt obvious, so think about that before you start play and adjust accordingly. Thatās a basic tip, but one that affects pretty much all of us while weāre stuck with shorter, online, socially distanced play.
There are fewer pop songs withĀ āBoysā in the title than you might think, and finding an appropriate one for each sessionās writeup was a pain in the hole.
Okay, I think thatās everything.
I hope folks found this series interesting and/or useful! I donāt think Iām going to do anything this in-depth in the future, or any session-by-session writeups. The era of long-form RPG writing is coming to a close, andĀ shorter, simpler summaries and articles at the end of a campaign seems like the way to go from here.
Well, like they say - if you gotta go, go with a smile.