The Premature End of DF Whiterock

The Bad News

I ended the DF Whiterock campaign today, after over 2 years and 100 sessions, but before the dungeon was finished.  (The Thane was the end of level 12 out of 15, so they were about 80% done.  Though they had skipped level 5, the underwater level.)

I'm disappointed we didn't finish, but I wasn't having fun anymore, and running this game was way too much work to continue doing if it wasn't fun for the GM.  I know some of the players weren't super-happy with the way it was going either.

What went wrong?  Ultimately I think a mismatch between player and GM expectations.  From my point of view, the players wanted continual increases in power, and complained about not getting enough points or treasure.  Meanwhile I was trying to keep the adventures challenging for the increasingly untouchable PCs.  Giving them more power was the last thing I wanted to do, as I thought they had too much already.

Also, in the game world, the PCs had defeated the Thane of Narborg, who appeared to be the ultimate boss behind the orc and human slavers who had dragged them into this adventure in the first place.  The fact that the red dragon Benthosruthsa was probably allied with the duergar was not clear enough to them.  I had Chauntessa clue them in a bit more last week, but they still didn't have enough motivation to do her dirty work.

Things I'd do differently if I ran this again

1. Award character points for accomplishments rather than play time, to give the players a reason to go faster.  And award fewer points overall from the start.  (If you set a low baseline rate of improvement and give bonuses for significant achievements, players are happy.  If you set a high baseline then slow it, players whine.)

2. Make the dungeon a bit smaller.  As written, it's the surface level with human slavers, then two orc levels, two trog levels, the underwater level (which our group skipped except for one brief encounter with the hydrohydra), the underground river level, the Immense Cavern, three duergar levels, the Demonhold, two levels of Burning Maze, then the final level with the dragon boss.  I think it could be reduced from 15 levels to 9 by removing an orc level, a trog level, the underwater level, two duergar levels, and the Demonhold.

3. Figure out voice or text ahead of time.  It appears that most players have a very strong preference for one or the other, so voting each session isn't a great idea.  (We stopped voting after text won about 20 times in a row, but at least one player was never happy that the game was text.)

4. Write up more ahead of time to make sure all the players are on the same page.  One player quit early because this was too much story, not enough mindless hack-and-slash for his vision of DFRPG.  I guess you can never do enough Session Zero.

5. I probably wouldn't use Roll20.  Making dungeon maps in Roll20 is too painful, because there's no support for doors, and you have to do line of sight blocking manually by drawing all your walls again on another layer.  If I had to start a new game today, I'd probably choose MapTool because it's the most mature cross-platform VTT available, even though its scripting language is gross.  FoundryVTT looks great, though it's really new and doesn't support enough game systems yet.  And the future not-Windows-only version of Fantasy Grounds might also be a contender.  Of course, the grass is always greener on the other side.  I know everything I hate about Roll20 after using it for two years.  I'm sure the others have warts too; I just haven't found them yet.

6. Give more blatant clues on what the PCs should be doing next, rather than expecting them to figure it out.  Player agency is great, but when there's only one dungeon prepared, the PCs always need a good reason to go into it.

7. Writing long detailed recaps for every session was a lot of work.  I think I'd try to farm that out to the players.

Random observations

1. If you remove mandatory templates from Dungeon Fantasy / DFRPG, the PCs will be more powerful.  You need to account for that when handing out points.

2. Wizards get drastically more powerful as their spell skills reach 20 (which is achievable with a stock 250-point wizard) and 25.  In particular, Flight-25 is "all the PCs fly all the time."

3. Bless is broken.  Luck is really good.  Having one of them is pretty good: it means fewer dead PCs.  Having both is probably too much.

4. Great Haste is broken.  I ended up limiting attacks per turn to 3 to curb the worst abuses of it, but just eliminating the spell would probably work better.

5. Mass Daze is often End Fight.

6. Everything in DFRPG is aimed at 250-point characters.  Balancing 125-point or 500-point characters is an exercise for the GM.  Getting it right is tricky.

7. In this particular adventure, wandering monsters had very little effect.  The PCs usually felt overpowered enough that nothing on the wandering monster table would be much of a threat, so wandering monsters were mostly a waste of time.  This probably contributed to a lack of urgency, as the players found no cost to slowly moving around looking for every secret.

8. Different players like different things.  I think (borrowing the terminology from Robin's Laws of Good Gamemastering which I think all GMs should read) our group was one Roleplayer, one Tactician, one Butt Kicker, and two Power Gamers.  (They might disagree with those assessments though.)

The Future

A couple of people want my Castle Whiterock GURPS conversion notes, so I'll throw those up on Github at some point and post here when I do.

I have a couple of GURPS oneshots I'm thinking of running for a group of friends and maybe at a (virtual?) convention: the Star Trek and Harry Potter adventures from 1shotadventures.com .  (So if you think you might want to play in those, don't read them.)

I'd also like to run The Traveller Adventure (for Classic Traveller, from 1983) in GURPS.  That's another campaign-length adventure, like Castle Whiterock, but it's 156 pages, versus about 800, so hopefully it wouldn't take as long to run.  It's kind of the polar opposite of Whiterock though: SF vs. fantasy, trading vs. combat, a subsector versus one town and one dungeon.