Help me design next year's PF campaign, /tg/
Ran a traditional ongoing story campaign this year. Party enjoyed it but in the end stated that they really need sessions to be shorter (2-4 hours) and they need allowance for players not being able to make every single session.
How do I design a campaign within those limitations? Previously they were happy with just running PFS scenarios each week, but that's no way to uplift my players (they're generally newbs).
Players not showing up repeatedly ruins a group. Don't make allowances for it. Yeah, if it happens once or twice, it's salvageable, but if certain players are missing more than a third of your sessions, you're better off just not including them at all.
>>43736233
>2-4 hours
Sadly, I've had to adapt to much shorter sessions as well. I used to consider anything under 6 hours disappointing, but in recent years 3 1/2 to 4 hours has been the average. 2 hours is bullshit though. Maybe it'd be tolerable for one session in the middle of a bunch of longer ones, but generally speaking, I hardly think of a session of less than three hours as worth playing.
Anyway, one of my ideas for addressing the problem of inconsistency of players is to run games more like movies than television shows. A movie may have a sequel, but you don't necessarily expect to have all of the same characters involved (and sometimes not any of them). And sequel can build on the same themes and profit from the world building in the movies that came before it, but you don't necessarily have to have seen them to follow what's going on.
So essentially, you can design your sessions as one-offs in which what happens does affect the world, and influence future events, but which can be understood and enjoyed in isolation. So maybe one session is about the party being hired to track down bandits, and the bandits were introduced or their identity was discovered in a previous session.
If you game like this, then you don't need a consistent roster of players, and can have signups for each individual session, with no assumption that just because somebody was there for last session, that they'll necessarily be there for the next. This means that you don't have to delay your game when people fail to show up, and it's easier to drop dead weight (it's easier to not invite somebody or to tell them a session is full than to boot them out of a more typical group).
>>43736338
It's definitely a problem if the campaign requries them to show up always/regularly. I'm just asking if there's a campaign structure that would cope with players irregularly showing up.
They ain't missing sessions because they're busy scoffing Doritos and playing Haloz, they're missing sessions because they're uni students and have commitments and things that come up and shit.
>>43736361
I do get the one-adventure-per-session structure. It's just that it requires me to write an entire PFS scenario each week, and I don't think I can do that. Putting in different paths and skill checks, put it in a different setting/adventure each time, managing to keep it all contianed to a set time; I just don't think I can regularly do that.
>>43736373
Maybe try a game that's (much) easier to run? http://www.mediafire.com/download/5ma63kxaz47ttr6/Barbarians+of+Lemuria+-+Mythic+%28v1%29.pdf
Truth be told though, I don't see why doing a series of one-offs is that much more difficult than the alternative. Yes, the format is a bit more limiting, and maybe you have to put a bit more effort into framing things to stay within the one session confines, but it shouldn't be *that* much trickier.
I do, however, agree with you that keeping everything within a set time can be tricky, but you can run adventures as 1-2 sessions to give yourself elbow room. Sure, you're depending on having most of the same people there for both sessions, but it's a lot easier to get people to commit (and actually show up) to 2 specific sessions than for every session in an indefinite arc, especially since you can try to work with folks on the scheduling.
Also, gaming once a week is ambitious and might not be feasible. By scaling back a bit, and allowing yourself one or two weeks off when scheduling doesn't work out, you may give your campaign / series of one-offs the flexibility it needs to survive.
>>43736434
>By scaling back a bit, and allowing yourself one or two weeks off when scheduling doesn't work out, you may give your campaign / series of one-offs the flexibility it needs to survive.
Of course, you could always have a fallback game--something quick and easy like Paranoia--that you could whip out and play whenever you failed to have a quorum. As long as you still get to play your primary campaign regularly enough to keep up the momentum (even if it's only every other session, or you sometimes miss two weeks in a row), it should be fine.
>>43736434
Really, I think the trick is to establish an organization or larger group that the PCs belong to, whereby you can end up with a random assortment of characters and not have to individually justify their presence for every session.
>>43736364
West Marches is designed to accommodate irregular groups. Essentially it off loads the burden of scheduling to the players, who decide on their own which days/weeks they'd like to party up and request the DM's time.
I think there's optional rules that make absent players burn cash and food while their characters sit around in town, providing an incentive to actually show up to games.
Go google it I guess, see if it'll work.
>>43738615
If OP's problem is that he wants to game every week but his players have too many other commitments to all commit to that, punishing players for not show up (more than they already are by not gaining experience/loot) is a good way to have more and more players shrug and not show up at all after a while.
Those sort of mechanisms can work okay when everyone has time but are too flakey, but when the problem is too many other things going on, it's just going to piss people off eventually and reduce the enthusiasm for the game.
>>43736434
Barbarians of Lemuria is a really good suggestion if you are worried about prep time, especially as you can pair it with all the dungeons from the 1-page dungeon contests pretty easily.
And breaking up adventures into 2 or more sessions is a really good idea too.
These days I take 2-3 sessions for each adventure and meet maybe once every 2 weeks. It isn't so bad as you might think. And that's another way to reduce your prep, especially if you can compartmentalize your prep mentally. You have a couple weeks to prepare for the next adventure as you run the previous one. Works better if the outcome isn't particularly relevant to the next scenario.
![get_on_with_it[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/a5r8hEx.png "get_on_with_it[1].png")
>>43736233
>Ran a traditional ongoing story campaign this year. Party enjoyed it but in the end stated that they really need sessions to be shorter (2-4 hours) and they need allowance for players not being able to make every single session.
This is where you need to drop any notion of having a greater extending storyline and start shifting into short, self-contained sessions.
I'd strongly recommend reading Tenra Banshou Zero, if only because it's a system that conscientiously sticks to that sort of episodic format and uses various mechanics to condense many aspects of your usual game so you can GET ON WITH IT
And, seriously, don't buy into the /tg/ campaign memes. Playing short and sweet episodic games are great as long as you know how to approach them.
>>43739538
>conscientiously
Consciously, rather.
>>43736233
Look to Cowboy Bebop for examples on how to do episodic-with-an-arc. When everyone is assembled, give them a chance to have a character-defining "episode"- something that focuses on them and an element of their character. Between those, have short "bounty" missions; you're looking for the kind of thing a hero wouldn't have time for, but a townie can't do themselves. Hunt down someone's lost sibling before bad things happen to them. Go stop the rouge mage from setting up a tower near the town. Deliver X to Y but DO NOT look inside. Plot hooks that can be resolved in a few hours, invite twists but don't require them, and self-contain, tying up neatly at the end of the session.
