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Imperial Campaign Commentary: Session 1
Mar. 10th, 2008 06:48 amAs you might know, I'm running a roleplaying campaign called "The Imperial Campaign" using the Returners Final Fantasy RPG 3rd Edition rules - or at least some recent iteration of them.
We recently had our first session. You can read some of my thoughts about it in the discussion thread at the Returners boards.
This post is sort of an addendum or supplement to the discussion in the thread. I should be making a post like this every other week or so, after a session.
What thoughts do I have here for you this week? Well, first I'd like to note that the session was one of the few times I've used pre-written material. I fiddled with it in notepad, then threw it on a page here in my LJ so I could work on it elsewhere. Livejournal is useful like that sometimes. Of course I added more in notepad in the minutes right before the session.
The second thought I have is holy crap I'm out of practice at making monsters by hand. It took me well over an hour to put Lich together. Granted this was probably more complicated than most monster constructions as I was trying to build Lich to be as close to the Summon as possible. Still, either I'm out of practice, or the MCS has gotten a lot harder to use since the last time I rolled monsters by hand. No more 3 minute monsters for me, I guess. I used an older copy of Sam's excel generator to make the mook enemies the party fought. I suppose that dampens the worth of the campaign as a playtest, but the time savings were immense. Someone should put together a nice simple Java app to do monster generating. Don't look at me, I don't know Java. >.>
My attempt to leave everyone a bit confused about the team's ability's worked well: Under the circumstances I guessed that the characters involved would not be fully aware of each other's powers and so on. I was right, and it worked well. Sadly it had a downside I didn't foresee: no one knew what the other people looked like, or even important things like what Race someone is.
The players fought three different monsters during the session. The high level party fought Lich and a pair of Ghasts. It was a gimmick fight that I wanted to just get over with after seeing what the characters could do. Very defensive party. They'll be impossible to balance for. The low levels fought Zombies. I wanted them to survive four rounds, which should have been fairly easy to do (and along the way they racked up XP for each kill). But the Thief got lucky and stole something I put there just in case he did get lucky. Bam! Dead zombies.
I guess the hardest thing for me in the session was simply that it's the first session. You never know how those will go, and I was ready to can the enterprise if it was horrible. Fortunately I think it went pretty good. Could have been a lot better, but it was at least mediocre as a session, which puts it head and shoulder above first sessions for some campaigns I've been in.
I'm planning on focusing on the low level party more in the next session, since they have more room to grow as characters ("OMG he's expecting his players to RP in an RPG!"), but my thoughts on that will have to wait until after the session has been run.
Monsters in Session 1
We recently had our first session. You can read some of my thoughts about it in the discussion thread at the Returners boards.
This post is sort of an addendum or supplement to the discussion in the thread. I should be making a post like this every other week or so, after a session.
What thoughts do I have here for you this week? Well, first I'd like to note that the session was one of the few times I've used pre-written material. I fiddled with it in notepad, then threw it on a page here in my LJ so I could work on it elsewhere. Livejournal is useful like that sometimes. Of course I added more in notepad in the minutes right before the session.
The second thought I have is holy crap I'm out of practice at making monsters by hand. It took me well over an hour to put Lich together. Granted this was probably more complicated than most monster constructions as I was trying to build Lich to be as close to the Summon as possible. Still, either I'm out of practice, or the MCS has gotten a lot harder to use since the last time I rolled monsters by hand. No more 3 minute monsters for me, I guess. I used an older copy of Sam's excel generator to make the mook enemies the party fought. I suppose that dampens the worth of the campaign as a playtest, but the time savings were immense. Someone should put together a nice simple Java app to do monster generating. Don't look at me, I don't know Java. >.>
My attempt to leave everyone a bit confused about the team's ability's worked well: Under the circumstances I guessed that the characters involved would not be fully aware of each other's powers and so on. I was right, and it worked well. Sadly it had a downside I didn't foresee: no one knew what the other people looked like, or even important things like what Race someone is.
The players fought three different monsters during the session. The high level party fought Lich and a pair of Ghasts. It was a gimmick fight that I wanted to just get over with after seeing what the characters could do. Very defensive party. They'll be impossible to balance for. The low levels fought Zombies. I wanted them to survive four rounds, which should have been fairly easy to do (and along the way they racked up XP for each kill). But the Thief got lucky and stole something I put there just in case he did get lucky. Bam! Dead zombies.
I guess the hardest thing for me in the session was simply that it's the first session. You never know how those will go, and I was ready to can the enterprise if it was horrible. Fortunately I think it went pretty good. Could have been a lot better, but it was at least mediocre as a session, which puts it head and shoulder above first sessions for some campaigns I've been in.
I'm planning on focusing on the low level party more in the next session, since they have more room to grow as characters ("OMG he's expecting his players to RP in an RPG!"), but my thoughts on that will have to wait until after the session has been run.
Monsters in Session 1