Re: OOC: Table Talk 2
Thanks all for the feedback!
For my part, if I had it to do over again, I would probably have put my foot down when it came to splitting up the party and forced the party to come to consensus. It was cumbersome to run two separate games, but the bigger issue came about due to balance issues between the two parties. One party had all the spellcasters and the other had all the melee characters. In the end, all it accomplished was to ensure some characters missed out on large portions of the adventure, which would have happened anyway (as I mentioned, it was impossible to complete all three threads of the story...not enough time), but certainly the entire party could have engaged in two of the three main arcs.
I would also have done a better job of awarding Inspiration. I forget about this when I run tabletop games as well, but have gotten better about it now that I use tokens, which I keep right in front of me when I run the game.
From the player's side of things, you guys worked together really well and had a good dynamic. There was a little bit of drama when Ellie was still in the group, but that resolved itself when I cut the player from the cast. You all played your characters very well and are excellent writers, giving me enough information in your posts to build from. It was definitely give and take, which is nice in PbP. Too often, I have seen games where it is all take, take, take and from the GM side of things, it feels like the players are waiting to respond to posts without doing anything to propel the game forward. That didn't happen here, for which I am thankful.
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As far as the "What Now?" goes. The goal of this game was to run Legacy of the Crystal Shard from beginning to end, which we've now done. So I feel pretty good about that and haven't given much consideration to anything beyond this goal. Bill and Rob have gamed with me enough to know I like having definite end state goals. I don't run open-ended, The Game Must Go On! type games anymore, especially in PbP, because it's too easy to lose focus and have games wither and die on the vine due to apathy, atrophy and entropy.
While it's true you are all fantastic players and writers, I value your (and my) time too much to sign us up for "MORE!" without doing the required homework to ensure a potential sequel is more than a pale, hollow, imitation of the original. If that makes sense?
Having said that, I have some rough ideas of potential sequels, but I need to mull them over a bit to determine what would be required to run them to a satisfying conclusion.
One idea involves continuing with The Forge of Fury adventure from the Tales of the Yawning Portal harcover adventure book. At its core, Forge is a relatively simple dungeoncrawl into an old dwarven mine that features a host of intelligent adversaries. It's well regarded and looks like it could be a lot of fun, and this coming from a DM who's not really into dungeoncrawls. I like this idea because it's different than the Legacy adventure, it would not be a lot of homework on my part, I have never run the adventure before, it would be nice to use The Yawning Portal book, and the adventure itself would be pretty straight-forward to run.
The other idea is more work on my part, but could potentially be more satisfying if we could pull it off--Storm King's Thunder. This is a hardcover 5e adventure that pits the PCs against rampaging giants and is also highly regarded. For this to work, I need to do some homework to figure out how to make this adventure work in PbP and then work up an outline using select elements of the larger adventure to frame out scenes. I like this idea because the story seems pretty cool and I think it has the potential to make for a fun, memorable game. This is a more risky option and I am still not sure it's workable in PbP, at least the way I run games.
At any rate, those are my preliminary thoughts on the subject.
Thanks,
Shane