Observations from One Year of Play

 The Campaign has reached a milestone, or two. We have had nearly 100 sessions in the past year, and one of the groups has accomplished the goal they set for themselves at the beginning. 

In this post, I'll be sharing links to observations made by some of the participants in this campaign: 

  • the players in the Tuesday group, 
  • a Downtime Player, and 
  • one from a member of Thursday's sessions. 
First of all, I would like to thank everyone, both Session Players and Downtime Players, for their participation. This Campaign was an experiment in re-creating a wargame-style RPG experience. I believe it was successful in that goal. We had three large-scale battles, with hundreds on each side, and a naval battle.

Second, I am truly moved by the thoughtfulness and effort that went into these evaluations. I am humbled and grateful.



What It Is All About

Brian, from Welcome to the Deathtrap, has been a Session Player in both of the games I've run over the past three years. He's shared some thoughts after reading the "post-mortems" from other participants, and I believe he's captured the precise spirit of what I was trying to accomplish with these games:

With Shadow Over Sojenka, Stephen was inspired by The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg to try to capture the essence of what Dungeons & Dragons must have been like when it was being run as a series of experiments by the war gaming societies in Wisconsin around 1973. Including trying to reverse-engineer some elements of play that disappeared as TTRPG culture evolved to become its own thing separate from wargaming in the early '80s.

...

One of the key things to remember about the early days of Dungeons & Dragons was that it evolved from a highly experimental wargaming group that was heavily influenced by early Free Kriegsspiel ideas. There were a lot of conventions and ideas that they used without overtly discussing it anywhere in the text of the game. They were writing D&D with the assumption that they were dealing with wargamers, and likely wargames who had already read about and were trying at home the experiments such as Braunstein in The Tactical Revue, the magazine where the rules for Chainmail and Dungeons & Dragons were first published in a piecemeal fashion.

Shadow Over Sojenka Reflections

The Post-Mortems

Each of the Tuesday Session Players has provided a recap of their experiences, with thoughtful commentary on the good and bad features of the playtest experiment.

F provided a discord post, as he is not active in social media:

I was brought into this campaign after start by Brigadine to add a more aggressive voice to the team dynamic. I am a firm believer that the team’s attitude is very important. I have played a couple games where people are intermittent at the table and the feel of games shift based on population. Leaning into this I immediately sought to produce characters that would patch holes in our skill sets. I believe my actions in this manner dramatically affected our economic situation and caused an immediate and game shifting change in our speed to scale and act militarily. As the game progressed I sought to disproportionately push for violent action and using our power to exert force on others. Towards the end I found my characters in need at the same time and we succumbed to using multiple in the same engagement as we had saw used by Thursday. 

Positive feedback: Stephen, you made an extensive world with lore, factions, and a notable style that was impressive. The work you put forward showed and was exciting. I appreciate our time and from someone that knows the effort and difficulties of making that depth, I thank you. 

Negatives (accept this as constructive only): Your market rules ad Hoc pricing and low prices for spells allowed me to exploit you. Fiddling with the markets and allowing (almost) open access to top tier markets(merely three days sail) broke any hope of balance. The size scale made travel trivial. The system we used was too broken. Unfortunately once things are set wheeling them back are difficult. Consistency, good or bad, wins out. 

Thank you for your effort and your creativity!

The other two Session Players for Tuesday are active tweeters and bloggers, so I will share the links to their commentary, then quote the constructive criticism and address these lessons as best I can in the next post.

In fairness to everyone involved, this Campaign was created with the express intention of using a limited ruleset to reproduce certain behaviors and to measure the quality and efficacy of this approach. As you shall see, even with participants who were invested in the concept of wargaming and Domain play, the simplicity and "openness" of the rules were insufficient.

Brigadine

(NOTE: Brigadine has written an excellent piece on Winning as a Player that I highly recommend!)

Sojenka Exit Thoughts

The economics of the game struggled to adequately support and balance the efforts taken by different members of the campaign. The DM used several different sources and game rules to put together a system for play, often caught off guard by the specific needs of the session or downtime requests at hand, which created gaps that could be exploited. This issue was almost solved by the DM asking if a swap to ACKS was the right choice earlier in the campaign. It was the right choice in hindsight but at the time we had begun to exploit the gaps and were unwilling to lose the effort that had been spent by both DM and players to cobble something workable together. We voted against it. I do not recall the other members’ of the campaign votes.

The aforementioned Frankensystem, as we so lovingly called it, ended up being quite a point of friction. It’s unreasonable to expect a DM and party of players to create a game system by cobbling pieces together from all over on the fly. We are not game designers. The Blueholme ruleset that the game started with was simply insufficient to the task that we ended up putting it to, which was beyond the scope of the original stated purpose of the campaign.

Originally, players were solicited to join a campaign to explore the megadungeon of Tonisborg and all the faction play that that would entail. Events during the game led us to press into the domain and military side of campaigning early on and the DM graciously obliged. We also perceived, fairly or not, that there was a competitive aspect to the game due to a separate group of players in the same campaign and the presence of Patrons. In retrospect, I believe we took that competition more seriously than some others.

A more dynamic environment could have been achieved with more freedom allowed between Patrons and players. Instead communication with and even the identity of Patrons was carefully monitored and restricted until very late in the game. I’m sure this was part of the experimental nature of the campaign. Everyone involved has to get comfortable with the flow of things.

We learned early on that our contemporaries in the Thursday group were playing many PCs per player during a single session. I felt then as I do now that this is an exploit. Rather than hiring henchmen for specific tasks/roles/abilities and managing a team, you can simply create the needed roles without all the headache of managing their loyalty. With very small groups of two to four members each, the DM was probably lenient about this in order to improve survivability but Tuesday only fell to this dark path in the final sessions. Even then it wasn’t necessary and I regret that we did.

Belloc

The Twitter Thread

I will share the entire thread for those who are not twit-i-fied.


Bos

A Sojenkan Postmortem

Bos writes a long, thorough, and very informative post on his experience, with a history of his Faction, its development, and lessons learned. I recommend you "read the whole thing"!

(NOTE: Bos has an excellent post on "How to Be a Good Patron" that I recommend you also read!)

Ante-scriptum: All of this is written from my own perspective, without any outside baseball knowledge of what others did. This way I can assess my mistakes and what lessons can be drawn from them, without tainting it with knowledge I did not have at the time. The beauty of these campaigns is only seeing it through the eyes of those in the campaign that you control, and I feel that the story of the Shadowed Sun goblins should be told by me from that perspective.

Last night my stint in the excellent Stephen's Shadow over Sojenka campaign ended (each word is its own link, check his stuff out!). I knew when I posted my last orders 5 hours before the Tuesday session started, that it would end either in victory or in flames. This morning I found out which of the two it was. This post, in part inspired by Stephen asking for a page or so of notes on what I learned in the campaign (which turned into six of them), was written while everything was still fresh. I asked and got access to all old chatrooms I had been part of and went through them chronologically to create a timeline of events.

First I'll lay out the events of the campaign from my perspective, and afterwards post thoughts on how I'll try to do better next time, using lessons learned in this campaign.

 Lessons Learned

Set aside time to convey actions

I am notoriously bad at making and maintaining a habit. I should've set aside an hour or so a week specifically to send my actions to Stephen. It's frustrating, looking back, seeing myself say in chat "I need to do this" and only doing so a week or two later. That Stephen never lost his patience with me over this is a testament to his good nature. This also would've given me a set moment to:

Ask the basic questions

Did you know I never asked Stephen what the fauna of my hex was like? This alone should give you pause. There is so much I could've known if I'd done things like this. Ask about the livery of things near you. Ask about the details of the places around your faction's location you'd know about. Any and all of these can fire the neurons and give you new plans. I could've tamed the wild beasts, which would've increased our numbers in battle (which we sorely needed). I could've found all sorts of magical artifacts in the dungeons in my sawmp hexes... We could've had goblins riding dinosaur howdahs. Because I forgot to ask the most basic of questions: "what do I see around me", we did not.

Document what you know

It was agonizing to go back. In the first week Stephen sent me the subhex map, complete with the hex's wandering monster tables. I saw them, forgot to note them down and therefore forgot their existence. Many of these encounters I could've and hopefully would've used. I should've added these tables to my documents so I could have used them. There was so much info I theoretically had, but never documented properly, and thus forgot about. I lost goblins in raids, and until reading back through the chat history to write this post, I'd entirely forgotten about it. Nothing about it in my documents.

Write down the important things. Keep lists of things you need to check out, or answers you've obtained. You cannot act on what you don't remember.

Have proper strategic objectives

This one bothers me to no end. In my initial document I'd written down my strategic objectives; 1: Expand my base of power, 2: sate our God and 3: keep our camp safe. Now, I did mostly chase these. However, I never properly reconsidered them as the situation changed. Furthermore, the actions I took to achieve these objectives were on the whole less than sufficient, and the prioritisation was wrong. I spent too much time expanding my village and its defences, when in the end no one had attacked it until that last day, and by that point the forces against me were so great that none of it would've mattered in the first place.

I misprioritized all throughout the first year, and frankly if I did so in the second year it hardly mattered anymore, given how far I was behind by then. My initial outreach to tribes was good, but I never set up a way to have these villages mutually defend one another. This allowed the Sons of Mithra to defeat me in detail.

Use all of your available assets

In part this failure was caused by me not properly documenting everything. I had a tribe of goblins. I had a troll. I used these big pawns relatively well. However, I entirely forgot about all other things I could've used. I had a reasonably high level cleric, and a mage/alchemist. Most of these spent their days picking their nose, when they could've been crafting scrolls, casting high levels spells to aid me in my scouting. I had 19 hobgoblins, many named. I could've sent these into a dungeon I knew was nearby, gain levels and bring back more loot. I had massive dragonflies my goblins could ride, and half the time I entirely forgot to use them to scout further afield.

I wasn't just playing at a disadvantage, I was doing so not realizing I'd tied my own shoelaces together.

Never let up the pressure

After all of my successes, I retreated and let off pressure with the intent to reconsolidate. This was a mistake. The false flag idea would've been great, if I'd done so directly after for example the attack in July '23. They were weakened, and if I'd managed to get other factions against them I would've taken the heat off of myself. Hell, I also could've just set up raids on their supply lines, which at the very least would've forced their resources there instead of into more expansion. All I did was weaken them, anger them to no end, and then give them time to recuperate and plan their revenge.

Respect the Fog of War

You think you respect it, but you don't respect it enough. This is a Hofstadter's Law situation. You don't respect the Fog of War enough, even if you keep this rule in mind. I had scouts patrolling, and I'm fairly sure I have no idea what was going on at all, even with the frequent updates I was given. I saw massive movements of troops just outside my swamp, and never figured out who they were, where they were going or where they came from. I've seen freak weather occurrences undoubtedly caused by someone. No clue who. Hell, the biggest one? I thought until a month or so ago I could still act in a guerilla/insurgent fashion and get away with it, while the actual campaign state was that I should've been doing preparations for open warfare four months before that. You might worry about the known unknowns, but the real things you should be worried about are the unknown unknowns.


What I Have Learned From This Experiment

 Dungeons & Dragons is a Wargame.

When you put the Campaign first, amazing things happen!

There are a few more lessons I'd like to share, but I wanted to get this out for the community to check out and comment on. I would love to get any feedback or questions you might have, so that I can put together some intelligent answers in the follow-up to this exercise.

I am looking forward to the conversation!


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