If all goes well, this Saturday night will be the final session of our 1950s WitchCraft campaign. For my group, the fact that the campaign is ending is bittersweet. While everyone is excited to see the big questions raised throughout the campaign to finally be answered and everything wrapped up, all of us around the table know that there is a lot of life left in the campaign and don’t really want to end so soon. So why are we?
A little over a month ago, one member of our group announced that he is moving away. Our group is small and with his loss there is really no satisfactory way for the campaign to continue as-is. While the time he is leaving is nebulous (it could be anywhere from a few months to the better part of a year), summer is here and that means a lot of schedule disruptions. Not only do we anticipate several skipped sessions but we have to do a bit of Gen Con event playtesting as well. I’d have to count on my player being here for several sessions after Labor Day and I’m not sure I can do that so I made up my mind to wrap the campaign sooner rather than later. I probably could have saved the final adventure or two for fall, but I decided not to for one reason: Momentum.
Momentum is a powerful thing. Right now, my players eagerly await the next session and they are all “into” their characters. The overarching plots and themes are still fresh in their minds. If I held off through summer I risk losing that and having the final adventure feel flat. Worse, I may lose the urge to bother running it or keep putting it off until it’s too late. I have files full of campaigns that were halted with an intent to finish and never were. All things considered, it’s best to wrap things now, even if it feels slightly rushed.
Funnily enough, I have another fresh example of momentum, or lack thereof, with another group. I run a Hellfrost campaign every two weeks, but scheduling issues have prevented me from playing for over a month. While I’m supposed to GM this Friday, it dawned on me today that I can’t remember where we left off or even what adventure I was running. While this isn’t a big problem (I’m running published adventures, so boning up isn’t an issue), it is still a great illustration of what happens with a loss of momentum.
Once momentum is lost, it’s difficult to recapture. My very first Witchcraft campaign suffered from this. Our intended one month break turned into a three month break. Worse, it was in the middle of an investigative adventure. I could not expect my group to remember anything from that adventure. I managed to overcome it by producing a “cheat sheet” that brought the players back up to date and laid out the clues and evidence they’d collected thus far. The result was that the first session upon resumption was very powerful and the campaign ran strong for another year and a half.
So how about you? How has momentum affected your campaigns? Have you ever been able to fully recover from a loss of momentum? Have you ever felt that a campaign would have ridden to a satisfactory conclusion had it not been for a loss of momentum? Have you discovered a great way to keep momentum?
I’m currently running 2 campaigns, and one of them has never quite gotten momentum for me. I was also recently prepping for Origins, which only disrupted events. One of my problems is that I am usually very enthused about whatever game I just finished.
What I’ve done, and seems to be working so far, is to impose a schedule on myself. I’ve managed to get the two campaigns (played on Saturdays) playing dates two weeks apart. That way, the week before campaign A is prepping for that one. The week following campaign A, I am also prepping for the next session, by addressing issues that came up in play. I write things-to-do on a piece of paper (usually the back side of the summary I noted as the game went on), with boxes to check off. Most of them, I leave until later.
The weekend in between the two games, I make sure to put all books and papers relating to Game A away. I can then pull out the stuff for Game B, starting with the list of check-boxes-to-do. The idea is that I can pick up where my mind left off the month before.
I’ve only been doing this formally for two months, but it seems to be working. Game B is next weekend, but I am still sorting out things from Origins week (catching up on emails, staying ahead of household chores, writing my own after-action notes for next year’s plan). Once I pull up the sheet of check-boxes, I’ll see how it goes.
That seems like a neat sort of tilting cycle to keep things fresh yet organized & consistent.
Someone in your local gaming group moves away? Great opportunity to give Roll20 a try. We had a member of our group move halfway across the country and we gave Roll20 a shot. We haven’t looked back.
http://roll20.net/
Thanks for the article, Walt.
It inspired one of my own: http://violentmediarpg.blogspot.com/2013/06/mass-x-velocity.html .
Momentum has often been a challenge. I’ve been in very fun campaigns that never came back from an extended delay. You’re being wise to an end it a high note.
It can sometimes be difficult to set aside a game after a good campaign has ended, but I would personally rather end things on a high note rather than risk pushing things until it fizzles.
Whats that rule in writing again about sometimes you have to be willing to kill off your favorite things? I’m sure if you ask G.R.R.M. he could tell you all about it. 😉
Yeah, we’ve suffered the end-of-momentum ailment with several campaigns. I’ve actually had two campaigns end when players died, which is one of those, “How do you recover from that?” kind of quandaries. We’ve had others that ground to a halt when the GM had a sudden urge to start work on something else. OK, I’m guilty of this, but not the only GM in the group to have that happen. Typically, though, the game just fizzles, either on the GM side of things or player side of things.
If you want to avoid fizzling campaigns, communication is the key. Keep the campaign on the player’s mind; remind them of why it’s been fun so far. A quick text message may be all it takes.
If it’s you that’s lagging in excitement take a moment and remind yourself why you wanted to run the game in the first place. If you’ve just gotta do the new thing maybe try and think of how the exist campaign might shift in that direction.
Just a couple of thoughts.
Warning! Shameless self-promotion: For more you might take a look at my article… link is above.
Odd, I thought I’d commented on this but I don’t see my reply.
You wrote an excellent article, randite!
Thank You, Sir! Appreciation is always appreciated.
Typically after each session, we discuss what went well, what went poorly. For years I’ve done as LesInk indicates: kept a notebook by my side during each session and jotted down what happened in order to refresh everyone’s memory at the beginning of the next session, and so on.
Still, campaigns fizzle. We’ve had some that the players were gung-ho about, and the GM just became less so. We’ve had others where the GM was excited to run the game but the players decided nap time during the session was more fun. After a few sessions of that, the GM throws in the towel. The sleepy/non-interested players say, “Yeah, [they] like the game; don’t change anything,” yet become easily distracted the very next session.
At this time, I’m gameless, having decided a month back to take a long break from RPGing. Hopefully for me this will recharge my player and GM batteries. Momentum will have to be dealt with once I get a game up and running again. 🙂
Good article, by the way.
As a player in a game that plays every 2 weeks or less often, I keep notes on what happened each game in a binder. Before game play starts, I go through the notes and recap what happened in the previous game. It only takes a few minutes and it generally gets everyone’s brains back in line with what was happening.