Tuesday 28 May 2019

Dissecting the frog: Team Tsathogga in retrospect

My long-running B/X D&D campaign ended this week, after three years, 70-odd sessions, and about 200 hours of actual play. It's the second-longest campaign I've ever run, beaten only by my old secondary school AD&D game, and the first that I've run on strict old-school principles. For the most part it was enormously successful: both I and my players had a huge amount of fun, and we've come away from the campaign with a treasure trove of scenes and characters that I'm sure I'll remember forever, or at least until I succumb to permanent senility. The Glasstown job. The salvation of QelongThat time the PCs tried to fool a snake-man by putting on an improvised radio playAdopting a dungeon full of skeleton death cultists. Inventing the giant projectile maggot vomiting zombie vampire toad. And more, so many more, that never made it into any of the actual play write-ups... the old sticky arm trick. The time Sophie pretended to be a noblewoman cursed with contagious amnesia. The insane fake legend of Anthrax and Judacus, which just kept getting more complicated as the campaign went on. It's been a really, really good campaign.

The terrible Wall-Eyed Frog, dread symbol of Team Tsathogga. Awful Latin also became one of their trademarks.

I found it an enormously liberating game to run. I had a world in my head, and the PCs ran around it messing things up. There was no need for 'plot' or 'story' or 'balance' or 'structure'. I didn't need to worry about problems or obstacles having preplanned solutions: I just laid out whatever made sense in context, and let the PCs figure out their own way of dealing with it. If an antagonist was much to weak or much too strong for the PCs, then so be it. If the dice said that someone lived or died, then so it was. If the PCs made friends with everyone in the dungeon instead of fighting anyone - and that happened repeatedly - then that was just what happened to happen. I was usually able to do all the 'planning' needed for each game in the half hour it took me to get to that week's session. After this, I think I'd really struggle to go back to a rule- or plot-heavy game like some of the ones I've played in the past.

All this said, however, there are some things that I think I could have done better, or should have done differently. So here's my list of lessons learned.

1: What you gain in breadth, you lose in depth

I started this campaign during my first gust of enthusiasm for oldschool D&D, which I embraced with the zeal of a new convert. What's the absolute opposite of a pre-scripted railroad? A game where you can go anywhere and do anything! The game-world sprawled endlessly in every direction, and I was absolutely committed to letting the PCs go wherever they liked. If, at any point, they simply abandoned whatever they were doing and lurched off in a random direction, I would be ready for them. (This came in handy after the whole skeleton adoption business, when that's pretty much exactly what happened.)

Over the course of the game, the PCs roamed back and forth across an entire continent's worth of geography. But the flip-side was that many of the places they visited were pretty sketched in. They lacked the dense specificity of the game's more thoroughly detailed areas, like Qelong, or the Purple Islands, or the underworld beneath Bright Meadows. I'm still absolutely committed to the idea of a free-roaming campaign: but next time I run one, I think I'll try to keep it much more geographically contained, allowing each region to be explored in much greater detail, and ensuring that everything is close enough to connect to and impact upon everything else.

2: NPC development takes work

The game featured a lot of NPCs, but there were relatively few who I felt really came to life. Titus the necromancer did, with his corpse obsession and his doomed romances and his horrible chewed-up face. Bat-Man Ron, with his combination of intelligence and naivety and his tragi-comic aspirations to be the saviour of his people. Vaud, with his passion for freedom and his total lack of volume control. Maybe Hallgerd, with her cheerfully amoral mercantilism. Maybe Elder Amelia, with her endless catalogue of secrets. Maybe Sophie's dim-witted college friend, Becky. Maybe Grick, Grak, and Gruk, the party's comedy goblin sidekicks. And maybe Sad King Nath.

But for every NPC who came to life in play, there were dozens who never really managed to be anything more than plot functions with a few mannerisms attached. Captain Matthew, who loyally ferried the PCs around the world for years on end, might as well have just been a 'map loading' screen with some stock art of a sea captain on it. Dara, the refugee Qelongese novice who introduced the golden lotus flower to the Purple Islands: what was her deal? What about Vem the huntress, who became queen of her people? Titus's ex-wife, Zenobia? The archivist of the tunnel-dwellers? We knew what they did. But who were they?

In many ways, this was a side-effect of point 1. After every scene, I always asked the players what they wanted to do next, and the answer was never 'have a heartfelt chat with Captain Matthew about how he really feels': it was always about moving onto the next item on the agenda. The NPCs who were able to become actual characters were the ones whose personalities were able to emerge through action: everyone else just faded into the background. In future, I can see that I'll need to be much more proactive about staging scenes of character interaction if most NPCs are to end up as anything more than placeholders. Much broader characterisation would probably also help.

3: B/X characters change fast (and change genres)

By the standards of modern D&D, character advancement in this campaign was glacially slow: the characters started at level 0, and seventy-odd sessions later they were levels 7-8. But their accumulation of power didn't feel slow to me. It felt like a massive accumulating snowball that increasingly threatened to crush anything in its path.

I'd say that the game went through three distinct phases. At levels 0-3, the PCs were desperately fragile, perpetual underdogs who had to rely on stealth, trickery, diplomacy, and rank cowardice. At levels 4-5 they started to feel like fantasy heroes, able to wade into battle in the knowledge that they had enough hit points and healing magic to see them through most situations. By levels 6-8 they were starting to feel superheroic, characters who had largely outgrown the world around them, able to resolve most situations through brute force. They became positively reckless, trusting to their spell lists, hit point pools, and saving throws to see them through all but the very worst of disasters. What fear can a man with a knife inspire in a woman with 51 hit points?

I didn't begrudge them their strength. They earned it, and they paid for it, and their road to power was strewn with the bodies of the PCs who didn't make it. But after the desperate striving of the first six levels or so, the high-level stuff felt a bit like a kind of extended epilogue or victory lap - especially given the complete freedom that the PCs possessed to travel the world, and thus to pick their battles, allowing them to smash through situations like a wrecking ball when their lower-level selves would have had to spend months patiently building solutions. They were never invulnerable, and threats like the marsh giants, the Ghost Drummers, Hild the blood-witch, and the robotic guardian of the Pools of Life still managed to give them a run for their money. But if I was going to do this again, I think I'd be more proactive about building in dynamic high-level threats that would move against the PCs once they attained a sufficient level of power, thus compelling them to more frequently pick on somebody their own size.

4: Caster vs. non-caster balance is tricky

Something that I didn't foresee, but probably should have, was that the kind of free-roaming, player-led game that I was aiming for, coupled with the Vancian spell-slot system of B/X D&D, would hand a massive advantage to spell-casting characters. D&D is balanced around dungeon environments, with the assumption that each delve is going to be a brutal battle of attrition, and spell slots a scarce and treasured resource. But with the PCs usually free to move at will, free to pick their battles, and free to choose when to strike and when to retreat, situations in which they were forced to have two or more 'encounters' in a single day were the exception rather than the rule. This, in turn, didn't matter much when the casters only had two or three spells each: but by level 5 or so there was often little to stop the PCs scouting a situation, retreating, preparing a specialised spell payload, resolving the situation in a blaze of magic, retreating again, using another full day's worth of spells to heal from the previous encounter, and then moving forwards fully restored and ready for the next challenge.

Under these circumstances, the advantages that non-casters would normally possess - resilience, combat skill, non-magical skill sets - were increasingly sidelined. Your attack bonus doesn't matter when the mage can alpha strike your enemies into goo on the first round, and being sneaky and charming isn't worth much when the wizards can just load up on Invisibility and Charm Person spells. By the end of the campaign, the party were in the habit of 'charm nuking' high-value targets by hitting them with ten or more Charm Person spells in quick succession, thus virtually guaranteeing success regardless of the target's saving throws. The fact that one of the fighters had Charisma 18, which had frequently been a lifesaver at the start of the campaign, became a virtual irrelevance by the end.

In this game, we dodged the problem by giving everyone two characters, usually one caster and one non-caster: a solution not dissimilar to the 'grogs and magi' set-up from Ars Magica. But I do feel that I should have done more to encourage some level of parity, partly by giving the players less ability to control the tempo of the situations in which they found themselves (although I'm wary of reducing this too much), and partly by giving more powers to the poor old fighters besides just escalating hit points. One quick and dirty fix that I'm considering is to let each fighter pick a new area of noncombat competency every time they go up a level, so that by level 8 or so they're less 'meat-shield' than 'Batman', although mastering entire new fields of knowledge every few months does rather strain my disbelief. The real solution is probably just to use more dungeons.

5: Structure, or the lack thereof

This was a campaign which deliberately, and indeed defiantly, lacked any kind of overarching structure. There was no 'main plot'. Nobody had a 'character arc'. It didn't build towards any kind of epic climax. It was just a bunch of stuff that happened, and then kept on happening, and then stopped.

In a lot of ways, I absolutely loved that. I have become so tired of 'epic' and 'awesome' finales, of scenes in which everyone gets together for One Last Battle, of heroes and villains punching each other on the edges of exploding buildings or erupting volcanoes, of scenes in which The Fate of The Universe Rests On Just One Man, of characters completing their Emotional Journeys and then dying tragic but emotionally satisfying deaths. I have become increasingly interested in raggedness, incompleteness, and incoherence, because the stories that we make and the victories that we achieve seem to me to be much more meaningful when there's no hand of destiny moving in the background, forcing them to occur. The adventures of the PCs, much like most people's real lives, was just a series of events that happened to happen. It didn't add up to anything more than the sum of its parts.

But there are drawbacks to that level of shapelessness, too. The two main threads running through the campaign were the discovery of the secret history of the world, and the demon / snakeman threat, and over the course of the campaign each of them got... maybe three-quarters resolved? As a result, the end of the campaign felt very arbitrary, like a TV show that suddenly got cancelled in mid-season, rather than like the logical end-point of the story of these characters, who would surely have wanted to continue uncovering the truth about their world instead of just randomly flying off into the sunset. But given the shapelessness of the campaign, playing all the way through to a full resolution of both strands would have taken years. 

I think the lesson learned here is to either go all-in with player-led hexcrawling, with no stories or structures whatsoever beyond those that the players choose to build for themselves, or have the Big Story tied to something dynamic, making it possible to force a resolution whenever the campaign nears its end. I did enjoy the whole campaign, and in many ways I felt that its anticlimactic non-ending was absolutely perfect. But part of me is still kinda frustrated that the players never got to finish figuring out their world's secret history, and that the sealed door beneath Bright Meadows remained stubbornly shut from the first session all the way to the last.

Image result for sci fi spaceship door
What did it conceeeeeal?

Anyway. It's been fun. It's been more than fun. It's been glorious and hilarious and utterly unforgettable, and easily one of the highlights of my gaming career to date. Thanks to all the oldschool writers and bloggers whose ideas I stole, whose advice I followed, and whose adventure modules I took apart for raw materials. A massive thank you to all my players, past and present, for coming up with more demented plans than you could shake a giant projectile maggot vomiting zombie vampire toad at. Shine on, you crazy diamonds. So long and thanks for all the beer.

Or, as the goblins would say...

Blood for the Frog God!

Image result for tsathogga

31 comments:

  1. Congrats on lasting three years. What made you decide to end the campaign? Do you intend to start up a new B/X campaign implementing your new insights?

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    1. We ended the campaign because some of the players are moving away, and it didn't feel right for me and the two remaining players to carry on without them. But, yes, I do hope to start up a new campaign soon, probably in the autumn.

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  2. I second JB's question. I've enjoyed your insights, so where to from here?

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    1. Depends on the players I end up with. Maybe something much more focused and serious. Maybe just starting over at level 0 in another area of the same world. If I find it difficult to recruit players I might even have to run something in D&D5 instead. Ask me again in October!

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  3. The Team Tsathoggua play reports have been a highlight of my blogger feed for some time, and it's nice to get a little look under the hood of the operation!

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    1. No problem. Glad you enjoyed the writeups!

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  4. Congrats! It's great to get a peek under the hood.

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  5. I've appreciated seeing several OSR works in action through these reports over the last few years. Equally impressive is your group's endurance over that time!

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    1. Thanks, both! And glad to see the Veinscrawl is still going strong, Skerples!

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  6. The nice thing about having sandbox themes(? metaplots? idk) 3/4 solved, and still floating around is, you can use them in another campaign some time.
    Maybe with the some of the same players.

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    1. Yeah, that's true. Maybe a new bunch of level 0 characters can find notes written by the old PCs and attempt to pick up where they left off...

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  7. Congratulations! I should write up my experiences as well. I can totally relate to you observations regarding character level and power. As for fighters vs MUs my solution was to to use the strict interpretation of the magic rules, ie. the repertoire of a MU is as limited as their spells per day. I’d recommend starting the new campaign nearby or in the same area with the old characters available as NPCs. Players really enjoy seeing the results of things they have set in motion from a different perspective. And the world is so much richer because of all the things you and your old players remember.

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  8. Great thoughts Joseph and excellent idea about the overlapping setting Alex. That's a really nice way of connecting things and being able to recycle old locations and NPCs. The old party can become the subject of future rumours and NPC anecdotes.

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    1. Yeah, that's a good suggestion. Too many references to the old campaign might be rather alienating to new players - too much like in-jokes that you don't get to share - but in moderation it could make the world feel like a much more lived-in place.

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  9. Thanks for the dissection post! It was really interesting to read from a DM's perspective, especially your concerns about the npc characters and the magic user vs fighter mechanics. For my part, I do think Skadi was less useful in the later stages, with her hit points becoming her greatest asset rather than her fighter abilities i.e she couldn't come close to dealing unmissable magic missile damage. Same problem with Jack - as you say we used to rely on his charisma in almost every non-violent encounter.

    Your comment re the npc characters is interesting because there were certainly those who stood out from the throng, i.e. Titus and his brother, but I didn't feel that the sketchiness of the rest was your problem - our flighty campaign hardly left you much time for side-character building, after all.

    Having sat in as an npc character myself for one session of 5th and been horrified at the unnecessary complexity, I enjoyed the freedom of simpler mechanics and a less structured narrative. I doubt we'd have produced the same creative level of crazy in a pre-determined storyline. Some of my favourite bits were making friends of enemies and leaving things half-finished, which I feel is closer to real life anyway.

    As you know, this is the first D&D game I've played so I have high standards going forward! Thank you for being an amazing DM and rolling with all our bizarre ideas. I can't conceive how many full-length books it would take to chronicle our every adventure.

    Long live Team Tsathogga!

    -Skadi the meat shield and Hash the inexplicably charming

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    1. Thanks, Lucy - both for this post, and for your three-year commitment to the campaign. It would have been a much poorer game without you. Glad you enjoyed all the craziness, half-finished plot arcs and all!

      I loved the fact that Titus basically became your best buddy, and probably the longest-running and best-developed NPC in the whole game. In any conventional campaign, a crazy cave-dwelling necromancer would just have been a 30-minute set-piece fight scene.

      Books are more your department than mine, but I reckon your adventures could fill about ten volumes or so, written in a suitably lurid pulp novel style:

      Team Tsathogga and the Shrine of the Frog God!
      Team Tsathogga and the Curse of the Purple Islands!
      Team Tsathogga and the Deathfrost Expedition!
      Team Tsathogga and the Stronghold of the Snake-Men!
      Team Tsathogga and the Doom That Came to Qelong!
      Team Tsathogga and the War With the Science Fungoids!
      Team Tsathogga and the Glasstown Job!
      Team Tsathogga and the Return to Deathfrost Mountain!
      Team Tsathogga and the Blood Men of the Stonemoors!
      Team Tsathogga and the Pools of Life!

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    2. Great post as always, I'm already missing the sessions! In terms of fighters vs mages I couldn't agree more, giving the fighters some kind of skills as they level up would help to give them a little more variety and utility outside of combat and possibly also in combat too.

      Also, as funny as the spell-nuking sometimes was, I agree that it did remove any real chance of failure with things like Charm Person or alternately simply casting Strength on someone so many times they could do things like crushing several spore-zombies in a door. Perhaps you could introduce a rule where one person can cast Charm or Strength on the same target only once in a given time limit. It would still allow each person who could cast Charm Person to try and charm the same target, but only once each, preventing the odds from becoming too stacked.

      As we discussed Skadi and Jack's utility fell off somewhat as we gained levels and we chose more often to overpower threats than talk to them or sneak past them using spells. Playing Tiny however I actually felt like I was relying on his stats a lot more as the campaign progressed because of his connection to and knowledge of the snakemen. It came in constantly useful, whether it was leading the skeleton army across half the land or the final session where he could read their language and use their technology, as well as a demon could.

      I think your concerns with some NPCs being plot devices is understandable, but as Lucy says, with our constant erratic movement and general unpredictability it was hard for you to know which of the NPCs to focus on and develop when we might never see them again and met so many each day. I really liked Titus, Ron and Becky amongst others. I also agree with your first point about having a more contained world, which would help a lot with this issue as well.

      I must say this has been an amazing game, I really loved the freedom you gave us to explore and the fact we could do somewhat unconventional things a lot more, like make Legion or make friends out of many of our enemies. You truly did an excellent job of dealing with all the randomness and chaos we threw your way.

      Long live Team Tsathogga!

      Sovan the living lotus & Tiny the demon

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    3. Thanks for your thoughts on this, all of which make a lot of sense. The ways that Tiny continued to be able to contribute were partly what got me thinking about this. Just being a big ball of hit points and to-hit bonuses became less and less impressive as the game wore on: but adding in darkvision, superior carrying capacity, no need for food or sleep or water, instinctive knowledge of high-tech military operations, and the ability to read the snake-man language did a lot to even the odds. Similarly, Hash's inferior spellcasting mattered less when paired with his stealth, darkvision, heightened senses, etc. So giving fighter-types a whole list of traits like that to pick from every time they went up a level might help.

      I'm really glad you've enjoyed the game. When you joined us halfway through I worried it would all just seem like nonsense, but you really picked it up and ran with it, and it wouldn't have been at all the same without you. If you're still in town this autumn, I hope you'll be willing to join Lucy and I for whatever we end up playing next!

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  10. Do you intend to DM something on the Great Steppe, mayhaps?

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    1. That'd be nice, wouldn't it? Actually using all the Central Asia stuff that this blog used to be about?

      It'll depend on the players I end up with, I guess. We'll have to wait and see.

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  11. I'm re-reading the archives of Team Tsathogga, and I think I want to loot the Command Corpse spell for my campaigns. Is it an Against the Wicked City creation? It's not on the BX or LOTFP spell lists. Or is it from some other OSR source that I should pay $5 on drivethrurpg to keep creators from having to get real jobs?

    (Yes, adapting it to 5th edition or to my heavily homebrewed 3rd/5th hybrid is probably as complex as writing it from scratch, )

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    1. I can't remember where I got it from. Some drivethru necromancy spell list thing. 1st level magic user spell, animates one mostly intact humanoid corpse as a zombie for 1 hour/level, obeys verbal commands from its creator in a very literal-minded way. That should be enough for you to work with!

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  12. I vaguely remember a report about a cursed village that was guarded by a mutilated angel that had failed to protect it. And my memory says it was probably here. Was it in this campaign?

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    1. I think you might be thinking of the demon lord Sifkesh, from Pathfinder, who manifests as a mutilated angel and whose home dimension is a nightmare city. I mentioned her ages ago in my post on why your demon lord doesn't need that many hit dice, here:

      http://udan-adan.blogspot.com/2016/04/your-demon-lord-doesnt-need-that-many.html

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  13. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  14. Oh man, I can't believe I missed this post when it first came out. There are a lot of good lessons to be learned here, and while I'm sad I won't get to read any more Team Tsathogga actual play reports, I look forward to seeing new ones in the future.

    A few months ago I left a comment asking about your world map and you mentioned wanting to wait until the campaign was done to post it. Is there any chance we could get a look at it? It sounds like a very interesting combination of a lot of different settings.

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    1. Yeah, OK. I'll try to get one tidied up and uploaded soon!

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  15. This is really brilliant, I’ve loved the madcap sandbox world you created out of stitched-together modules, horror sci-fi and Romantic OSR and I’ve come away with a real affection for 1st edition DnD mechanics. If anything the half-finished storylines, logic-defying war plans and general chaos added to the game better than any railroad narrative could have done.

    I liked that we’d glimpse things like the mirror men, underground chitinous people, akkoum-infected hands and vast subterranean lakes in a way that would hint at tangential worlds with infinitely recurring complexity (before directly running off in the opposite direction to train a trench full of maggots or suchlike). I can really imagine the world 500 years later, confusedly struggling to understand the mess left behind by our campaign. Contagious amnesia was such a highlight.

    The ‘post-apocalyptic sci-fi’ thing worked for that as well, especially since the world had us piecing together what had happened before the original party descended into the catacombs underneath Bright Meadows through the forced perspective of neo-medieval peasants. Tangential-ness was really interesting in-game as well, I wonder what the entire crazy narrative would have sounded like from the viewpoint of each of the minor characters we baffled to death/left for years in a mountain full of undead/accidentally exploited into economic slavery. Spy Rat probably had the most long-running and unbiased first-person perspective on events tbh. If only he could hold a pen.

    I’d say that the sheer richness of the world/the multiplicity of creatures and social networks was more the point than the conflict mechanics, but even giving the disparity between fighters/mages and the possibility of stacking charm/strength spells on a single target, a lot of the combat encounters gave us a run for our money (the Science Fungoids, Myrmidon Army and Zombie Mountain come to mind). The genre did seem to change though, edging much more towards comedy as the possibility of character death became less likely (or so we thought…)

    In other 5e or VtM games I’ve been in, it’s not been so much the case that Anyone Can Die, but the pretty high death toll we tallied up right from the start introduced a bit more grittiness (giving each player two characters did really come in handy there).

    The blog’s been really useful as a resource for all kinds of nerdy reading lists (I just need to find Dragon Warriors now) as well as for pure entertainment (The Gothic Villain and Wizard’s Conference especially). Thank you so much for writing up all of this, there’s so much ephemera that might have been lost to the ages there - likewise, thank you for putting together such an intricate, long-running and utterly bizarre campaign,

    All Hail The Frog God!!!1!!!!1!!

    - Circe of Bright Meadows, Warlord High Priestess of the Frog God Tsathogga, Witness to the Devourer, Desecrator of Shrines, Wielder of Kitchen Skillets etc. etc., and Sophie the Muscle Wizard (RIP)

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    1. With the aid of speak with animals and a thousand patient hours, Spy Rat's epic autobiography, WTF I JUST STEPPED OUT FOR A CRUMB, will be published next spring.

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    2. Along with the long-awaited sequel, "Want Crumb Got Crumb Please Can We Leave The Underground Now: A Life"

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    3. Thanks, Rosa - glad you enjoyed the campaign! Thanks for bringing so much high-voltage lunacy to the table, session after session, year after year. Think how boringly heroic the group might have become without Circe to lead them astray...

      I think the connection you've drawn here between the tangential nature of the party's adventures, and that of their interactions with the world, is actually really insightful. The secrets of the world around you weren't placed before you like a trail of breadcrubs, to be fully and neatly uncovered in 6-8 sessions apiece: they were just sort of *there*, and you bounced off them glancingly and intermittently, uncovering some but not all of the truth behind the Sleepers, the fall of the Snake-Man empire, the Bright Lady, etc. But the same was true of your own adventures, and the people *you* interacted with had the same relationship with you that you had with various figures from the world's past and present: they got glimpses of a larger story that they would never fully understand. In a few centuries, people would absolutely be trying to puzzle out your story in exactly the same way that you were trying to puzzle out the stories of people like Elizabeth Lockheart. In both cases, I'm glad that you found the resulting raggedness fulfilling rather than frustrating.

      I can assure you that all the world's mysteries totally did have answers that could have been found if you'd been willing to carry on looking for them, though!

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