Web of Wavemeet Review

It's been almost a month since I ran my adventure The Web of Wavemeet, a mystery adventure in a tabletop RPG system of my design. I figured it would be good for me to share with you my thoughts on how things went.

I don't want to share too much about the adventure right now, as I may use it as an adventure that I actually publish with my system in the future. However, the basic jist is that the PCs are a group of smugglers who arrive in a town to find out that their contact is missing. As they explore the city looking for their contact, they find that there are many strange and interconnected things going on in almost every form, be it magical, political, or otherwise.

1. I Think People had a Good Time

I always have a really hard time knowing for sure how much my players were enjoying it. Sometimes I think I did awful, but I'll be talking to someone afterwards and they'll say it was one of the better sessions I've run. Other times, I'll think things went really well and find out later that my players just weren't in it.

But, in this case, even being a one-shot where a lot of the players didn't know each other to begin with, it seemed like people were really getting into it. They were making jokes with each other and using voices for their characters and generally seemed to be having a good time.

2. Players New to the Craft

Of the players we had, 3 of the 5 were completely new to tabletop RPGs. This is a blessing and a curse for something like this. Being a playtest of my own system, it's helpful to have someone new so that I can make sure the game makes sense to someone who doesn't have the assumptions that come with having played other RPG games. However, it also means that these players are less inclined to recognize if something is a bit off, not having anything to compare it to.

Afterwards, one of these players did comment that it was a bit slow. I'm not sure how much this complaint is genuine versus how much it is just unfamiliarity with the hobby. From where I was sitting, things seemed to move fairly quickly, and it seemed like the players always had at least one place to go. I only remember one point in time where players seemed to sit and have a long discussion about the plan without moving forward, and this was only about 20 minutes (which may have only been that long due to a combination of off-topic discussion and multiple players getting up to take restroom breaks at that point in time.

3. The Mystery

To plan the mystery, I utilized the 3-clue rule as explained by Justin Alexander here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1118/roleplaying-games/three-clue-rule

Specifically, I used a node-based design as described here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7949/roleplaying-games/node-based-scenario-design-part-1-the-plotted-approach

From the starting location (A), I had three different clues (or logical pieces of information that the players would have), each of which pointed to a different location (B, C, and D). At each of those locations, there would be three other clues. Two of these clues (one each) would point at the other two locations indicated by the starting location. The other clue would point to one of three locations deeper into the mystery (E, F, or G).

Once in the second tier of locations, each of these locations would have three clues. Two of the clues would point to the other two locations at that tier. The other clue would point to the location of the final confrontation where everything would come together (H).

Because of this, the players always had a good number of clues pointing them at varying sources of information and allowing them to choose between it. It seemed to work well, and it's certainly a format that I'd like to use more in the future, potentially on a wider scale.

Of course, something that I was afraid of, was that the players could just take a straight-line path to the end. They could go A-B-E-H without exploring C, D, F, or G, effectively missing more than half the adventure. Of course, it's very unlikely players will visit every node, but taking a straight-line path runs the risk of being far too short of an adventure, as well as failing to see the depth/complexity of the mystery itself. This wasn't what ended up happening when I ran the adventure, but it was something that was discussed/could have happened. (The players didn't know how the clues were laid out, but at their first tier location, they almost followed the clue to the second tier one, which is the second tier location that points the hardest at the final location.)

Overall though, I would say that the mystery format was successful and that it went well. I will possibly make a post later with some additional thoughts about running mystery adventures, hoping I can add something to what's already been said in the articles above.

4. The System

There are definitely some things that need adjusting, but I think a lot of it just had to do with how I'd set up the player characters. Character creation is the biggest thing my system is still missing, so I put together characters trying to keep things relatively balanced with each other as well as with the adventure.

With each other:

Honestly, it's hard to say how well the characters balanced against each other without more/longer play-testing. There were definitely some over-powered abilities, but if each of the characters had one equally overpowered ability, that's still a form of balance.

With the Adventure:

The players were definitely too powerful for the adventure, rarely running into any real trouble. Based on how they had been doing to that point, I increased the difficulty of the final encounter on the fly, but they still were able to win without too much difficulty (although, this may have been different if they hadn't used one of their overpowered abilities to incapacitate the boss while they took out his minions.)

As formerly mentioned, some of their abilities were just too powerful for the adventure they were handling. I'd designed the characters to be a little better than starting characters would be, but they weren't supposed to be that astronomically good.

Also, there's something about probability that I'm still trying to work through. To begin with, it seemed like their rolls were on the whole much higher than I'd expected. However, later in the game they seemed much lower. I designed the system using die pools to avoid constantly getting super high or super low rolls, since a die pool has more of a normal curve of probability. I was discussing it with one of the players a while after, and I think that the probability may not actually have been as skewed as it seemed, just that when you're rolling that many dice, a super high or low result sticks out and seems more notable than rolling a 20 on a d20, so they stick out more and seem more common even if they aren't. (Apologies on the run-on.)

5. Moving Forward

I've recently put together the character sheets for my upcoming Toybox campaign which uses the same system. I definitely took into account the lessons learned when deciding what powers to give the players in the campaign. However, it'll still be something I'm sensitive to going into the campaign, and I've warned my players that adjustments may be necessary as things go along if any of the characters are over or under powered.

I've also tried to make a few other minor tweaks to the system itself based on the results of the one-shot, and I am looking forward to how things turn out.

I've been laying a lot of ground-work for the Toybox campaign, and I'm very excited to start it next month. I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.