So we finally finished our year plus game.

So we finally finished our year plus game. I wanted to leave a brief summary and postmortem. Feel free to ask more specific questions.

The setting was loosely based on Chris Wooding’s “Tales of the Ketty Jay” series, where instead of starships we had jet-powered airships. The world was crisscrossed by powerful belts of persistent thunderstorms that are incredibly dangerous to fly through except at certain “passes.” The crew flew the “Goose’s Gimmick,” which looked something like the galleon from treasure planet (complete with open top deck).

What worked well:

– everyone had a great time, across a wide variety of rpg experience levels from first timer to decades-vet. This is really the most important thing! The players all want to keep playing and we’ll be jumping into a new campaign with a first time gm (a role we may start rotating)

– prompts, and getting everyone directly involved in world building and figuring out consequences, worked very well. Although some players are more comfortable with that improv than others, with experience I got better at making sure I didn’t ask stuff that left people feeling clueless and pressured.

What didn’t work as well:

– advancement fell apart and everyone got massively over leveled. I think the characters had something like 14 skills each when we wrapped up. This has already been well discussed and I think the new advancement rules largely should fix this.

– Debt/factions proved difficult to use effectively. Some “factions” ended up operating more like threats. Others never really had much narrative impact at all when the characters veered far from their sphere. And the impact of each level of debt and what it should mean in terms of the narrative was chronically unclear: what’s the difference between 2 debt and 3 debt? It was also often unclear how an individual’s debt reflected on how the ship/crew were treated. Most interactions with factions were quid pro quo deals with the whole crew, where any debt/favor was very specific and usually canceled out quickly. Narratively the faction interactions all made sense but it was awkward to fit the mechanics.

– Skills that give specialized equipment made sense at character creation but were awkward later on, when suddenly acquiring a shiny new toy probably didn’t make any narrative sense at all when you’re in the middle of nowhere fleeing pursuing pirates.

I may add more as I think of them but those are the bits on my mind for now. Hope this is useful to someone!