I've spent this last week sick as a dog and stoned out of my mind (on Nyquil! Nyquil None of that devil's cabbage for me!), and while I was able to shake off the cold enough to actually run the game yesterday - well, I get two or so hours into running the proceedings and my non-Nyquil addled brain goes "Jesus, this thing really stinks!"

Fortunately everyone else in the group was down from getting ready for the Holidays, so I was able to bury off my terrible game idea with the notion that nobody was really into it last night. So we picked a pretty terrible cliffhanger (actually hanging on a cliff) and called it an early evening. My problem is, of course, is even if we're super tight next week, I'm left with a barely coherent fever dream in GM Note form.

So my choices before me are A) Call a mulligan and just cut our losses, come up with something all new. B) Try and re-write what has come before with something all new or C) muddle on and play out the suck to the bitter end. Fortunately I have a whole week off from work to pull out of this nose dive. What do I want from you guys? No idea - I just wanted to rant for a moment, I guess.

This is Star Wars. Just rewrite history about what happened and call it good.

"No, no, Leia was ALWAYS meant to be Luke's sister...if you slow them down to frame-by-frame, those kisses were harmless..."

So that’s how they came up with the script for TLJ?!

Did you get actual feedback that the session was bad, or could it be that it really WAS just everyone not feeling well? You can have the best-written session ready to go; and if people just don't feel like playing, there's a good chance it's going to fall flat.

I couldn't really give a confident answer without more details; but based on what little you've said, I'd take 'C'; especially if you've already sunk a lot of work into it. It might be better than you think and you're just second guessing yourself. Writers tend to be their own worst critics.

I wrote a long arc about a year and a half ago; put a lot of time and effort into it. And then right before that arc kicked off, I suddenly found myself thinking "This whole thing is crap; they're going to hate it." Fortunately, I didn't have time to write anything else; and I say 'fortunately' because my players ended up loving it. In fact, they've already been asking when that arc might see some follow-up.

"You awake in bed, groaning at the headache and looking around the [room/cabin/whatever]. Your eyes align on the dreaded green bottle. Space-Nyquil. Never again , you swear, staggering out of bed to discover that [last session events] were all a fever-dream..."

"What would George Lucas do?"

No, that's no good, he'd retcon it and force his silly retcon to become canon to ruin everyone's fun later!

"What would Marcy do?"

I dunno - throw some semi-naked women in it and call it good? (at least you could tell your players you got the idea from crazy old lady on a forum?

P.S. Happy Life Day everyone! I'm putting on my red robes to join some wookiees!

Pass the NyQuil around the table and see where it takes you? (Don't try this at home, kids!)

It's not all on you to fix it, the rest of the table helped you get there. Have them help dig you out. Purple Monkey Dishwasher.

How much can you reveal here without giving too much away?

This is easy to fix.

Have your players roll to climb up from hanging on the cliff. Make the roll really, really, really hard to pass. When one of them fails and falls to their death have them wake up, realizing it was all a bad dream.

Que Dallas music and start a new, better campaign!

My personal advice?

Option D) Go all out.

Throw all the coal into the engines, put it into top speed and aim to create the most over-the-top and glorious trainwreck you can think of.

I'm talking: Aboleth tap-dancing to Coruscant wielding a lightwhip, garroting Grand Admiral thrawn and Mara Jade while being backed by a Yuuzhan Vong cantina band level trainwreck here.

In short: Go nuts.

Warning: Please consult with medical professionals and rpg experts to see if Option D) is right for you first before use.

6 hours ago, unicornpuncher said:

This is easy to fix.

Have your players roll to climb up from hanging on the cliff. Make the roll really, really, really hard to pass. When one of them fails and falls to their death have them wake up, realizing it was all a bad dream.

Que Dallas music and start a new, better campaign!

Ya ninja'd me

Everyone's had sessions that just didn't click for whatever reason. Nature of the beast, and even superstar GMs and game designers have had it happen. I still chuckle at the notion of "drink vouchers" after a pick-up game that Jay Little at a past GenCon was running fell apart into fits of laughter due to Jay's brain being more or less fried from the long con, which itself lead to the bunch of hanging out in a hotel lobby subbing "drink vouchers" into various Star Wars phrases. ("What about those drink vouchers?" "You worry about that bar tab, I'll worry about the drink vouchers!")

Ultimately, shrug your shoulders, accept you and your group had an off week, and pick up as best you can.

Granted, I'm one of those GMs that pretty much runs by the seat of their pants (I have at most an outline of plot points for the adventure and stat blocks for major NPCs as well as those ever-handy Adversary Decks), so recovering from a dud of a session (of which I've had my own fair share) isn't quite as much of an issue.

Also, don't be afraid to solicit ideas and suggestions from the PCs about where to go from your literal cliff-hanger. For instance, perhaps they do fall, but literally fall into something that helps them get to the next major plot point (I've done this literally in a Deadlands: **** on Earth game).

Let the past die

Go for the glorious train wreck!

On 12/25/2017 at 0:54 PM, copperbell said:

How much can you reveal here without giving too much away?

Well, we had just had the battle of Endor and some fun times there. The alliance, wanting to keep the pressure on for the Empire, sent the team to an ISB Black Vault - you know, one of those dirty little Area 51 facilities - to grab whatever intel they could before the Empire fragmented enough to make said intel useless. The planet was a remote, rocky uninhabited affair and the ISB base was up in the mountains - so the PCs did their due diligence, managed to get down undetected, up into mountains on a ledge overlooking the base - which is where we left off.

And that's when I realized that all my notes were pretty much a really crappy JRPG that consisted of nothing but fetch quests and dungeon crawling (but without the dungeon mapped out). In short there was no real reason to go do this other than it served to insert some fighting in the game.

Now that I have a week to think about it (New Years and my birthday is screwing up next week's game), and now that I'm not addled with fever and NyQuil, I think I can come up with something cool to do in the base and some reason to be there other than "Go kill imperials". But yeah, if we had continued playing from that point, I would have felt bad about running a game like that.

You mean like Palpatine's Observatory as seen in Battlefront 2?

Maybe that ISB Base is actually set within the ruins of a Jedi Temple so maybe reuse the AoR Beginner Game mat revealing it overlooks a hidden valley which holds the Temple Palpatine is so interested in?

So not only do they find a base they need to defend as the Empire wants to erase anything that might threaten their return.

The twist is that Palpatine was trying to locate a Gatekeeper Holocron hidden within the Temple which involves a long lost Jedi Explorer who explored the Unknown Regions...

I am running into a problem with my party... and believe it or not I think it is a semantics issue.

They are on their way to a khiber mine crossing a century long storm as slaves on a specially designed train called “Stormpiercer” (I know... a bit on the nose). However, during the first session one of my players got sort of pissy stating this “railroading was extreme” while I have left literally everything open for them. Sure, I have some premade battles and set pieces but everything else can be dealt with in any which way they want.

Yet somehow the metaphor of it being a train journey is literally ruining the game.

“It makes no difference what I do.”

“The train will go where it is supposed to anyway.”

”So? What happens next?”

I have tried to pull them back in the game by having astrogation checks trigger memories of lost settlements in the eye of the storm. I have had speeders flank the train. I had robbers attack the carriages of the overseer under their eyes. Nothing works. And this is an experienced party with 3 years of play beneath their belts. Somehow the word “train” has broken the fourth wall and I have no idea how to built it back up without abandoning the current plot, which, ironically enough, would involve actually railroading the session.

On 2017-12-30 at 11:30 AM, DanteRotterdam said:

I am running into a problem with my party... and believe it or not I think it is a semantics issue.

They are on their way to a khiber mine crossing a century long storm as slaves on a specially designed train called “Stormpiercer” (I know... a bit on the nose). However, during the first session one of my players got sort of pissy stating this “railroading was extreme” while I have left literally everything open for them. Sure, I have some premade battles and set pieces but everything else can be dealt with in any which way they want.

Yet somehow the metaphor of it being a train journey is literally ruining the game.

“It makes no difference what I do.”

“The train will go where it is supposed to anyway.”

”So? What happens next?”

I have tried to pull them back in the game by having astrogation checks trigger memories of lost settlements in the eye of the storm. I have had speeders flank the train. I had robbers attack the carriages of the overseer under their eyes. Nothing works. And this is an experienced party with 3 years of play beneath their belts. Somehow the word “train” has broken the fourth wall and I have no idea how to built it back up without abandoning the current plot, which, ironically enough, would involve actually railroading the session.

Derail it. If they don’t like the train, lose it for some reason and have them have to decide how they deal with being in the heart of this massive storm. Maybe there are tunnels underground, maybe they see a long abandoned settlement over the next rise, maybe they want to utilize scraps of the train wreck to signal someone to come brave the storm and try and save them. If they feel that the train is the problem, remove it from play and let them respond as they see fit. Do it near the end of the session and that way you have time to adjust to whatever their solution will be.

Yeah, that is exactly what I did yesterday!

I knew a way out of course. I was just annoyed by their semantic blockage I guess. It made for horrible GMing.

Because I all know that you guys were on pins and needles about what I was going to do. . . . . I wound up scrapping the game, calling a mulligan via "You wake up having had the strangest dream" to the Jedi who picks up visions like that and forging ahead on an all new course.

Mind you, my carefully plotted out story that was the replacement? Yeah, that got completely sidelined when someone in the group went "Ya know, with the Battle of Endor just having happened and the Empire in disarray, I bet the Jedi Temple on Courscant is more or less unprotected." and they went off in a completely random direction. I just shrugged and said to the group "Well, I guess I can close the file with my notes. . . ."

(Spoiler - it wasn't all that undefended and it was nearly a close thing for the party. . . )