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What surprised you most when you ran your first full campaign? (ttrpg.network)

submitted 2 weeks ago by realmkithq@ttrpg.network to c/rpg@ttrpg.network

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What honestly surprised you most when you ran (or played in) your first full campaign?

I've been talking to a lot of indie TTRPG creators lately — people designing their own systems, running campaigns, preparing Kickstarters — and one thing keeps coming up: the gap between what you planned and what actually happened at the table.

For some it's pacing (sessions ran 2x longer than expected). For others it's player attachment to NPCs they thought were throwaways. For some it's the opposite — a carefully built villain got ignored completely.

As someone who builds tools for TTRPG creators, I'm genuinely curious what the community thinks:

What's the one thing you wish someone had warned you about before running your first campaign?

Could be prep, could be player dynamics, could be the mechanics themselves. No wrong answers — I'm here to learn from people who've actually been at the table.

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[–] bwebster@dice.camp 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

@juergen_hubert @realmkithq my baseline for whether I will GM a game these days is “can I create a fully-statted NPC in less than 30 seconds”. If I can, that means I can probably create them on the fly in a session, which is necessary for the way I GM. It’s such an important part of a game, but is not often talked about! Particularly I think it’s a lot more important than how long it takes to create a character, which is talked about way more often

[–] juergen_hubert@ttrpg.network 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah, GURPS character creation can take quite a lot of time, but once the character is done it flows very smoothly, so that doesn't bother me. But GMs need to create NPCs all the time, and the speed of character creation is very, very important.