Big Wins

In connection to yesterday's evaluation of my biggest misses, I wanted to take an entry to recognize what helped a lot with this game.

First, creating forms for the rules.  Especially for Downtime XP, creating forms for tasks that required a lot of rolls was one of the best things that I did in this campaign.  Besides simplifying the somewhat arduous process of the party getting their experience points, handing these out during breakfast and having the players run through them as they chatted provide some subliminal structure to getting the session rolling and transitioning from the "chatting" phase of the morning to the "playing" phase; when the last person handed in their Downtime sheet, the table quieted down pretty naturally, people took their dishes to the kitchen, and got into the mindset to play.  This transitional effect was totally unexpected, but very helpful later in the campaign.

Second, defining specific plot lines, and having specific characters spotlighted in each plotline, greatly helped in giving initial definition to each session.  For example, the Bioweapons arc featured Clark, the Sarna arc featured Alexander and Cho.  Knowing what the main thrust of each session would be helped a lot in giving me a primary path through each session, onto which I could attach challenges and complications that would require assistance from the other characters.

Third, Downtime XP was not as extremely unbalancing as I initially feared it might be; the fact of the matter seems to be that the XP level of a character doesn't mean too terribly much in A Time of War unless that experience is being spent in a very targeted manner toward a specific task.  In the end, the party ended up having a few really great skilled (Simon with Computers, Alex with Gunnery/'Mech, David with Martial Arts, all at +8), which really more helped me determine what encounters to give them than anything else.

Finally, after a number of closely spaced sessions at the beginning of the campaign, I did manage to keep the campaign running at approximately one session per year through the 3070's.  I originally planned the campaign to be 15 sessions, and it ended up going 21, which is a significant miss, but not a catastrophic one.

There were certainly other successes, especially on the roleplaying front.  More so than most other games I've played or run, this campaign had a feeling of character and party development as the party slipped from being highly principled into the depths of what even by their own definition were terrorist tactics, and towards the end clawing their way back toward their original ideology to reconcile their principles with the need to stop a truly evil opponent.  In that regard, exploring situations and scenarios we would (hopefully) never encounter in real life, Ten Years on Terra was an outstanding success, and I think ended up being just a tiny bit more than a Sunday morning distraction.  That, perhaps more than anything else, makes me feel like I did a good job with this game.