Coming Up Short

There were a few ways in which I feel Session 21, and Ten Years on Terra as a whole, came up short.  Let's take a quick look at those things.

First, Cho's backstory.  Cho was essentially a Capellan double-agent who was discovered and recruited by ROM during the Truce period.  There were a lot of opportunities to parry that into exciting adventures, which I utterly failed to do.  Perhaps if I hadn't ardently held to my schedule and done multiple sessions per year, I might've had a slot in which to explore Cho's backstory more completely.  As it is, though, it feels like a major miss on my part.

Secondly, Simon's backstory.  Granted, this was by far the most difficult character to write backstory for; he's essentially an office worker, and not a terribly exciting one at that.  Trying to tie him into the grander events that were going on in this campaign proved beyond my imaginative powers, and I feel like Simon's player suffered greatly for that failure in having very few spotlight episodes.

Thirdly, the sense of not having many resources.  Certainly, the party wasn't regularly running around in BattleMechs and Aerospace fighters, but rarely did they have a plan in which the financial and material resources at their disposal were not up to the task; there was no pain point in being a resistance group working out of a ranch in rural Colorado.

Finally, I think I didn't provide a good sense of feedback that what the party was doing was having an effect on the Word of Blake's operations on Terra and abroad.  I provided a list of ways in which they changed the timeline from canon at the end, but that felt like something I should've been doing a better job of communicating as the campaign was underway.  Early in the campaign, I provided notes on news that was coming in from around the Inner Sphere, but that tapered off later in the campaign.  I now feel I should've maintained that and used it as a means of rewarding the party with some direct acknowledgement of the affect their actions were having.

Those were the four major regrets I have coming out of this campaign.  One and two are simple laziness and lack of imagination on my part; I'll have to work on my personal creative skills to shore those up.  The last point I think I can resolve in future campaigns by paying more attention to the feedback I give my players; essentially and "After-Action Report" from the GM.

The third point is somewhat harder to fix.  Making the tone of the campaign one of scraping by was one of my primary goals in this campaign, along with having a "base" mechanic that would've been centered around the ranch.  Neither of those goals were accomplished, and I feel like there were two reasons: one of setting, one of GMing style.  The setting was difficult in that the party was on Terra, and therefore had reasonably reliable access to almost any non-military equipment they wanted (even, as it turns out, a Gorilla suit.)  The GMing style issue was more a problem with my generosity towards the players; I generally let anything pass that isn't obviously impossible or very difficult.  As a result, the party never really pushed up against their limits until they were undertaking regular BattleMech maintenance starting in 3076, and that was quickly solve with an infusion from their significant savings, and mothballing.

I still count this campaign as very successful, but recognizing where I failed as a GM is important in becoming better in future games.