If you are a member of this campaign, you should not read this.

Though this may have seemed like a session where nothing much happened, I had a ton of fun. I really enjoyed seeing the party haggle over who had to carry the lantern, and what they should drop to be able to pick up more treasure. I think they’re starting to better understand the encumbrance system as well. I asked them if they found the increased bookkeeping annoying, but Earl said he actually found it really enjoyable! That’s good! I honestly think that my style these days is to run the kind of campaign I want to run, advertise it truthfully, and find people who also really like that kind of campaign. This is different from my attitude in the past, which was much more focused around appeasing current players. I’m very glad that I was able to discover this style by engaging with OSR content, because the prevailing zeitgeist is very much in the appeasement camp, from what I’ve seen.

The group totally missed the hidden treasure as a result of the failed Detect Magic roll. I was actually rooting for them, because seven sessions without leveling up is very different from our past games. I think we’re OK with it, though.

The kobold encounter was very interesting. I rolled them as a random encounter, and decided that they were sent by the kobolds to catch the party on their way back. The group definitely gained some good information from them, and I had the kobolds be amenable to that because of the party’s gift-giving and their willingness to share information in return, as well as an assumed good-word about the party from Grimblegrom.

After the session, Mark messaged me with some feedback. It was a somewhat long conversation, but the summary is that he is getting bored by random encounters where he just swings his sword against wild animals that attack on sight, and would like more random encounters like the kobold encounter, or even some custom-written ones where the party had a choice on whether to engage or not. My response was to say that dangerous random encounters are crucial for maintaining the time and resource management aspects of the game, and that I actually found them to be pretty exciting. After all, two of the three times a PC went to zero HP occurred as a result of a random encounter, and those both resulted in permanent injuries.

In the end, what really animates me about TTRPG’s is thinking of the campaign world as a massive, complex, interconnected system and building logical procedures to measure the ripple-effect consequences of player actions. “Playing to see what happens” - that’s what keeps me coming back to this hobby. Not so much the creative-fiction-writing or improv-acting side. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with those styles, but they just aren’t me. The only thing I can do now is seek out others who like that side of things as well, and play :smile: