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.
I wish that someone had warned me that one of the most important aspects for picking a system to run is how difficult or complex it is to create NPCs or monsters.
I ran D&D 3.X for a time, which… wasn’t great for that.
Then I ran Exalted 1E and 2E, which were worse.
These days I mostly run D&D 5E, which is (a) vastly simpler when it comes to NPC prep, and (b) has so many stat blocks in both official and unofficial sources that I rarely need to come up with something custom.
A honorable mention goes out to GURPS, which is actually pretty easy to run for once you know what you are doing - first you need to keep in mind that “character points” are mostly for player characters, and can be ignored for NPCs for the most part. Then you also need to keep in mind not do overdo it with defensive stats, or else combat will get bogged down and boring.
@juergen_hubert @realmkithq This issue always lurked in the background for any game I ran, I distinctly remember NPC creation taking forever when I started (briefly) designing D&D 3.0 scenarios, and later NPCs for WotC’s Star Wars games. Ugh!
That said, NPC creation for the West End Games Star Wars RPG remains second nature for me, given my long involvement with it and the very intuitive skill-based nature of the D6 system that ties dice pools to expertise.
@juergen_hubert @realmkithq absolutely. I run high-level Pathfinder (by accident) and creating monsters and NPCs for the party to deal with takes enormous amounts of time, if they’re going to be remotely challenging.
Pathfinder 1E or 2E?
I don’t have much practical experience with the latter, but it did move away from the notion that NPCs must be created with the same system as PCs.
@juergen_hubert I’m in 1E. I still haven’t tried 2E at all. Someone proposed running a game, so I made a character, but it fizzled before even starting.
@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
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.