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.

  • Dunstabzugshaubitze@feddit.org
    15·
    2 days ago

    what suprised the most:

    • how much time things take at the table
    • what players don’t get that seemed super obvious to me when i prepped a murder scene for example
    • how much time i put into things, that don’t matter for the session.

    what advice i would have liked to have:

    • if something hinges on the players finding a specific thing, the thing exists atleast 3 times.
    • don’t prep a plot, prep situations and know the motovations of your npcs, the story happens at the table and trying to prep that beforehand only restricts you.
    • get your things in order before the session, if you know you need specific statblocks write them down in a way you can reference them quickly, if you need a dungeon with a complex layout, draw yourself a map before hand, have a roomkey where you can quikly findt it and so on.
    • present players with possible hooks for the next session, that way you can prep 2 or 3 specific things instead of “everything”, and the path they did not follow might still be something you can use later.
    • dumples@piefed.socialEnglish
      5·
      2 days ago

      I would also add that if a player needs to find a thing not only should be be in there 3 times it shouldn’t be behind a skill check. Especially a hard skill check.

      Maybe they find it with some negative consequence but it’s not fun to miss something by failing a single check.

    • Apepollo11@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 days ago

      This was perhaps the most surprising thing for me too - just how little progress players make in each session compared to what I expected.

      Also I was surprised by their interactions with NPCs. The first goblin they captured was made to lead them to his lair, whereupon his throat was slit. The second goblin they captured was made to march about in front of them as a trap detector before they eventually adopted him as their pet.

      Huge importance would be read into random bits of dialogue, and I’d have to rework things to make that pay off for them instead of the thing they were supposed to notice.