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.
You know, what really surprised me was how natural it came. I’m not saying I didn’t make mistakes, or that everything worked the way I thought it would. It’s that whether I had a plan for a session, was winging it, or was crafting long term setups that didn’t pay off for months, it flowed for me.
Reading my players, adjusting to the vibe of the table, switching things on the fly, it wasn’t a struggle.
Mind you, that’s my first campaign. There was a little bit of struggle learning d&d as a whole, and that learning curve meant the previous adventures were clunky as fuck all because I was just wrong about a bunch of stuff. Thac0 alone was a huge factor. But once I grasped the rule set, making my own campaign and running it felt as natural as breathing.