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.
It wasn’t my first campaign, but it was a game I ran for a group that hasn’t played before, and it was funny how unintuitive a lot of “player actions” can be if you’re not used to it. Like, they didn’t know what they could do?
I had an NPC slip something under the door, and when the players opened the door they could just barely see the NPC nip around a corner at the end of the hall. This was “meant” to be a chase. Instead they were basically like “huh… I wonder who that was. Guess we’ll never know” 😛
Or when one of them talked to a witness of a crime and I described the witness as “eyeing you suspiciously and only barely nodding in response to your greeting” they were like “I don’t think he likes me, I don’t want to disturb him, I’ll leave him alone” 😅
It was all fully my fault, of course, but I was used to playing with much more active and plugged-in players, and fully dropped the ball with players that were a lot more passive, either from lack of experience or just mismatch between players and game genre.
So for them, I think a few railroads would have actually helped them quite a bit. Or if not railroads, at least maybe some bumpers or training wheels until they start to figure out what it means to have agency in a genre story.
I’m running for a group where 3/5 players are totally green, and they’ve been doing incredible. They’ve been catching onto plot hooks early, pulling off risky heists, decisive diplomatic strategy when working characters for info.
Then last session they went to a new city (Neverwinter) homebrewed in detail. I spent 90 minutes waiting for them to ask me (or y’know, an NPC) what was around. I teased them by handing out a blank map with juicy-looking points of interest to get them curious.
They did not ask. They wanted to find: their quest destination (the keep/castle, to drop off a prisoner), a cheese shop, and an inn — in that exact order. Player agency is just a trip sometimes.