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.
The main thing I’ve learnt is to tell your players as much as you can before you start playing. Give them background lore, locations and maps, give them descriptions of well known characters - tell them everything a normal person in the setting would know and they’ll engage with the story far more, because they feel like part of the setting rather than an outsider looking in.
For my most recent campaign I wrote a 9 page guide that detailed mechanical restrictions, backstory requirements, and common themes that would crop up throughout the campaign, and everyone turned up to their session 0 with a complete character whose presence and motivations closely fitted the story, including the guy who was in prison for the first 4 sessions.