The Eight Arms and the Deed of Taiyun Gao is the third campaign to end in the Eight Arms universe, though it was the second to start (five-week campaigns do a number on my count). The Eight Arms see an opportunity to gain a footing in a new part of the world by sending a small group to stop two nations from going to war. Their plan is hindered by a contract that grants the land to the country that doesn’t own it, assassins targeting the negotiating diplomats, giants knocking at the country’s border, and the ambitions of a powerful oni.
Here’s what I learned from running this campaign:
- Some stories don’t have perfect endings. As an escapist, this kills me, because I want everything to be great forever. But sometimes the players or characters make decisions that prevent happy endings, and it can be rewarding to just make things a lesser sort of terrible.
- Players can do great evil in the name of middling good. The party tortured an assassin to death to get the location of their guild, and only then stopped to consider what they might do with that information. It turned out alright (if you can consider “the party is now pursued by all living assassins” alright), but it was a pretty jarring moment for me, anybody I could get to listen to the story, and the player who missed that week.
- Setting a campaign in a place with an unspeakable language is rough. The players and I knew this going in, but it did occasionally leave one or more players on he wayside because they couldn’t speak the language.
- Good party composition is very helpful, but bad party composition is absolutely crippling. I’ve talked about the roles that characters can fill and acknowledged that players can do without one or two, but I didn’t really address what happens when roles are duplicated. This party had four players, and the roles broke down like this:
- Zero controllers
- Three damage-dealers
- Two half-defenders (one needed buffs, the other was a barbarian)
- Three diplomats
- One quarter-healer (a bard who spent his spells on the aforementioned defending)
- Zero naturalists
- One sneak (and a guy who could cast invisibility)
- Certain classes as more popular than others. Again, I knew this, but now I know which classes those are. I go into more detail on this below.
Given the option, here’s what I would change:
- I actually would have made the ending more bleak. The players managed to pull a Hail Mary at the last second with two crits in one round, and it was easy to ride that wave of emotion, but the players did fail at their mission, and failed in a way that made things worse than if they hadn’t shown up at all. The conclusion should have been darker than “all of you live, though some are uncomfortable”. Luckily, those assassins are still around…
- I might have run my set piece. I’ve said that I like planning campaigns with a set piece in mind. This time it didn’t happen, so I actually didn’t do the thing I designed this campaign to achieve. But I say I might have run it because I don’t know if I could fit it in without it feeling forced.
On a related note, I think I’m going to disallow summoners in the short-term future. Every Pathfinder campaign I’ve run so far has had one, and all of them used very similar builds to deal more damage than the other strikers while being more survivable and leaving a whole character free to perform other actions. It seems too easy to build an eidolon that steps on other players and negates the normal disadvantages of high-damage characters, and some players aren’t as conscientious as others about it. Besides, it means that the Eight Arms are 25% summoners (for reference, they have no representatives from six core classes); I’m just tired of running games for them.
I may soft-ban ifrit sorcerers for the same reason, though I think this guarantees that I’ll see them at Delve Night.
This campaign and The Great Tower of Oldechi also inspired me to cancel the Evil Campaign, an idea I had where all characters must be evil. After seeing how nonchalantly players can slide into evil when its expedient or fun, I think running an Evil Campaign would be redundant. A Good Campaign might be more rewarding.
Edit: It was not
In an ideal world, most D&D games would be “good campaigns”. We’re both in a campaign where the expectation is that everyone will be good (or at least end up there). When you set expectations and have conscientious players, the game and metagame both line up to push good behavior.
That doesn’t happen in every campaign. There are several things that I think lead to players going over to the dark side, and all have to do with consequences.
One is pressure from the other players (or a lack thereof). If there is no expectation to behave well in character or out, then expediency rules. In some cases, there is pressure towards expediency over good behavior. Expediency often leads directly to evil. This is something that I think has to be corrected at the meta level, if not by the players then directly by the DM. “Hey, would your lawful good character have something to say about that?” “How would your employers/order/deity/mother feel about you doing that?” “Is that the kind of ‘hero’ you really want to be?”
Another is in-game social consequences. Players need to be shown early and often that their actions have severe consequences in the way people treat them and who will deal with them. The more detached and less dependent the party is from the society around them, the less they will have to think about the consequences of their actions. When the honest shopkeeper won’t do business with them and they have to go to the shady fencer who gives them terrible prices, they’ll learn.
Finally, there is the tendency of some players to want to avoid consequences entirely. Consequences make games interesting. If by applying enough planning you could just win at everything and not have anything go badly for your character, you would not be playing a game at all. But many players hate consequences and will try to bargain their way out of anything possibly going wrong for them. “I want to murder the king’s personal guards but in such a way that nobody hears, no trace is left, and nobody can pin it on me” might just not be a thing you can do. This is where the “here are three things you want – pick two” type of choices come in. You let the player know that nothing is free, and success just gets you more of what you want, not all of it.
First off, I want to put out there that a “terrible ending” can be entertaining, appropriate and a lot of fun. As long as you can maintain the separation between yourself and your character a bad ending can be the best. I still smile every time I think about bleeding to death while I rode off into the sunset in my first game of Fiasco. Plans are made, Catastrophe looms and then Hilarity Ensues is one of my favorite tropes.
Personally I did not realize that communication would be an issue until halfway through the first session. And really this was also my only real complaint about the campaign. It can be pretty funny to be ineffective in combat, but when you can’t communicate that doesn’t leave a lot else to do. I feel like the whole issue was ignored quite a bit, which did salvage the campaign, but at a cost to my ability to maintain suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, without the need for a translator we wouldn’t have had Yang, and that would have been a great loss.
I concur that our party composition blew bilious chunks. Usually there is at least 1 or 2 players in a group that say “What are we missing?” and makes a character to help fill that hole. None of us did this. Hell I didn’t help much by trying to steer away from Gygaxing D&D just to show I could, seeing as everyone else did their level best to fill that bucket.
As for the “Bleak Ending” I think that would actually have gone over fine. Kveldof could have died gloriously in combat fighting for the losing side. Who knows what Vampire Egan would have done, but in his new incarnation he might well have swung with the tide, regardless I would have been entertained.
All in all I had a good time in the campaign. It really didn’t fit my expectations based on what I’d experienced in the previous 8 Arms campaign, or how it had been described. But you know me, I like basically all styles of game.
If it helps, it didn’t fit my expectations either.
I was doing to describe what was up with Yang but, after my recent post on letting sleeping plots lie, I think it would be disingenuous.