Maintenance and Preservation - Lessons Learned

Juan de Valdés Leal

 

Simplification is great. The lack of classes and class subsystems meant character creation only took a few minutes. This let new players quickly join tables of experienced players without the need to prepare before the session. This is a fantasy offered by other Basic clones like OSE and Lamentations, but in my experience chargen in those games takes substantially longer and requires more paperwork at the table, because you've got to pick a class and then copy a bunch of class features, saving throws and additional items (particularly rolled spells) to your sheet. Every player missed something on their first go (skills, starting items, the ability to "invert" ability scores which I admit is unintuitive) but since there weren't a lot of interdependencies on the sheet it was easy to fix.

 

The name sucks. It's not evocative and it's only barely descriptive. I'm sure I could come up with something better.

 

Three hour sessions are great. I used to shoot for four because I felt anything shorter than that wasn't worth blocking out time on a schedule - either for myself or for the players. But three is just better.

The venue was good, but could have been better. Taprooms and breweries are some of the last remaining "third places" in this country. Grab a table, grab a beer and you'll be left alone by the staff for the next three hours. The downside is these places can be very, very loud, even during the middle of the day. Even a roomful of people talking at normal volume can make it hard to hear someone at the end of a normal sized table, and it only gets worse if any of your players have sensory processing issues.

Home scenes are great. Like in Delta Green, they let the players explore things they discovered during the session, but might not have had time to pursue on their own. I still like my domain play system for Esoteric Enterprises but home scenes accomplish the same thing without requiring the players to master a lot of additional rules. I think I could have done a better job hooking some of the players' personal pursuits back into the game. 

Exploration is a satisfying and time consuming activity even if you don't make the players draw their own maps. I already knew this from other dungeon crawls but the contrast here with the previous Esoteric Enterprises games I ran was striking. I think I could have deputized the players to manage the big book of player-facing maps, even though I was the one filling in the blank space. It would have meant I had to juggle fewer documents. We played at picnic style tables but I still found myself constantly running out of space to store all the giant pages.

If combat ever devolves into a lot of tedious rolling-to-hit, change something. The NPCs realize they're stuck in a battle of attrition they might not win, and either retreat or come up with a new plan. Ambush predators don't press the attack if the initial attack fails. Wild animals are loath to risk injury in fair fights when even a minor injury can spell death.

(If the monsters are locked in a battle of attrition but obviously winning the battle, that's another story. That puts the onus on the players to mix things up or retreat)

Translation is a great skill. It lets the players cast from scrolls but it also lets them communicate with intelligent beings that don't speak vanilla human languages - or creatures that understand human languages but lack the hearing or mouthparts to vocalize them. The maintenance team had lots of discussions with mute NPCs and creatures, with the characters who had high translation scores acting as interpreters.

 

Lots of fun overall, I think this is where I put down Esoteric Enterprises (but I've said that before).