Reflections on an Open Table after 20-ish Sessions
My Knave2e open table (Hither and Yon Infinite) recently finished its 21st session. It's not the longest open table I've ever ran (yet), but it is the first one that I feel like I could run forever. My normal method of running campaigns is to get extremely excited about the initial idea and run sessions up until I come to a good stopping point or run out of gas and cancel the game entirely. This game is one of the few that I get renewed spurts of excitement about, even months into the project.
I credit that excitement largely to blogging about the game and discussing it online. Keeping track of my session notes (also a new thing), rewording them enough to make them comprehensible enough as a session recap to at least the players that were there, and discussing the articles after has forced me to reflect much more on past sessions instead of just continuing to plow onwards in a campaign. The results of the mere-measurement of my sessions have resulted in me thinking quite a bit more about the campaign over a longer period instead of doing all of the thinking all at once at the beginning.
To that end, I thought it might be useful [to later-me, to others] to list the major considerations I'm thinking about for H&Y Infinite currently:
- Quick Character Generation: Reducing barriers to getting into play has made it much easier to convince random adjacent friends to join a session. Being able to literally roll up a random character is enough of a novelty to attract casual TTRPG player friends as well.
- Easy Companions and Hirelings: Allowing easy access to NPCs has been pretty successful so far, with most players paying a daily rate for their henchpeople. I've allowed pretty lenient conversion of hirelings (paid) to Companions (tagalong extra Player Characters that get a share of loot and XP). Pushing players to gain access to more controllable characters makes it easier to replace dead PCs in the field and easier to perform multiple activities simultaneously (especially "errands"-type activities).
- Lack of Visuals: I haven't been providing any location maps to my players. I give out XP to players who make an attempt to add to shared maps of locations (crowd-sourcing the Mapper job), but I make no attempt to provide maps of these locations myself. I only ask that they put all maps in a shared Miro board. Different mapping styles have emerged and I think broadly its been a success. I have provided a regional hex map recently due to player confusion on where everything is, but I'm chalking that up to a failure on my part to properly explain the region.
- Starting Equipment: Knave2e is incredibly lenient and also vague on what exactly you might want to get or bring adventuring. It's got a couple of d100 tables for gear items to pick from but also allows for players to come up with their own via the freeform pricing model. This ends up with some types of players getting needless heavy analysis paralysis on what to start off with, made especially grating because for the most part whatever they start with is going to be dropped on the ground the first time they find treasure anyway. To fix it, I'm going to take a stab at some starting equipment packages from adjacent games like Cairn or just write my own instead.
- Treasure and XP: I'm issuing XP for gold value of treasure brought to a safe area, which works to drive a dungeon-delvy, exploratory game. I do find that the limited inventory and ephemeral sessions tend to incentivize players to just liquidate everything they find, even though they've already got the XP from bringing the treasure back. They can't even use gold to acquire similar items to the ones they're selling and they know that they're not getting a great price for anything they sell and despite that they continue to sell almost everything they find, a fact with puzzles me. It's possible that I should make vendors more diegetic and less menu-book-keeping-ephemeral, saying something like "no the barkeep does not want to buy old armor, its useless to him" might help to curb this behavior. On the other hand, if all the players are doing it, should I be curbing this behavior? Is this just an artefact of the open table format?
- Format and Scheduling: I'm running sessions in a Discord server unique to this campaign with a dice bot. Session sign-ups are just me posting in a specific channel with a timestamp so people can react based on whether they want to play. If I have more than 2 players, I run a game. I've got consistent timeslots every Monday and Thursday and sporadic timeslots whenever another game of mine cancels or if I have other free time for some reason (holidays). The only visuals in the game are pictures that I link in Discord and whatever the players draw in Miro. I'm a fan of this format and schedule, with my only real pain point being not enough time in the week to run sessions for my friends who can't play weekdays.
- System: Knave2e is just fine. It works. I ended up having to rip out and rewrite the Hazard Die system that it uses for Travel and Delving, completely rewrote the magic rules in their entirety, and have been modifying lots of the systems inside like housing, recruitment, monster part harvesting, etc as it comes up in play. Knave2e just functions as a document that's already written that I can hand to players so we have a shared base language for me to build up off of. None of the parts I've kept are unique to Knave2e so really the system itself is just a collected document. I might rip out and rewrite what I need for a player-facing doc so they don't have to scroll past the unnecessary tables, but it's not been super necessary so far.
- Prep: I prep using my weekly J3H series and augment that with prep whenever the mood strikes me (or if I think I need something for an upcoming game). Having the weekly scheduled prep has helped a lot to ensure that I have a steady flow of shallow content to add to the world, while the spontaneous prep is where I make all of the deep content, fleshing out the other parts. It's a good system that works well together!
- Notes: I'm using Obsidian for my notes and storing it on a flashdrive for theoretical portability (though in practice I don't bring it to work anyway, so). I used to use Google Docs and switched largely because I was running into performance issues with multiple large docs open in tabs combined with a distaste for the formatting available. Obsidian is great because its just Markdown, it already covers essentially all the formatting I was doing and is much lighter to boot. My one complaint is the lack of access to my Obsidian Vaults from the internet, but that's a solved problem in the Obsidian ecosystem, I just have to implement it. Keeping my notes in Obsidian also means I can backlink my notes and see relationships forming between my most heavily used notes, though I have to admit I haven't done a ton of this yet.