When Campaigns Fail

Intro

I haven’t posted here for a while and there’s a good reason for that. My last few games haven’t gone well.

There’s nothing existential about that. It doesn’t send me spiralling and calling into question my skills as a GM. It doesn’t have me throwing my toys and vowing to never touch the game again.

It’s just a thing that happens sometimes. Campaigns don’t work out. It’s a shame I didn’t get the chance to take lessons from the new things I was trying to do in each of those campaigns, instead though I get to take lessons from each campaign’s failure.

Let’s take a look in broad brushstrokes what went wrong and what to do when campaigns fail.

Why Campaigns Fail

First let’s just run through some of the basic reasons why campaigns fail and what can be learned from these common causes for failure. I’ll go into more detail about why I feel my games specifically failed further on.

Scheduling Issues

This is the big one. It’s been talked about to death but if you’re struggling with scheduling issues and it proves to be a terminal issue for your games then the big takeaway is you should find people with more suitable schedules for what you’re trying to do, or perhaps otherwise insist they put more priority on being free for sessions.

Often ‘scheduling issues’ are actually a symptom of something else. More on that shortly.

It’s Not What Players Wanted/Expected

Maybe you promised Political Intrigue but didn’t deliver and ended up running the same Hack n’ Slash as usual. Maybe you did deliver but it turns out your players don’t really like Political Intrigue. Maybe you failed to have the conversation in the first place on what sort of campaign you were going to be running (or, its close relative, you did have that conversation but your players still came in with misguided expectations).

If this is why your campaign falters then communication is key to solving it for future games, but so is maturity. If your players won’t take on board what you’re saying when you tell them ‘This will be a light-hearted campaign, no tragic backstories please’ and half of them show up with Tiefling orphans then there’s a maturity issue. They’re not adult enough to compromise on all their desires to more closely align with the group-wide intention.

You Done Fucked Up

This is always a possibility. Maybe you just ran shit badly. Maybe your NPCs were all super abrasive; you were having a blast but your players hated RP because of it. Maybe your grasp on the rules is just not strong enough, making your combats super clumsy and leaving players dissatisfied. Maybe your games just aren’t that interesting (let’s be honest, not everyone wants to play in your weird Hamtaro-AU setting).

If you suspect this is what’s happened, see if you can gather feedback from your players about things you did wrong and do some of your own self-reflecting. Once you’ve identified the issue you can targetedly solve it (work on your RP skills/brush up on your rules knowledge/run something in a stock setting).

Interpersonal Issues

Ok I’ll be honest this is a big reason games fail. Maybe Georgia and Patrick break up and, not wanting to make it awkward, both bow out of the game. Meanwhile Mike has beef with Luke because Luke never pays him back for pizza. Maybe the game always gets sidetracked by the GM’s new boyfriend who isn’t playing but always comes in and distracts the GM.

There’s not much you can learn from this kind of failure. Just find new people to play with and move on. Take anyone who’s keen to keep things going and rebuild the group around them. Maybe pay Mike for the pizza, Luke. Seriously it’s hundreds of dollars now. If you’re hard up for it then just say so, or start bringing your own lunch. Stop scabbing off other people bro.

Ok So Why Did My Game Fail?

I had 2 fail. I’ll talk about the simpler one first.

I was hired to run a paid game. Another GM-for-hire friend of mine recommended me to one of his paid groups who wanted something that was, in their words, ‘a bit more of a challenge’. These players felt their application of the rules wasn’t great and they wanted something that would punish their mistakes. Because they usually paid GMs to run games for them, said GMs were overly permissive and were too afraid of ‘spoiling their fun’.

I don’t think these players really understood what they were asking for. I ran a world, as I usually do, that wasn’t inherently centered around the party. NPCs were not immediately helpful in the very ‘gamified’ way they were used to. Because they weren’t always confident with the rules of combat they would lean on their old crutch of avoiding it through roleplay even with creatures that were always going to be antagonistic (like, say, a golem that was programmed to guard the building they were trying to explore). They would often ask to do things other DMs had allowed with, RAW, didn’t work (like making a perception check in combat, followed by taking the attack action).

Again, they had explicitly asked for a game that was run this way. I think, though, what they were expecting when they asked for a game that punished their mistakes and let them fall on their sword was a game where the punishments would be in the same light hearted tone their other games had often taken on (the GM friend who recommended me to them runs very ‘Pratchett-esque’ games). Instead they got something more self-serious and geared toward simulation/immersion.

Neither of us are in the wrong here. It can be argued I should have changed how I was delivering what they were asking for. It can be argued they didn’t actually want what they thought they did when they asked for this style of game. It can be argued that they should have been more open to learning a different way of playing. It can be argued that I should have been more discerning from the outset and got closer to the heart of what they truly wanted.

In the end, I pulled the plug. It was clear they weren’t having the kind of fun they were hoping for and the sensible thing to do was to go ‘we’re not a great fit’ and go our separate ways.

My biggest takeaway from this was that I don’t think I’m a flexible enough GM to run paid games. No shame in that, I do what I do well but it’s not for everyone.

Game 2

This was my campaign for my main group. We’ve been playing together for a good 7 years now with various people coming and going. We’ve seen some campaigns to completion in that time, tried out different systems, rotated GMs at points. You get the picture, this is a solid, stable group that all likes playing together.

The campaign was a bit of an odd one. We’d started playing in Pathfinder 2e right as it came out. I took everything people had liked most from our last few games and refined it, I built the most detailed and complex world I’d ever put together, I went all out on setpiece design (this is the campaign that The Grave of the Lantern Keeper was built for, along with 5 other equally complex dungeons). All of this was done on top of learning the ins and outs of a new system.

We had an absolute blast. Everyone loved it, the story was a real slow burn with fascinating reveals and twists. The combats were dynamic and immersive. The whole thing was going great. The pandemic slowed things down a bit but the game survived it (our country wasn’t in lockdown as long as many places). Then one of my players had to move back to their home country, one of them moved overseas for work, one of them grew tired of TTRPGs in general, one of them started flaking due to personal issues. The whole thing fell apart.

Then we slowly rebuilt the group, running something in 5e again since it’s easier to find new players that way. Once we had a stable crop of people again we went back to the old campaign, but rather than just throw everyone in cold halfway through a well-established narrative we played a sort of mini bridging campaign. This was designed to have everyone catch up in levels to the main party, get a little bit up to speed on the world’s lore and state of the narrative, get used to Pathfinder 2e, and when they finally linked up with the main party the players who had been with the group the whole time would switch back to their old characters and the whole thing would continue.

During this time though sessions became very sporadic. I moved house to somewhere that couldn’t really host that many people, we switched to fortnightly sessions instead of weekly, we kept having to push sessions back because of scheduling conflicts. It became a bit of a slog.

But we got through the bridging campaign! Success! We were all poised to finally get back underway with the grand narrative that had stayed on hold for the last year.

But people kept flaking. We had no structure, no rhythm, and frankly not enough players. The whole thing just fizzled out.

So What Really Happened?

Underneath this all was, frankly, a campaign most of my players weren’t that interested in. I’d put the whole thing together based on the preferences of an almost entirely different group of people. By the time we linked back up with the main party there were only 2 players who had characters in said party (one of whom hadn’t even been in the campaign from the start).

I’d also totally lost sight of what was fun for my players. Everything interesting in the setting was happening way up on the ‘big picture, cosmic stakes’ level which only one person had any context on. For everyone else it was just a series of infodumps with no direct impact on what their characters were doing.

It was all too abstract. It was brilliant, but too high-minded. I was more interested in pushing the envelope of what I could do with a grand narrative, I’d stopped weaving it down into the part of the game the players actually interact with (at least not in a way that was exciting to them).

Why were people flaking? It was because DnD wasn’t as fun as usual, and we’d got out of the habit of playing regularly, and honestly why put aside the time to play sessions they just weren’t that invested in?

So What Have I Changed?

For one thing I’ve gone back to basics. I’m running something much more grounded in terms of what’s going on in the wings lore-wise. I’ve also structured the campaign so that there’s more emphasis on the characters’ place in the world (their backstories, their goals, etc).

I’ve gone for a whole new setting. The last one wasn’t fit for purpose for something like this and, frankly, had become bloated with too many moving pieces behind the scenes.

I’ve also set a much more regimented schedule. Rain or shine we show up and play. I’ve been very emphatic about this while we rebuild the habit of playing regularly. As part of that, we’ve explicitly talked about the fact that we want to rebuild that discipline and have agreed we’re all on board with this approach.

The last piece of it is I’ve brought in a couple more players. Life happens, usually on a given week someone won’t be able to make it, that’s fine. If I have 6 players and on average 1 isn’t there each week I can still run just fine. If I have 4 players and on average 1 isn’t there each week I have a problem. For me, medium-to-large groups are more stable. My longest-running campaign had 8 players, 6 of whom would be there in a given week.

Setting Expectations

You’ll note a common thread here. In the two games that failed there was a failure on my and the players parts to set expectations, agree to them, and follow through on them.

For the paid game we had misaligned expectations and lacked the necessary experience and skill to recognise it. The players were on the newer side, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. They hadn’t played enough to talk in terms of things like ‘immersion isn’t the most important thing to us, but we want mistakes to be punished. Make the punishment a bit fun though. Meaningful, but fun’. I didn’t have the wherewithal to realise that would be the case with new players and I should ask more probing questions (and run with softer gloves to start with despite their wishes, better to be too soft and get meaner than be too harsh and kill the fun before it starts).

For my home game I hadn’t really explained what the appeal of the game would be, I hadn’t checked whether the majority of the rebuilt group would actually be interested in what the campaign would be once we’d finished the bridging arc, I hadn’t got them invested in all that big-picture lore stuff that the campaign hinged on.

For our new campaign we’ve gone out of our way to set expectations very clearly, and not just about what kind of game I’m running. We’ve also set very clear expectations around attendance, all buying into the plan of staying strict until the habit is built. We’re being very intentional with how we’re approaching this campaign.

I made it very clear, between my life getting busier and these games falling apart I was losing interest in running these big high-effort campaigns. I said in no uncertain terms that I was going to do one more, really pull out all the stops to build a satisfying world, work with them closely on character backstories and goals so I could tie them all into the narrative, print maps and miniatures to add that wow factor to setpieces. If it didn’t work out I was done, at least for a long while.

It’s going great.

Let’s Wrap This Up

I have to say, this most recent campaign has really re-lit the fire for me a bit. It’s a shame I didn’t get to see some things through to completion across this last year with my games, I definitely had things I wanted to reflect on and post about here that never panned out.

I’m also in different work now. It’s hard to know what my content production is going to be like, though my intention is to dust off a few drafts and get posting here more regularly again.

When your games fail take the time to reflect on why, take what lessons you can, and just move on. Don’t dwell on it and get yourself down, don’t throw in the towel wholesale, and don’t have an audience of readers you’re leaving in a content drought.