High Level Campaign Diary – Nov. 27, 2024
By Jason Campbell
I’ve been running a weekly 5e campaign in Monte Cook’s Ptolus setting since January 2022, the player characters are currently 17th level. It can be difficult to run a 5e game with higher level characters while keeping the game challenging and the players engaged. This campaign diary series features notes from my players and I about the challenges of playing high level 5e.
Introduction
In our most recent session we focused on lighter events, and the players just weren't engaged. Today we'll discuss both of those aspects.
Pacing: Not Just for Sessions Anymore!
There's a lot of advice about pacing, and it mostly deals with managing up and down beats within a rpg session. That's all great advice, but withiin a long form campaign a can also keep track of the pacing of the campaign as a whole, session to session to session.
I regularly check in with my players to see how they think the campaign is going, what the like and what they'd like to see more of. One thing that came up a few times is that they enjoy occasional casual side quests. In our campaign the characters had been on an extensive, tense dungeon crawl and shortly after the returned to confront a demon lord and found themselves trapped in a dangerous haunted house for another two sessions. For this session I'd planned that the city would throw a celebratory parade to honor the characters as protectors of the city, which included appearances by NPCs from the past and some fun casual encounters. This seems like it would be a good break from the tension of the past 10 sessions or so.
Parade? Meh.
The parade included some callouts to NPC allies from the early days fo the campaign and even references to the previous campaign we'd played. The way the session played out I narrated through all the encounters in the parade, and they picked up a few single use magic items as gifts, but the players didn't engage with any of it. I was surprised that they had no reaction at all to most of it.
Conclusion: What to Do About It?
I'm always looking back at games because I want to learn from what went right and what went wrong to continually improve the games I run. I'm not trying to criticize my GM style or blame myself for anything, it's just about being better in the next session. In this case I built the parade scenario based on feedback I'd received from my players, and I think my assessment that the pacing of the story arc needed a lighter moment was correct.
Sometimes sessions just don't work out for no particular reason. It's not the GM or the players' fault, it just wasn't a great session. I look at this one in this way and expect to move on and have a great session next time.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments!
