GM Confidence: 3/5. I really buggered this one up. I’d rate it worse, but I think the mess was, thankfully, mostly invisible to the players.
Wibbly-Wobbly
I thought I had everything properly organized, but “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” I suppose it could be accurately said that my failure here was the result of players doing what I should have expected, but did not. In hindsight, the first domino appears to have been my intent to have the “voyage planning session” occur after the “dive.” I expected all the PCs to participate in the Skill Challenge, and not make any real plans until after it was resolved. When some split off, it made more sense for them to start making voyage arrangements on the side, which would require them to know where they would be going first. (Payne already knew about Île-à-Vache, so they could reasonably plan it out, even though the Coin wasn’t yet in hand.) That meant they had to have the conversation before the dive—which would sensibly occur when they returned to the ship that night. Since I didn’t know they were going to split up until afterward, that meant I had to backtrack. The second fail was my on-the-spot decision to roll-up the entire Skill Challenge at once and sort it out afterward, which caused me to miss a bunch of events I intended to occur during the process, and muddled up the timeline even more. Those two combined with other mistakes, to make a complete mess of things, behind-the-screen:
- I realized days later that I had completely forgotten the second clue from Old Tom, which will greatly affect the voyage planning (requiring a bit of backtracking next week)
- For whatever reason, it skipped my mind that the process of getting freight/passengers/etc. takes two days, which meant my timeline needed to be extended (and some events could have occurred later); also, even though I did review the rules in Pyramid 3/97 “Medieval Sea Trade” beforehand, I didn’t actually make note of the skill needed to roll against
- In spite of my extensive notes on the matter, I completely forgot to actually do the skill-rolls for the voyage planning process—I’ll have to backtrack next time and cover that
- I have no idea why it didn’t occur to me that one of the PCs might actually try to seek out the captain of the Nijmegen and, y’know, talk to him. At least it’s got their curiosity going. It’s a shame I didn’t have any real detail on the character. That would have been a good idea…
- I had forgotten how absolutely passive Davino’s player has always been, and I wasn’t prepared for his complete lack of response to his info dump (though, in my defense, I’ve not GMed a full campaign with him in it before)
- There were a few events in town, and a number involving the NPC crewmen’s introductions, that I completely skipped, in the general confusion
- It never occurred to me that someone on watch aboard the ship might just “yell at” the saboteurs in the water—I completely froze for a minute, not quite knowing how to respond; I think my use of Serendipity wasn’t quite in the spirit of the Advantage as written, also
It Wasn’t All Bad
- The Skill Challenge actually went through more-or-less without a hitch, which surprised me—maybe we’ve finally figured it out
- Once again, my pacing was pretty accurate—it ended roughly where I expected
- As GM or player, I’m not usually the “accents” guy; this was my first time attempting French—good or bad, I felt mostly comfortable doing it, which is a big step for me. (I’ll have to listen to the stream later and see if it makes me cringe 😛 )
- Planning big operations always takes a lot of table-time; I tried to speed it along, and I don’t think it dragged on excessively, so that’s a win
Unsolicited Information
During the Skill Challenge, I ended up volunteering some background information regarding goggles and diving bells. It was related, and potentially useful, whether or not it was “interesting.” But it was unsolicited, and frankly, I doubt the players would ever have asked for it, because it probably never would have occurred to them. I find myself wondering what a GM should do here? You want them to have the info, but if you volunteer it, it can feel forced, and can be mistaken as “important” when it isn’t really. I don’t have an answer (yet).
Conclusion
I like to think I generally learn from my mistakes, and that means I should have learned a lot from this session. But we’re going to be moving out of the relative safety of the kiddie-pool next week, and into the deep end of the unknown (that is, stuff I haven’t prepared for as thoroughly, due to the sandbox nature of the campaign). That will be the real test of my GMing ability.