M. writes:
With everything going on in Israel and Gaza, I’m struggling with my game. I know too many people who have been affected by the war. The idea of running fantasy raids and having monsters kidnap villagers and innocent people being threatened by dragon fire just isn’t fun right now.
I’ve been running my current campaign for over a year, and we’ve been building up political intrigue, abductions by slavers, secret cults, and a simmering civil war… And I just don’t know what to do.
Do you have any advice? Where do I go next? What sorts of adventures could I run?
The trap you’re feeling stuck in is the ubiquitous combat structures that are the default structure and backbone of play for most RPGs. I talk about this in Game Structures, and also the way in which play tends to gravitate towards structure. Combat is what most RPGs give you, so both your adventures and the actions of your players gravitate towards it.
It can be tough to think outside of that box, but your question about what types of adventures you could run instead shows that you’re already heading in that direction. Personally, the first thing I’d look at would be some sort of mystery scenario. Mysteries are flexible and also very conducive to combat-free scenarios. (Or, if combat is featured, it can be structured to not resemble the real world events you don’t want to be reminded of.)
You may be able to pivot the ongoing events of your campaign into a scenario you won’t find problematic, but given the prevailing themes and threads you describe, it’s probably going to be hard to get away from it entirely. So I strongly suspect that you and your group need to take a break.
There are a couple of approaches you can take for this.
First, you might be able to take a break within your current campaign with something like a beach episode. This is a concept from anime/manga, where all the main characters in the series head to the beach together. This usually involves hitting the Pause button on all of the current, ongoing story lines.
You don’t literally need to take your campaign to the beach, of course. (Although you could.) The point is to contrive a reason for your PCs to all hit the Pause button on whatever they’re doing and go do something else for a while, and this will likely be easiest to do if it’s accompanied by a change of venue. They could be:
- Sent somewhere by a patron to deal with a problem.
- Invited to a grand party.
- Sucked through a portal into a demiplane.
- Get sent back through time to explore an historical epoch.
The second option is to literally put your campaign on pause. Take a break for a few sessions and run some one-shots or a short campaign. This might be a good opportunity to experiment with some new games you haven’t played before. Zero-prep games like Lady Blackbird or Technoir would be the first place I’d personally start looking, and it might also be a great time to check out some more “experimental” games that aren’t based in the tropes of pulp fiction at all.
Regardless of which option you choose, I’d frame things up by having an open conversation with your players about where you’re at personally and why you need to take a break from the campaign. Discuss the options you’re comfortable running and get their input on what you should do next.
From a purely practical standpoint, make a point of setting a specific date when you’ll revisit the discussion and see if you, and everyone else, is ready to go back to the main campaign. Aim low for this (e.g., “let’s take a break for the next month” or “we’ll touch base again once we finish up our mini-campaign on Kepler Station”). You don’t want to wait too long, because then the campaign might just fade away. And if it turns out that it’s still too soon, you can always kick the can further down the road when the time comes.
My beach episode included a strange hidden temple in an island (I used the yuan-ti map from Volo) and there was displacer beast.
The hidden reveal was that the island was in fact a dragon turtle…players still joke about the displacer beast in a barrel, chasing them down.
This is so human. Thanks for writing this man
This is also a good opportunity for players who want to try their hand a DMing to give it a go for a one-shot or short three-episode arc. It might be nice for the DM to take a break and allow other players to exercise their creative muscles.
I am GMing a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and without realising it, we made last session a “beach episode” by having the PCs all head to a casino and play poker. We had discussed before the session that we all wanted to have the in-game group catch up with eachother and build up some reputation and/or re-establish the relationship between eachother so we decided to actually play poker but in-character.
It was a very nice break from all the investigative social interactions they had done before, and it allowed me to also relax a bit and reintroduce an old friend NPC they had met from an earlier chapter.
I and several of my players are emergency room workers. At the height of COVID my incidental plague story got to be too much. I floated a low-consequences GTA-style “everything resets when the heat dies down” 5e game. They jumped at it. 3 of my players were Smackdown-style gladiators. The cleric was a pile of peen jokes.
If I can add: try to identify the core of the burnout. My worlds have consequences: it’s usually a selling point. In this case it was too much. Low-stakes was what my whole group needed. Try to identify where your fun still lies.