This flowchart can fix your episodic campaign

[@benjones1452]

Love this approach would like to see more of your spreadsheets. I think this is a really interesting way to approach. It also identifies critical moments for interesting social role-play to solve the most intractable problems, there’s always a way 😊

[@1Lee]

Hey thanks for making this and thanks for the shoutout

[@matthewtopping]

In my episodic campaign we mostly follow your flow chart but with one exception: If the player is off the following session (and that can't be explained), the character stays with the party and is run by another player.

[@BTDND]

That works too as long as both players are cool with it!

[@LuizCesarFariaLC]

I've been GMing short adventures at school and for my kids for 5 years now. I put this fast forward descriptions on the middle of the adventure e just roll the final battle. Fighting some random skeletons is boring compared to fighting their lich or necromancer boss, so I won't skip the most fun part of the adventure

[@beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees]

The non-gameplay wrap kind of reminds me of a video I saw once about how a puzzle game goes from fun to frustrating in the time between seeing a solution you know will work and actually implementing that solution is very long, or if it's tedious to accomplish. It's a good idea! I have a question about XP - to be honest, I have pretty much only run one-shots or short 3-session games because I just cannot bring myself to do games with level 1 characters again. I like the idea of leveling and the expanding scope it lets you work in, but in practice (especially in west marches format, which was like all the long games anyone I knew ran over the past 10 years lmao) people pour a ton of effort into their characters and then have to worry about being downed from a single arrow or whatever. How do you think about leveling in games you run, and is there a particular system/ruleset/etc that you think gets around these issues (alternatively, would you ever just start at level 2,4,etc or something?)

[@BTDND]

I started at level 5 for this campaign, because it made sense for the characters to be immediately powerful because they were a sort of elite strike force. The last campaign I played in we started at level 2 so everyone had a bit more HP and more people had like subclass features. I have never actually used XP leveling and instead relied on milestone, generally give them levels after completing (or sometimes right before completing) major narrative arcs. My campaigns tend to have a decent amount of character death, and that’s something my players are aware of, but player death can always be a bit challenging. I don’t think there’s any single right way to handle this, though I do recommend trying to telegraph that potentially deadly locations and encounters are exactly that