Woodsmen report

This is a bit late, but yesterday I was kind of mentally decompressing on the subject and wasn't really up to thinking about it again yet. But now that Woodsmen has officially run for the first time,

I will preface this by saying I am not in love with the World of Darkness universe. My personal interpretation of vampires (and, indeed, my way of "doing angst" in storytelling) is very different than White Wolf's. I like its gothiness, but believe it or not, it isn't exactly my kind of gothiness. So I have troubles with lots of the establishments of the setting, but I was content to accept them as the setting for this idea I had for a mod. So my attachment was ancillary at best. And let me say now, overall things went well. There was nothing majorly broken, nor was there much unexpected that I couldn't bullshit my way through. I was pleased with the story I made. Moreover, more importantly, the players seemed to have a good time.

But there were a number of things that could have gone better. One thing I hadn't taken into consideration that tends to be an issue in World of Darkness games is the likelihood of inter-party conflict. As often happens in games where the characters are inherently kind of evil, they have lots of in-character reasons to fight and not to work together. And I didn't really have much of an in-game reason for them not to. I was terrified player-vs-player combat was going to break out at times, which I really was not prepared to adjudicate, but fortunately things didn't go that far. Also, as Jared pointed out to me when I related the details to him, one must either tailor the mod to the players or the players to the mod. I wrote the mod before I knew who would be playing what in it, and I could have done a better job helping some of them (particularly Sheena, I think) choose characters that would make sure they'd have enough to do. It was a very mystery-solving-heavy mod, with some social interaction and one large instance of combat, and I think next time I will make more of an effort to guide players building characters to slightly more specific things.

But mostly it went well. I had times when I wasn't so good at rolling with things as a GM should, but I will learn better. The mystery aspect of things worked well, as more or less did the story, and the final combat, after much testing and adjusting, turned out pretty much as I hoped it would. So by and large, success, though I think I'll be going over it to change and edit things. Not right away, though, when I run a project, I need a bit of a break from it afterward. It's the reason Alice didn't get edited until the second run forced me to get things done. :-)

But anyway, thank you, players, for agreeing to take part. It meant so much to me that you were willing to play.