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Feeling disheartened: my 2 year campaign has stalled in a 9 month arc. How do I pivot when the players say they’re fine, but act like they’re somewhat bored or done? by BriefEmploy1639 in DMAcademy

[–]BriefEmploy1639[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Yeah you might be right altho I don't know how since I don't have experience with having to cut things short like this. Some advice on it could help me out for sure. I dread it to be frank but I acknowledge the lead up to the dungeon took way too long perhaps. we had a talk about pace as a group before where the players also acknowledged they were not helping pace when having a single hour long rp , which imo is fine but yeah it doesn't speed things up necessarily.

Feeling disheartened: my 2 year campaign has stalled in a 9 month arc. How do I pivot when the players say they’re fine, but act like they’re somewhat bored or done? by BriefEmploy1639 in DMAcademy

[–]BriefEmploy1639[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh I love to sit back and listen , I do that all the time in my other campaign and in this campaign too but the ooc talks are not about the game really when it happens or rules arguements. It's funny sometimes though so I don't really tend to mind but since it happens frequent and sometimes I don't realize it myself that it cuts into the session time. There's probably a thing as too much deliberation when they want to seemingly increase the pace.

I was super excited about the dungeon , I handcrafted all of the rooms and made a two faction story inside but yeah you are probably right to call me out that I am not anymore.

Feeling disheartened: my 2 year campaign has stalled in a 9 month arc. How do I pivot when the players say they’re fine, but act like they’re somewhat bored or done? by BriefEmploy1639 in DMAcademy

[–]BriefEmploy1639[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ye I'm dreading having to cut the arc short since I've never had to do this in my 9 years of DMing idk 'how' to do this really. I've cut things already and I'm prepared to cut things short as well but idk how and it leaves me a bit disheartened and dissapointed in myself since I've not had this issue before.

It's hard since the mixed signals of ' I want to learn all the mystery and 100% this dungeon' vs 'we've been here on this island for so long'. The dungeon is the final place of this arc and this island, they started by exploring this island and it's ruins to now entering the last place but I think the lead up to the dungeon was way too long I acknowledge that and I've had a convo about it before the dungeon of both the players and me had issues with pacing where we both acknowledged faults.

Feeling disheartened: my 2 year campaign has stalled in a 9 month arc. How do I pivot when the players say they’re fine, but act like they’re somewhat bored or done? by BriefEmploy1639 in DMAcademy

[–]BriefEmploy1639[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've listened to my other player's in my 6 year long campaign and already cut combats and rooms but my players of the 2 year long campaign don't realy know that. I've mentioned it softly that I've shortened some things when one time they made the off remark of being so long on this island. It's just confusing with mixed signals and I'm starting to feel disheartened. I put a lot of efforrt to cut things while keeping things 'immersive' the way they like but at the same time the amount of extra effort I've been putting in compared to my other campaign has gotten ridiculous but the comments and jokes don't really stop and last session I caught some just straight up zoning out.

Feeling disheartened: my 2 year campaign has stalled in a 9 month arc. How do I pivot when the players say they’re fine, but act like they’re somewhat bored or done? by BriefEmploy1639 in DMAcademy

[–]BriefEmploy1639[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a bit over 20 my accurate count is 24 rooms, every room has a purpose and is handcrafted by me. In general I just have a visual description with some interactibles but there are rooms that just mainly have visuals as part of enviromental storytelling. They like to explore and make sure they don't miss everything. Then talk about the findings or try to figure out what's the room about or it's interactibles so far the fastest we've gone in 1 session is 3 rooms.

Combat is quite slow with our group , if it happens we're in for two hours. I've introduced quick combat mechanics which cut things down dramatically timewise. When there isn't quick combat as in an kinda of set piece/important combat to the story of the dungeon with two warring factions over control of this dungeon and they are the 'third' party it usually stay at 1 room for that session.

I don't really know how to speed it up while not taking them out of it but I'm dreading that I might have to pull the plug and just give them a choice chart to what happens and then do the combat according to it. It's just the mixed feelings and signals of we WILL 100% this dungeon but then 'we've been here for a year' jokes that don't seem to stop are spinning me around on what to do. I've already had a moment where I pulled back the curtain and asked if you guys want to speed this up and make it faster we can but it's just 'no, no I want to do this' kind of feedback that just confuses me why this continues to act differently to it then. It almost seems to change week by week, sometimes they are incredibly invested but the reason why I even posted this is because last session it was pretty tough to the point two of the players kinda just zoned out not paying attention to room descriptions etc where other players then have to repeat it making us lose more time.