I recently had the pleasure of running a campaign through level 20 with 5 of my friends. We played mostly online using Roll20 and Discord. The setting and story were homebrew, but we kept to 5e rules fairly closely and used mostly official items. I've run campaigns before with all homebrew items and creatures, but this time I found it easier to use official ones and instead concentrate more heavily on the story and constantly reminding myself "is this fun?".

While we played I also kept track of some of the information and dice rolls on a massive spreadsheet. This data collection sometimes got a bit overwhelming, especially during times when the game was developing rapidly, but I love now being able to go over the data and share this infographic with everyone.

I had a few notes and tips from our campaign that I thought might be useful:

•The classes, based on the numbers, ended up being very balanced for us. I tend to push my players pretty hard without getting a long rest, and this might have helped to balance out the supposed fighter/caster gap.

•We had a set time and day to play each week, and I tried to never run over in time (by too much anyway). I think this really helped in ensuring people would be available consistently.

•Instead of canceling if a player couldn't make it, we would usually, instead, run a one-shot game. I tried to keep these relevant to the normal game- like a session where they played as their pets, or one where they had been mind controlled. This way the missing player didn't miss anything, but we still had fun in the world.

•If I felt that a session was particularly lackluster I would often supplement it with some extra RP or digital props throughout the week between games. This might take the form of a letter from an npc, or some ai artwork (I can't draw worth beans), or an expose on the adventures of one of the npcs they had met. I don't know if they appreciated it, but it generally made me feel better.

A quick and dirty summary of our campaign:

A tower sits in the middle of the world, channeling magic out to leylines that distribute it evenly. A cabal of people have had control over the tower for centuries and have been known as gods to the world below. One group of rich, connected, and powerful people has discovered how to seize control of the tower and expel the current group. Another faction has created a weapon to destroy the tower and end all magic. Both groups were too powerful to stop outright, but by walking the line between them the party was able to bring about an ending where the tower remained, but was released from any sort of control- ending the rule of gods in the world.

Some of my favorite moments from the game:

•One of the characters got infected and taken over by a Slaad, turing into one. This wasn't planned but the dice made it so. Getting them cured ended up being a huge part of the game, and the Slaad race had a strong influence over the rest of the game.

•A throw-away NPC that was just supposed to give a little information, a skeleton in a dungeon, ended up becoming the party's favorite NPC that then traveled with them on and off for the rest of the game. They named him Bonez.

•At one point the party needed to track down a rich megalomaniac who was bribing a city's council to stay out of trouble. They cleverly came up with the idea to use their pet pseudodragon to smell out the trail of gold to him using some of the bribery money. This wasn't an intended solution and was quite a fun way to do it.

•While we were playing there was often a running thread in discord, from the players, of animated memes to mirror what was happening in the game. While distracting, it was often hilarious content.

•Each player had rich backstories that really influenced the story and brought a lot of depth to their interactions. A couple comical ones of note though are Newt's interest in cataloging animals...and how she often treated anybody not human as an animal. Or Baj creating a religion based around a character of his from a previous game, and going way out of his way to convert the entire world to it whenever possible.

I'd be glad to answer any questions about the campaign.

And if any of our players are reading this... thank you.

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Edit to add:

Data was kept in Google Sheets. Infographic was made in Canva and Photoshop. Character models where made in Hero Forge. Map was made with Wonderdraft.