My new campaign has officially started!

In these posts, I’ll talk about preparing and running sessions for my roguelike-style D&D 5e campaign.

Session structure

This campaign is heavily inspired by Hades, so I wanted the sessions to replicate the feel of that gameplay loop. We have sessions on Saturdays. This allows us to have longer 6 hour sessions. We split the session up into two 3 hour halves with a 1 hour break in between.

The first half is the combat portion. This is where the player characters are fighting through randomly generated rooms of monsters. Once they’ve cleared a certain number of rooms, they’ll fight a boss and then proceed to the next area. As they clear rooms, they receive resources and magic items to help them get further. They get a long rest, lose their magic items, and return to the start if anyone dies.

The second half is the roleplay and preparation portion. The player characters can spend resources they’ve accrued in the first half to obtain permanent upgrades to their gear. They can also interact with NPCs in a “hub” area and work together to solve the mystery behind their situation.

The first session

In this first session, the group almost made it to the first boss before dying in the third room. They were almost able to make up their lost ground, but time ran out. Overall, though, the players enjoyed the rapid pace of combat and are excited to get further!

The roleplay portion was a lot of set up and introductions of the NPCs and the hub area. I expect that things will be similarly shaken up when our fourth player joins us next session. Things started to lag a bit once I finished introducing the current NPCs, so I’m thinking I should plan some scenarios to throw in whenever the roleplay slows down during sessions.

For next time

After we finished the session, we did our Stars & Wishes. This is going to help me prepare content that my players are excited for!

I’m going to look into a virtual tabletop or some other way to give an interactive visual aid for combat. Hopefully this can help combat move faster with less ambiguity about positioning!

I’m also going to prep some specific scenes to deploy when roleplay lags during the second halves of the sessions. I want to encourage the players to take the initiative, but it’s important for me to establish the NPCs as engaging characters who they’ll want to seek interaction with.

We have sessions once a month, so I have some time to work on these! Overall I’m pleased with how everything went.