A couple of weeks ago the Sunday D&D group was heading into a session that, as a Gamemaster with a few years under my belt, I came into with a small degree of trepidation. It wasn't a situation I've never faced before or something that I was unsure if I could handle. They weren't headed into the cataclysmic final encounter with an enemy that I've been building up to for some time now. They had, in fact, just finished up that particular type of game our previous session, two weeks prior. No, this particular snowy Sunday, as we drove down I-80 to Pat and Jon's apartment for the biweekly "Adam tries to be more entertaining than the NFL game going on behind him" session, I faced a different kind of beast all together. This was the session that no one really fears but no one really looks forward to, either. The kind that if it works out at its best, you can probably assume everyone will just walk past it and not remember most of what happens and, at its worst, could be the start of the game break-down that causes the whole thing to evolve to the awkward "...so...who wants to run the game next week?" conversation.
The Bridge Game.
For the uninitiated, the Bridge Game is the game session that comes between adventures in an RPG, when your party is travelling and doing the things that make up the daily lives of people like you and I (except, you know, with more wizards.) Some GMs flow through these like they're nothing. Others will actually set their game up particularly to avoid these, perhaps by doing them in an episodic Star Trek-type format. I, at the beginning of this campaign, had made the choice to challenge myself by essentially running the game as a "sandbox," or a game wherein the plot is driven by the players exploring an open world rather than by me driving them from one adventure location to another in a linear plot.
In this particular case the party had just finished "saving" the homeworld of a group of High Elves called the Eladrin and, in doing so, one PC had basically finished his complete descent into evil. The rest of the group had not thrown him out at this point, but over the course of the adventure it was becoming more and more painfully apparent that there was an elephant in the room, in this case the character's complete lack of empathy or morality, that was going to lead eventually to a break, particularly given three of the characters being of a religious background. The group was back in their own world again, and needed to make their way home to the city of Thorvar that they had previously saved from a massive flood. The game, intentionally, was pulling them in two separate directions at this point, as there was a war in the south with blood-crazed Undead creatures broiling and, in the meantime, a vault of the world's most dangerous evil artifacts was currently being plundered by an organization of evil monsters. The party would need to make a choice, and I would need to spread the wrap-up material from the previous events and the intro stuff from what was coming out to fill 5 hours of gaming with players experienced enough to tell when I'm just stalling for time because I've got nothing.
The answer for me, in this case, was to do something that I have previously not spent a lot of effort on, to my game's detriment: rewarding the characters and giving them some time to unwind. Up until very recently, the storyline of the majority of my games very closely resembled an episode of 24, in that it consisted of a ton of action in a very short range of time with not a lot of downtime in between. After all, we're playing Dungeons and Dragons, not dress-up tea party. These are warriors and mages and priests of ancient gods. But I noticed in a lot of games, particularly those that tended to drift towards darker themes, the longer I waited kept them running through the gauntlet, the harder it became to make them actually care about anything or anyone that they ran into. They just kind of get numb after a while, and the edges of their suspension of disbelief will slowly but surely wear away until eventually they reach a point where the game becomes a slog from one fight to the next and your players are looking at you and honestly asking "Why does anyone stay in this terrible place? Why wouldn't they just leave?"
This session, I did something different. After finishing up some business in the Feywild, they came home and, upon making their way through the gate, were greeted with the closest thing to a ticker-tape parade the damaged city could put together. They had saved the town from a Katrina-esque flood prior to their previous departure, and though the city was still in bad shape, the group was recognized as the heroes they were. A street party broke out. People in the town were falling over themselves to offer them discounts in their shop or free items to help them out on their next mission. A couple of Succubi were waiting in Bakari's room for him at the end of the night to "reward" him for his efforts on the behalf of the Nine Hells. Even the normally rigid, cold Captain of the Guard let his guard down for a moment to share a drink with our party paladin. It was a chance for them to let their hair down, and I could tell from the amount of actual engagement from the players that it was welcome. I wasn't having to fight with the Packers game behind me for people's attention. The players volunteered suggestions on where their characters wanted to go and what they wanted to do when they got there. It was, to put it plainly, much better than I could have hoped it would have turned out, a well earned rest for the party that everyone seemed to enjoy. It wasn't all fun and games, but when it came time to drum up new tension between the church in the city and the people who practice Arcane magic (regrettably leading to the final departure of Bakari from the party into the ranks of the "almost certainly going to come back to menace us later" NPCs) and at the same time prod the group to head south and deal with an army of the dead heading relentlessly north to face them, people seemed to actually be relishing the opportunity to make a choice and get back out to defend a world that, suddenly, seemed like it actually had real people who were worth defending.
I really can't explain enough how much of a swing this was from the session two weeks earlier, where it looked like the group was just slogging along with their heads down through an (admittedly harsh and tedious) dungeon more to get it done than out of any real desire to see it finished. That, plus an off-the-cuff sermon from the dying former head of the church about the evils of the Arcanists and the look in everyone's eyes as they realized that this old man, with his final breath, may have just fired the opening shots in a holy war inside the city, made this one of the most memorable and frankly enjoyable gaming sessions in my memory.
Good Gaming,
Adam
