Campaign Assessment: Taking Stock

Tips & Tricks

Anytime you participate in a long-term endeavor, it is good to take stock of how you are doing and why you are doing it. The same can be said of a role-playing campaign. You want to be sure that the players are still invested in their characters and that they are still getting something out of the campaign. You want to sure that the campaign is still on-track with their goals. If you don’t have player buy-in, you are not going to have a successful campaign.

Recently, when my players reached 6th level in our Pathfinder campaign, I decided to do a campaign assessment. I wanted to know how things were going in our campaign and if I needed to change anything to make things better.

These are the questions I asked of my group. I asked them to answer them as players, not as their characters, and to answer them as honestly as possible.

1. Overall, are you enjoying the campaign so far?
2. What, specifically, are you enjoying about the campaign?
3. What, specifically, are you not enjoying about the campaign?
4. When you created your character, what were some of the goals you set for your character?
5. Have you met any of those goals? Are you on track to meeting any of those goals?
6. Going forward, what are some of the short term plans you have for your character?
7. Going forward, what are some of the long term plans you have for your character?
8. Do you wish to continue with the campaign?

I then took all of these answers and applied them to the campaign. Turns out I did need to make a couple tweaks. I ended up changing the experience track from the moderate to the fast track and have also made some behind-the-scenes changes to the storyline to try and accommodate some individual character goals. Now, I hope, I’m going to have more player buy-in and a more successful campaign. And I wouldn’t have necessarily known I needed to make these changes if I hadn’t stopped, taken stock, and asked questions.