Ragnarok Rumination Finale

As you all know, Im a confident about my own work.  Some might say Im conceited or pompous.  One reason for that is I'm my harshest critic.  So although my players had a good time, and I had a good time, everything can be better and there is always more to learn.  So after over a month of thinking and regretting.  Here are my list of ragnarok semi-failures.

1. Too fucking long.  Now I dont mind a long game at all.  And I dont think my players did either.  But there are hidden difficulties with a long game.  When people are tired they are more likely to make poor decisions, or worse, stop caring about their decisions.  We were lucky and I dont think we ran into this, but we risked it by staying up SO late each night.  The other trap is that your climax will happen when people are most exhausted.  Its not working as intended when you get to the big climax and the players have to kinda go "wait, huh what?" then they realize its the climax and they get all pumped and into it, but you dont want them to have to feel that way.  They should still have their energy when they get to it, so the boost from realizing their there drives them past normal levels of excitement and fun, not gets them back to normal levels.

My players were fucking champs and rock stars and dealt with everything in awesome stride.  But we did get to the finale of it all and the general consensus(myself included) was "ok, yes, falling action, narration type stuff...ok, little character talk...ok jesus fuck we need shower we have work in an hour."

I think some scenes, emotions, interactions were definitely lost in the wee hours of the night.  I know I kinda botched the ending cause I was so tired(but we'll get to that later).

Also because everyone was tired, their memories of the events will be a little sloppier.

My plan was a medium length night friday, and a day long game saturday.  This plan was horribly ill conceived.

First we had our normal wednesday game, it wrapped up those characters last 6 hours or so before ragnarok.  6 hours(yes, playing 6 hours lasted 6 actual hours)

Then the players wanted a night to wrap up sunday games preragnarok.  6 hours

Friday game I ended early at 1am so we could have energy for saturday.  7 hours

Saturday was LONG.  4pm til 3am...and still had so much left.  11 hours

Sunday....sunday we had to finish.  There were zero days left that were options.  We had rehearsal at 10am til 1pm.  Then at 2pm started gaming.  We ended game the next morning at 7am.  19 hours.

Bringing our total ragnarok play time to: 49 hours in 5 days.

So, although a ton of fun, i cannot imagine those are optimal hours for creating a good story and for having all the players on their A game.  I certainly wasnt A game at times.

2. Too many characters.  I really enjoyed my weaving of many characters from many pantheons into the story of ragnarok.  It fit well with my early plans(all explained in first ragnarok post) and finished up 3 years of gaming nicely.  But as the dust settled and I thought about it.  There were just too many npcs.  That many NPCS certainly gave the feeling I wanted of a giant battle that so many gods and titans are involved in.  But the other side to that is that eventually, the characters become faceless and nameless.  It became so hard for the pcs to keep track of ALL the people involved and what was happening to them that at some points it became blurry.

This ended up making some deaths less meaningful.  It properly set the scene of a brutal war where people are dying left and right.  When there is so much going on, and time is so precious and intensive that it is barely a footnote when demeter dies....there is a problem.  So I think I could make the giant scenes happen with fewer(but not few) characters.  I think maybe half would have achieved my goals but kept the gods that died front and center for their moment in the sun.
Some of this also might tie in with 1.  Perhaps we were so tired that we wanted to slough through.  But I think at the very least, too many.  Instead of the big battlegrounds having 10 characters(after npcs) they could have been successful with 6.  Also, spreading the scenes out just a tad would have led to less spillover between the different battles ending, and SO many characters from those battles going on to the next one.

3. Olympus.  Because 2 of our characters were greek, and all the others had a lot of interaction with the dodek, and because the two pcs who were greek happened to be the two pcs who were leaving.  I tried to shoehorn the end of a very long term plot into ragnarok.  With so many dodeks not on olympus, it did make sense for it to happen, but there was so much else going on that it really just ended up not being doable.  By the time it got started the world was in flames and the battle was over.  So Olympus just became a sort of waste of time that had no resolution.  It ended up doing some neat things for the two greeks because of the no resolution, but I think for the quality of Ragnarok in general, it would have been more successful if we cut the olympus bit.

4. And my final and probably most important quibble with myself.  I think it was generally all wrong.  I think I kinda threw the baby out with the bathwater.  It was a truly epic thing with so many characters and places and stories culminating.  It was so much....that we almost miss actual ragnarok.  Ragnarok became more like a place where all the stories have to end, instead of dealing with the actual ragnarok.  Now obviously there was a ton of ragnaroking going on, and some characters made excellent use and were very in the thick of things.  But there were also so many other things happening that characters were able to leave ragnarok for a bit to deal with other pressing matters.  And that probably ended up being more of a distraction then a success.

I could have had a lot of extra time to focus on each of the ICONIC battles of ragnarok and let the pcs participate more directly in each of those, making it much more ragnarok!  The more I thought about it, the more that would have been a better final ragnarok story.

But Im not sure it could have been done with 10 pcs and 7 players.  And I dont know if it would have been as good a send off for the players that left.

So bah, I was pretty sure about that last one for a month now.  But now Im not sure.  Im certain it should have been more focused on the events(not that it wasnt, it was super focused, but in hindsight I wanted more).  But typing it out and thinking about it, Im not sure if it would have been possible the way I had re-envisioned it.

Also a more norse focus would have given the other stories(aztec, greek, etc) that happened during ragnarok more pacing and time to be their own thing.  But then there was something about decisions made during the crucible of the entire world falling apart that make those decisions special.  So Im not actually sure about that either.  The side stories also turned out some great wonderful stories for the PCs to expand on, so I definitely wouldnt say I regret them.



But, that ends my talks about ragnarok.  I hope you enjoyed them.  It was a difficult amount of information to process postmortem so sorry it took so long.  One day, in the distant future, the fiction will catch up to ragnarok, and Im sure you can have a 100,000,000 word story to read from anne about it.  I know her pages and pages of notes are immensely detailed.

Thanks again for the catharsis.