Reflecting on the first Serpents Fall session

Well we made our first attempt at running an introductory session of Serpents Fall (our G+ Fate Accelerate Fantasy game) last night; i've just sent off messages to all of the players in it asking for feedback and thought i'd put my own views in this blog.

You can find a link to the video footage here.

For me the game was something of a mixed bag, consisting of both positives and negatives; since I was on a bit of a downer following the amount of work that myself and the players had put into the campaign setting only to have the first session so dogged by technical hitches I thought that i'd list some of the positive and negative points in an attempt to cheer myself up:

Positives

• Everyone seemed to enjoy the session.
• Character genning was fairly quick and I really loved how the players all grabbed hold of the story based idea of the Fate Accelerated rules system.
• Was good to do some tabletop with friends whom I don't get chance to game with (in that format).
• The player characters seemed to gel as a party with the first flickers of IC banter and relationships forming.
• We managed to carry out a small introductory (since not all players are familiar with the Fate Accelerated rules) combat that went off fairly well.
• The scene is now set for the next main session.
• All of the players seemed willing and keen to do another session.

Negatives

• Almost constant technical problems meant that we had people dropping out and jumping back in, I got booted from the hangout twice meaning that we ended up having to film it in three segments.
• Due to the tech problems the game felt a little dis-jointed since we had to keep re-capping for people who had dropped out and re-joined.

In Summary

Despite feeling a little down about the campaign when I originally sat down to start writing this post, looking at the list of positives and negatives there are far more positives from the game than their were negatives, indeed the only negative points seem to stem from the technical issues that we had.

Writing this post has cheered me up no end and made me far more optimistic about the potential of Serpents Fall as a long running campaign; I'm now going to wait for the players to get back to me with their feedback and see where we go from there, our next session is scheduled for a couple of weeks time - hopefully we'll have a bit better luck on the technical side of things and we can just jump straight into the game :)