The Kingmakers: Final Update/Autopsy

Kingmakers has not had a session for almost three months. I personally find it very hard to gather the motivation to GM for the campaign, and none of my players have been vocal about playing.

That said, I'm going to outline the aspects that I feel contributed to this.

My contributions:

• Care needs to be taken to make sure that when characters are created, that they can operate within the confines of the campaign- and that involves any twists that may change the fundamentals of the campaign. Telling the players that they're going to be playing high stakes lawyers and then dumping them on a desert island is design whiplash, and it's something I've done to my players a few times. This applies to any campaign, but GURPS is especially vulnerable to this given the front-loaded nature of character generation in that system.
• If the players are incapable of working together during character creation to reduce possible problem points, it's going to fall to the GM to say no to elements that will cause problems. I've had this issue twice- first during CRTF with the PC Kate, and more recently with the PC Bretia who had a phobia of magic with a mage in the party.
• Playing with ~8 PCs was a mistake.
• Some of my own personal biases need to be made more clear to players before they get stumbled on during play. These include prejudices against bards, demihuman races, Japanese mythology and feline humanoids.
• I should not typecast player characters. In particular, nobody (myself and other players) took one PC seriously in-character, ever.
• Twice weekly sessions were likely too frequent.
• If the players are struggling to keep up with the intrigue going on, introducing an adversarial backstabbing PC is only going to make them incapable of doing anything at all.

Their Contributions:

• Most players had trouble keeping up with the events and people of the campaign- something that I attribute to lack of attention and refusal from everyone to take notes.
• I have some outright atrocious wallflowers who are incapable of playing characters who are self-motivated to do anything.
• My players do not work together as a team, and their coordination is nonexistent.
• The ever present time-zones and real life have also contributed.

That said, I can barely recall the details of what actually happened as far as the most recent campaign events, so unfortunately I won't be going into the actual in-game events. I may go through and clean up the last few subs that didn't make it onto the larger organizational list, but I believe that's all I'll be doing until I start producing either more creative content or start a new campaign.