[[2024 Cafe Posts]] After about a year or so, we managed to start and finish up our Fabula Ultima campaign! I have lots of thoughts on the system, and how I performed as a DM, so I'm just gonna break it all down here: ## The System ### The Good Fabula Ultima is neat! It captures the energy of JRPGs quite well. Combat is pretty light-weight once you get the hang of it, which was good for my party. Multi-classing is cool as a concept, and it was fun seeing my players naturally shift into roles they liked, and picking abilities that helped them do so. The idea of building out the world together before starting play was a new one to me, but I loved it and would like to incorporate it in future campaigns beyond the Fabula system. ### The Not So Good There are definitely some aspects I think could use some polish, though. For starters, this game does not do very well with the "role-playing" aspect of TTRPGs, at least in my experience as a DM. Almost all of the systems and skills you can gain are centered around combat, and combat only. You're not talking to corpses, or manipulating the environment in most instances, and if it's possible, it wasn't very easy for my players to make those kinds of calls. As such, the game ends up being very combat-oriented. This clashes with what I think is most fun about JRPGs - melodramatic speeches, weird situations and fun party banter. It was hard to coax that out of the game's mechanics, at least for me. To extend on that, the bond system *should* have helped with this aspect, but it didn't?? Outside of, again, combat potential, like one player's character using Hatred to do more damage. I'm not a weathered DM by any means, so it could just be me not using these concepts to their fullest potential, but yeah. The other thing isn't so much a negative, but it definitely made using the system tough: because Fabula is so new, there are negative zero resources available for it. As a result, I had to dig deep to build out monsters, scenarios, abilities, tokens, etc. It was exhausting, especially as a new DM, but I'll get into that below. On that note, my performance as a DM: ## The DM ### The Good I think I managed to land the ending, which is just nice because it was giving me immense anxiety, lol. Just getting that out there. Apart from that, I'm most happy that I managed to finish a campaign. I was adamant to not let it fall apart, and so even when we as a group had to take breaks, even extended ones, I would think about or build on the campaign little by little so that I didn't just call it off. I think I was able to successfully include and make every person feel like they were getting focus and screentime, even when we had a player that only communicated via text. This is also very important to me because as a player I've definitely felt shunted off to the side[^1] and it does not feel good. I fudged the numbers sometimes and I think that's a good thing. I opted for rule of cool in most instances, and if someone was rolling like trash I usually let *something* slide. This is particularly important because you really don't get any sort of comeback mechanic in Fabula for bad rolls. We never really went over two hours per session, which was good for my ADHD and my party's ability to concentrate, so add that as a plus. The party told me they enjoyed their time, which. Yay! That's the whole point, right? If they're satisfied, I'm satisfied. ### The Bad *cracks knuckles* this section is going to be way longer because I'm hyper-critical of myself. STRAP IN! I struggled to keep track of gear and providing loot naturally. It didn't really end up mattering because of the point after this one, but I def didn't reward my players enough. A part of this is because there's no real loot table in Fabula. I had to build almost every item myself. The ones I *did* make I think were effective, but in the future I'll probably just spend an evening brainstorming as many loot pieces as possible for a campaign and then dole them out whenever appropriate, or even retroactively, because who cares. Second thing was combat balance. I think I trended to too easy for the most part. I think that's fine in this instance, because this party was happy to delete my encounters, and it was pretty funny! But I would have liked to establish a bit more challenge at times. That sort of thing is tough for me. I might have to just simulate full battles next time. Near the end of the campaign I started straight up stealing some of my favorite boss battles' mechanics from other JRPGs, which I think helped the back half of the campaign. Not to beat a dead chocobo, but it doesn't help that combat is THE primary interaction in Fabula. If we're just gonna do fights, may as well make them relatively quick. I think I railroaded at times. This could be seen as a positive in some cases, and probably a negative in others. I usually did so when the party wasn't sure of what they wanted to do or where they wanted to go next. It was hard to find natural transitions, so I cheated a couple times. That's an aspect I'll have to work on the next time I DM. I think I did the best I could with the resources the system gave me, but I could have used more. I kind of just ignored the danger clock, but I bet I could have used it in more interesting ways. But trying to keep track of that was tough when my combat balance was so heavily sided towards the player anyways. ## In the End: ~~It doesn't even maaaatter~~ it went pretty well! It's the first campaign I managed to complete, so it's an 8/10 by default, as far as my ability to DM. Next I'm probably going to be the DM for a Lancer campaign. I wanted to be a PC for a change of pace, but I don't mind DMing again, particularly for Lancer - unlike Fabula, it has years of resources that I can work off of to quickly spin up needed assets, from stat blocks to tilesets to scenarios. I think I'll be able to do some really cool shit with it compared to Fabula Ultima. This'll probably be a party of 3 + me, which I also deem a plus - less schedules to bounce around, haha. >[!info] That said... >I'm down for a 4 person party too, so if we're mutuals on Cohost, hmu! I'd be happy to get some new blood in the group. I'm excited to keep up with tabletop in 2024. I'd still like to be a PC in a campaign, but even if I only DM again, I think it'll go even better this time! [^1]: Not by anyone here, IRL, haha