A reflection back at my MYZ campaign

I have been a fan of Free League and their Year Zero Engine for a long time. The simplicity of roll d6’s and if you get a 6 you achieve what you set out to do. It makes it easy to introduce to new players. Yet Free League seems to find new ways to expand and enhance their games with their system. Recently I was able to finish a campaign of one of their early games with Mutant Year Zero, a post apocalypse game where players play as Mutants that deal with a meta-plot throughout the game. This is actually my second campaign, but my first campaign ended fairly early due to a TPK. Afterwards, the players wanted to try something else for a while. This is important because while we didn’t finish the meta-plot on the first go around, we were able to on the second, to its detriment

Overall I felt the campaign went just okay. I do think my overall GM-ing and the moves I made to move the story felt more to lean towards story beats to finish the meta-plot than it was to play into the player characters. All PC’s are built with NPCs they need to protect, that they hate, and big dreams that they aspire to . This helps me as GM know what kind of NPCs are in their lives and what I should challenge to have them reach their dream. I found it somewhat difficult. Each class has different dreams, which the players dived fully into. However there was a slight clash in the dreams. The player that chose the boss had more desires to stay at their commune ark to build their crew . While others had desires to leave this place and find a safe haven known as Eden. When trouble came up that was outside in the wilderness zone, the boss player almost did not join the other players. Leaving one person back while 4 others is something I try to avoid.

I had explained it’s not unusual for the bosses to leave with their crew to explore the zone. I think I should have given an option of making a character that will join the characters instead. I did that later in the session. Two player characters had to stay back. One player was unable to make the session while the other player character used an in-game reason to stay back. One picked an NPC I had, to play as during their exploration. The other got to play a character I made. This new character had goals and relationship to the place that was being explored. This worked great, and led to play of different characters, classes, and roleplaying something that usually wouldn’t have been played. Playing a different society than what was established. Even then, I ran a 2 person session for these two players to see what happened at the ark. The main Friday group ran the adventure longer in game time than I thought. So I made a secret chat with the other two players to play by post on how a few things got wrapped up. Once again this worked fantastically. The two players were super excited to see the chat and immediately start typing the future trouble, things that their characters did to further the story. This is something that I have to remember to try again in the future

While I love the Ark, this community base players create at the start of the game. It grow throughout the game with It was difficult at the start to incorporate what they knew regarding the ark and how they ran it. Questions I had to figure out was, How does the ark make decisions? The elder is going looney, how does the rest of the ark react? How much power does the elder have? In hindsight, this should have been things I brought up in a session 0 to the players instead of them to me. This is their small community of mutants. Let them build it out.

Looking back at the game, the big thing I would have done differently is that I would try to extend or suggest moments with NPCs. At least for the first couple of sessions. Near the end of the campaign, one of the things I heard constantly is that it seems like a lot of bad things are constantly happening. There’s never a moment of calm, it’s just the world beating on the PCs. I feel like the moments to recharge Empathy are supposed to give those moments of respite. Though whenever PCs were having moments with another PC, it usually led to plans and more things being done that further the action. If I just pushed a bit by example with an NPC that the moments are supposed to be times you sit and empathize or share the trouble. Open a can of grub to share with the foreign mutant who is looking out to the river, mention how the quiet stillness reminds of the sea though the view would never be as good as the sea when the moon and stars are out over the blue waters. Or just even pushing, what is the moment you and your dog share in order to remember you both have each other in this brutal world? More leading questions, than ones that were established, to have players try to have those moments with each other.

Another thing is just for me to pay attention to classes/powers. I noticed one player had chosen the dog handler class, but all the tracking was done by the stalker class as they had the mutation of a dog nose which helps in the same way. This kind of left that player being more a spectator and fighter, than actively contributing to the explorations. It, somehow, wasn’t until the last sessions that I realized this, and had to ask the player playing the stalker to let the dog handler track.

Overall, I need to work on letting go into the meta-plot and need work on NPCs with PCs in a small consistent setting. The home base relationship and my ability to use important NPCs in a character’s backstory to spin off their own hooks. To remember the GM adage to bring back an old NPC versus introducing a new one. I should also be okay with running smaller campaigns. This game took us about a year to complete, not nearly the longest we ever ran. But there was an overall feel of fatigue with the game around session 18. I felt like the general excitement got back up near the end when I started trying two new techniques. Painting-the-scene and 7-3-1 techniques from The Gauntlet. It definitely helped flesh out the world.

Our next campaign is going to be a game of Mausritter. I think i might journal the adventures and my thoughts. Might be a good way to keep a record of everything. I’ll post it here a few weeks after the adventure in case any of my players read this site.