Referee Skills Review 2: 1 Year Later
the Referee Skills Review is about playtesting soft skills in the same way that rules and modules get playtested. My aim is not to tutorialise, but to review based on actual experience from play. Relevant links to educational content will be linked where I can find them.
I finished a 3-year campaign of DnD 5e. More posts will be coming about that, but for now, a very quick look at how I ended it.
how I used it
The final battle of the campaign was, to be frank, an anticlimax. I half expected this. Although set amidst a giant siege, the game was always at its best when focused on the characters, factions, their relationships, and how this siege changed them.
So before the final session, I pre-warned that I'd call on each of them to narrate what their characters were up to a year after they broke the Siege of Sialk.
is it good?
Yeah! The players got really into it, and as usual, trusting them with narrative control yielded moments that filled me with emotion and wonder. It was honestly really special.
YMMV with the kind of group you're playing with. The game we'd been playing was pretty character/sandbox focused, so giving the players control over the end of their story fit pretty perfectly. I struggle to think of any kind of game I have, or would like to, run that wouldn't suit this ending technique.
Will I use it again?
Hell yeah!
I like my soft skills like I like my machines: simple. Give me a lever long enough and I will move the moon. Give me a wedge wide enough and I will split, uh, also the moon. 1 year later fits this brief -- simple, effective, inspired.
resources
I got it from... I think from here? I swear there was a blog post somewhere about Mike Mearls using it to end his campaigns. Maybe I dreamed it. Anyways, you probably don't even need to read the article -- the name of the skill explains itself.