Today marked the end of the current Ars Magica campaign. Once again, we ended on a positive note. We wrapped up the final major plot thread and lived happily ever after, more or less. This marks the end of the fourth Ars Magica campaign that we have run, and the third that I've participated in.

With this being the most consistently good game that we have run over the years, what lessons can I take out of this to improve my campaign? Also, now that I've run my first campaign, what have I learned from this experience? How will I improve my gamemastering style to provide a better game for my players?

What disintinguishes our Ars Magica campaigns from our other campaigns? Well, there's the troupe-style play. This gives consistently better results week after week. Each GM can take their time developing their next scenario and their overall plots. For a long time we had three primary GMs so the games were always fresh each week. It's only towards the end when Shannon was the primary GM that play started to suffer a bit.

I'm not going to do this, of course. It's anathema to my core concepts of what a role-playing game is. This puts the onus on me to be ready each week to run. My experience from my current campaign is that I can do it if don't have to spend each week prepping for the next adventure. In BattleTech it is easier since every week is a fight of some sort. For Star Trek I'll be relying on prepackaged adventures to relieve some of the design burden.

Unlike most of our other games, Ars Magica is rather combat light. We only got into a big fight every third adventure or so. Most of the conflict is cerebral or political. It's more interesting since we have to rely on our brains more. In every other campaign, we shoot first and apologize later.

The group is more oriented towards action than intense role- playing. Star Trek has both a rather boring combat system and a deadly combat system. It takes 30 points of damage to kill an above average human (about PC level). A disruptor will do about 23 points of damage, enough to incapacitate a PC. Which means that PCs should avoid combat, since they'll only be good for one fight, which will leave half the PCs out for the rest of the adventure.

My objective is to run a role-playing intensive campaign, with less combat and more puzzles, diplomacy, and interaction. I'm going to depend on the other campaign to satisfy our group bloodlust. And I haven't actually read the scenarios yet, so maybe they are designed to provide action and drama. I guess I should wait a bit.

The biggest problem with my current campaign is the lack of diversity in scenarios. Everything is combat, not only that, but almost all that combat is BattleTech Mech-scale. There have been some variations, BattleForce, Solaris, BattleTroops, even BattleSpace, but it's all just combat. It's not as if I've run more than a handful of role-playing adventures, much to my chagrin.

As usual, I'm still quite a ways away from being ready to run my next campaign.