#RPGaDay2025 - 16 - Overcome

It's RPGaDay season again. Here's a link to the blog post with the current year's prompts.

Today's prompt is Overcome. 

You may have noticed that yesterday, I managed to give Deceive number 16. I'd love to claim that was deliberate but it was totally an accident. Anyway, that's fixed and hopefully it won't break any of the permalinks.

I think that longer form campaigns give you a better opportunity to feel like you've overcome something. Sure, one-shots are brilliant and, as a player, you can pull off amazing things with stories to tell, but there's something about the extended game that makes it mean more.

Some examples.

At Longcon 2016, I was fortunate enough to play a truncated version of The Dracula Dossier over a weekend. Although the game was short compared to how the campaign could play out, it had the space for highs and lows, for terror and success. At the end, when we killed Dracula, it really felt like we'd struggled to overcome a true threat and succeeded.

I also played in Dr Mitch's Darkening of Mirkwood campaign, which ran over an extended period, and was a chain of defeats and successes where we managed to lift the Shadow from Mirkwood, leaving it in a better place for the events of The Lord of the Rings. However, it included one of the most terrifying slow motion events of my gaming life, the death march out of Angmar. We'd found ourselves in the Witch King's former kingdom and ended up fleeing, with children we'd rescued, back towards safe havens in Eriador. We had a number of poor rolls - lots of Eyes of Sauron - and found ourselves pursued and accumulating fatigue to the point that we were shedding equipment just to keep moving. We only just managed to get out alive, and it felt like we'd overcome the worst that could have been thrown at us.

I ran Curse of Strahd over multiple sessions and wrote it up here. The player's had a huge challenge to overcome, bring hope to Barovia and getting themselves to the point where they felt that they could overcome Strahd. What amuses me to this day is the fact that they felt it necessary to have a WhatsApp back channel without me where they plotted how they could overcome their Vampiric enemy. I'd initially felt it was a joke, but soon realised that it was very real. I think that they definitely had a feeling of overcoming despite great odds against them at the end.

Finally, at Longcon 2025, I ran both parts of the Stormbringer epic campaign Stealer of Souls & Black Sword. The end point of the campaign saw one of the characters seeking vengeance and facing off with Elric over the death of her father, his soul stolen by the demon sword Stormbringer. Somehow a path was found that didn't end up with what would have been an otherwise inevitable death. The gave a real feeling of success, and the character definitely overcame her likely fate.

I do think that the longer form game lends itself to a stronger feeling of having overcome something significant.

16th August 2025