Unturned Hovel

What I Learned from Running a Super Adventure

These are my initial observations after running the first half of my Super Adventure. I will be writing more concrete advice on how to structure one after that one finishes up in a few weeks.

Balance

You can impose level limits in your Super Adventures and probably should! I didn't and had low level Delta Green operators and Tunneling Trolls running alongside 8th level 5E OCs that could shrug off howitzer rounds. If that kind of thing bothers you I would prepare obstacles you know would be a challenge to both ends of the power spectrum. I don't think that there's an issue with things being unbalanced like that as Super Adventures are HYPER REAL already. The weaker characters may be prone to dying more easily, but they often have knowledge or skill mastery the higher levels one don't!

Beforehand Prep Saves Time!

I really love running sandbox investigations when I run Delta Green. The often assumed standard of fairly linear investigations presented by some of the official stuff and community advice is something I feel really limited by when I run it. So when I chose to run a Delta Green operation for a Super Adventure I was really concerned with how to keep the sandbox investigation part intact alongside the increased power and player count.

Turns out the answer was extremely obvious, just do the preliminary investigation stuff ahead of time as a play by post. A few players really dug into chasing down leads and exploring what was going on which set the party up to start the session with an immediately clear goal and framework on what to do.

Set Communication Expectations

I don't typically give a spiel about mic etiquette or break folks into teams for ease of comms during online sessions but breaking the group up into two teams each with a caller made play very fast and smooth. Any future Super Adventure GMs I strongly suggest figuring out a caller beforehand, multiple if they're breaking up into teams. And start the session with what your expectations on communication are.

Let Everyone Shine

Part of the fun of a Super Adventure is the larger than usual party size and the variety of wildly different characters that show up. Let everyone get a chance to show off, even if it results in things getting deadly for them! It's easy to lose track of who you've called on, one way to do it is to just jot everyone's name down on a piece of paper and make a mark whenever you call on them for an action or something. Some folks will take point and that's fine, but just be sure everyone gets a chance to pop off!

Keep Momentum

With the amount of people that will show up things will take a while, especially combat. My only advice is to decide on something and move on, don't get mired in the details or trying to be wholly authentic to any given system. You just gotta pick something that makes sense and keep it rolling.

Be Flexible

There was a moment when I misunderstood what a critical failure looked like for a skill in Longshot City and a player corrected me, don't assume you have to know how all those systems work. The players will chime in and help out! But be flexible if you made a ruling and something happens that shouldn't have, just quickly re-contextualize things and keep the ball rolling.

There was one PC death as well because I didn't understand how deadly Tunnels and Trolls combat can be and splatted someone with a grav-tank. There is gonna be this friction that comes from lack of knowledge of certain things, trust your players and try to contribute to the communal understanding of Super Adventures after the fact to help out the next GM!

Create (Don't be a slave to conversion)

Kill the sick voice in your head that wants to convert everything, don't don't don't. Create things for how you want to handle these edge cases. Before we ran I had figured out: