The problem is, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. I could just write up basic account of what happened and who did what, but I don't. My instinct for story telling drives me to provide narrative, meaning and context for the imaginative solutions my players come up with in the stories. Plus, the Adventures in Time and Space game is so strong for creating great Doctor Who stories, I want to do those stories justice by giving them a decent write up.
Listening back to the recordings I make of the sessions, two thoughts have struck me. The first is how easy it is to forget something which was set up earlier in the story. In group B's first adventure, Das Metallreich (the first part of which you can read here) I have been reminded that the group spent a good deal of the session preparing weapons for their return to the creepy German castle. We remember the molotov cocktail, fashioned from a bottle of the apothecary's finest medicinal alcohol, but we entirely forgot a very special gadget which The Doctor had crafted: a vial of advanced acid, capable of stripping the armour from the outside of one of the deadly, black, Nazi Robot Stormtroopers and which could be remotely detonated with the Sonic Screwdriver.
It's a pity, because it would have been an excellent opportunity for a key reveal in the story, as well as an item which could have been very rewarding for the players to make use of their own ingenuity.
As usual I didn't do any actual research, but in the back of my mind this is probably the castle I was thinking of in Das Metallreich. PHOTO CREDIT
The second point I've realised is that listened back helps me to identify mistakes I have made as GM. I describe myself in this blog as a "newbie" GM, because I've never run any kind of roleplaying game before and at times it feels like a bit of a steep curve.
Perhaps mistakes is the wrong term. Judge for yourself: game B had taken the bait to hijack a supply transport in the morning. They had a solid plan and support from local NPCs. Perhaps influenced by D&D mechanics, I decided that their overnight rest should not be without incident and I faced them with a grab squad, raiding the village in the night for new slaves. As a result of this battle, they decided that the castle would be alerted if the squad didn't return, so having defeated them, they took the uniforms and returned to the castle in the guise of the soldiers.
This was fine and moved the adventure on and allowed them access, but it negated the work they had done formulating an exciting heist with the supply truck and forced their hand to do something slightly different - but largely the same. They had a fight with similarly stat'd soldiers and ended up with a vehicle they could use to enter the castle discretely. Maybe it doesn't matter, but I feel that in replacing a fight which the players had created for a similar one which they hadn't invested any time in, I cheated them out of a more rewarding encounter, albeit inadvertently.
The first of these faults is perhaps down to poor note-taking. I am already working on technical means to overcome some of the administrative problems I face when running Doctor Who game sessions. The second of these lessons is more tricky. It requires a kind of forecasting what kinds of outcomes may occur by introducing a new threat when then players already have a plan. With them facing a fight already, setting up a quick encounter probably wasn't worthwhile.
Lesson learned for the future.
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