Marvel RPG in Haven - more and more prepared to Wing It in sessions

Both my Marvel and DnD campaigns are on the weekends. Doing Friday and Saturday sessions is recipe for missing players here and there. 

My "Haven" campaign with Marvel Multiverse is on Fridays, and the DnD campaign on Saturday. And both are going better than I probably deserve. I might do another post about the makeup of each group (currently with the exception of one person the Haven campaign has come to be made up of players from my DnD night), but I will just say that Friday has tended to be a night I might most likely be missing a player or two. This is the price you pay for running on weekends. Maybe not me lately, but some of my players at least have a life. Especially if they have kids. If you are a family person you will go on vacations and such pretty much on the weekend from time to time. 

For the Haven sessions, I had early on settled into doing two sessions arcs with little story bits. It mostly just happened that way. With short sessions anything with meat on the bone should take a couple sessions at least. An encounter situation bleeding into the next. Player Amber mentioned the other week (she is smart as a whip at times) what I knew already; that I tend to run episodic sessions. Which works well for this kind of game I think, and very much how I always ran my supers campaigns going back to Villains and Vigilantes. But I have also found its useful to be prepared to do some little side encounter here and there depending entirely on who is available. If we have three players, we usually go for it. I mean, we only play for a couple hours on Friday night. I just started finding that I should be more prepared for little quick side things that can be done that night, but also these can potentially lead to more growth in the campaign and the characters. 

I do have the next couple of session arc chambered for some weeks now, but I keep tossing in quick little adventures. And I do have experience with this. Back in my Champions days we could play even if most of the group cancelled. That is how Justice Incorporated sort of started. Not enough players for The Protectors supergroup main campaign, so have a couple of JI characters stop a bank robbery or fight some gang members or something. But these little one session bites have been fun. And I tend to have players who love RP and character development. So many sessions first 45 minutes might be just the characters having a meeting. I will then have a choice of starting a little adventure arc or tossing a quick encounter at them. And I have been enjoying the little ones. Some I might have prepared way ahead of time. And some I might just whip up a half hour before the session. I have found that sort of exhilarating lately. 

And I have plenty of city images that I have been collecting since this started. Streets and rooftops. All you gotta do is make a blank page in your Roll20 pages, drag an image unto it, and you are almost there.

Endless amounts of this stuff online. The only thing is, if I don't have a foe done up in Demiplane, I need to do one up (I do have things like gang members and basic gunmen prepared at all times). But I have gotten pretty good at knocking out characters. Last year before the campaign I spent a lot of time whipping up NPC's. So I do have some chambered. But often I will need to spend a few minutes doing on up and finding and image for a token. 

Not too long ago we were down a couple of players, and the Paladin player had to miss a rare for him evening and with only about an hour and a half to play since we waited a bit (he is a valuable player in this campaign and has been very reliable, so I forgive his lack of pre-session communication), after a bit of role play and character interaction, I suggested that since they often say the characters go out to secluded areas to train, that they do a little "Danger Room" character vs. character training. I grabbed a map of a country road (from my collection of DnD session random images I often use) and let the three characters present we had; Iggy, Nova, and Seraph, go to town on each other. And not in the way you are suddenly thinking, you dirty dog. 

They actually were a bit confounded and maybe even resistant. "Uh, what do you want us to do?" I said "Train with each other. Have a fight." Just a few minutes into it, they were loving what I thought might be a rare bomb of an evening. But that is me, an experimenter. OK, not really, In past decades I did this with Champions sessions all the time. I even had a short X-Men of the future campaign as a teen so you know a danger room things happened at least once. Long time ago so don't remember details. Anyway, the point is, it was a hit. Amber said they should do it again soon. Especially funny moments include Igneous at 100 feet grabbing one of them and throwing them into the other. Also Seraph flying up to his ear and reaching in with her bo staff to beat on Iggys ear drum. I also realized I could nab a hand image from the free Roll20 marketplace and made it big and give him control of it so he could indicate where he was reaching.✋ Yeah, it was a blast and I only had to set up the map and let them have at it. 

Then the following week there was a point I gave Paladin a few minutes at night on the rooftops. I know I could count on the Paladin player to help make it quick (the player is no nonsense like the character and I think maybe former military), and it really was just a 10-minute thing. He had said he spent some nights sort of getting to know the city since he was from another country (the Mediterranean or something like that). So I had a couple members of the York Industries sponsored superteam Safeguard see him while on patrol and Blackwolf, an Alaskan who can turn into a giant supernatural wolf, engaged him in a couple rounds of combat before Wind Sorceress said that their sponsor would not like them going in on their own like that and flew them away. Before that though, Paladin gave Wind Sorceress a copy of the bible. He had yet to indicate he would have such, but he is part of some ancient religious warrior group.  So yeah, a quick little side things which I like to do for characters to give them a sense of their own life going on (he did not even mention it to the other characters for a couple sessions). 

OK, to keep this from getting too long, I will talk about the last couple of sessions that were pretty much prepared a half hour before the sessions. That this campaign has gotten really easy peasy to be prepared for is just one of the aspects I am loving. But yeah, hopefully soon get into another actual arc for them. A campaign does not live on mini encounters alone. YMMV

Cheers