Singularity Campaign Post-Mortem

Whenever I finish a campaign, I like to think back on it, and consider what I think went well, what I think sucked, and what I would do differently if I were to do it again. The Singularity Campaign is going to finish next week, and so here are a few of my thoughts. Make of them what you will.

d20 Mecha Crusade Mini-game

This was published as a Polyhedron bonus about a year ago, and is absolutely fabulous. That said, I have a few reservations:

• The rules are necessarily very lightweight. As a result, I feel there are a number of balance issues that cropped up during play that led to some PCs being utterly unkillable (especially when power-gamed) while others were horribly fragile in places.
  
• Having to maintain two different versions of the PC character sheets was a pain. Further, character management seemed to take up a huge part of the game time, which rather sucked. d20 is complex enough to make automated character sheets extremely useful - this campaign made such things far harder to use.
  

Military Campaigns The structure of this campaign was very much one of "here's your mission for this week. Off you go". That's fine for one-offs, but it didn't allow a lot of room for actual role-playing. Moreover, the challenges faced were very similar throughout the campaign, which made the Fast Hero the optimum choice of class for all PCs (by the end of the campaign, every PC had taken at least some levels in the class). This wasn't too good. Actual Gameplay The rules for the game were suitably simple (by d20 terms), and ran very well. It improved further once I got a handle on setting attack and damage bonuses, which led to opponents providing a genuine threat. I certainly enjoyed the challenge of building more interestign combat situations, which I'll carry over into other games. Doing It Again To be honest, I doubt I'd run this campaign again - the structure was just too limited. I don't think there were any gaping flaws in DMing or the rules that I could have improved, but it was all a bit dull, especially nearer the end. What I am inclined to do is retrofit the mecha rules for use in Star Wars d20, should I ever run a campaign in that setting again. By stripping the melee combat aspect of Mecha, providing a number of fighter wing options, and changing a few rules, we gat a very simple and very respectable starfighter combat system, that provides an appropriate vehicle for use. Before I do that, though, I'm going to have to pick up a copy of Star Wars d20 Revised. My Next Campaign
I'm getting a hankering to run D&D again, so I think that'll be my next campaign. However, I'm going to be taking a stint playing Exalted first, which looks interesting.