Campaign pacing

[Mary K. Kuhner]

I think I've written here before about how many pitfalls I ran into
trying to go from the pacing of a "stock" campaign to an Ars Magica
convenant-building game meant to cover decades. A lot of my GMing
techniques just didn't work.

I'm finding this in reverse at the moment. I'm (trying to) run
the _Age of Worms_ mega-module, which goes from 1st to 20th+ level
(in AD&D) over the course of twelve adventures and maybe a year
game-time.

This means that the PCs must go up approximately 2 levels per
adventure, occasionally only 1; and, even more dauntingly, approximately
two levels per *month* in the internal time of the game. (Also
in the external time of player and GM, more or less--maybe 1.5
months per 2 levels.)

I keep finding that I've missed doing something and now it's far
too late--even the next session. The PCs picked up an apprentice
mage, an ex-servant of the evil mage-god with memory issues and
a tendency to have visions. I was developing a thread about her
and how she grapples with her past--but suddenly she's 9th level and
that thread doesn't feel sensible anymore. Presumably she must
have some sense of herself as a 9th level wizard (even if I don't!)
and that's going to leave her in a different, much less vulnerable,
internal space.

Similarly, the modules have an arc about how one NPC starts out as
a mentor (level way above the PCs') and how it's supposed to be
a major characterization point when the PCs surpass him and must
advise and protect him instead of vice versa. But that transition
took all of three weeks. There was just no sense of the mentorship
relationship. My player played his PCs as already knowing they were
destined for greatness--otherwise the rapid advancement would
probably destroy their personalities--and they never looked at this
person as being far above them, despite the level difference.

I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path
games before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce
lots of side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that
the PCs' relationship with NPCs and the world changes with
dizzying speed? Something else? Are there character personalities
which should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[gleichman]

So...basically...

The question is how to compress the extended meaning of a full
campaign into a quicker version without all the required time for
playing out the character development? Nope, I don't have a clue as to
why a person would even want to to shoot themselves in the foot so
badly let alone an answer to that.

I'm am however starting to wonder how beaten down you have to get by a
rule system and adventure style before you give up and do something
different.

1. PoD too high, uninteresting combat.
2. Worthless Paladins (even if the player use wasn't proper for a
Paladin).
3. Poorly balanced opponents for the adventure
4. Surprise dominance (PoD related)
5. illogical adventure twists and requirements
6. No time for advancement and character development.

I'm sure I've forgotten something in there.

I would have punted the campaign on item #1. I'm starting to think you
like failure.

[Peter Knutsen]

Post by gleichman
So...basically...
The question is how to compress the extended meaning of a full
campaign into a quicker version without all the required time for
playing out the character development? Nope, I don't have a clue as to
why a person would even want to to shoot themselves in the foot so
badly let alone an answer to that.

[...]

Quite likely, the person wants the "powerful" sense that one gets from
high-level play, but he feels that the only legitimate way to get it is
to piously "earn" it, by starting with an incompetent character and then
gaining experience after game-start.

A more charitable guess is that the vast number of crunchy bits high
level D&D3 characters have is simply too much to handle at once, and
that the only way to cope is to accumulate the crunchy bits gradually,
i.e. by starting at low level (with few crunchy bits) and then adding
half a dozen or so after each session. This guess, however, fails to
explain AD&D, in which there are very, very few crunchy bits, and in
which charater class choice can easily "shield" you from the problem
(i.e. by chosing one of those classes which gets very few crunchy bits,
or none at all).

[Brandon Blackmoor]

Post by Peter Knutsen
A more charitable guess is that the vast number of crunchy bits high
level D&D3 characters have is simply too much to handle at once, and
that the only way to cope is to accumulate the crunchy bits gradually,
i.e. by starting at low level (with few crunchy bits) and then adding
half a dozen or so after each session.

I thought this was common knowledge.

Post by Peter Knutsen
This guess, however, fails to explain AD&D, in which there are very,
very few crunchy bits, and in which charater class choice can easily
"shield" you from the problem (i.e. by chosing one of those classes
which gets very few crunchy bits, or none at all).

I do not know about AD&D, but in D&D, even characters who do not
themselves have an abundance of "crunchy bits" as you call them still
have to cope with the existence of those bits in the hands of other
characters and opponents (typically through the avenue of "magic
items"). It may be maginally easier to play a 18th level rogue than a
18th level wizard, but it is by no means easy to jump into it cold.

That's my opinion, anyway.

[Peter Knutsen]

Post by Brandon Blackmoor

Post by Peter Knutsen
A more charitable guess is that the vast number of crunchy bits high
level D&D3 characters have is simply too much to handle at once, and
that the only way to cope is to accumulate the crunchy bits gradually,
i.e. by starting at low level (with few crunchy bits) and then adding
half a dozen or so after each session.

I thought this was common knowledge.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by this.

Post by Brandon Blackmoor

Post by Peter Knutsen
This guess, however, fails to explain AD&D, in which there are very,
very few crunchy bits, and in which charater class choice can easily
"shield" you from the problem (i.e. by chosing one of those classes
which gets very few crunchy bits, or none at all).

I do not know about AD&D, but in D&D, even characters who do not
themselves have an abundance of "crunchy bits" as you call them still
have to cope with the existence of those bits in the hands of other
characters and opponents (typically through the avenue of "magic
items"). It may be maginally easier to play a 18th level rogue than a

Perhaps I tend to underestimate the prevalence of magic items in pre-3.0?

Even if I don't, you still have a fair point in terms of strange and
weird abilities that encountered monsters might have. High level
monsters are likely to have many moe such abilities than monsters
appropriate for low-level parties.

Post by Brandon Blackmoor
18th level wizard, but it is by no means easy to jump into it cold.

That makes a lot of sense.

Post by Brandon Blackmoor
That's my opinion, anyway.

[DougL]

Post by Peter Knutsen

Post by Brandon Blackmoor
I do not know about AD&D, but in D&D, even characters who do not
themselves have an abundance of "crunchy bits" as you call them still
have to cope with the existence of those bits in the hands of other
characters and opponents (typically through the avenue of "magic
items"). It may be maginally easier to play a 18th level rogue than a

Perhaps I tend to underestimate the prevalence of magic items in pre-3.0?

I started in the mid 70's with the original game out of the box.

We using the provided random treasure tables and didn't allow purchase
of magic items.

I recall a case where two level 10 or so characters had a duel. They
started at range so they started by throwing their masses of otherwise
useless +1 and +2 weapons at each other, they both had so many that
they needed bags of holding to hold them all.

Modules were always even worse.

DougL

[Russell Wallace]

Post by DougL
I recall a case where two level 10 or so characters had a duel. They
started at range so they started by throwing their masses of otherwise
useless +1 and +2 weapons at each other, they both had so many that
they needed bags of holding to hold them all.

Yeah, I remember D&D magic items followed an exponential curve, so that
for every good item that had tactical interest and supported the fantasy
theme, there'd be an immense pile of junk that just cluttered up the game.

A partial solution I came up with, back when I ran D&D, was to emphasize
consumable items where at all possible, especially for the lower-level
stuff.

There's also the solution video games tend to adopt: have magic item
shops, and encourage players to sell their piles of junk to save up for
something good.

[DougL]

Post by Russell Wallace

Post by DougL
I recall a case where two level 10 or so characters had a duel. They
started at range so they started by throwing their masses of otherwise
useless +1 and +2 weapons at each other, they both had so many that
they needed bags of holding to hold them all.

Yeah, I remember D&D magic items followed an exponential curve, so that
for every good item that had tactical interest and supported the fantasy
theme, there'd be an immense pile of junk that just cluttered up the game.
A partial solution I came up with, back when I ran D&D, was to emphasize
consumable items where at all possible, especially for the lower-level
stuff.
There's also the solution video games tend to adopt: have magic item
shops, and encourage players to sell their piles of junk to save up for
something good.

Which is the D&D 3.x solution. BtB you can buy and sell magic items
pretty freely getting 50% of retail for anything you sell. All those
+1 swords get sold for 1,157.5 gp each, and then you spend 14,000
having your +3 weapon upgraded to +4.

DougL

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Russell Wallace
Yeah, I remember D&D magic items followed an exponential curve, so that
for every good item that had tactical interest and supported the fantasy
theme, there'd be an immense pile of junk that just cluttered up the game.

One difference between games and novels is that in novels the main
characters don't usually spend a lot of time looting those they fight,
whereas this is (quite naturally) common in RPGs. If you win a lot of
fights, you are going to end up with enormously more gear than the
average combatant. This is hard to prevent. (The only campaigns I've
seen which were fairly free from it had the bad guys using magic
items the good guys simply would not use. But it's hard to justify this
for the penny-ante items.)

Post by Russell Wallace
A partial solution I came up with, back when I ran D&D, was to emphasize
consumable items where at all possible, especially for the lower-level
stuff.

This can work, and v3.5 does push somewhat in this direction. It can slow
the game down, though, because a dozen different potions and scrolls
take more brainpower to use than a single flaming sword of the same gp value.
Early on in our SCAP campaign I was using one-shot items very heavily, but
it's gotten more and more difficult to manage the complexity, and I'd
much rather have a few larger things.

Jon's _Worms_ characters have made a lot of wands, and their prepped armor
class is 8 points higher than unprepped due to all those wands. But it
makes the results of dispel magic really time-consuming to adjucate. We
are getting to the point where a significant part of every combat is
likely to be spent (a) setting up those wand-charge spells, and (b) taking
them down again when dispel magic strikes. I find myself wishing he would
use permanent items instead....

Post by Russell Wallace
There's also the solution video games tend to adopt: have magic item
shops, and encourage players to sell their piles of junk to save up for
something good.

The problem I have with this as a player is that I find using something
taken from a defeated enemy more intrinsically interesting than cashing
it in and "going shopping" to pick out the best things in the DMG.
The shopping method tends, naturally but disappointingly, to focus
attention on the few best items in the list.

I think, given my druthers, I'd get rid of a lot of the small items
altogether. There's an arms race where meaningful opponents are expected
to have +x to hit and +x to armor class, and you need items to get
either of those; but you could tone down both and not have, or need,
items of +1 to hit or +1 armor class. These little things are not,
in my experience, very interesting or evocative. I'd rather focus
attention on the occasional flamebrand or crown of splendor (the two
most spectacular things in my current party) and not bookkeep so much
small stuff.

The idea behind the small items was presumably so that low-level parties
could have some magic items. But you could do more with the non-magic
equipment, and with interesting, flavorful oneshots: it doesn't have to
be "+1 ring of protection." (We had so many of those, Fritz was giving
them away as party favors.)

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007 16:59:58 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Russell Wallace
A partial solution I came up with, back when I ran D&D, was to emphasize
consumable items where at all possible, especially for the lower-level
stuff.

This can work, and v3.5 does push somewhat in this direction. It can slow
the game down, though, because a dozen different potions and scrolls
take more brainpower to use than a single flaming sword of the same gp value.
Early on in our SCAP campaign I was using one-shot items very heavily, but
it's gotten more and more difficult to manage the complexity, and I'd
much rather have a few larger things.

The push toward consumable items is one of the things I find annoying
about 3.x. I can see potions and scrolls being consumable by their
nature, but it bothers me to have consumable & disposable wands so
common, not to mention the other misc items that get "used up."
Especially when making those items costs XP. I can accept an XP cost
for making durable magic items (given that XP is a "renewable"
resource in the game - I'm the anti-Peter Knutsen on this point), but
spending XP to create scrolls & potions rubs me the wrong way.

(A house rule I adopted for one of my games is to have potions &
scrolls cost XP to *use* rather than to make. This puts a desirable
psychological brake on the wanton use of such items, and avoids the
problem of setting a gold-piece price point for them that has to meet
the contradictory goals of making them both cheap (readily available)
and expensive (too scarce to just burn through).)

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Jon's _Worms_ characters have made a lot of wands, and their prepped armor
class is 8 points higher than unprepped due to all those wands. But it
makes the results of dispel magic really time-consuming to adjucate. We
are getting to the point where a significant part of every combat is
likely to be spent (a) setting up those wand-charge spells, and (b) taking
them down again when dispel magic strikes. I find myself wishing he would
use permanent items instead....

How much does this exacerbate your problems with the difference
between prepped and un-prepped groups? If both sides have an always-on
+1, or +2 or +4 instead of the attacking side having a temporary +8...

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Russell Wallace
There's also the solution video games tend to adopt: have magic item
shops, and encourage players to sell their piles of junk to save up for
something good.

The problem I have with this as a player is that I find using something
taken from a defeated enemy more intrinsically interesting than cashing
it in and "going shopping" to pick out the best things in the DMG.
The shopping method tends, naturally but disappointingly, to focus
attention on the few best items in the list.

Mileage varies. Having a selection of interesting items available that
day at the magic marketplace (but not necessarily just what you want)
isn't something I find any worse than finding items on a defeated
enemy/in a defeated foe's hoard. Having *all* the items in the DMG
being "in stock" does cloy, but that's an extreme case. And being able
to "custom order" an item, and then a few weeks or months later having
something that was *made just for me* is, IMO, *better* than a prize
from a defeated foe.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I think, given my druthers, I'd get rid of a lot of the small items
altogether. There's an arms race where meaningful opponents are expected
to have +x to hit and +x to armor class, and you need items to get
either of those; but you could tone down both and not have, or need,
items of +1 to hit or +1 armor class. These little things are not,
in my experience, very interesting or evocative. I'd rather focus
attention on the occasional flamebrand or crown of splendor (the two
most spectacular things in my current party) and not bookkeep so much
small stuff.

Yes. But one problem, as you point out in your next paragraph, is that
small stuff gives low-level parties a chance to have items. Another
problem is that the existance of the big magic items implies the
existance of the small stuff. This can be gotten around, to a certain
extent by playing around with the price curve for magic: A big
up-front cost to make the item magic at all will encourage item-makers
to make their items as splendiferous as possible.

Stricter stacking & slot limits will also encourage high-level types
to invest in a smaller number of bigger items, at the cost of
increased bookeeping (and at a cost of characters trying to find ways
around the limits).

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The idea behind the small items was presumably so that low-level parties
could have some magic items. But you could do more with the non-magic
equipment, and with interesting, flavorful oneshots: it doesn't have to
be "+1 ring of protection." (We had so many of those, Fritz was giving
them away as party favors.)

Well, giving away minor magic items as party favors isn't unknown in
the read-only fantasy literature (Bilbo's big Birthday Party where
some of the party favors were "obviously magical.")

Anyway, if you could do more with non-magic items, the same creative
effort would also let you do more with minor magic items. And
"interesting, flavorful oneshots" are something I'd prefer not to see
emphasized due to my own varying mileage.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
The push toward consumable items is one of the things I find annoying
about 3.x. I can see potions and scrolls being consumable by their
nature, but it bothers me to have consumable & disposable wands so
common, not to mention the other misc items that get "used up."

The wands appear to me to be mispriced. It's *much* cheaper
to do a 50-charge wand than 50 scrolls or potions, and it's
generally more useful than 50 scrolls and only slightly less than
50 potions.

They change the game a lot, too. We have not been able to resist
the temptation to buy wands of magic missile for every wizard
and sorceror, at the best level they can afford, because it
changes the character from "I have some nice stuff but need to
ration it out carefully" to "I have a strong magic attack which
I can afford to use every round."

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Especially when making those items costs XP. I can accept an XP cost
for making durable magic items (given that XP is a "renewable"
resource in the game - I'm the anti-Peter Knutsen on this point), but
spending XP to create scrolls & potions rubs me the wrong way.

I dislike the XP rule, because the amounts are small enough that
it doesn't really restrict item creation much, the bookkeeping is
large, and the eventual result of overspending (the wizard is one
level lower than everyone else, on and off) doesn't do much for me.
I'm also not really sure what the PCs think they are paying.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
(A house rule I adopted for one of my games is to have potions &
scrolls cost XP to *use* rather than to make. This puts a desirable
psychological brake on the wanton use of such items, and avoids the
problem of setting a gold-piece price point for them that has to meet
the contradictory goals of making them both cheap (readily available)
and expensive (too scarce to just burn through).)

That's an interesting idea. How much did it actually cut use?

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Jon's _Worms_ characters have made a lot of wands, and their prepped armor
class is 8 points higher than unprepped due to all those wands.

How much does this exacerbate your problems with the difference
between prepped and un-prepped groups? If both sides have an always-on
+1, or +2 or +4 instead of the attacking side having a temporary +8...

Makes it much worse, of course. But after the double TPK I feel
inclined just to let matters take their course with these modules:
they are balanced against parties like this, and I don't want to
be in the position of telling the player he can't, and then having
another TPK.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Mileage varies. Having a selection of interesting items available that
day at the magic marketplace (but not necessarily just what you want)
isn't something I find any worse than finding items on a defeated
enemy/in a defeated foe's hoard. Having *all* the items in the DMG
being "in stock" does cloy, but that's an extreme case.

I guess neither Jon nor I is very patient with making up magic-shop
inventories. It seems harder than making up treasure hoards, because
with treasure you can think "This is stuff the person would have
wanted". And once the group gets into the mindset of "The small
stuff is freely available for money" they tend to resent it if the
GM suddenly says "Well, no potions of fire resistance are available
today." So we have tended to go with "everything in stock" up to
the town's GP limit.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
And being able
to "custom order" an item, and then a few weeks or months later having
something that was *made just for me* is, IMO, *better* than a prize
from a defeated foe.

Okay, mileage differs. Brand-new stuff doesn't seem as rich to me
as objects with lineage. Fritz is attached to the Crown of Splendor
even though he could do better mechanically, because it's got a
chip from a Soul Pillar in it, and connects in his mind with the
whole story of how he learned about the Soul Pillars, and that
late-night confrontation with his sister over them.

When they custom-order something it is usually, alas, a boring
utility item: the latest trend is wands of searing light at
level 10, and they have owned too many of those to be excited by
any one of them.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Stricter stacking & slot limits will also encourage high-level types
to invest in a smaller number of bigger items, at the cost of
increased bookeeping (and at a cost of characters trying to find ways
around the limits).

A month or two ago I made a big table and shuffled items around
my SCAP party, getting about +1 AC across the board by using the
slots a little better--definitely too much accounting for my
tastes. It turned out to have been a mistake from the character
point of view, as Tillie keeps moping about her cloak of arachnidia
and I'm just going to have to shuffle everything back so that
she can wear it again.

But a lot of the "bigger items" turn out to be +3 protection
or +3 greater protection rather than anything more interesting.
The AC boosts and save boosts are a survival necessity in these
modules. But they are not very interesting despite being
essential. Maybe that's my biggest problem with how the items
are working out.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Anyway, if you could do more with non-magic items, the same creative
effort would also let you do more with minor magic items. And
"interesting, flavorful oneshots" are something I'd prefer not to see
emphasized due to my own varying mileage.

Fair enough.

We have had our share of interesting minor magic items, but the
slot limitations mean they tend to be discarded in favor of
boring essential AC, save, to-hit, and damage boosts. The one
that pained me most greatly was the ring of fire resistance Jules'
father gave her, which was a pointed hint about the invasion of fire
elementals, as well as the only present he'd ever given her that
acknowledged her life as an adventurer. It would stink to lose
the PC because she wore that and not the +3 pro/+3 resist combo
that the other PCs have. But it also stunk not to wear it. (This
comes around to "These adventures are too hard for me", I guess.)

Jon's _Worms_ party doesn't have a single magic item that
stands out for me as being part of a characterization: they
have tons of items and use them constantly, but it's all a big
blurry item pool. I find this kind of sad, but maybe he is
deliberately saving the interest for class abilities. The
SCAP party does have a couple: Fritz' crown, Tillie's bow and
cloak, the Elixer of the Divine Wind.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[DougL]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Mileage varies. Having a selection of interesting items available that
day at the magic marketplace (but not necessarily just what you want)
isn't something I find any worse than finding items on a defeated
enemy/in a defeated foe's hoard. Having *all* the items in the DMG
being "in stock" does cloy, but that's an extreme case.

I guess neither Jon nor I is very patient with making up magic-shop
inventories. It seems harder than making up treasure hoards, because
with treasure you can think "This is stuff the person would have
wanted". And once the group gets into the mindset of "The small
stuff is freely available for money" they tend to resent it if the
GM suddenly says "Well, no potions of fire resistance are available
today." So we have tended to go with "everything in stock" up to
the town's GP limit.

Hmm, I've typically gone with NOTHING is in stock, but a local broker
or manufacturer can make/get pretty much anything within the GP limit
within a time-period comparable to the manufacture time.

Do you seriously think a large city has X hundred extra copies of
EVERY weapon in the PHB + every Splat book sitting in a warehouse
somewhere + Y masterwork copies? Then add the exotic sadles for every
possible mount and all the other crap in the books?

The GP limit is what the locals can get or manufacture reasonably
quickly, and almost EVERYTHING that isn't excessively durable is being
custom made AFTER you order it. This is part of slowing things down,
you have to wait for stuff to get made.

DougL

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by DougL
Do you seriously think a large city has X hundred extra copies of
EVERY weapon in the PHB + every Splat book sitting in a warehouse
somewhere + Y masterwork copies? Then add the exotic sadles for every
possible mount and all the other crap in the books?

No, probably not. On the other hand, that's not what the PCs are
usually buying: they are buying from a short list of highly useful
potions and small items, over and over again. CLW, CMW, invisibility,
spider climb, levitation, fly. +1 protection, +1 resistance,
disguise. +1 arrows. Silver and cold iron arrows. Sunrods and
alchemist's fire. (My low-level parties go through alchemist's
fire literally by the gross.)

I won't dispute that it makes more sense for most items to be
special-order, maybe even the ones I listed (it depends on the
size of the local "adventurer" community). But I don't think it's
extremely strange for the listed ones to be available.

Post by DougL
The GP limit is what the locals can get or manufacture reasonably
quickly, and almost EVERYTHING that isn't excessively durable is being
custom made AFTER you order it. This is part of slowing things down,
you have to wait for stuff to get made.

I'll think about whether that could work for our games. I'd worry
that it will lead to the same thing (in Worms, specifically--
I wouldn't have built a campaign of my own this way) that the
item-creation rules did, which was that the player could not stand
to wait while the world went to hell in a handbasket, so his PCs
died for lack of essential items.

We've experimented with various things that slow down the
item acquisition process--not having Identify was one experiment--
and they just seemed to annoy the player.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:20:51 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
The push toward consumable items is one of the things I find annoying
about 3.x. I can see potions and scrolls being consumable by their
nature, but it bothers me to have consumable & disposable wands so
common, not to mention the other misc items that get "used up."

The wands appear to me to be mispriced. It's *much* cheaper
to do a 50-charge wand than 50 scrolls or potions, and it's
generally more useful than 50 scrolls and only slightly less than
50 potions.

AAUI this was a deliberate design decision. A mistaken one, IMO, but
deliberate. The designers *wanted* to give wand-buyers a discount for
buying in bulk. The minor problem with this is that bulk discounts and
economies of scale strike me (and many other people) as profoundly
un-magical. "Industrial magic disease" is how I've heard it described.

The major problem is that the bulk discount given is just too fricking
huge.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
They change the game a lot, too. We have not been able to resist
the temptation to buy wands of magic missile for every wizard
and sorceror, at the best level they can afford, because it
changes the character from "I have some nice stuff but need to
ration it out carefully" to "I have a strong magic attack which
I can afford to use every round."

Well, I don't mind seeing sorcerers and wizards being able to do
something magic every round. I dislike the idea of magic users having
to be magic misers. But a burst of magic missiles each round is too
powerful.

(That has to be my #1 complaint about D&D: "The spells are too
powerful." If the spells were weaker, they wouldn't need to be
rationed so tightly, they wouldn't be the unbalanced and over-balanced
encounter-enders and campaign-busters that they are, and
non-spellcasters wouldn't need sacks of magic items and comicbook
superhero type special abilities at high levels to keep parity with
the spellcasters.)

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
(A house rule I adopted for one of my games is to have potions &
scrolls cost XP to *use* rather than to make. This puts a desirable
psychological brake on the wanton use of such items, and avoids the
problem of setting a gold-piece price point for them that has to meet
the contradictory goals of making them both cheap (readily available)
and expensive (too scarce to just burn through).)

That's an interesting idea. How much did it actually cut use?

Unfortunately I can't say. The campaign didn't last long enough for me
to really find out.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Mileage varies. Having a selection of interesting items available that
day at the magic marketplace (but not necessarily just what you want)
isn't something I find any worse than finding items on a defeated
enemy/in a defeated foe's hoard. Having *all* the items in the DMG
being "in stock" does cloy, but that's an extreme case.

I guess neither Jon nor I is very patient with making up magic-shop
inventories. It seems harder than making up treasure hoards, because
with treasure you can think "This is stuff the person would have
wanted". And once the group gets into the mindset of "The small
stuff is freely available for money" they tend to resent it if the
GM suddenly says "Well, no potions of fire resistance are available
today." So we have tended to go with "everything in stock" up to
the town's GP limit.

It seems to me that determining inventories and availability is the
perfect place for random table use. There's the headache of making up
the tables in the first place, but once it's in place, the mindset IME
becomes "finding the stuff you want is a crapshoot, especially for odd
stuff or in small towns" rather than "the small stuff is freely
available for money." Or more precisely, since stuff can be
special-ordered: "The small stuff is freely available for money plus
time. If you can get it for money only, then you've gotten yourself a
bargan." But this may be a varying mileage thing.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
And being able
to "custom order" an item, and then a few weeks or months later having
something that was *made just for me* is, IMO, *better* than a prize
from a defeated foe.

Okay, mileage differs. Brand-new stuff doesn't seem as rich to me
as objects with lineage. Fritz is attached to the Crown of Splendor
even though he could do better mechanically, because it's got a
chip from a Soul Pillar in it, and connects in his mind with the
whole story of how he learned about the Soul Pillars, and that
late-night confrontation with his sister over them.
When they custom-order something it is usually, alas, a boring
utility item: the latest trend is wands of searing light at
level 10, and they have owned too many of those to be excited by
any one of them.

Well, custom orders of consumables don't have that same flair - but
then how much flair does a found-in-a-hoard consumable have?

This is just nitpicking though. Mileage does differ, as your Crown of
Splendor example shows.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Stricter stacking & slot limits will also encourage high-level types
to invest in a smaller number of bigger items, at the cost of
increased bookeeping (and at a cost of characters trying to find ways
around the limits).

A month or two ago I made a big table and shuffled items around
my SCAP party, getting about +1 AC across the board by using the
slots a little better--definitely too much accounting for my
tastes. It turned out to have been a mistake from the character
point of view, as Tillie keeps moping about her cloak of arachnidia
and I'm just going to have to shuffle everything back so that
she can wear it again.
But a lot of the "bigger items" turn out to be +3 protection
or +3 greater protection rather than anything more interesting.
The AC boosts and save boosts are a survival necessity in these
modules. But they are not very interesting despite being
essential. Maybe that's my biggest problem with how the items
are working out.

Yes, those are the downsides. My thinking on this may be warped
somewhat because my main campaign for a long time was Etan, run under
a heavily house-ruled version of TFT. That system had a "rule of five"
limiting the number of magic items a character could use: One could
use only the first five items one picked up (excluding one-shot things
like potions and items flung away like magic arrows). To switch to a
different set of items, if one had more than five items, one had to
put stuff down and then pick them back up again in a different order.
But normally a character didn't have that many items.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
We have had our share of interesting minor magic items, but the
slot limitations mean they tend to be discarded in favor of
boring essential AC, save, to-hit, and damage boosts. The one
that pained me most greatly was the ring of fire resistance Jules'
father gave her, which was a pointed hint about the invasion of fire
elementals, as well as the only present he'd ever given her that
acknowledged her life as an adventurer. It would stink to lose
the PC because she wore that and not the +3 pro/+3 resist combo
that the other PCs have. But it also stunk not to wear it.

ouch.

(This

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
comes around to "These adventures are too hard for me", I guess.)
Jon's _Worms_ party doesn't have a single magic item that
stands out for me as being part of a characterization: they
have tons of items and use them constantly, but it's all a big
blurry item pool. I find this kind of sad, but maybe he is
deliberately saving the interest for class abilities. The
SCAP party does have a couple: Fritz' crown, Tillie's bow and
cloak, the Elixer of the Divine Wind.

Again, ouch. It ought to be possible for a character's signature item
to be "I don't have one. I have a bunch of minor magic things." But it
isn't so good when every character has to be that character.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Well, I don't mind seeing sorcerers and wizards being able to do
something magic every round. I dislike the idea of magic users having
to be magic misers. But a burst of magic missiles each round is too
powerful.

I agree. In our hands it puts the wizard up with a non-specialist
archer, or a bit better; somewhat below a specialist archer, except
for targets with very high AC where the wizard is superior. Of course some
targets are immune, but that applies to arrows too.

That's awfully good for a character who is not a fighter, and who
has all those other impressive spells.

The situation is greatly improved from v3.0, though, due to the
change in Haste: at least you don't get the two-fisted wand user!

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
(That has to be my #1 complaint about D&D: "The spells are too
powerful." If the spells were weaker, they wouldn't need to be
rationed so tightly, they wouldn't be the unbalanced and over-balanced
encounter-enders and campaign-busters that they are, and
non-spellcasters wouldn't need sacks of magic items and comicbook
superhero type special abilities at high levels to keep parity with
the spellcasters.)

We are seriously thinking about trying the "each level of primary
spellcaster must alternate with a level of something else" variant.
I imagine it's going to break system assumptions right and left, but
it does seem as though it would fix a lot of problems.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
We have had our share of interesting minor magic items, but the
slot limitations mean they tend to be discarded in favor of
boring essential AC, save, to-hit, and damage boosts.

ouch.

Yeah.

Tillie insisted on getting her Cloack of Arachnidia back last night,
and nearly died through lack of the "boring" +3 protection she had to
give up to get it. Slurped into the embrace of a vampiric ooze,
yuchh. The encounters are all balanced against the assumption you
have around +3 to +5 saves and +6 to +8 armor class over what non-equipped
characters would naturally have.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Jon's _Worms_ party doesn't have a single magic item that
stands out for me as being part of a characterization: they
have tons of items and use them constantly, but it's all a big
blurry item pool.

Again, ouch. It ought to be possible for a character's signature item
to be "I don't have one. I have a bunch of minor magic things." But it
isn't so good when every character has to be that character.

I don't think "has to be" is true, but for a relatively short, fast
campaign, permanent items are a poorer buy than expendables for
many purposes, and this leads to having no signature stuff, just a
mountain of expendables.

I have severe worries about the survival of my Worms game at this
point. There's an implicit contract between player(s) and GM when
playing D&D, it seems to me, that the GM will do something appropriate
for non-minimaxed PCs and the player will not minimax to a game-
busting degree. Episode #4 of _Worms_ broke the GM side of that
contract *badly*. It is hard to tell the player "don't minimax"
after throwing a CR16 at level 8 PCs. But once you've started down
that road, is there really a stopping point short of "every fight is
determined before it starts" outcomes?

Episode #5 really never posed any serious danger to the PCs; the
gladiatorial fights in particular were a joke. (The crowd didn't
like the PCs as much as the module thought they should, because
yes, the PCs won, but it was *boring.* Madtooth the great monster
never got to act at all; it just turned into a frog on the first
action of the first PC. Admittedly that was a bad die roll, but
still.)

But it's hard to tell the player "Back down a bit on the minimax"
when there might be another Episode #4 coming at any moment.
(And in fact, I think he *has* backed down some. The line between
enough minimax to survive and too much to be fun is very thin and
hard to spot. I'm not sure that for me there *is* such a line
past about level 12.)

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Simon Smith]

In message <eurrn1$fta$***@gnus01.u.washington.edu>
***@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:

<snip>

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I have severe worries about the survival of my Worms game at this
point. There's an implicit contract between player(s) and GM when
playing D&D, it seems to me, that the GM will do something appropriate
for non-minimaxed PCs and the player will not minimax to a game-
busting degree. Episode #4 of _Worms_ broke the GM side of that
contract *badly*. It is hard to tell the player "don't minimax"
after throwing a CR16 at level 8 PCs. But once you've started down
that road, is there really a stopping point short of "every fight is
determined before it starts" outcomes?
Episode #5 really never posed any serious danger to the PCs; the
gladiatorial fights in particular were a joke. (The crowd didn't
like the PCs as much as the module thought they should, because
yes, the PCs won, but it was *boring.* Madtooth the great monster
never got to act at all; it just turned into a frog on the first
action of the first PC. Admittedly that was a bad die roll, but
still.)
But it's hard to tell the player "Back down a bit on the minimax"
when there might be another Episode #4 coming at any moment.
(And in fact, I think he *has* backed down some. The line between
enough minimax to survive and too much to be fun is very thin and
hard to spot. I'm not sure that for me there *is* such a line
past about level 12.)

This probably counts as a band-aid over a broken limb, but as a possible
future suggestion, how do you think this would work:

1. 'No minimaxing - design the characters as characters, not combat machines.'

2. Use a 'drama multiplier' - for lack of a better term - that multiplies
the characters' capabilities by some scalar in the range 1.0 to 2.0
(hopefully x1.5 would be the most you'd ever need, unless it's a real
munchkin module) and reduces damage taken by a similar amount.

This is a very quick-and-dirty way to 'rebalance' unbalanced encounters. You
might allow characters to 'pull out all the stops' and operate at a higher
level of efficiency when something is really important to them, or it's a
dramatic encounter - a bit like Star Wars Force Points - but the primary
objective would be to provide an easy way of correcting for other people's
bad scenario design rather than to provide an in-character turbo boost. I
know you would have in-character problems with 'hey, we beat that last
Tarrasque easily, why is this one so much harder?', but AFAICS you get that
/anyway/ with badly-designed encounters, and at least this way characters
die less often. If you keep track of the 'drama multiplier' of a particular
campaign, you will see spikes and dips, I assume, but hopefully this would
give you some indicator of the average difficulty level that is independent
of the Challenge Rating. Particularly as it seems the Challenge Rating can't
be relied on to be all that accurate (or well-chosen) anyway.

If you can track the drama mulitiplier through a campaign and find it's 1.0,
1.0, 1.2, 1.5, 1.2, 1.2, 1.5, 2.0 you at least have a marginally better
chance of the characters coping. And you have some chance of gauging at
least in rough terms where the next scenario is going to be pitched. What's
more, if you under- or over-estimate a particular encounter, you can bump up
the multiplier relatively quickly, and even apply it retrospectively if
necessary, and adjust it slightly from round to round.

Given the agonisingly slow train wreck I've been reading about (I hope
you're painting it at least a bit blacker than it really is :-), I'd really
want to keep a simple trick like this in my GMing armoury to cope with the
scenarios.

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:26:40 +0100, Simon Smith

Post by Simon Smith
This probably counts as a band-aid over a broken limb, but as a possible

I'm not Mary, but I'll comment anyway.

Post by Simon Smith
1. 'No minimaxing - design the characters as characters, not combat machines.'

This rules out the 'pro from Dover' character type, not to mention
that being really really good in combat is a common *character*
motivation. IOW, it's common in fiction for a character to be both a
character *and* a combat machine ("Hello, my name is Indigo
Montoya...")

It just feels *wrong* to me to rule such characters out-of-bounds if
they can be built with the game's given character-building resources.

Post by Simon Smith
2. Use a 'drama multiplier' - for lack of a better term - that multiplies
the characters' capabilities by some scalar in the range 1.0 to 2.0
(hopefully x1.5 would be the most you'd ever need, unless it's a real
munchkin module) and reduces damage taken by a similar amount.

If the problem could be so easily patched, it could be so easily
patched. The problem isn't that the characters are too weak (or too
strong) it's (IMO) that the game has a very low tolerance for
variability in character power at high level.

If something like this is to work at all, the GM would have to apply a
different "drama multiplier" or "drama bonus" to the characters for
each encounter. Actually I could see this working for a strongly
Dramatist group, but I suspect it would drive Mary nuts. I think it
would drive me nuts too.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
On Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:26:40 +0100, Simon Smith

Post by Simon Smith
This probably counts as a band-aid over a broken limb, but as a possible
1. 'No minimaxing - design the characters as characters, not combat machines.'

This doesn't help at all, because it makes (as far as I can tell) most
published adventures and modules completely unusable unless you bump up
character level a *lot*--and many of them are still unusable. A 15th
level party which is strongly de-optimized may lose to a 12th level
scenario; on a bad day, to a 10th level scenario. (And everything in the
module but the one killer fight will probably be too easy to be
interesting.)

The encounter which caused the double TPK in _Age of Worms_ #4 (a module
for levels 8-9) not only mopped up Jon's 8th level party, I think it would
have mopped up my less-optimized 11th level party. (Now, at 13th, they
could do it. But if you ran that module for 13th level characters I think
it would break; they have too many capabilities the module author didn't
allow for. And all of the other encounters would be trivial. The PCs would
probably need to make a new plan like "Win without causing any fatalities"
or "Take over the evil organization and turn it to their own ends" in order
for the game to be at all interesting.)

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Simon Smith
2. Use a 'drama multiplier' - for lack of a better term - that multiplies
the characters' capabilities by some scalar in the range 1.0 to 2.0
(hopefully x1.5 would be the most you'd ever need, unless it's a real
munchkin module) and reduces damage taken by a similar amount.

If the problem could be so easily patched, it could be so easily
patched. The problem isn't that the characters are too weak (or too
strong) it's (IMO) that the game has a very low tolerance for
variability in character power at high level.

Yes. I could get something of the same effect by running modules meant for
much lower-level characters, and we have had partial success with this,
but the higher the actual level gets, the more brittle it becomes. The
warm-up encounters are so easy that they aren't a warm-up--they don't
give the player any useful practice in handling the characters--and the
boss encounters may still be lethal, depending on exact details of party
composition.

There was a CR12 leonal guardinal (a kind of angel) in one of the SCAP
adventures; an 11th level PC challenged it to a duel and lost hopelessly.
The PCs went up a level, went back and (at the urging of the now-ex-paladin)
jumped it en masse, all eight of them, average level 12th; and lost. (We
had thought that might happen so were very prepared to retcon it.) There
are a bunch of twiddly little numbers in D&D and if a couple of them are
out of the normal range, you get results like this. (SR, DR, AC, and Fast
Healing are the usual suspects.) And there start to be spells which are
unanswerable except by a few very specific countermeasures. (Wall of
Force was the culprit here.)

On the other hand, Jon's 10th level party, now fairly well optimized, would
win that fight pretty handily.

It's not that the PCs are too weak or too strong. It's that they're
frequently too weak *and* too strong, depending on the precise details
of the adversaries. You can fine-tune the degree of optimization but
at some point, you're just changing the relative proportions of too
strong and too weak: the sweet spot in between seems to have vanished.
(In my previous game I felt we were irrecovably past that point at
level 14.)

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007 21:14:09 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
(That has to be my #1 complaint about D&D: "The spells are too
powerful." If the spells were weaker, they wouldn't need to be
rationed so tightly, they wouldn't be the unbalanced and over-balanced
encounter-enders and campaign-busters that they are, and
non-spellcasters wouldn't need sacks of magic items and comicbook
superhero type special abilities at high levels to keep parity with
the spellcasters.)

We are seriously thinking about trying the "each level of primary
spellcaster must alternate with a level of something else" variant.
I imagine it's going to break system assumptions right and left, but
it does seem as though it would fix a lot of problems.

I expect that it would make modules unusable unless you wanted to
spend a lot of time tinkering. It would also do strange things to
magic item availability.

But I've toyed with something like that myself; the spell progression
would be a lot saner if level 5 spells were only available to
characters at the high teen levels, and level 6+ spells were "epic"
ones available only to those characters of levels 21-33. One worry I
have, though, is that spellcasters wouldn't have enough spells under
such a system, even if I allowed something equivalent to alternating
wizard & sorcerer levels (or more generally alternate levels in two
different primary spellcaster classes).

D&D is at or beyond my preferred upper end for spell power anyway.
What I really like is a situation approaching that of Runequest, where
spell use is common as grass and appropriately weak to match.
(Runequest has problems for me, but I think it's nifty that one can
run it as a super-common magic "every child above the age of six knows
Healing-2" game.)

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Tillie insisted on getting her Cloack of Arachnidia back last night,
and nearly died through lack of the "boring" +3 protection she had to
give up to get it. Slurped into the embrace of a vampiric ooze,
yuchh. The encounters are all balanced against the assumption you
have around +3 to +5 saves and +6 to +8 armor class over what non-equipped
characters would naturally have.

This sort of thing reminds me that I really need to find and read over
a copy of Iron Heroes. From what I've heard of it, it is a solution to
the problem of assuming that characters have bonuses from items, even
if it's an extreme one that assumes/requires that *no* items even
exist.

I wonder how it would work if medium-to-high level characters were
given a "heroic" bonus to saves, AC, etc, that didn't stack with
bonuses from magic.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I have severe worries about the survival of my Worms game at this
point. There's an implicit contract between player(s) and GM when
playing D&D, it seems to me, that the GM will do something appropriate
for non-minimaxed PCs and the player will not minimax to a game-
busting degree. Episode #4 of _Worms_ broke the GM side of that
contract *badly*. It is hard to tell the player "don't minimax"
after throwing a CR16 at level 8 PCs. But once you've started down
that road, is there really a stopping point short of "every fight is
determined before it starts" outcomes?

1. ouch ouch ouch

2. My working theory is that the module designers really haven't
internalized the concept of "+2 levels = x2 power" Which to be fair is
a concept that makes encounter design (and the game as a whole)
terribly brittle and hard to do at mid to high level. There just isn't
enough "room" between a Standard Encounter and the strongest "tough"
encounter you can use without being an abusive GM.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Episode #5 really never posed any serious danger to the PCs; the
gladiatorial fights in particular were a joke. (The crowd didn't
like the PCs as much as the module thought they should, because
yes, the PCs won, but it was *boring.* Madtooth the great monster
never got to act at all; it just turned into a frog on the first
action of the first PC. Admittedly that was a bad die roll, but
still.)

I'm reminded of a piece of advice I once read for Champions, that the
villains should be over-armored and under-gunned. The idea being that
the losing side of a fight should last at least a few turns unless
mookishly weak. That way, if the NPC is on the short end, the fight
will still be somewhat interesting, and if the PCs are on the short
end, they have a chance to "change the rules" (run away, surrender,
call for divine intervention...) before they go down.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
But it's hard to tell the player "Back down a bit on the minimax"
when there might be another Episode #4 coming at any moment.
(And in fact, I think he *has* backed down some. The line between
enough minimax to survive and too much to be fun is very thin and
hard to spot. I'm not sure that for me there *is* such a line
past about level 12.)

If it exists, it's razor thin. I blame the official "+2 levels = x2
power" power curve. IMO teen-level characters need to have room for
having a couple of levels of variability in their actual power level
vs their nominal level without this breaking the game - but they
don't.

(And to get back to my original complaint, the reason for the "+2
levels = x2 power" power curve, the reason why it's so hard to
house-rule that steep power curve away, is that primary spellcasters
keep getting spells that are more and more powerful. That power
exponential curve is needed to cram those 9th level spells into the
reach of 17th level casters.)

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
If it exists, it's razor thin. I blame the official "+2 levels = x2
power" power curve. IMO teen-level characters need to have room for
having a couple of levels of variability in their actual power level
vs their nominal level without this breaking the game - but they
don't.

Yes. The variability among characters seems to go up with level.

Pretty much by accident, I put the party fighter into a "sweet spot"
of the system: I didn't make an effort to minimax him, but his design
is naturally optimal. He contrasts with the swashbuckler (who
has levels of fighter, rogue, scout, and dervish) who I had to optimize
fiercely to get her to work at all. This was a success till around
level 8, and then it became apparent that the fighter was still
useful, even increasingly useful, and the swashbuckler had become
totally ineffectual. The level difference seemed huge to me--by the
time they were both 11th I think the fighter looked like 14th and
the swashbuckler looked like 9th.

Part of this is a changing environment. We started hitting DR against
which no one had the necessary countermeasures. (This is much more
prevalent in v3.5 than it was in v3.0.) The fighter had no trouble
as he could consistently use Power Attack, Weapon Specialization, and
a two-handed weapon to go through even DR15. The swashbuckler, using
a d6 one-handed weapon, was stymied. We also started hitting increasing
numbers of foes immune to sneak attack, critical hits, and precision
damage, negating most of what her rogue and scout levels offered her
as a combatant.

Part of it is just that what the swashbuckler was doing didn't scale
to high levels as well as what the fighter was doing. The scout
precision damage is great when you get only one attack, but using it
requires taking only one attack, so it's a bust when the fighter is
getting 3 or 4. The swashbuckler always had superior AC but after a
point, serious foes would hit her anyway and she had 20% fewer hp.

I think this was a pretty modest discrepancy compared to what you can
do to yourself if you allow prestiege classes. It's not just that
some are overpowered (an alert GM may catch that) but the majority
are grossly underpowered for at least a few levels somewhere in the
progression--anything that reduces a primary spellcaster's spell
progression, for reasons you've noted elsewhere in this thread, almost
*does not count as a level increase*. A player incautiously taking
an interesting-sounding prestiege class for his primary-caster
PC may reduce the whole party's effective level by 1 or more.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 20:32:49 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
If it exists, it's razor thin. I blame the official "+2 levels = x2
power" power curve. IMO teen-level characters need to have room for
having a couple of levels of variability in their actual power level
vs their nominal level without this breaking the game - but they
don't.

Yes. The variability among characters seems to go up with level.
Pretty much by accident, I put the party fighter into a "sweet spot"
of the system: I didn't make an effort to minimax him, but his design
is naturally optimal.

This is another reason why a "no minimaxing; create characters, not
combat machines" rule just doesn't work.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
This sort of thing reminds me that I really need to find and read over
a copy of Iron Heroes. From what I've heard of it, it is a solution to
the problem of assuming that characters have bonuses from items, even
if it's an extreme one that assumes/requires that *no* items even
exist.

We ran one game in Iron Heroes. I found myself deeply allergic to
its tone and style, but I think it has a lot of really good ideas
which could be salvaged and used elsewhere.

It has a really strong "mooks/heroes" contrast, even more than
v3.5 does, and also uses magic as a plot device more than as a
feature of the world. There is quite a bit of magic around, it's
just not PC magic and there are no real rules for much of it.
(Admission: I ran this for months without ever reading all of
it, because of the tone. I may have missed things.)

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
I wonder how it would work if medium-to-high level characters were
given a "heroic" bonus to saves, AC, etc, that didn't stack with
bonuses from magic.

I think that could work very well, if it were high enough.
I'd want to get rid of the bonuses from magic altogether, though,
because they are a bookkeeping nuisance and (to me) flavorless.
The +1 ring of protection is about as boring as a magic item
can be.

One lesson I took away from my Feng Shui games is that with the
exception of stuff which relies on subterfuge, character
shticks should be *visible*. A character whose sword bursts into
flame to the dismay of his foes, or who is covered head to toe
in the scales of a black dragon, adds more to the game than a
character who has an invisible plus with the same general effect.
But you can't afford to make things colorful if each character
has too many of them. I'd really like to trim the numbers down.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[psychohist]

Mary Kuhner posts, in part:

One lesson I took away from my Feng Shui games is that with
the exception of stuff which relies on subterfuge, character
shticks should be *visible*. A character whose sword bursts
into flame to the dismay of his foes, or who is covered head
to toe in the scales of a black dragon, adds more to the
game than a character who has an invisible plus with the
same general effect.

I can see how that would fit with a Feng Shui game, but my personal
preference is the opposite: I prefer to play characters that look
normal, even if they have unusual abilities. Flashy and highly
visible effects usually get tedious about the second or third time
they are used for me.

Warren J. Dew

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007 22:32:08 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
This sort of thing reminds me that I really need to find and read over
a copy of Iron Heroes. From what I've heard of it, it is a solution to
the problem of assuming that characters have bonuses from items, even
if it's an extreme one that assumes/requires that *no* items even
exist.

We ran one game in Iron Heroes. I found myself deeply allergic to
its tone and style, but I think it has a lot of really good ideas
which could be salvaged and used elsewhere.

I suspect I'd have the same reaction.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
It has a really strong "mooks/heroes" contrast, even more than
v3.5 does, and also uses magic as a plot device more than as a
feature of the world. There is quite a bit of magic around, it's
just not PC magic and there are no real rules for much of it.
(Admission: I ran this for months without ever reading all of
it, because of the tone. I may have missed things.)

A mook/hero contrast I wouldn't mind so much, as long as it avoids the
D&Dism of "PCs must start as mooks and *become* heroes, rather than
getting to *start* as heroes." Magic that's fiat, plot device, and
NPC-only would really bug me, even as the GM.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
I wonder how it would work if medium-to-high level characters were
given a "heroic" bonus to saves, AC, etc, that didn't stack with
bonuses from magic.

I think that could work very well, if it were high enough.
I'd want to get rid of the bonuses from magic altogether, though,
because they are a bookkeeping nuisance and (to me) flavorless.
The +1 ring of protection is about as boring as a magic item
can be.

If the +1 ring were one of a half-dozen AC boosters, yes. Maybe not so
much for low level characters with few magic items of any sort.

On further thought wrt slot and stacking limitations, I'm not too keen
on getting strict with slots, but would like to see a lot fewer bonus
types for stacking. E.g. no more than three possible bonus types to
AC, and thus no more than three AC-boosting magic items - including
the one that boosts Dex.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
One lesson I took away from my Feng Shui games is that with the
exception of stuff which relies on subterfuge, character
shticks should be *visible*. A character whose sword bursts into
flame to the dismay of his foes, or who is covered head to toe
in the scales of a black dragon, adds more to the game than a
character who has an invisible plus with the same general effect.
But you can't afford to make things colorful if each character
has too many of them. I'd really like to trim the numbers down.

Agree about trimming the numbers down. Have mixed feelings about items
being colorful/visible vs not. I think it's more important that the
item & its effects be visible to the player - i.e. a relatively big
bonus, for the character's power-level. Gaudy but wimpy items might be
a little better than quiet & wimpy ones, but "big" pluses are better
than either, and not so dependent on visibility for their coolness.

Edgar Ironpelt's flaming burst greatsword "Dunar!" was a great,
character-defining magic item, but so was Don Maximillian's magical
rapier-and-dagger set: The two weapons when used together functioned
as a "+5 Defender." Bonuses could be shifted between the rapier (bonus
to hit & damage) and the parrying dagger (bonus to AC). This didn't
have any flashy special effects, it just let Max look more competent.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Agree about trimming the numbers down. Have mixed feelings about items
being colorful/visible vs not. I think it's more important that the
item & its effects be visible to the player - i.e. a relatively big
bonus, for the character's power-level. Gaudy but wimpy items might be
a little better than quiet & wimpy ones, but "big" pluses are better
than either, and not so dependent on visibility for their coolness.
Edgar Ironpelt's flaming burst greatsword "Dunar!" was a great,
character-defining magic item, but so was Don Maximillian's magical
rapier-and-dagger set: The two weapons when used together functioned
as a "+5 Defender." Bonuses could be shifted between the rapier (bonus
to hit & damage) and the parrying dagger (bonus to AC). This didn't
have any flashy special effects, it just let Max look more competent.

Your comments and Warren's have made me realize that while Feng
Shui really prioritizes effects that are visible to outside
observers (it's a naturally flashy genre) I'm often happy with
effects that are only visible to the character. What I really
don't like are effects that are not visible at all.

In a d20 based system a +1 to the roll is fairly marginal--you
have to have it for a long time before you notice that it's there,
if you ever do notice. (This does not apply to, for example,
+1 to damage, which is on a different scale.) If you have a
low-level party, it seems as though it should be a big deal
that Fred has a masterwork sword inherited from his adventurer
granddad; but in practice you won't be able to tell.

Each of my SCAP PCs except the wizard has, differently distributed
across slots, +3 to +6 in save boosts and +6 to +12 in AC boosts.
I couldn't reliably tell you what those plusses are coming from,
and if one plus mysteriously vanished, I'd probably never notice.
I do notice that the wizard has an AC 13 points lower than the
rest of the PCs, though, or that the swashbuckler has a Dex 6 points
higher.

It seems to me that while +1 is undeniably useful--if you load
up on those across a whole party you can see that something has
changed--it is not big enough to be noticable on a single PC, and
that's disappointing. +2 begins to be noticable.

Things like Tillie's ring of See Invisible, which are not externally
flashy, are definitely flashy to the PC--the wide-eyed look of
alarm when Tillie sees something that no one else can see is an
important bit of character byplay. I'd like more of that and less
+1 protection/resistance/etc.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[psychohist]

Mary Kuhner posts, in part:

It seems to me that while +1 is undeniably useful--if
you load up on those across a whole party you can
see that something has changed--it is not big enough
to be noticable on a single PC, and that's
disappointing. +2 begins to be noticable.

In my opinion, this is a defect of using a system designed for D20s.
Those +1s do add up, but any individual +1 doesn't feel that
noticeable.

Simply switching to a 2D10 system helps a lot, in my opinion. Of
course, doing that in the context of a system which is balanced around
using D20s might not work so well.

Warren J. Dew

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 20:47:13 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
In a d20 based system a +1 to the roll is fairly marginal--you
have to have it for a long time before you notice that it's there,
if you ever do notice. (This does not apply to, for example,
+1 to damage, which is on a different scale.) If you have a
low-level party, it seems as though it should be a big deal
that Fred has a masterwork sword inherited from his adventurer
granddad; but in practice you won't be able to tell.
Each of my SCAP PCs except the wizard has, differently distributed
across slots, +3 to +6 in save boosts and +6 to +12 in AC boosts.
I couldn't reliably tell you what those plusses are coming from,
and if one plus mysteriously vanished, I'd probably never notice.
I do notice that the wizard has an AC 13 points lower than the
rest of the PCs, though, or that the swashbuckler has a Dex 6 points
higher.
It seems to me that while +1 is undeniably useful--if you load
up on those across a whole party you can see that something has
changed--it is not big enough to be noticable on a single PC, and
that's disappointing. +2 begins to be noticable.

You have a point, but it seems to me that a +1 can be meaningful as a
token. Either as something to say "this effect is real, and not just a
fraud composed of lying flavor text" (e.g. "This is the good-luck
charm my mother gave me." - if it's really a +1 item of protection or
resistance, then it really is a good-luck charm. But if it doesn't
give any game-effect at all, then it's an annoying piece of ignorant
superstition.)

Or as something to say "this is a token of greater things to come."
(e.g. "This is the masterwork greatsword my grandfather gave me when I
came of age. And I'm going to do him proud: By the time I'm finished
it's gonna be a +5 holy greatsword of fire and frost.")

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Things like Tillie's ring of See Invisible, which are not externally
flashy, are definitely flashy to the PC--the wide-eyed look of
alarm when Tillie sees something that no one else can see is an
important bit of character byplay. I'd like more of that and less
+1 protection/resistance/etc.

I don't disagree with you, but there also seems to be an implication
in your posts of "I'd like to get rid of +1 protection/resistance/etc.
entirely, at least if that's what it takes to keep them from being
annoyingly common." I'm not sure I'd want to go that far.

The other interesting thing about Tillie's ring is that it's only
useful against opponents who use magic. *That's* something I'd like to
see more of.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
You have a point, but it seems to me that a +1 can be meaningful as a
token. Either as something to say "this effect is real, and not just a
fraud composed of lying flavor text" (e.g. "This is the good-luck
charm my mother gave me." - if it's really a +1 item of protection or
resistance, then it really is a good-luck charm. But if it doesn't
give any game-effect at all, then it's an annoying piece of ignorant
superstition.)

Luck bonuses are particularly iffy for me, because I have had some
bad experiences with characters whose shtick (in a variety of
systems) was "I'm unusually lucky" but whose dice-rolling belied
it. In particular, if you model Luck as a reroll where you're
required to take the rerolled result (a common mechanic in many
systems) the subjective experience of the group can easily be
"Boy, this guy is really *un* lucky. He rerolls and it gets
worse!"

A +1 lucky charm can easily be owned by a character who seems
markedly unlucky, the variance of d20 being what it is. And then
it still feels like a bit of a fraud. Folkloric good-luck
charms, if they work, do make you lucky, not just statistically
prone to being luckier than the next guy.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Or as something to say "this is a token of greater things to come."
(e.g. "This is the masterwork greatsword my grandfather gave me when I
came of age. And I'm going to do him proud: By the time I'm finished
it's gonna be a +5 holy greatsword of fire and frost.")

I like that, and it's something I wish happened more in our games.
In practice the character is more likely to abandon it because he
has found something better, or stick to it and suffer with
regard to more pragmatic characters.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Things like Tillie's ring of See Invisible, which are not externally
flashy, are definitely flashy to the PC--the wide-eyed look of
alarm when Tillie sees something that no one else can see is an
important bit of character byplay. I'd like more of that and less
+1 protection/resistance/etc.

I don't disagree with you, but there also seems to be an implication
in your posts of "I'd like to get rid of +1 protection/resistance/etc.
entirely, at least if that's what it takes to keep them from being
annoyingly common." I'm not sure I'd want to go that far.

At the moment they are annoying me so severely--not the items
themselves so much as the fact that all high-level play is
balanced against having bucketfuls of them--that I would just
get rid of them. But I haven't playtested the results, and
maybe I would change my mind.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
The other interesting thing about Tillie's ring is that it's only
useful against opponents who use magic. *That's* something I'd like to
see more of.

And against ghosts, which I hadn't expected: a strange side
effect of the mechanics!

It's fairly specialized, and such items are often not chosen because
a more general item is a better bet. (We don't see much
fire/acid/etc resistance, because there is too high a chance that it
will be the wrong kind for a given situation. If the PCs have
forewarning, they cast or use potions to get the appropriate kind.)
But Invisibility is so devastatingly powerful that the ring still
pays off, and is a signature item for Tillie, despite it not doing
anything else. (Around 6th level the party hit a major hoard,
and practically all of it went for Tillie's two rings, invis and detect
invis; a huge investment but they've never regretted it.)

The whole specialized/generalized thing is a major tension in
game design, even more so in point-cost systems: it's hard to
price highly specialized abilities so that they're cost-efficient
without making them overpowering in their limited circumstances.
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better. In D&D
this shows up as a tension between interesting specialized
defenses (which are really hard to use well) and the standard
AC/DR/SR/saves defenses, which are good against almost everything
and usually a better investment.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[gleichman]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better.

No it isn't.

But then again those game systems assume as *part of their design*
that the GM will make that ability worth the points you spent on it.

It is also up to the GM in such systems to *disallow* Speak with
Everything if it fits the Genre.

If the GM is not willing to do this, any point system will fail them-
and fail them badly.

[Rick Pikul]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better.

Hero doesn't have much of a problem with that.


Speak with Everything: Universal Translator, (20 points), plus
5d6 Telepathy only for communication with animals, (10 points). Total
cost 30 points.

Speak with Ravens, 5d6 Telepathy, only for communication with ravens, 7
points.

[DougL]

Post by Rick Pikul

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better.

Hero doesn't have much of a problem with that.
Speak with Everything: Universal Translator, (20 points), plus
5d6 Telepathy only for communication with animals, (10 points). Total
cost 30 points.
Speak with Ravens, 5d6 Telepathy, only for communication with ravens, 7
points.

So I can speak with about 0.01% of the things I meet that don't speak
English for 7 points or with 100% for 30 points. One of these things
is clearly better than the other unless the GM is deliberately fucking
with the world to have Ravens show up with important messages for me
every 5 minutes.

Mary didn't say that the two had the same cost or that you couldn't
buy Speak with Ravens. She said Speak with Everything is clearly a
better deal, you and Brian appear to be disagreeing with her by
providing supporting evidence that she is correct.

DougL

[Simon Smith]

Post by DougL

Post by Rick Pikul

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better.

Hero doesn't have much of a problem with that.
Speak with Everything: Universal Translator, (20 points), plus
5d6 Telepathy only for communication with animals, (10 points). Total
cost 30 points.
Speak with Ravens, 5d6 Telepathy, only for communication with ravens, 7
points.

So I can speak with about 0.01% of the things I meet that don't speak
English for 7 points or with 100% for 30 points. One of these things
is clearly better than the other unless the GM is deliberately fucking
with the world to have Ravens show up with important messages for me
every 5 minutes.
Mary didn't say that the two had the same cost or that you couldn't
buy Speak with Ravens. She said Speak with Everything is clearly a
better deal, you and Brian appear to be disagreeing with her by
providing supporting evidence that she is correct.
DougL

From a practical viewpoint, though, there's a lot to be said for
making/encouraging speak with <stuff> to apply as a universal ability.

Say speak with <one species> cost 5 pts, ten species cost 10, 100 species
cost 15, 1000 species cost 20 . . . and so on. You either have to enumerate
all those species ahead of time, or give the PC a Schroedinger's
skill whereby they're entitled to add new species in mid-scenario. I use
this for my Knowledge skill system in Star Wars, and it works very well -
for me - but it's not going to work in every game. If a player buys 1000
species the GM is regularly going to get caught out with 'oh I can Speak
with them' even for quite obscure critters. And if it's treated as a
Schroedinger's skill, then even a mere 1000 or so species is likely to be
ample even for a long campaign. At that point, it's better to make the skill
universal - then at least the GM knows where he stands.

Using lesser versions of such an ability and allowing the PC to get
appropriate 'value for money' out of paying the points for it is
partly a game contract issue, but partly self-fulfilling. (While these
comments concentrate on the 'self-fulfilling' side of the argument, I do
consider the game contract side roughly equally as important.)

On the 'self-fulfilling' side of the argument, if a PC knows they can only
speak with Ravens, then they're actively going to seek out ravens. They're
going to know where ravens nest. They're going to 'cultivate' them as
allies. Anyone likely to want to communicate with the PCs is also likely to
be aware of this channel. Such a trait becomes a signature ability of the
character. To make ravens appear more frequently than they would simply by
chance isn't 'fucking with the world', it's allowing for the fact that by
virtue of a PC having that skill, the game is going to be more
raven-centric. Take a universal skill, in contrast, and this effect does not
occur.

It does mean you need to try to quantify raven populations, and the PC needs
to know a bit about the population levels, and will have a good idea /in
advance of a scenario/ when, where or whether to expect them. And if a raven
shows up in an unexpected location, it's a scenario hook of some kind;
someone's sent it, knowing the PCs can interact with it. (Even in a campaign
where no-one but the PC knows he can talk to ravens, eliminating NPC
contacts from consideration, that raven could still legitimimately have been
sent by the gods). It also means the GM is going to mention ravens whenever
they chance to be present, because the characters will be far more likely to
be keeping an eye out for them. If you don't have any speak with Ravens
characters or NPCs, then ravens could still be present, but they're only
going to be mentioned as flavour, if they're mentioned at all. So that
further distorts the apparent difference between a campaign where ravens
matter and a campaign where they don't; in one, ravens are mentioned 100% of
the time when they appear, 'cos they matter, and in the other they may only
be mentioned one or twice throughout the campaign, 'cos they don't. Even if
both GMs use the same population model: "0.2% chance of enountering a raven
per day, except at the Tower of London where the figure is 75%", there's
still going to be many more mentions of ravens in the first campaign, even
before we allow for PCs and NPCs distorting matters yet further by
breeding/attracting them/using them as messengers.

[Ken Arromdee]

Post by Simon Smith
Say speak with <one species> cost 5 pts, ten species cost 10, 100 species
cost 15, 1000 species cost 20 . . . and so on. You either have to enumerate
all those species ahead of time, or give the PC a Schroedinger's
skill whereby they're entitled to add new species in mid-scenario.

No, you don't. "Speak with birds" probably lets you speak with 1000
species, but you don't need to make a list of 1000 species to use it.

[gleichman]

Post by DougL
One of these things
is clearly better than the other unless the GM is deliberately fucking
with the world to have Ravens show up with important messages for me
every 5 minutes.

I hope you don't mind that I object to your use of the f**king to
describe my gaming style. But if you wish to take this to straight to
a flame war, you've made an excellent start.

Point Systems are (or should be) designed primary to be used
specifically to justify and guide the campaign genre by means of
character (and item in some systems) construction. That's the gaming
contract they are designed for. They are not designed for any other
style and generally will not work with them.


For example, if I were to use HERO to run a Prydain game the following
things would happen:

Speak with Anything would be disallowed. That ability doesn't exist in
that setting. Very few characters on concept could buy "Speak with
Ravens", typically only those of a fair folk background.

And yes, Ravens would have rather common interaction with the
character as a result of how such a character spent his points. It
would likely be a major genre highlight for that character in fact.
This is the whole point of buying the ability in the first place.


Now lets say I was (IMO stupid enough) to attempt to run an open
setting where both "Speak with Everything" and Speak with Ravens
appears together. I require the former to be brought as Telepathy
likely at the 10d6 level, No End Cost (+1/2), Only for Communication
(-1/2) for 50 points.

Meanwhile I'd count "Speak with Raven" as a specific language for 3
points (it would work like speak wookie in a Star Wars game). Special
effect in HERO is wide open you know.

Generally there's no problem with relative effectiveness because the
latter can be afford while the former is a major and likely character
budget breaking buy.

Where things turn really stupid is when you attempt to mix a group
that insists on buying both abilities for different charaters. Any
group of players where the niche of one (speak with Ravens) is
completely contained in the niche of another who's more effective at
that niche (Speak with everything) is asking for campaign failure no
matter the system. Blaming the point buy construction is doing nothing
but deflecting blame from where it belongs- on the players/GM.


If you or Mary are not willing to play the game towards the ends in
which the system was designed, that's fine. But the fault isn't with
the game system. It's with yourself. Find another game and stop
whining about systems that work perfectly for those who understand and
accept how they are meant to be played.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

No whining intended here, nor any disrespect to point-build systems. I just
think that correctly pricing both general and specific powers within the
same system is an extremely tough problem, and one that probably does not
have general solutions, other than "don't do that."

The problem arises with non-overlapping powers as well as overlapping ones,
though it is more acute with overlapping ones. If birds and mammals are
both pretty abundant and important in the campaign world, it is hard to
correctly price Speak with Ravens versus Speak with Mammals. Speak with
Ravens is certainly of lower usefulness, but it's hard to rate how much
lower. You can, of course, forbid one or the other, which goes back to
"don't do that."

The problem becomes more severe if the character with Speak with Ravens also
wants Speak with Doves, but does not want Speak with Birds. (She is, let
us say, a priestess of the Twin Goddesses, whose holy birds those are.)
There is going to come a point where it would be cheaper to buy Speak with
Birds (a sort of volume discount) but setting that point correctly is
challenging. It's almost surely not proportional to how many bird types
there are in the setting. Once a character can speak to, say, twenty
kinds of birds there is little additional use to having a twenty-first
(unless it fills a niche the others don't, such as being the only arctic
bird among them). Certainly reckoning that Speak With One Kind of Bird
costs 1/1400 of Speak with Birds (based on a rough guess that there are
1400 kinds of birds in the world) is going to make one of them impossibly
mispriced.

"Don't do that" is always an option. For these contrived examples it
is probably the best option. It would also be very reasonable to bundle
the Ravens and Doves together, on the grounds that you are unlikely to
have two characters interested in speaking with birds in the same party
anyway, and a consistent pricing structure is therefore unimportant.

It gets, in my hands anyway, a lot uglier when the two powers involved
are Resist Fire and Resist Energy, or "+2 on Charm Saves" versus "+2 on
Will Saves." A non-point-cost system may not explicitly need to price
these but it still "prices" them in terms of their availability, the
cost of a magic item which can do them, etc. And it seems nearly impossible
to price them in such a way that both are attractive.

One example is that as a cast spell, Resist Energy would be only moderately
more useful than Resist Fire in D&D. There are only 5 energy types,
most foes use only 1, and the more specific spell is usually good enough.
If you have advance information that you are facing a fire dragon,
Resist Fire does everything that a (hypothetical) Resist Energy would do.
If you want both of them to be used, Resist Energy can be only modestly
more expensive than Resist Fire--if you make it 5 times more expensive,
in my experience everyone will prefer Resist Fire, and this may already
be true at 2 times more expensive.

However, as a permanent item Resist Energy is *much* better than Resist
Fire, possibly 5 times better or even more (since a single item is
always better than multiple items due to slot limits).

This makes hash of attempts to price items based on spell difficulty.
I don't think there's a solution. You have to fine-tune for the kind
of game you want--would you rather favor general or specific, and do
you care more about item costs or spell costs?

To my tastes, D&Dv3.5 pushes too much for the generalist solution: it
is almost always better to go for a bland general resistance, because
the specific ones are too costly (considering both gold and slots).
I would find it more interesting the other way around.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[gleichman]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The problem arises with non-overlapping powers as well as overlapping ones,
though it is more acute with overlapping ones. If birds and mammals are
both pretty abundant and important in the campaign world, it is hard to
correctly price Speak with Ravens versus Speak with Mammals.

You're still trying to do something a point buy system like HERO isn't
intended to do. Basically you want the costs to match the objective
usefulness of the ability in an already existing world.

But the system isn't intended (and I would argue can't in practice) do
that. Instead it's meant only to price "how often and how useful is
this ability to my character". After that, it's up to the GM (and the
player in a way) to make sure that it (in perception) lives up to that
price.

You want the Point Value to pull from an objective world, when the
game system is intended to push reality upon it instead.

Thus it doesn't really matter if it's "Speak with Raven" or "Speak
with Ravens & Doves". The specific is nothing more than a special
effect in HERO. Cost them the same and they are of equal usefulness,
it's just that one character always talks to ravens while another one
gets a mix of ravens and doves. Both get the same information value
level. Cost them different, and one either gets better information- or
can access it more often. The same applies to birds, or mammals, or
carrots.

And it's quite possible in HERO to have someone with "Speak with
Mammals" that costs less than another character with "Speak with
piglets" because the latter is more useful *for the owning character*
than the former is for its.

And to add confusion, HERO isn't linear in the usefulness of it's
points.


Your problems with D&D is harder for me to speak to, as I haven't
played D&D for decades and likely never will.

However here too I think you're trying to buck the intent of the game.
It *appears* to me that D&D is all about selecting the best option
from a vast array of options provided. Thus when you say that "General
is better than specific, no one should select specific", you're just
playing the game the way it was intended. You've made a "best"
decision, it's time to play it.










Speak with

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Ravens is certainly of lower usefulness, but it's hard to rate how much
lower. You can, of course, forbid one or the other, which goes back to
"don't do that."
The problem becomes more severe if the character with Speak with Ravens also
wants Speak with Doves, but does not want Speak with Birds. (She is, let
us say, a priestess of the Twin Goddesses, whose holy birds those are.)
There is going to come a point where it would be cheaper to buy Speak with
Birds (a sort of volume discount) but setting that point correctly is
challenging. It's almost surely not proportional to how many bird types
there are in the setting. Once a character can speak to, say, twenty
kinds of birds there is little additional use to having a twenty-first
(unless it fills a niche the others don't, such as being the only arctic
bird among them). Certainly reckoning that Speak With One Kind of Bird
costs 1/1400 of Speak with Birds (based on a rough guess that there are
1400 kinds of birds in the world) is going to make one of them impossibly
mispriced.
"Don't do that" is always an option. For these contrived examples it
is probably the best option. It would also be very reasonable to bundle
the Ravens and Doves together, on the grounds that you are unlikely to
have two characters interested in speaking with birds in the same party
anyway, and a consistent pricing structure is therefore unimportant.
It gets, in my hands anyway, a lot uglier when the two powers involved
are Resist Fire and Resist Energy, or "+2 on Charm Saves" versus "+2 on
Will Saves." A non-point-cost system may not explicitly need to price
these but it still "prices" them in terms of their availability, the
cost of a magic item which can do them, etc. And it seems nearly impossible
to price them in such a way that both are attractive.
One example is that as a cast spell, Resist Energy would be only moderately
more useful than Resist Fire in D&D. There are only 5 energy types,
most foes use only 1, and the more specific spell is usually good enough.
If you have advance information that you are facing a fire dragon,
Resist Fire does everything that a (hypothetical) Resist Energy would do.
If you want both of them to be used, Resist Energy can be only modestly
more expensive than Resist Fire--if you make it 5 times more expensive,
in my experience everyone will prefer Resist Fire, and this may already
be true at 2 times more expensive.
However, as a permanent item Resist Energy is *much* better than Resist
Fire, possibly 5 times better or even more (since a single item is
always better than multiple items due to slot limits).
This makes hash of attempts to price items based on spell difficulty.
I don't think there's a solution. You have to fine-tune for the kind
of game you want--would you rather favor general or specific, and do
you care more about item costs or spell costs?
To my tastes, D&Dv3.5 pushes too much for the generalist solution: it
is almost always better to go for a bland general resistance, because
the specific ones are too costly (considering both gold and slots).
I would find it more interesting the other way around.

[psychohist]

Mary Kuhner posts, in part:

To my tastes, D&Dv3.5 pushes too much for
the generalist solution: it is almost
always better to go for a bland general
resistance, because the specific ones are
too costly (considering both gold and
slots). I would find it more interesting
the other way around.

It's to be noted, however, that making specific resistances the better
choice is an approach that is much more open to exploitation. For
example, you could seek out encounters that your party has good
resistances against. You could also have multiple sets of items and
put on the ones that you're expecting to need. In fact, with specific
resistances being the better choice, I think most parties would end up
needing a full set of specific resistance gear against all the most
common classes of foes.

Against uncommon classes of foes, I think you'd run into the problem
that if your party happened to have an appropriate set of resistance
gear, they'd be a walkover, and if not, you might have no chance.
This would just exacerbate the balance issues found in high level D&D.

Warren J. Dew

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by psychohist
It's to be noted, however, that making specific resistances the better
choice is an approach that is much more open to exploitation. For
example, you could seek out encounters that your party has good
resistances against. You could also have multiple sets of items and
put on the ones that you're expecting to need. In fact, with specific
resistances being the better choice, I think most parties would end up
needing a full set of specific resistance gear against all the most
common classes of foes.

This is quite true, if having resistance to the foe is essential in
defeating it. I don't think it would be a good idea to implement
my scheme in v3.5, because it's definitely the case by high level
that you *must* have defenses or you'll die, and making the defenses
very diverse just increases the item load required.

Your point is well illustrated by a change made between v3.0 and v3.5.
In v3.0 creatures which required special weaponry to hit almost always
required magical weapons; more fearsome creatures required stronger
magic weapons. This is a problem with an obvious generalist solution
(get the most powerful magic weapon you can) and that is what everyone
did.

In v3.5 creatures may require any combination of magic, holy, unholy,
lawful, chaotic, silver, cold iron, or adamantine: a fair number
require two ("can be hurt normally only by a holy silver weapon" for
vampires, for example). To compensate, the severity of not having
the right weapon has been decreased quite a bit.

You could approach this with a specialist strategy of having the
appropriate weapon for a foe. Unless the PCs can control their
encounters, though, you need to carry a lot of specialist weapons.
Vampire hunters are in pretty good shape, but in many scenarios
you don't know in advance whether you need cold iron or silver.
(Is the mysterious thing afflicting the town a demon, or a devil?)

The "golf bag of weapons" lacks something, esthetically.

Some characters--my fighter Bryce is one--can go with a generalist
strategy "Do so much damage that it doesn't matter." Unfortunately
this seems to narrow the range of possible fighter strategies
painfully at levels where DR starts to become common. The party's
other two fighters, not optimized for high damage, stopped being able
to compete with Bryce.

But if DR levels were still lower, so that having the right weapon
was helpful rather than (for anyone but an optimized strength-heavy
fighter like Bryce) absolutely essential, then the holy-silver
vampire sword might be a neat thing to give its owner flavor, rather
than part of a golf bag of essential specialist weapons.

I think if I were rewriting the system--it's getting more and
more tempting to do so--I'd want to make magic-item defenses a lot
less significant and character abilities a lot more so. When DR
started to become a real killer for us, we invented a class ability
for one PC that would let her overcome it. This felt better to me
than either (a) saying only high-strength two-hand-weapon fighters
are viable at high level, or (b) carrying the golf bag.

If the defenses from items were not so large as to become essential,
specialist defenses might have more of a niche, and getting rid of
item-based generalist defenses might not be so troublesome.

I don't know. As I found out last time I did it, in the 80's, revising
one rule in D&D is like eating one peanut!

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:01:22 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by psychohist
It's to be noted, however, that making specific resistances the better
choice is an approach that is much more open to exploitation. For
example, you could seek out encounters that your party has good
resistances against. You could also have multiple sets of items and
put on the ones that you're expecting to need. In fact, with specific
resistances being the better choice, I think most parties would end up
needing a full set of specific resistance gear against all the most
common classes of foes.

This is quite true, if having resistance to the foe is essential in
defeating it. I don't think it would be a good idea to implement
my scheme in v3.5, because it's definitely the case by high level
that you *must* have defenses or you'll die, and making the defenses
very diverse just increases the item load required.

There's also the problem of changing ones item loadout between
encounters. If you're set up with defenses vs cold, and you get jumped
by a fire-based encounter...

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Your point is well illustrated by a change made between v3.0 and v3.5.
In v3.0 creatures which required special weaponry to hit almost always
required magical weapons; more fearsome creatures required stronger
magic weapons. This is a problem with an obvious generalist solution
(get the most powerful magic weapon you can) and that is what everyone
did.
In v3.5 creatures may require any combination of magic, holy, unholy,
lawful, chaotic, silver, cold iron, or adamantine: a fair number
require two ("can be hurt normally only by a holy silver weapon" for
vampires, for example). To compensate, the severity of not having
the right weapon has been decreased quite a bit.
You could approach this with a specialist strategy of having the
appropriate weapon for a foe. Unless the PCs can control their
encounters, though, you need to carry a lot of specialist weapons.
Vampire hunters are in pretty good shape, but in many scenarios
you don't know in advance whether you need cold iron or silver.
(Is the mysterious thing afflicting the town a demon, or a devil?)
The "golf bag of weapons" lacks something, esthetically.

And it succumbs to the pressure to create generalist "can act as any
special material or property" solutions. I found the "more magical
plusses" solution of 3.0 (and earlier) to be annoying, but the golf
bag is even more so.

I do like the idea that "more plusses are helpful" but not the idea of
"magic is trumps." I rejected the common house rule of changing
"DR/special material" to "DR/special materal or +N weapon" because it
made "+N" into a superset of various special materials. The house rule
I ended up with is that each magical plus above +1 reduces DR by 5. So
something with DR 10/holy would be DR 5 vs a non-holy +2 weapon. Which
isn't a perfect solution, but...

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If the defenses from items were not so large as to become essential,
specialist defenses might have more of a niche, and getting rid of
item-based generalist defenses might not be so troublesome.

Hm. What are the necessary defenses in 3.x? Boosts to AC, boosts to
the three saves, resistance/immunity to the five "energy" types (fire,
cold, sonic, acid, electricity), resistance/immunity to poison. What
others?

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I don't know. As I found out last time I did it, in the 80's, revising
one rule in D&D is like eating one peanut!

IME this is true for *any* game system. I'm not sure if D&D is worse
than most others.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 00:01:22 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The "golf bag of weapons" lacks something, esthetically.

And it succumbs to the pressure to create generalist "can act as any
special material or property" solutions. I found the "more magical
plusses" solution of 3.0 (and earlier) to be annoying, but the golf
bag is even more so.

Yeah. I really thought I disliked 3.0's approach--until I had
some experience with 3.5's. DR has been the bane of my life in
SCAP, starting around 8th level and just getting steadily worse.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If the defenses from items were not so large as to become essential,
specialist defenses might have more of a niche, and getting rid of
item-based generalist defenses might not be so troublesome.

Hm. What are the necessary defenses in 3.x? Boosts to AC, boosts to
the three saves, resistance/immunity to the five "energy" types (fire,
cold, sonic, acid, electricity), resistance/immunity to poison. What
others?

You need to be able to deal with:

Touch-attack level drain and stat drain (no saves!). This could
either be ungodly touch AC, or death magic immunity.

Invisibility, especially improved invisibility, and darkness.
(These may not be "defenses" per se but they behave similarly.)

Save-to-half effects where half damage will kill you--particularly
a problem for mages. The usual approach is to somehow get Uncanny
Dodge.

My PCs also always seem to need specific charm and fear defenses,
as the Will saves are never high enough to be certain, and the
high-level charms are devastating. We have come very close to
losing PCs to the half-orc fighter already, and it only gets worse
with level. And the mentalist wizard can take out the rest of the
party without their even knowing that something is wrong.

There may be a level beyond which you need SR. I haven't been
there yet, if so.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Erol K. Bayburt]

On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:40:33 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Hm. What are the necessary defenses in 3.x? Boosts to AC, boosts to
the three saves, resistance/immunity to the five "energy" types (fire,
cold, sonic, acid, electricity), resistance/immunity to poison. What
others?

Touch-attack level drain and stat drain (no saves!). This could
either be ungodly touch AC, or death magic immunity.

The "defenses" I've seen to this one have been along the lines of "the
GM uses these attacks sparingly, and only against parties with quick
and easy access to Restoration."

I'm tempted to house-rule that *drains* simply don't exist, that the
worst case is stat and level *damage*, which "heals" at the rate of 1
point or negative level per day (or possibly even faster, for "lesser"
forms).

But then I find "only powerful magic can fix this" afflictions to be
really annoying in general.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Invisibility, especially improved invisibility, and darkness.
(These may not be "defenses" per se but they behave similarly.)

Yeah.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Save-to-half effects where half damage will kill you--particularly
a problem for mages. The usual approach is to somehow get Uncanny
Dodge.

I think a combination of two memes are at work here: "Mages must be
wimps; they have a powerful offense, and so must be 'eggshells armed
with sledgehammers' in order to be balanced." And "It should be
possible for a well-placed blow to take down even the mightest hero
(or monster) with one shot. If a figure can't be taken down that way,
it's cheating."

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
My PCs also always seem to need specific charm and fear defenses,
as the Will saves are never high enough to be certain, and the
high-level charms are devastating. We have come very close to
losing PCs to the half-orc fighter already, and it only gets worse
with level. And the mentalist wizard can take out the rest of the
party without their even knowing that something is wrong.

In the read-only literature, high level types seem to be naturally
immune to charm & fear effects, or at least highly resistant. In the
worst case, a high level type will attack friends at a much lower
effective level if charmed to do so.

Part of the problem, IMO, is that D&D really doesn't have "high level"
in the sense of "no longer can be treated as a mook." The concept of
"there's always a bigger fish" has been exaggerated into "there's
always someone who can treat you as a speed bump."

I've occasionally toyed with the idea of a "reverse massive damage"
rule, e.g. that a character can never take more than 50 pts per round,
rather than 50 points giving a chance of instant death no matter how
high the hit point total. I've never been able to come up with one
that worked to my satisfaction, but I'd like to see, as a general
design philosophy if not necessarily a hard-coded rule, the concept
that an Nth level character can never be taken down in less than N/3
rounds, no matter *how* powerful the forces attacking him.

I know this would annoy the believers in "a single
sufficiently-well-placed blow should be able to take out even the
mightest of characters," but that belief annoys *me*

[Simon Smith]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
I've occasionally toyed with the idea of a "reverse massive damage"
rule, e.g. that a character can never take more than 50 pts per round,
rather than 50 points giving a chance of instant death no matter how
high the hit point total. I've never been able to come up with one
that worked to my satisfaction, but I'd like to see, as a general
design philosophy if not necessarily a hard-coded rule, the concept
that an Nth level character can never be taken down in less than N/3
rounds, no matter *how* powerful the forces attacking him.
I know this would annoy the believers in "a single
sufficiently-well-placed blow should be able to take out even the
mightest of characters," but that belief annoys *me*

Do you have any familiarity with Mutants and Masterminds? That's a D20
superhero system, and obviously that genre can suffer from enormous power
differentials between characters. Batman v Superman for example. The
solution used is to abandon hit points entirely; when a character is hit, he
has to make a Toughness save, and if he rolls well (and/or has
super-toughness powers) then he is unhurt, and if he rolls poorly he is
'bruised', then 'stunned', then 'hurt' then 'wounded' and so on, depending
on how much damage was taken and how well/poorly he rolled compared to the
save target. By adopting a similar system in D20, it would be possible to
make 'killed in one hit' an unattainable result, if that's what you wanted.

From another perspective, of course, you can view this system as: 'Every
character has six hit points; a character who has lost one hit point is
'bruised', a character who has lost his second is 'stunned' ...' and so forth,
and it's just the criterion for losing a hit point that's different.

This seems like one way out of the standard D20 hit point quandary. Although
it's not a perfect solution by any means; all characters tend to max out
their toughness saves, and there ends up being little if any difference in
terms of game mechanics between a 'normal human in super-powered armour'
compared to a super-strong tough-skinned type like Superman. If both
characters are the same level, their toughness save numbers will be
nigh-identical. Still, I thought I'd mention it.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
On Fri, 13 Apr 2007 05:40:33 +0000 (UTC),

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Touch-attack level drain and stat drain (no saves!). This could
either be ungodly touch AC, or death magic immunity.

The "defenses" I've seen to this one have been along the lines of "the
GM uses these attacks sparingly, and only against parties with quick
and easy access to Restoration."

That's my recollection of our 1st ed. and variant games in the 80's
and 90's, but lately the big problem with level/stat drain is not
"Will we be able to undo this?" it's "Is the target character going
to be irrecoverably dead in another round?" My PCs recently lost
7 levels in 2 rounds--and it's a spectacular death spiral after that
point! (Luckily the damage was spread out.) Negative levels are in many
ways worse for your survival than old-style level loss; in particular,
they are -1 to saves per negative level, which real level loss never is.

Jon's PCs met an adult black dragon of significant plot importance,
drained 8 levels from it, charmed it, feebleminded it, and turned
it into a lizard. The level drain has no save (Enervation) and
everything else was a cinch with a target at -8 to all saves.
(He then selectively unpicked the spells so that he could question
it. Module authors seldom allow for events like this....)

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
In the read-only literature, high level types seem to be naturally
immune to charm & fear effects, or at least highly resistant. In the
worst case, a high level type will attack friends at a much lower
effective level if charmed to do so.

One thing that writing a novel set in a high-magic setting really
did was spoil RPG charm spells for me. You can be *so* much more
subtle and work with so many more gradations if you don't have to be
able to represent everything mechanically....

It's interesting that charm spells remain one of the most obvious
inconsistencies not fixed in v3.5. The authors cannot seem to make
up their mind whether Charm Person is Dominate or not--look at the
suggested combat tactics for the mind flayer for a really blatant
example. Charm Person not only allows you to order someone to kill
his friends, it keeps him still while you *eat his brain*? Not
clear what you'd need Dominate for in that case.... I'm not sure
why this point is not addressed, but it's suggestive of a basic
issue somewhere.

Post by Erol K. Bayburt
Part of the problem, IMO, is that D&D really doesn't have "high level"
in the sense of "no longer can be treated as a mook." The concept of
"there's always a bigger fish" has been exaggerated into "there's
always someone who can treat you as a speed bump."

There may be a level where this is no longer true, but it's past
my personal Singularity limit (Wish and Mordenkainen's Disjunction)
and I no longer have any idea what's going on in the game at those
levels.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Ken Arromdee]

Post by Erol K. Bayburt

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If the defenses from items were not so large as to become essential,
specialist defenses might have more of a niche, and getting rid of
item-based generalist defenses might not be so troublesome.

Hm. What are the necessary defenses in 3.x? Boosts to AC, boosts to
the three saves, resistance/immunity to the five "energy" types (fire,
cold, sonic, acid, electricity), resistance/immunity to poison. What
others?

Death ward (or other forms of immunity to level draining).

[Ken Arromdee]

Post by gleichman
Now lets say I was (IMO stupid enough) to attempt to run an open
setting where both "Speak with Everything" and Speak with Ravens
appears together. I require the former to be brought as Telepathy
likely at the 10d6 level, No End Cost (+1/2), Only for Communication
(-1/2) for 50 points.

I would suggest adding Incantations, unless the user can speak with things
silently.

[gleichman]

Post by Ken Arromdee

Post by gleichman
Now lets say I was (IMO stupid enough) to attempt to run an open
setting where both "Speak with Everything" and Speak with Ravens
appears together. I require the former to be brought as Telepathy
likely at the 10d6 level, No End Cost (+1/2), Only for Communication
(-1/2) for 50 points.

I would suggest adding Incantations, unless the user can speak with things
silently.

Agreed.

[Rick Pikul]

Post by DougL

Post by Rick Pikul

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Try pricing Speak with Ravens in any point-build system and I think
you quickly learn that Speak with Everything is better.

Hero doesn't have much of a problem with that.
Speak with Everything: Universal Translator, (20 points), plus
5d6 Telepathy only for communication with animals, (10 points). Total
cost 30 points.
Speak with Ravens, 5d6 Telepathy, only for communication with ravens, 7
points.

So I can speak with about 0.01% of the things I meet that don't speak
English for 7 points or with 100% for 30 points. One of these things
is clearly better than the other unless the GM is deliberately fucking
with the world to have Ravens show up with important messages for me
every 5 minutes.

Two things:

The percentage of things you can speak with, that you normally couldn't,
does not have a linear relationship with the utility of that ability. The
first bit, (speak with <limited foo>), is the most valuable bit.

Hero point values are also not linear, going from 7 to 30 is about a 24
fold increase.


Of course, those point values were just first blush calculations. I did
make an error, I forgot to use standard effect[1]: So I could drop the
Speak with Ravens down to 2 or 3 dice, for a real cost of 3 or 4 points.

You can also add more points to the Speak with Everything, both to
increase the telepathy dice and the universal translator INT roll.

Post by DougL
Mary didn't say that the two had the same cost or that you couldn't
buy Speak with Ravens. She said Speak with Everything is clearly a
better deal, you and Brian appear to be disagreeing with her by
providing supporting evidence that she is correct.

You have a large cost difference, similar to the utility of the powers
within an environment where ravens are reasonably common, (if the only
ravens in the campaign area are going to be the character's pet and about
six others that people have imported, I'm going to give a lot more than -1
for "only with ravens").


[1] For non-Hero players: In Hero you can define a power to always have
every die of its effect be a 3.

[George W Harris]

On Sat, 31 Mar 2007 14:20:51 +0000 (UTC),
***@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:

:the Elixer of the Divine Wind.

That'd be a good name for wheat beer.

Yes, I know.
:
:Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Simon Smith]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I think I've written here before about how many pitfalls I ran into
trying to go from the pacing of a "stock" campaign to an Ars Magica
convenant-building game meant to cover decades. A lot of my GMing
techniques just didn't work.
I'm finding this in reverse at the moment. I'm (trying to) run
the _Age of Worms_ mega-module, which goes from 1st to 20th+ level
(in AD&D) over the course of twelve adventures and maybe a year
game-time.
This means that the PCs must go up approximately 2 levels per
adventure, occasionally only 1; and, even more dauntingly, approximately
two levels per *month* in the internal time of the game. (Also
in the external time of player and GM, more or less--maybe 1.5
months per 2 levels.)

When characters advance 'too fast' in real-world time one tends to get a
feeling of disjointedness, and lose contact with them as characters - they
just become numbers on a sheet. And also, they start to pick up so many
abilities that one loses any handle on how they should be played
effectively. I would have thought that if the characters advance from
1st-20th over the course of a year, they would probably end up feeling
almost as disjointed in-character. Why does this campaign need to be crammed
into such a short in-game timescale? It seems an odd thing to need to do, to
me.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I keep finding that I've missed doing something and now it's far
too late--even the next session. The PCs picked up an apprentice
mage, an ex-servant of the evil mage-god with memory issues and
a tendency to have visions. I was developing a thread about her
and how she grapples with her past--but suddenly she's 9th level and
that thread doesn't feel sensible anymore. Presumably she must
have some sense of herself as a 9th level wizard (even if I don't!)
and that's going to leave her in a different, much less vulnerable,
internal space.

I dunno. Self-conceptions don't change that quickly. I can imagine her
feeling like a third-level wizard trapped in a nineth-level body.

But if I'm right in that assessment, the same feeling should strike most of
the other PCs, to a greater of lesser degree depending on their personality.
So they'll get to 20th level and feel like they've only earned five of those
levels. Unless they're the monomaniac type who feel the reverse (20th level
character trapped in first-level body). But either way, isn't this campaign
going to feel almost as disjointed and odd for the PCs as it is for the
player? And if so, is it going to be any fun to roleplay?

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Similarly, the modules have an arc about how one NPC starts out as
a mentor (level way above the PCs') and how it's supposed to be
a major characterization point when the PCs surpass him and must
advise and protect him instead of vice versa. But that transition
took all of three weeks. There was just no sense of the mentorship
relationship. My player played his PCs as already knowing they were
destined for greatness--otherwise the rapid advancement would
probably destroy their personalities--and they never looked at this
person as being far above them, despite the level difference.
I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path
games before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce
lots of side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that
the PCs' relationship with NPCs and the world changes with
dizzying speed? Something else? Are there character personalities
which should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?

To play a 1st-20th level campaign in a year of game time and not be bothered
about the pacing, you must either not care about - or be completely
oblivious to - the entire /concept/ of pacing. As I suspect the campaign
author (or at least the campaign editors/publishers) was/were. At that
advancement rate, gaining a level is of less significance than gaining a
monthly wage cheque. And all the PCs have to treat it that way. One
character going 'Oh my god, I'm 12th level, how did I ever reach such a
pinnacle of power?' is just going to get funny looks from the other PCs,
and probably should. If you care about that sort of thing, you've got to
rewrite the campaign to a saner pace and introduce another couple of dozen
sidequest scenarios. Frankly I don't think such a campaign deserves this
level of work/effort. I'd go for the "one level = a month's paycheque"
attitude and get the campaign over with. The corrollary of 'one level = one
paycheque' is that there are going to be hordes of characters in that
setting at 40th level and upwards (attainable with three-five years
experience for the high flyers), and the most adventuring careers would top
out at about 100th level. Oh, and there ought to be a handful of 200th level
characters in this setting. Maybe 250th, but really, at this stratospheric
level who the hell cares? Such a setting really doesn't deserve any respect,
and I wouldn't invest any great emotional capital in it. Treat it as a
buddy-movie (or CRPG) setting, no more than that.

[Simon Smith]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I think I've written here before about how many pitfalls I ran into
trying to go from the pacing of a "stock" campaign to an Ars Magica
convenant-building game meant to cover decades. A lot of my GMing
techniques just didn't work.
I'm finding this in reverse at the moment. I'm (trying to) run
the _Age of Worms_ mega-module, which goes from 1st to 20th+ level
(in AD&D) over the course of twelve adventures and maybe a year
game-time.
This means that the PCs must go up approximately 2 levels per
adventure, occasionally only 1; and, even more dauntingly, approximately
two levels per *month* in the internal time of the game. (Also
in the external time of player and GM, more or less--maybe 1.5
months per 2 levels.)

When characters advance 'too fast' in real-world time one tends to get a
feeling of disjointedness, and lose contact with them as characters - they
just become numbers on a sheet. And also, they start to pick up so many
abilities that one loses any handle on how they should be played
effectively. I would have thought that if the characters advance from
1st-20th over the course of a year, they would probably end up feeling
almost as disjointed in-character. Why does this campaign need to be crammed
into such a short in-game timescale? It seems an odd thing to need to do, to
me.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I keep finding that I've missed doing something and now it's far
too late--even the next session. The PCs picked up an apprentice
mage, an ex-servant of the evil mage-god with memory issues and
a tendency to have visions. I was developing a thread about her
and how she grapples with her past--but suddenly she's 9th level and
that thread doesn't feel sensible anymore. Presumably she must
have some sense of herself as a 9th level wizard (even if I don't!)
and that's going to leave her in a different, much less vulnerable,
internal space.

I dunno. Self-conceptions don't change that quickly. I can imagine her
feeling like a third-level wizard trapped in a nineth-level body.

But if I'm right in that assessment, the same feeling should strike most of
the other PCs, to a greater of lesser degree depending on their personality.
So they'll get to 20th level and feel like they've only earned five of those
levels. Unless they're the monomaniac type who feel the reverse (20th level
character trapped in first-level body). But either way, isn't this campaign
going to feel almost as disjointed and odd for the PCs as it is for the
player? And if so, is it going to be any fun to roleplay?

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Similarly, the modules have an arc about how one NPC starts out as
a mentor (level way above the PCs') and how it's supposed to be
a major characterization point when the PCs surpass him and must
advise and protect him instead of vice versa. But that transition
took all of three weeks. There was just no sense of the mentorship
relationship. My player played his PCs as already knowing they were
destined for greatness--otherwise the rapid advancement would
probably destroy their personalities--and they never looked at this
person as being far above them, despite the level difference.
I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path
games before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce
lots of side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that
the PCs' relationship with NPCs and the world changes with
dizzying speed? Something else? Are there character personalities
which should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?

To play a 1st-20th level campaign in a year of game time and not be bothered
about the pacing, you must either not care about - or be completely
oblivious to - the entire /concept/ of pacing. As I suspect the campaign
author (or at least the campaign editors/publishers) was/were. At that
advancement rate, gaining a level is of less significance than gaining a
monthly wage cheque. And all the PCs have to treat it that way. One
character going 'Oh my god, I'm 12th level, how did I ever reach such a
pinnacle of power?' is just going to get funny looks from the other PCs,
and probably should. If you care about that sort of thing, you've got to
rewrite the campaign to a saner pace and introduce another couple of dozen
sidequest scenarios. Frankly I don't think such a campaign deserves this
level of work/effort. I'd go for the "one level = a month's paycheque"
attitude and get the campaign over with. The corrollary of 'one level = one
paycheque' is that there are going to be hordes of characters in that
setting at 40th level and upwards (attainable with three-five years
experience for the high flyers), and the most adventuring careers would top
out at about 100th level. Oh, and there ought to be a handful of 200th level
characters in this setting. Maybe 250th, but really, at this stratospheric
level who the hell cares? Such a setting really doesn't deserve any respect,
and I wouldn't invest any great emotional capital in it. Treat it as a
buddy-movie (or CRPG) setting, no more than that.

[Simon Smith]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I think I've written here before about how many pitfalls I ran into
trying to go from the pacing of a "stock" campaign to an Ars Magica
convenant-building game meant to cover decades. A lot of my GMing
techniques just didn't work.
I'm finding this in reverse at the moment. I'm (trying to) run
the _Age of Worms_ mega-module, which goes from 1st to 20th+ level
(in AD&D) over the course of twelve adventures and maybe a year
game-time.
This means that the PCs must go up approximately 2 levels per
adventure, occasionally only 1; and, even more dauntingly, approximately
two levels per *month* in the internal time of the game. (Also
in the external time of player and GM, more or less--maybe 1.5
months per 2 levels.)

When characters advance 'too fast' in real-world time one tends to get a
feeling of disjointedness, and lose contact with them as characters - they
just become numbers on a sheet. And also, they start to pick up so many
abilities that one loses any handle on how they should be played
effectively. I would have thought that if the characters advance from
1st-20th over the course of a year, they would probably end up feeling
almost as disjointed in-character. Why does this campaign need to be crammed
into such a short in-game timescale? It seems an odd thing to need to do, to
me.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I keep finding that I've missed doing something and now it's far
too late--even the next session. The PCs picked up an apprentice
mage, an ex-servant of the evil mage-god with memory issues and
a tendency to have visions. I was developing a thread about her
and how she grapples with her past--but suddenly she's 9th level and
that thread doesn't feel sensible anymore. Presumably she must
have some sense of herself as a 9th level wizard (even if I don't!)
and that's going to leave her in a different, much less vulnerable,
internal space.

I dunno. Self-conceptions don't change that quickly. I can imagine her
feeling like a third-level wizard trapped in a nineth-level body.

But if I'm right in that assessment, the same feeling should strike most of
the other PCs, to a greater of lesser degree depending on their personality.
So they'll get to 20th level and feel like they've only earned five of those
levels. Unless they're the monomaniac type who feel the reverse (20th level
character trapped in first-level body). But either way, isn't this campaign
going to feel almost as disjointed and odd for the PCs as it is for the
player? And if so, is it going to be any fun to roleplay?

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Similarly, the modules have an arc about how one NPC starts out as
a mentor (level way above the PCs') and how it's supposed to be
a major characterization point when the PCs surpass him and must
advise and protect him instead of vice versa. But that transition
took all of three weeks. There was just no sense of the mentorship
relationship. My player played his PCs as already knowing they were
destined for greatness--otherwise the rapid advancement would
probably destroy their personalities--and they never looked at this
person as being far above them, despite the level difference.
I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path
games before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce
lots of side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that
the PCs' relationship with NPCs and the world changes with
dizzying speed? Something else? Are there character personalities
which should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?

To play a 1st-20th level campaign in a year of game time and not be bothered
about the pacing, you must either not care about - or be completely
oblivious to - the entire /concept/ of pacing. As I suspect the campaign
author (or at least the campaign editors/publishers) was/were. At that
advancement rate, gaining a level is of less significance than gaining a
monthly wage cheque. And all the PCs have to treat it that way. One
character going 'Oh my god, I'm 12th level, how did I ever reach such a
pinnacle of power?' is just going to get funny looks from the other PCs,
and probably should. If you care about that sort of thing, you've got to
rewrite the campaign to a saner pace and introduce another couple of dozen
sidequest scenarios. Frankly I don't think such a campaign deserves this
level of work/effort. I'd go for the "one level = a month's paycheque"
attitude and get the campaign over with. The corrollary of 'one level = one
paycheque' is that there are going to be hordes of characters in that
setting at 40th level and upwards (attainable with three-five years
experience for the high flyers), and the most adventuring careers would top
out at about 100th level. Oh, and there ought to be a handful of 200th level
characters in this setting. Maybe 250th, but really, at this stratospheric
level who the hell cares? Such a setting really doesn't deserve any respect,
and I wouldn't invest any great emotional capital in it. Treat it as a
buddy-movie (or CRPG) setting, no more than that.

[Gary Johnson]

I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path games
before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce lots of
side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that the PCs'
relationship with NPCs and the world changes with dizzying speed?
Something else? Are there character personalities which
should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?

We played the Shackled City Adventure Path (SCAP), and did the following.

* De-emphasised the passage of time in the game. There wasn't a whole lot
of "we're doing this today, then that tomorrow" in the game, so time was
always "fuzzy". Also, nobody kept a detailed record of events, so there
wasn't any way of quantifying the passage of time in game once we'd been
playing for more than a month or two.

* Had downtime between adventures. Most of our magic items got upgraded
between adventures, which means it took more than a trip to Capital City
to buy the item - it also took days (and then weeks) for our
weapons/armour/stat boosters to be upgraded.

* Did side-journeys for reasons unrelated to SCAP. For example, when the
elven wizard reached 5th level, the player wanted him to go home and get
promoted from journeyman wizard to master wizard, and the other characters
went with him, met his family, squabbled with each other over
misunderstandings caused by the complexity of elven culture, and so on. We
also decided that the dwarven cleric's family mine was between Cauldron
and the elven kingdom, so the characters detoured there, got to see the
signs of the massacre that killed the dwarf's family, the family tombs
with the inscriptions carved by the then 30 year old dwarf (~10 years old
in human terms), and so on.

* Did one additional adventure when the opportunity presented itself. The
dwarven cleric cast dismissal on the human swashbuckler while on Occipitus
(a hellplane) so that the swashbuckler wouldn't go through with her offer
to sacrifice herself for the good of all. Because dismissal sends you to a
random place on your home plane, the swashbuckler wound up in a cold and
gloomy country, with conifer forests instead of jungles, snow instead of
monsoonal rain, and villagers hiding in their cellars from their undead
lord. When the others got back to the prime material plane, they scried,
teleported, reconciled with the swashbuckler, and then did a stand-alone
Dungeon adventure that the DM liked but couldn't otherwise have used.

* The elven wizard's PC had the most problems with the passage of game
time, because he got promoted too quickly (she had developed titles - and
hats/cloaks - that arcane spellcasters were awarded at 5th, 9th, 13th and
17th level). She made up a cultural assumption that elves who went
travelling among the shorter-lived races lived life at a much faster rate
than those who stayed at home, went on adventures more often, and
therefore were forced to master stuff they were already learning more
quickly than if they'd been in their sedate, "nothing happens in a hurry
here" Elven home.

* My character's story arcs were about stuff that didn't need specific
amounts of time to accomplish. For example, the dwarf (my PC) wanted
revenge on the half-orc who killed her family 30 years ago - it didn't
matter to her whether it took 30 years or 35 years to find and kill him.
At my request, the DM picked one of the villains from the second adventure
to be the person who killed her family, because I wanted the
characterisation to be more about adjusting to life after fulfilling the
oath of vengeance than about being vengeful and obsessive. Once she killed
the half-orc, her goal was to one day be favoured enough by St Cuthbert to
true resurrect her family - again, it didn't matter to her whether it took
a year or a century to get that powerful.

Hope this helps,

Gary Johnson

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Gary Johnson
* Had downtime between adventures. Most of our magic items got upgraded
between adventures, which means it took more than a trip to Capital City
to buy the item - it also took days (and then weeks) for our
weapons/armour/stat boosters to be upgraded.

I can see this working in _Shackled City_ because until very late
in the game, the PCs have no idea who their real enemy is and no
motivation to initiate action against him. (This broke for us because
the GM chose to make the core conflict apparent earlier. I still
like that decision, but it makes the pacing harder.)

In _Age of Worms_ the core campaign problem is apparent early
on and becomes increasingly pressing. My player initially set up
his party to rely heavily on item creation, but too often he could
not justify, in-character, taking the time to do it. We eventually
gave up on this and just let characters with item-creation feats
buy stuff at half price.

The _Worms_ modules say helpful things like "A dragon ravaged the
PCs' home town this morning. Reports from survivors say it flew
off to the west. Be sure to give the PCs downtime for item creation
here." My player won't do it. I think he would have in SCAP, where
the links between individual modules are less forcing, at least up
till near the end. Did you manage to get downtime in the last couple
of modules? If not, how did you deal with items then?

Post by Gary Johnson
* Did one additional adventure when the opportunity presented itself. The
dwarven cleric cast dismissal on the human swashbuckler while on Occipitus
(a hellplane) so that the swashbuckler wouldn't go through with her offer
to sacrifice herself for the good of all. Because dismissal sends you to a
random place on your home plane, the swashbuckler wound up in a cold and
gloomy country, with conifer forests instead of jungles, snow instead of
monsoonal rain, and villagers hiding in their cellars from their undead
lord. When the others got back to the prime material plane, they scried,
teleported, reconciled with the swashbuckler, and then did a stand-alone
Dungeon adventure that the DM liked but couldn't otherwise have used.

Eerie! We did this too, at the exact same place, and tying into an
unrelated Dungeon adventure. (And it was the swashbuckler's fault,
though not in exactly the same way.) We also did five or six unrelated
adventures between Zenith and Demonskar (and I really wish we had
started doing that a lot sooner). But this went with a drastic cut
in level advancement, because otherwise it would have been too many
EXP.

It's getting harder and harder, though. The PCs have Teleport and
Plane Shift, and they are worried about what's going on in Cauldron.
It's increasingly difficult to discourage them from zapping straight
back there and tackling their real problems, now that they have an
inkling what they are. But the GM feels that this will lead to
a pillar-to-post endgame with no downtime at all, and that won't work
for us.

Post by Gary Johnson
* The elven wizard's PC had the most problems with the passage of game
time, because he got promoted too quickly (she had developed titles - and
hats/cloaks - that arcane spellcasters were awarded at 5th, 9th, 13th and
17th level).

In SCAP we had the most trouble with the cleric, who went from being
most junior acolyte in the Temple of Wee Jas to being third-ranked
without ever having any of the organizational or temporal ties
that should go with that kind of power. (And then it was too late,
because he'd found out what was going on with his Temple, and building
connections was no longer a possibility.) He eventually organized his
own 9th-level ordination ceremony in Sasserine but I did feel I'd
missed out on a lot.

In Worms it seems more pervasive: the PC/NPC relationships just
don't gel because the power balance changes too fast. I think Worms,
in my hands at least, goes significantly faster than SCAP. I should
probably have taken steps to slow it down a lot earlier.

Post by Gary Johnson
* My character's story arcs were about stuff that didn't need specific
amounts of time to accomplish. For example, the dwarf (my PC) wanted
revenge on the half-orc who killed her family 30 years ago - it didn't
matter to her whether it took 30 years or 35 years to find and kill him.
At my request, the DM picked one of the villains from the second adventure
to be the person who killed her family, because I wanted the
characterisation to be more about adjusting to life after fulfilling the
oath of vengeance than about being vengeful and obsessive. Once she killed
the half-orc, her goal was to one day be favoured enough by St Cuthbert to
true resurrect her family - again, it didn't matter to her whether it took
a year or a century to get that powerful.

Cool! I wouldn't have thought of this.

Thanks for the description--it's really helpful.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[Gary Johnson]

Post by Gary Johnson
* Had downtime between adventures.

I can see this working in _Shackled City_ because until very late in the
game, the PCs have no idea who their real enemy is and no motivation to
initiate action against him. (This broke for us because the GM chose to
make the core conflict apparent earlier. I still like that decision,
but it makes the pacing harder.)

<nods> One of the things I disliked about the way SCAP played out for my
group was that the "big reveal" of who the bad guys were had no emotional
impact on us, as players or as characters. We didn't know the big bads
well enough to know why they hadn't dealt with us directly at an earlier
point, when we were significantly less powerful than they were, so it was
a bit too obvious a case of the scenario waiting until we were powerful
enough to beat them up.

In _Age of Worms_ the core campaign problem is apparent early on and
becomes increasingly pressing. My player initially set up his party to
rely heavily on item creation, but too often he could not justify,
in-character, taking the time to do it. We eventually gave up on this
and just let characters with item-creation feats buy stuff at half
price.

Seems a reasonable workaround.

The _Worms_ modules say helpful things like "A dragon ravaged the PCs'
home town this morning. Reports from survivors say it flew off to the
west. Be sure to give the PCs downtime for item creation here." My
player won't do it. I think he would have in SCAP, where the links
between individual modules are less forcing, at least up till near the
end. Did you manage to get downtime in the last couple of modules? If
not, how did you deal with items then?

We had more downtime later in SCAP than in the early-mid part of SCAP. For
example, the DM made it clear out of game that we didn't have to follow up
on the second group of big bads immediately after defeating the first
group of big bads. In game, the DM came up with some hand-wave involving a
new macguffin, we came up with a divination-magic handwave using the
commune spell, then did our two months of upgrading equipment, learning
new spells, and attending Cullen's wedding.

FYI, the handwave went something like this.

Me: "Will something bad happen if we wait until tomorrow to go to their
lair?"
St Cuthbert: "No."
Me: "Will something bad happen if we wait a week before going to their
lair?"
St Cuthbert: "No."
Me: "Will something bad happen if we wait a month before going to their
lair?"
St Cuthbert: "No."
Me: Will something bad happen if we wait three months before going to
their lair?"
St Cuthbert: "Yes.:
Me: Will something bad happen if we wait two months before going to their
lair?"
St Cuthbert: "No."
Me: "Will something bad happen if we wait two and a half-months before
going to their lair?"
St Cuthbert: "Maybe."

Me to the other PCs: "We have two months to get ready - any longer and it
may be too late to foil their next evil plot."

Post by Gary Johnson
* Did one additional adventure when the opportunity presented itself.

Eerie! We did this too, at the exact same place, and tying into an
unrelated Dungeon adventure. (And it was the swashbuckler's fault,
though not in exactly the same way.)

Those pesky swashbucklers. :-)

We also did five or six unrelated adventures between Zenith and
Demonskar (and I really wish we had started doing that a lot sooner).
But this went with a drastic cut in level advancement, because otherwise
it would have been too many EXP.

Given some of your concerns with playing these scenarios as written seem
to be related to the power level of the opponents, maybe you should have
been getting full XP for the side adventures and "playing down" for the
SCAP adventures? It's not a global fix, but in general being 1-2 levels
about the expected level for a scenario should give the PCs sufficient
additional resources make the combats easier to manage and less risky.

It's getting harder and harder, though. The PCs have Teleport and Plane
Shift, and they are worried about what's going on in Cauldron. It's
increasingly difficult to discourage them from zapping straight back
there and tackling their real problems, now that they have an inkling
what they are. But the GM feels that this will lead to a pillar-to-post
endgame with no downtime at all, and that won't work for us.

From my player experience (not having read the actual scenarios), SCAP may
adapt well to an "onion-skin" model for the evil organisation - but i
think it would take some work to turn the existing material in SCAP into
an enjoyable "onion-skin" model. Given the bad guys are evil, it's not too
hard to present the bad guys as having sufficient internal divisions that
they can't organise effectively to deal with problems like the PCs - that
may be the easiest way to justify in-game why the high level bosses don't
take out the low level heroes.

Post by Gary Johnson
* My character's story arcs were about stuff that didn't need specific
amounts of time to accomplish.

Cool! I wouldn't have thought of this.

Thanks! I really enjoyed the session where she true resurrected her
family. They knew she hadn't fulfilled her oaths of vengeance properly
(because they hadn't been allowed into the Halls of their Ancestors, but
had to sit outside in the antechamber and beg for scraps of food of the
tables of Moradin), and when her parents realised how much money she was
spending to bring all four of them back to life (100K gp), they thought
she was a wastrel. It wasn't until Beren (the elf) mentioned to her
parents how she was very wealthy and still had approximately 400K gp of
equipment that her father visited her in her room and told her she had
done well for herself - high praise indeed from her father!

Thanks for the description--it's really helpful.

No worries.

Cheers,

Gary Johnson

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by Gary Johnson
<nods> One of the things I disliked about the way SCAP played out for my
group was that the "big reveal" of who the bad guys were had no emotional
impact on us, as players or as characters. We didn't know the big bads
well enough to know why they hadn't dealt with us directly at an earlier
point, when we were significantly less powerful than they were, so it was
a bit too obvious a case of the scenario waiting until we were powerful
enough to beat them up.

This seems, from the Paizo discussion boards, to be nearly a universal
reaction.

If you do let the PCs have more information earlier, it's hard to keep
them from interacting disasterously with the big bads, or alternatively
realizing that it's suicide to do--at which point it makes sense for
them to bail out of the module permanently. I think you're right that
an onion-skin approach is needed, and it's not adequately set up in the
modules as written.

One thing my GM did that really helped: Somewhere around Demonskar the
PCs captured a Cagewright apprentice and put her to the question. When
she realized who they were, she let slip "Thifane was supposed to keep
an eye on you, and he never mentioned that you were so powerful!"
Apparently Thifane has been playing a double game all along: one
of the PCs is his daughter, and Shackleborn, and he wanted both to
keep his position with the Cagewrights and to protect his
daughter. So he's been systematically misleading his bosses about the
PCs' activities, and systematically misleading the PCs about his own, and
postponing the day of reckoning. I don't know if he's aiming to postpone
it until it's Too Late, or until the PCs are powerful enough to
extricate him from his divided loyalties safely. Either way, it does
help explain why the PCs aren't dead yet.

There is a conversation somewhere in the future between Thifane and his
wayward daughter, who is now Lord of Occipitus. I'm really looking
forward to that.

(I know Thifane is supposed to be female, but we didn't realize that
at first, so ours is male.)

Post by Gary Johnson

We also did five or six unrelated adventures between Zenith and
Demonskar (and I really wish we had started doing that a lot sooner).
But this went with a drastic cut in level advancement, because otherwise
it would have been too many EXP.

Given some of your concerns with playing these scenarios as written seem
to be related to the power level of the opponents, maybe you should have
been getting full XP for the side adventures and "playing down" for the
SCAP adventures? It's not a global fix, but in general being 1-2 levels
about the expected level for a scenario should give the PCs sufficient
additional resources make the combats easier to manage and less risky.

I needed the slowdown desperately; I was not capable of playing the PCs
at their level, not having had anything like enough practice. Letting
the level advancement continue would only have landed me with 5th level
mindsets in the bodies of 12th level characters--and it was bad enough
with 5th/8th.

Now they are 12th and more or less manage to function as such, but it
took me a long time to work out the necessary tactics. And I think they
really still function at around 10th.

With _Worms_ we are doing what you suggest--we level-jumped the PCs so that
they are now 2 levels higher than they're supposed to be. Jon is much better
with high-level PCs than I am, though even he is suffering some from
lack of practice and experience. But we had two TPKs in a row on the
same _Worms_ scenario and it just didn't seem reasonable to continue
with PCs of the specified level. (We also abandoned that scenario
completely, because to be honest, it's still TPK even with PCs two
levels higher. My impression from the bulletin boards is that either
the GM or the players need to cheat to get through it.)

With _SCAP_ Jon is trying the alternative approach of scaling down the
endgame. He doesn't think the PCs will tolerate long delays between the
scenarios--he thinks that they will be pretty much pillar-to-post once
they begin--and the book scenarios involve too many level raises. So
he's going to try to cut them down to 13-14. Don't yet know how that will
work, or if it will work. But I also have qualms about them
working at their native level: in my hands D&D tends to fall apart around
that point, if you think at all hard about the NPCs' capabilities.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[tussock]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I'm finding this in reverse at the moment. I'm (trying to) run
the _Age of Worms_ mega-module, which goes from 1st to 20th+ level
(in AD&D) over the course of twelve adventures and maybe a year
game-time.

IMC, that'd be 19 years game time minimum, and more likely pushing
25 with deaths and such. *Never* more than 1 level per game year, never
again anyway, not until the next time at least. 8]
Obviously, that requires modules get the odd boot to the head.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I keep finding that I've missed doing something and now it's far
too late--even the next session.

I find that even with the relatively small encounter numbers needed
to progress in 3e, affording a great expanse of downtime to PCs lets
players get at least a little attached.
Families and estates are great, having a son at 3rd level, a
daughter at 5th, taking over as head of the night watch; that allows a
character to take root in the world and to seem more familiar.


It's not fireballing some zombies outside town: it's marrying the
shipwright's daughter, building up a library, fireballing the zombies
that killed the new brother-in-law, providing for his widow, getting
promoted in the town guard, and knocking up your wife.
Sure, the fireballs and other gamey stuff still take up the
majority of the session, but I reckon it all has a little more
attachment to the world when one takes a couple minutes here and there
to go over a character's life that year.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Similarly, the modules have an arc about how one NPC starts out as
a mentor (level way above the PCs') and how it's supposed to be
a major characterization point when the PCs surpass him and must
advise and protect him instead of vice versa.

Heh, 30 fights later .... Downtime helps there to, as the dashing
gentleman who was the mentor of your 18 year old wide-eyed Fighter
becomes a middle-aged guy with a paunch who's sat on his ass for a
decade that your 30 year old grizzled veteran returns to rescue.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path
games before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce
lots of side material in between the main arcs?

With all modules, I have to redo them a bit to allow breaks, the
bad guys have lives too and all that. I mean, the PCs are allowed to
bite off more than they can chew, get in over their heads, that's all
part of the fun; but generally there's something out there for them that
they can defeat in detail and return home to drink away the horrid
memories of.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Just accept that the PCs' relationship with NPCs and the world
changes with dizzying speed? Something else?

When the chief bad guy is at least four game years from being in
your reach, it doesn't matter so match that you'll be fighting him late
next month IRL. How much you glossed over the non-combat stuff along the
way is fairly unimportant, that fact that your character is acknowledged
to have *lived* through that time, in whatever detail level keeps folk
happy, just works for me.

It's OK that you kinda forget what your character was like a couple
levels ago, because that was a couple years game time. It's still tricky
to get a good handle on what your character can do *now*, but such is
life. I could throw in endless little easyish side quests if the players
want to polish up their skills at a certain level, but no one's been
much interested.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Are there character personalities which should/shouldn't be
preferred in such a game?

Not really. As always, PCs with defined goals and attachments to
the world around them are great for the game.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by tussock
With all modules, I have to redo them a bit to allow breaks, the
bad guys have lives too and all that. I mean, the PCs are allowed to
bite off more than they can chew, get in over their heads, that's all
part of the fun; but generally there's something out there for them that
they can defeat in detail and return home to drink away the horrid
memories of.

How do you do it?

SPOILERS for SCAP follow:

A pretty typical module adventure: An evil priestess has waylaid a
priest who was returning to the city with some magic items needed
to prevent a flood. The PCs get word of this. They try to rescue
the priest, but too late: they tangle with the thugs who killed
him, but the evil priestess has gone. They track her down to her
underground lair and defeat her and her companions. They then
return to town in time to stop the flood.

The PCs went up two levels in the course of this. (I don't recall
exactly where the first level advance was: maybe right after
the thugs.)

How do you redo something with a plot like that so that the PCs can
have significant downtime in the middle? Or do you avoid using
anything with such a structure? Most of the modules I've seen
are either frightfully, almost (to my mind) unusably short--one or
two encounters, basically, like the ones WOTC has on line--or cover
2-3 levels' worth of advancement, like the original Adventure
Paths or the SCAP or Worms modules.

If you run it as written, the PCs start out at 5th and are 7th
a couple of days later. It's not clear to me how you could stretch it
over months of game-time, unless you abandon the "we need to
stop the flood" time pressure. And then it gets hard to feel that
the PCs are involved with their setting.

The material you write yourself is, I presume, much less encounter-
dense than most modules. I know the stuff I write myself is.
But the modules really impose a pretty strong advancement clock.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[tussock]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by tussock
With all modules, I have to redo them a bit to allow breaks, the
bad guys have lives too and all that. I mean, the PCs are allowed to
bite off more than they can chew, get in over their heads, that's all
part of the fun; but generally there's something out there for them that
they can defeat in detail and return home to drink away the horrid
memories of.

How do you do it?
A pretty typical module adventure: An evil priestess has waylaid a
priest who was returning to the city with some magic items needed
to prevent a flood.

He's got the MacGuffin. It's irrelevant to the game, that's the
point of a MacGuffin. It can easily be something to prevent the flood
predicted due in a couple years time (a natural damn has blocked a
tributary and will break about then), or protect the city from a plague,
or whatever.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The PCs get word of this. They try to rescue the priest, but too

Heh. Being a moment too late is just melodrama, I'm not bothered
with throwing that sort of thing out. The PCs can chase down the thugs a
month later as they start throwing around their payment and getting
loose lipped with booze.
The PCs put the hard word on them, but they play all innocent: then
they panic and try to take out the PCs, and we continue. Or, you know,
whatever, there's always something to draw the fights into play.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
they tangle with the thugs who killed him, but the evil priestess
has gone.

So the items have gone to ground and there remains no trail to
follow. They can turn up next spring doing something ominous, word
quickly working it's way to the PCs.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
They track her down to her underground lair and defeat her and her
companions.

/Finally/, in the late summer, a lacky is uncovered who betrays
their location. The autumnal rains are due, but not for few weeks (or
maybe it's the spring thaw, doesn't matter).

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
They then return to town in time to stop the flood.

Or they don't, floods can be fun too. 8]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The PCs went up two levels in the course of this. (I don't recall
exactly where the first level advance was: maybe right after
the thugs.)

And if they're a little short, pull a couple of encounters from
elsewhere and work them in as a side story. Or, you know, wait 'till
next year to go up a level.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
How do you redo something with a plot like that so that the PCs can
have significant downtime in the middle?

I think I've done that alright above.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Or do you avoid using anything with such a structure?

Not a lot of the structure needs changed, just a paragraph or two
of preamble. Same major NPCs, same encounters, almost all of the same
connections between them, and that's where the work is in preparing DnD
games. The plot is just happening over a year instead of a couple days.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Most of the modules I've seen are either frightfully, almost (to
my mind) unusably short--one or two encounters, basically, like the
ones WOTC has on line--or cover 2-3 levels' worth of advancement,
like the original Adventure Paths or the SCAP or Worms modules.

The longer stuff all has natural break points, they're designed to
let parties regain spells and heal up. Just stretch the connection
between them, instead of a secret three sectioned dungeon have three
secret dungeons.

Even something weird like "The World's Largest Dungeon" could see
the PCs setting up little extended camps within the place, learning to
get on with the less obnoxious of their neighbours.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
If you run it as written, the PCs start out at 5th and are 7th
a couple of days later. It's not clear to me how you could stretch it
over months of game-time, unless you abandon the "we need to
stop the flood" time pressure.

Any extended plot arcs have to be nudged into having the requisite
years available, or just accept that the PCs might have to let someone
else handle the problem.
They are perfectly allowed to push on, but there's little to gain
in game or out, and you don't want to stick your neck out too far anyway.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
And then it gets hard to feel that the PCs are involved with their
setting.

The setting is the lives of the people around you; not the fights
or some external time pressure. Say the coming flood will destroy the
low-lying structures, so people are selling up and closing shop in
preparation. This causes devaluation, unemployment, vacant buildings,
and sees lots of minor crime and disorder springing up. An old friend
gets in debtors trouble with the magistrate, that sort of stuff.
In the downtime the players can work on providing for the new poor,
organising useful work boarding up abandoned buildings, clearing fire
dangers, and managing any refugees. It's not just a few fights over the
MacGuffin, it's a major event in the life of your city.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The material you write yourself is, I presume, much less encounter-
dense than most modules. I know the stuff I write myself is.

Sort of. I don't mind the whole level/year worth of fights stuck
into a two or three day seige, I just like to put some background around
why the seige is happening and what its extended effects are.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
But the modules really impose a pretty strong advancement clock.

If you've seen the newer Savage Tide stuff, it's been on a railroad
from the home city to a shipwreck and across an island. The voyage takes
a long time naturally and a shipwreck provides an excellent forced rest
as food, water, and shelter needs organised, and the weather has to
clear enough to go walkabout.
Across the island there's time to be taken in a villiage, have them
learn to accept the PCs before they'll guide them further. Spending a
year with the villiagers helping them out makes sense in the long-term
too. It doesn't matter that the PCs were lost for three years crossing
the island, it'll make reuniting with the boss all the more dramatic.

[David Alex Lamb]

Post by tussock
as food, water, and shelter needs organised, and the weather has to

'needs organised' -- are you from Pittsburgh by change? That was a localism:
"needs <<past participle>>"

[tussock]

Post by David Alex Lamb

Post by tussock
as food, water, and shelter needs organised, and the weather has to

'needs organised' -- are you from Pittsburgh by change? That was a
localism: "needs <<past participle>>"

Southern end of New Zealand, mostly. I'm struggling to picture how
else one would phrase that: it all clearly needs organised, unusual
tenses be damned.

You know, that fish needs cooked, someone's ass needs kicked around
here, that job needs done before the end of the day.

[Ed Chauvin IV]

Post by tussock

Post by David Alex Lamb

Post by tussock
as food, water, and shelter needs organised, and the weather has to

'needs organised' -- are you from Pittsburgh by change? That was a
localism: "needs <<past participle>>"

Southern end of New Zealand, mostly. I'm struggling to picture how
else one would phrase that: it all clearly needs organised, unusual
tenses be damned.
You know, that fish needs cooked, someone's ass needs kicked around
here, that job needs done before the end of the day.

You're leaving out the "to be", as in the fish needs to be cooked.

[tussock]

Post by Ed Chauvin IV

Post by tussock

Post by David Alex Lamb

Post by tussock
as food, water, and shelter needs organised, and the weather has to

'needs organised' -- are you from Pittsburgh by change? That was a
localism: "needs <<past participle>>"

Southern end of New Zealand, mostly. I'm struggling to picture how
else one would phrase that: it all clearly needs organised, unusual
tenses be damned.
You know, that fish needs cooked, someone's ass needs kicked around
here, that job needs done before the end of the day.

You're leaving out the "to be", as in the fish needs to be cooked.

I s'pose, but technically I don't think the fish needs anything,
what with it being dead. It's true that there is a need for the fish in
question to become cooked.

B'round'ereth'wordsdon'eedthosebits, savestime eh. Needs cooked.

[Rick Pikul]

Post by tussock
B'round'ereth'wordsdon'eedthosebits, savestime eh. Needs cooked.

New Zealand, or Newfoundland?

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by tussock
Any extended plot arcs have to be nudged into having the requisite
years available, or just accept that the PCs might have to let someone
else handle the problem.
They are perfectly allowed to push on, but there's little to gain
in game or out, and you don't want to stick your neck out too far anyway.

[snip]

Post by tussock
The setting is the lives of the people around you; not the fights
or some external time pressure. Say the coming flood will destroy the
low-lying structures, so people are selling up and closing shop in
preparation. This causes devaluation, unemployment, vacant buildings,
and sees lots of minor crime and disorder springing up. An old friend
gets in debtors trouble with the magistrate, that sort of stuff.
In the downtime the players can work on providing for the new poor,
organising useful work boarding up abandoned buildings, clearing fire
dangers, and managing any refugees. It's not just a few fights over the
MacGuffin, it's a major event in the life of your city.

I guess I just don't understand what you are advocating here, especially
given your earlier comments in a thread on _Age of Worms_. I'm sure
I'm misunderstanding you and that your games work well, but I can't
make heads or tails of these descriptions.

In the _Age of Worms_ thread you chewed me out for allowing my player to
have PCs who would try to protect their relatives in town, and cared
whether the bad guys might retaliate against them. Here, you seem to
be expecting the players not to care enough about the town to work hard
at trying to stop the flood ("there's little to gain in game or out").
You want the players to accept their failure to find the enemy, rather
than continuing to try. But you also want them to care about the
townsfolk and be motivated to do something once the flood happens.

You also seem to be saying that you don't want the module events
("a few fights over the McGuffin") to matter, but you want their
results (a flooded city) to matter. I don't see how this can happen.
If the flood matters, doesn't preventing the flood matter? Maybe the
PCs cannot possibly prevent the flood, but won't they spend many
sessions trying, if they really care about the city? The resources
available to a mid-level D&D party to find someone are truly staggering:
diplomacy, intimidation, bribery, gather information, bardic lore,
hiring spies, mindreading, Commune, Divination, Locate Person, Locate
Object, Lesser Planar Ally....

I guess I don't see why you would use the module events at all, if you
don't want the PCs to react to them. Why let the players think they
might be able to stop the flood? Why not just have a flood?

I know that as a player I can't tolerate very many repetitions of
having my characters hooked strongly by a plotline and then having
them fail utterly to be able to make progress by their own actions.
The soft spots where hooks are supposed to set just get torn out, and
my PCs stop caring. I don't suppose that's really what you're doing,
but I don't understand what you *are* doing.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[tussock]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by tussock
Any extended plot arcs have to be nudged into having the requisite
years available, or just accept that the PCs might have to let someone
else handle the problem.
They are perfectly allowed to push on, but there's little to gain
in game or out, and you don't want to stick your neck out too far anyway.

[snip]

Post by tussock
The setting is the lives of the people around you; not the fights
or some external time pressure. Say the coming flood will destroy the
low-lying structures, so people are selling up and closing shop in
preparation. This causes devaluation, unemployment, vacant buildings,
and sees lots of minor crime and disorder springing up. An old friend
gets in debtors trouble with the magistrate, that sort of stuff.
In the downtime the players can work on providing for the new poor,
organising useful work boarding up abandoned buildings, clearing fire
dangers, and managing any refugees. It's not just a few fights over the
MacGuffin, it's a major event in the life of your city.

I guess I just don't understand what you are advocating here, especially
given your earlier comments in a thread on _Age of Worms_. I'm sure
I'm misunderstanding you and that your games work well, but I can't
make heads or tails of these descriptions.

I do struggle to put ideas in clear forms on paper. I know what I
mean, and I tend to read what I've written as agreeing with me, even if
it doesn't. 8]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
In the _Age of Worms_ thread you chewed me out for allowing my player to
have PCs who would try to protect their relatives in town, and cared
whether the bad guys might retaliate against them.

I was trying to point out that doing those things added difficulty
to the adventure as written, difficulty I didn't think you'd allowed
for. Doing AoW "as written" doesn't assume the characters suffer such
extra vulnerablilties or time pressures.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Here, you seem to be expecting the players not to care enough about
the town to work hard at trying to stop the flood ("there's little to
gain in game or out").

Personally I prefer to leave any PCs family out of direct conflict,
as I don't think it adds anything to the game. It's not particularly
realistic or productive for the bad guys in most cases anyway.
In the mean time players are helping their families, but it's not
worth playing out in any detail.


Anyway, I'd delay the flood for a year, which is easy enough to do
AFAICT. Their attempts to finish the module _right now_ won't provide
any leads. Or maybe it will, but I don't force it by design.
Players get used to that a bit, act a little more like politicians
doing something about global warming. 8]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
You want the players to accept their failure to find the enemy, rather
than continuing to try. But you also want them to care about the
townsfolk and be motivated to do something once the flood happens.

Yes, and the lack of any path to find the McGuffin will allow that
to happen. Any care for other folk will lead to them helping out as best
they can, even though they can't immediately end any threat of a flood.

"We're on the lookout for clues, using everything we've got."
"Sure, time passes, what else are you doing? The prediction of the
flood's causing a bit of trouble ...".

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
You also seem to be saying that you don't want the module events
("a few fights over the McGuffin") to matter, but you want their
results (a flooded city) to matter. I don't see how this can happen.
If the flood matters, doesn't preventing the flood matter?

I'd hope so, and when the first chance comes up to do something
about it next year I'd hope they'd be interested in doing just that.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
Maybe the PCs cannot possibly prevent the flood, but won't they spend
many sessions trying, if they really care about the city?

A few minutes, at most, I don't much see the point in playing it
out. It all takes a certain amount of game time and provides certain
answers, which in my case wouldn't be anything that solves the mystery.
So time passes and lives happen until the game kicks in again.

Style example; 10th level PCs decide to clear the sewers, a 1st
level adventure. Play time about one minute, "you succeed, it takes a
week, loose 250gp to cover costs, no XP". Next.
Apply that same style to the search for clues.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
The resources available to a mid-level D&D party to find someone are
truly staggering: diplomacy, intimidation, bribery, gather information,
bardic lore, hiring spies, mindreading, Commune, Divination, Locate
Person, Locate Object, Lesser Planar Ally....

And when there's literally one person knows what's going on, very
little of that has any effect. When Ms Anonymous sticks the MacGuffin in
an extraplanar space and doesn't tell anyone there's nothing to be done
to find it.
There's plenty of module series where the final bad guy isn't
confrontable or even knowable immediately; you don't have to save that
shtick for the /final/ opponent.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I guess I don't see why you would use the module events at all, if you
don't want the PCs to react to them. Why let the players think they
might be able to stop the flood? Why not just have a flood?

But they /will/ be able to stop the flood, assuming they're
interested in doing so, that very thing set up in the module. It's just
happening next year, no big deal.
If they don't keep their ears to the ground in the meantime (not
all parties have the applicable abilities) they'll miss the first cues
and we'll have the flood, and that'll be interesting too: they can go
deal out justice and help rebuild afterward.

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
I know that as a player I can't tolerate very many repetitions of
having my characters hooked strongly by a plotline and then having
them fail utterly to be able to make progress by their own actions.
The soft spots where hooks are supposed to set just get torn out, and
my PCs stop caring. I don't suppose that's really what you're doing,
but I don't understand what you *are* doing.

It is frustrating for the /characters/, they're stuck for months
watching their lives turned upside down unable to find any answers to
these mysteries.
It's fine for the /players/, we skip foward. We go over what's
happened in their lives in whatever detail people are happy with (some
can go on for ages getting into their characters lives, others just want
an occaisional few words of summary), and get back to the game, one
level up, better trained, better equipped, and a little more lived in.

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by tussock
It is frustrating for the /characters/, they're stuck for months
watching their lives turned upside down unable to find any answers to
these mysteries.
It's fine for the /players/, we skip foward. We go over what's
happened in their lives in whatever detail people are happy with (some
can go on for ages getting into their characters lives, others just want
an occaisional few words of summary), and get back to the game, one
level up, better trained, better equipped, and a little more lived in.

Okay, that makes the style difference much clearer, thanks.

My group seems to have a lot more emotional spillover from characters to
players. If the characters are frustrated and unhappy, in general, the
players are too. We can "fast-forward" over the rough parts, but the more
of that we do, the less intense the enjoyment of the fun stuff becomes.

So I'd try hard to avoid scenarios that will make the PCs miserable and
frustrated for a year, especially if the players have any reason to think
that they could or should be doing better.

When I ran _Ars Magica_ games which absolutely demanded this kind of
pacing, I tried to make sure that the downtime pauses were *not*
"We're stuck, we're frustrated, we can't accomplish anything" but
instead "We've set matters in motion and now it's natural to wait until
they're ready." The PCs train a milita force to take on the
Winterfolk, but it won't march until Spring when the passes are clear
of snow and the Winterfolk have less of an advantage. Then the player
can comfortably think about the PCs' lives, and not constantly "Should
I be doing something else? Is there an angle we haven't tried yet?"

If you're not angling for that identification of player and character,
this stops being a problem, and I can see how interrupting
a scenario between hook and resolution would be much more feasible.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[tussock]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner

Post by tussock
It is frustrating for the /characters/, they're stuck for months
watching their lives turned upside down unable to find any answers to
these mysteries.
It's fine for the /players/, we skip foward. We go over what's
happened in their lives in whatever detail people are happy with (some
can go on for ages getting into their characters lives, others just want
an occaisional few words of summary), and get back to the game, one
level up, better trained, better equipped, and a little more lived in.

Okay, that makes the style difference much clearer, thanks.
My group seems to have a lot more emotional spillover from characters to
players. If the characters are frustrated and unhappy, in general, the
players are too. We can "fast-forward" over the rough parts, but the more
of that we do, the less intense the enjoyment of the fun stuff becomes.

One can still throw them a bone here and there without giving away
the whole roast dinner. I went over some of that earlier, not that it's
to everyone's style. 8]

Post by Mary K. Kuhner
So I'd try hard to avoid scenarios that will make the PCs miserable and
frustrated for a year, especially if the players have any reason to think
that they could or should be doing better.

Seems quite sensible, you've got a "no loose ends" thing going. I
might point out to players that there's thousands of problems in the
world they're /not/ solving, one more's no big deal, but they do get
quite determined about the odd thing regardless.

There's always the chance they'll get all creative and bypass the
MacGuffin, somehow. Stopping the flood without the artifacts. Such is
tabletop.


And hey, if you want the problem solved in the meantime, have the
artifacts found in pt1, seemingly tying everything up, and then stolen
_again_ in time for pt2. That'd just get a bit cheesy eventually, so
you'd also have to go to the trouble of a whole new hook now and then.
Oh well. 8|

[Mary K. Kuhner]

Post by tussock
Seems quite sensible, you've got a "no loose ends" thing going. I
might point out to players that there's thousands of problems in the
world they're /not/ solving, one more's no big deal, but they do get
quite determined about the odd thing regardless.

I think I make a distinction between the thousands of problems that are
out there, but not pressingly brought to my attention, and the handful
of problems that *are* pressingly brought to my attention.

My views here may be colored by having played under a GM who truly
didn't care if any given problem ever got solved. If the
players were not proactive and aggressive about picking up a problem and
solving it, nothing *ever* got solved, which made for an extremely
unsatisfying game after a while. So as a player, I try to pick out
an interesting-looking problem and push it hard. I hope that the GM
will work with this by presenting problems which the PCs can actually
engage with, and trying to background problems which they can't.

If the PCs can't do anything for six months about the flood-McGuffin
plotline, I would personally not like to see it introduced by the
murder of a major NPC ally and a just-too-late-to-save-him combat
scenario. To me, that's a pretty strong hook, too strong to casually
unhook. But mileage differs a lot here.

Jon ran one game for me where looming in the background, all game long,
was the Saluvian invasion of the Bandit Kingdoms. The game was in
a Bandit Kingdom city, and everyone was thinking and talking about
the invasion, but it wasn't central to the PCs and they successfully
avoided trying to do anything about it, all game long. The GM made
sure not to present hooks that would force the PCs to engage with
the war, though. He had background details about it, but he didn't
draft the PCs' buddies into the army, or have Saluvian spies try to
kill them, or give them a magic item critical to the defense of the
city, or anything like that. This is, for me, the line between
loose ends and unwelcome red herrings.

Mary Kuhner ***@eskimo.com

[psychohist]

tussock responds to Mary Kuhner:

He's got the MacGuffin. It's irrelevant to the game, that's
the point of a MacGuffin. It can easily be something to
prevent the flood predicted due in a couple years time (a
natural damn has blocked a tributary and will break about
then), or protect the city from a plague, or whatever.

Okay, I can see how having the flood happen in two years rather than
next week would make a difference in campaign pacing, and allow more
in character time for character adjustment and development. However:

Heh. Being a moment too late is just melodrama, I'm not
bothered with throwing that sort of thing out. The PCs
can chase down the thugs a month later as they start
throwing around their payment and getting loose lipped
with booze.

The thing is, the player characters don't know they are going to be
late when they start chasing down the priestess. It seems to me that
most player characters would want to start the pursuit immediately,
since time might be of the essence, from their point of view. Some
people might wait a month just because they had the time, but most
player characters I've seen wouldn't.

Am I missing what you're suggesting here?

Warren J. Dew

[tussock]

Post by tussock
He's got the MacGuffin. It's irrelevant to the game, that's
the point of a MacGuffin. It can easily be something to
prevent the flood predicted due in a couple years time (a
natural damn has blocked a tributary and will break about
then), or protect the city from a plague, or whatever.
Okay, I can see how having the flood happen in two years rather than
next week would make a difference in campaign pacing, and allow more
Heh. Being a moment too late is just melodrama, I'm not
bothered with throwing that sort of thing out. The PCs
can chase down the thugs a month later as they start
throwing around their payment and getting loose lipped
with booze.
The thing is, the player characters don't know they are going to be
late when they start chasing down the priestess.

That the module's setup though, they can teleport or walk and
they'll always be just a moment too late. It's melodrama, everything
happening just too late for the PCs to stop, until they save the day
just in time.

I'd rather play so the PCs actions aren't so unnaturally in tune
with external events.

Post by tussock
It seems to me that most player characters would want to start the
pursuit immediately, since time might be of the essence, from their
point of view.

May as well say they'd want to guard the artifacts from the start,
months ago, and kick everyone's ass before they can kill the guy who's
carrying them. The plot isn't switched on until it is, the module says a
moment too late, I say a couple months too late.