Orcus -- kind of a pushover
Feb. 25th, 2009 11:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHi,
So last night we finished up our short stint of high-level D&D play.
Actually, I just killed an aspect of Orcus (or at least, I put a serious hurt on him with two criticals among other things). We didn’t kill the high priest of Orcus who was causing all the problems, but the swordmage did shear off the should straps holding the McGuffin and tossed it down to the cleric who did a lateral pass to the warlock who teleported it to the end zone for the win. That was fun, we should do stuff like that more often.
I think my original assessment still stands – high level play has a lot of fiddly modifiers which is probably not a big deal if you grow the character organically. The underlying math remains the same even if the numbers get bigger, but bigger numbers feel cooler and you do actually get a broader (but not unmanageable) suite of things to do. Those options seem cooler even if they’re not mechanically a whole lot different.
So in two weeks, I’m going to guest GM the game because it’s the GM’s birthday that week so he should get a break. Then, starting at the end of March and at the end of every month thereafter, I’ll GM a separate game with our current group. This gives our regular GM a break (which seems fair) and it’s also an opportunity for people to try out the new PB2 character classes/races.
The birthday game will be a chance for me to test out a couple of ideas and see how they fly. The biggest challenge with the once-a-month game is that the adventures must be pretty episodic because no one’s going to remember from month to month what happened last time. I could just have all PCs be part of some military organization/police force/thieves guild and each session they get orders to carry out, but that’s basically the set-up in the main game and I want something a bit more self-directed (or at least it seems more self-directed).
A friend recently suggested gluing Prime Time Adventures and D&D together. That sounds awesome, but will probably not fly with this group. I’m thinking of more of a GUMSHOE like setup where people can move from point to point and do skill challenges to decide where they go next and wrap up with a big fight. Or the skill checks give them bonuses to apply during the big fight.
Oh! Maybe they start will all encounters/dailies exhausted and good skill checks recover them. Do cool stuff, get an Encounter back. Or healing surges. Or action points (actually, that’s built-in I believe). If you fail, you still get what you need to move on, but you don’t refresh your powers. I can give characters “spotlight” episodes by making it easier for them to recover powers or just let them start off with a few already charged. That set-up might make players reluctant to get to the big fight until “we’ve got everything back”, even though no one ever uses all their stuff in a fight anyway. But if that’s too obnoxious, maybe I just give them bonus uses of their encounters/dailies when they do well in skill challenges. That might be better since no one “loses” anything, but in the big fight at the end, they can be super cool (plus the additional encounters/dailies should end the fight faster and that’s really important for a time-constrained game like this).
So there’s that. I’m thinking that the game will be something like “The A-Team meets The Keep on the Borderlands”. The PCs are the owner/operators of a mercenary team and they operate out of this frontier outpost town. They can get missions or go exploring out in the wilds or whatever strikes their fancy. I’ll try and solicit input before the game so that there are appropriate things to do/encounter, but as long as they reach the big fight in 1-2 hours they can wrap up with a big fight and go home happy.
I think I might also borrow some stuff from InSpectres/Thirty and have a common pool of resources representing how successful their “adventuring business” is. Completing adventures fills the pool, spending out of it (obviously) reduces the pool. Or maybe those skill challenges from earlier generate the points that go into the pool. You could generate a huge batch of points and watch other people spend them – always fun for future role-play. But I do want people to be spending these things and not sitting on them.
A lot to think about but I feel like I’ve got some good stuff in here that should be fun to play with and hopefully the players will enjoy it too.
later
Tom
So last night we finished up our short stint of high-level D&D play.
Actually, I just killed an aspect of Orcus (or at least, I put a serious hurt on him with two criticals among other things). We didn’t kill the high priest of Orcus who was causing all the problems, but the swordmage did shear off the should straps holding the McGuffin and tossed it down to the cleric who did a lateral pass to the warlock who teleported it to the end zone for the win. That was fun, we should do stuff like that more often.
I think my original assessment still stands – high level play has a lot of fiddly modifiers which is probably not a big deal if you grow the character organically. The underlying math remains the same even if the numbers get bigger, but bigger numbers feel cooler and you do actually get a broader (but not unmanageable) suite of things to do. Those options seem cooler even if they’re not mechanically a whole lot different.
So in two weeks, I’m going to guest GM the game because it’s the GM’s birthday that week so he should get a break. Then, starting at the end of March and at the end of every month thereafter, I’ll GM a separate game with our current group. This gives our regular GM a break (which seems fair) and it’s also an opportunity for people to try out the new PB2 character classes/races.
The birthday game will be a chance for me to test out a couple of ideas and see how they fly. The biggest challenge with the once-a-month game is that the adventures must be pretty episodic because no one’s going to remember from month to month what happened last time. I could just have all PCs be part of some military organization/police force/thieves guild and each session they get orders to carry out, but that’s basically the set-up in the main game and I want something a bit more self-directed (or at least it seems more self-directed).
A friend recently suggested gluing Prime Time Adventures and D&D together. That sounds awesome, but will probably not fly with this group. I’m thinking of more of a GUMSHOE like setup where people can move from point to point and do skill challenges to decide where they go next and wrap up with a big fight. Or the skill checks give them bonuses to apply during the big fight.
Oh! Maybe they start will all encounters/dailies exhausted and good skill checks recover them. Do cool stuff, get an Encounter back. Or healing surges. Or action points (actually, that’s built-in I believe). If you fail, you still get what you need to move on, but you don’t refresh your powers. I can give characters “spotlight” episodes by making it easier for them to recover powers or just let them start off with a few already charged. That set-up might make players reluctant to get to the big fight until “we’ve got everything back”, even though no one ever uses all their stuff in a fight anyway. But if that’s too obnoxious, maybe I just give them bonus uses of their encounters/dailies when they do well in skill challenges. That might be better since no one “loses” anything, but in the big fight at the end, they can be super cool (plus the additional encounters/dailies should end the fight faster and that’s really important for a time-constrained game like this).
So there’s that. I’m thinking that the game will be something like “The A-Team meets The Keep on the Borderlands”. The PCs are the owner/operators of a mercenary team and they operate out of this frontier outpost town. They can get missions or go exploring out in the wilds or whatever strikes their fancy. I’ll try and solicit input before the game so that there are appropriate things to do/encounter, but as long as they reach the big fight in 1-2 hours they can wrap up with a big fight and go home happy.
I think I might also borrow some stuff from InSpectres/Thirty and have a common pool of resources representing how successful their “adventuring business” is. Completing adventures fills the pool, spending out of it (obviously) reduces the pool. Or maybe those skill challenges from earlier generate the points that go into the pool. You could generate a huge batch of points and watch other people spend them – always fun for future role-play. But I do want people to be spending these things and not sitting on them.
A lot to think about but I feel like I’ve got some good stuff in here that should be fun to play with and hopefully the players will enjoy it too.
later
Tom
