subrosas

SPOILERS BELOW: I am completely unable to judge whether I will enjoy a module by simply reading it, or predict whether my players will enjoy it.

Last summer, H2 and H3 in hand and the party still knee deep in the Keep on the Shadowfell, I would have predicted that H2 would be the winner, and that H3 was an atavistic throwback to a lazier era of adventure design. H2 had a home base, H3 did not, and that home base seemed interesting. H2 had the crazy Well of Demons, a werewolf guide, a cynical drow renegade turned merchant, and a Q&A session with a god.

H3 seemed disconnected, random. Nearly every room was a fight, and few of the fights made any sense. All potential allies were obviously, monotonously treacherous. The party would need to be lead by Charlie Brown to believe any of these Lucys.

And yet.... we had a terrible time in H2. Everyone found the Hall of Seven Pillars boring. If it had been a more sandbox campaign, I think my players would have voted to find a town not overrun with duegar and other scum. The missing pig quest resulted in laughs, but mostly about whether the dwarf had a gold question mark floating over his head. Getting into the inner sanctum of the Well of Demons was a long, annoying chore.

H3 on the other hand has been crazy fun. The party negotiated a truce with the lizard men (!!!), something the module didn't seem to leave much room for but which turned out to be some solid, fun roleplaying. The battle against the animated body was hilarious. The rotating rat trap was good fun. The second level was interesting too. Eladrin foes came as a surprise, but after I explained their nimbleness on the ice away by giving them all hockey skates, there were some good laughs and the magic was happening. Mutant Karavakos was a wild Lovecraftian disco showdown.

The key for our group has been to play H3 as comedy. As the party approaches the third level, they are accompanied by their brave (but lobotomized) companion Renauld, one of the bandits originally but stuck in his current state after being kidnapped by the foulspawn seer. Vyrellis loves the party despite being tossed around like a football in order to help party members teleport around (she usually complains loudly).

What does this mean? Probably nothing. Perhaps the quality of a module only has a tangential relationship to the fun a game group can squeeze from it. Perhaps the readability of a module is independent from its quality in play. Maybe we're just twisting the module into parody. Whatever - I've loved it.

Just thinking about those other roots of D&D: the sword-and-sorcery mercenary kill-yer-mother-for-a-gold-piece campaigns. I've played maybe two adventures of that flavor since 1980. Everything else seems to be about saving the world writ large or writ small.

Allow me to explain.

As much as D&D has its roots in Middle Earth it also has its roots in the world of Vance, Lieber, Howard, etc. But for whatever reason the players who've indulged me over the years (and there has been a few) have seemed to favor the Tolkien side of things.

They wanted to save the world and little else.

Now, if the world needs saving, I'm all in favor of saving it, whether we are talking RL or fantasy-land. But when I read others talking about the drudgery of one more tavern-brawl, one more dungeon door kicked in out of raw unapologetic greed, the emotion I feel is envy. Please send me some of that boredom - it sounds fun!

I'm sick of these world is a princess in distress campaigns.

I blame myself as much as the players at my table. I can roll a mean story, and I get caught up in the whole "epic" thing too. I'm an instigator I admit. More than one dark lord has traipsed through my campaign setting. Its embarrassing.

On the other hand my players are responsible too. The players' characters live like goddamn ascetics. They don't drink, eat the cheapest gruel at the cheapest taverns, abandon their families unless I force them to talk to a relative with the plot hammer, and are misers with their gold - spending nothing unless it ups their to-hit and damage ratios. When I asked them what their characters did between adventures they shrugged. Looked for another way to save the world? Its kind of disturbing to think about - especially since its become the norm in my campaigns.

No doubt I'm most at fault. I create the world their characters exist in, and player after player has redrawn their character to fit this mold. They claim they are having fun, but I'm not sure I am anymore.

So I go back to the old stuff. Stories about rogues (in style, not the class) blowing their share of the treasure in ugly taverns, nasty bar brawls, parties taking down monsters to get paid, and all the rest.

Which I suppose makes me about a decade out of step - wasn't everyone talking about the return of old-school back when 3e rolled out? I did too, but somehow the players I was gaming with then always ended up saving the world.

They always do, bless them.

One of these days I'll cook up a world that doesn't need saving.