Thorin Stoutfoot
First Post
Tonight, the party found and destroyed the Lich Queen's phylactery, ending a 3.5 year game that started in October 2001. There were 4 players at the end, and they all reached 20th level with an 18th level cohort. Being a busy professional who spends his weekends doing outdoor activities rather than writing adventures, I ran published adventures exclusively:
1-10: Temple of Elemental Evil
11: Queen of Lies
12: (That dungeon adventure where the PCs break into a mindflayer fortress to rescue their friend)
13: (Another dungeon adventure where they find an undead gate being built and destroy it)
15: Demon God's Fane
16: Another dungeon adventure (the forgotten realms on featuring the two headed firebringer sladd)
17: Maure Castle
18-20: The Lich Queen's Beloved
In terms of running the game I think I felt that I lost control of the game (in terms of being able to play the opponents as well as the players played their PCs) around level 15th. I started having to look up spells that I'd never seen before (in any edition). PCs became nearly unkillable. We also switched editions to 3.5 at level 11 (especially after the harm/magic missile combo that the big bad in Queen of Lies did to the PCs). There were a few close TPKs, but the PCs always managed to run away in time (though they did lose a number of PCs). Somewhere early on half the group refused to play with the other half, so I ran parallel universes for awhile between the two groups until one group completely broke up. There were a lot of PC deaths, though the PCs did manage to resurrect all PCs (even though some PCs did retire after that harrowing experience), but those tailed off after around 15th level. The players felt challenged all the time (and they felt poor, but that's also because of the constant spending on True Res), but none of them had ever played to 20th level in any previous edition of D&D (one of the players almost literally begged me to keep the game going until he could cast 9th level spells since he'd never had the chance to do so before). Say what you want about the fast levelling, I think the standard system paced the levelling just right --- 3 years to go from 1st to 20th is not a fast pace by any means.
I'm definitely a big fan of the 3.5 rules (and Dungeon magazine!) at this point. What's amazing is that I want to play D&D again. We're now going to take a break and play Grimm d20, but after that it's the Banewarrens! (I'm going to run a few short campaigns for awhile before we do something big again)
1-10: Temple of Elemental Evil
11: Queen of Lies
12: (That dungeon adventure where the PCs break into a mindflayer fortress to rescue their friend)
13: (Another dungeon adventure where they find an undead gate being built and destroy it)
15: Demon God's Fane
16: Another dungeon adventure (the forgotten realms on featuring the two headed firebringer sladd)
17: Maure Castle
18-20: The Lich Queen's Beloved
In terms of running the game I think I felt that I lost control of the game (in terms of being able to play the opponents as well as the players played their PCs) around level 15th. I started having to look up spells that I'd never seen before (in any edition). PCs became nearly unkillable. We also switched editions to 3.5 at level 11 (especially after the harm/magic missile combo that the big bad in Queen of Lies did to the PCs). There were a few close TPKs, but the PCs always managed to run away in time (though they did lose a number of PCs). Somewhere early on half the group refused to play with the other half, so I ran parallel universes for awhile between the two groups until one group completely broke up. There were a lot of PC deaths, though the PCs did manage to resurrect all PCs (even though some PCs did retire after that harrowing experience), but those tailed off after around 15th level. The players felt challenged all the time (and they felt poor, but that's also because of the constant spending on True Res), but none of them had ever played to 20th level in any previous edition of D&D (one of the players almost literally begged me to keep the game going until he could cast 9th level spells since he'd never had the chance to do so before). Say what you want about the fast levelling, I think the standard system paced the levelling just right --- 3 years to go from 1st to 20th is not a fast pace by any means.
I'm definitely a big fan of the 3.5 rules (and Dungeon magazine!) at this point. What's amazing is that I want to play D&D again. We're now going to take a break and play Grimm d20, but after that it's the Banewarrens! (I'm going to run a few short campaigns for awhile before we do something big again)
