Recent content by Celebrim

Even the most linear adventure, say Tomb of Horrors will provide different experiences to different groups. There will be a lot in common but how they dealt with or failed to deal with different traps and the different solutions that they applied to the Tomb will all be different. You'll have...

This is why people buy adventures. It saves them prep time. You're paying someone else to do it.

This is 100% correct. The reason I prepare so much is so the game won't be on rails. The more I prep, the less on rails it would be, it's just I can't possibly spend the time it would take to go from my already prep heavy Narrow->Broad->Narrow to a true sandbox without narrow gates.

The structure I'm providing is more "narrow-broad-narrow". The PC's are bounty hunters. Right now I am not giving them really the ability to choose their own jobs. The standard structure is the Guildmaster tells them there is a particular job he wants them to take and the job involves...

Your average of 3000 to 4000 words a session sounds to me like a very realistic estimate for planning purposes. I'm guessing that I'm writing 5000 to 6000 words per session over the course of the campaign, especially when counting the overhead for house rules and such things (for example, I...

Well, it's not my win-button. In essence I'm talking about how differently games play when you play them for 20 hours or 40 hours compared to 200 or 400 hours. What seemed cool at first seems trite more often than not now. And while I'm not planning to mid-campaign rewrite or take away...

It's an interesting thought, but if I have to take away the force point at exactly the time it's supposed to be useful, it feels like it is answering my original question in the negative. Which again, is very similar to the problem of "I have decided to use my win button to negate your win...

Fixed it for you. May their reward be great in heaven.

3.5 had a very few things worth adopting, mostly in the form of weaker spells. Generally speaking, I take the weaker of either the 3.0 or 3.5 version of the spell. But for the most part, the changes in 3.5e were bizarre and ill-thought out, and the situation just got distinctly worse over time...

I can relate. The past year it's been hard to meet every other week as was our usual habit, and as such we had a lot of problems with everyone forgetting what had happened. But one of the players has without prompting taking it on themselves to write up a 3-4 paragraph recap so that we can all...

No. I'm too arrogant for that. Nothing I have is publishable or currently formatted to publishable quality, but I like it and just like the wild dream were for no reason whatsoever, someone picks me without any prior experience to work on the Dungeon & Dragon's cartoon reboot (my character...

You know how in Battletech moving first is a handicap? Those with the initiative move second, so they can perfectly respond to the opponent's plans? Running an adventure without having anything written down and decided before hand is like always having the initiative. Your plans are nebulous...

Sure seems like you are. I went to check. My shortest full adventure of the current campaign was "Plague of Lies". Notes for it are 24000 words (as measured by Microsoft Word). But my longest was the opening adventure of the campaign "The Dogfish" which has notes at over 90000 words. But I...

D&D 3.0e would be my go to. I have extensive house rules tweaked to deal with the balance issues and cut down the content bloat of 3.5e and it is the most versatile and powerful game system I know especially over the long haul. Other choices would be BRP or a derivative (CoC, Pendragon), D20...

A typical adventure will have 40,000 to 75,000 words worth of notes. And with that I would bet I ad lib 40% of the content of the adventure. And it's not because I don't use my notes. It's because you can't plan for everything. But without those notes, I don't think it would be possible for...