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After Three Years... we Finished the Campaign

Wik

First Post
...and had a blast.

Okay, so I am not a big fan of 4th edition. After having run it from 1st to 30th, I can honestly say that it is not my edition of choice. And I will probably never run it again (I may play it again, but as for running it? No. Not unless there were some HUGE changes released).

That being said, finishing up the campaign was a lot of fun. The PCs got to see the Demon Stone of Kar Azul, hinted at since the very first session - and they now knew that it could not be destroyed.

The demons that were unleashed upon the world 150 years ago were going to be around... but whoever was controlling the stone had the power to control those demons. So they had an ancient eladrin ghost queen volunteer to take the place of the maddened tiefling general who had been in the stone for 150 years.

Of course, when the PCs got into the main room, a tiefling elite unit ("The Black Hand of Kael Turath") was already there, and their leader, captain Veronica Hyers, was unknowingly trying to take control of the stone so she could lead the demons as part of the tiefling military machine.

The PCs weren't gonna have any of that... so they got to fight Veronica, her war troll second in command named Greldinga (who the PCs kind of liked, in an adversarial way), and about ten million legionnairre archers.

(in mechanical terms, they fought Lloth! And a few demons and angels).

After that fight, the gem broke open and the imprisoned tiefling general was let loose upon the world, in a demonic/draconic form. And demons began to rush out of hell. And then there was another, HUGE fight. Against a dragon. With a breath weapon that was a blast 20.

It was a close fight, with the group cleric nearly dying, the rogue nearly killed, and so on. And while there was a lot of mechanical crap I hated ("What do you mean, I miss you on a 20? And what do you mean, you're hitting this max level solo monster on a 2?"), it was still a lot of fun.

And then, of course, when the dragon was destroyed, someone had to take his spot in the gem, in an eternal purgatory. We all expected the eladrin ghost to take the spot... but one of the PCs, an evil wizard who wanted to become a demigod, was forced to take the position when his alternate personality (a human paladin that acted as his conscience) made the ultimate sacrifice.

I ended the campaign by saying "One year has passed. Where are your PCs?"

The wizard controlled the demons trapped on the material plane, using them to fulfill his long term godly ambitions in the hope of one day escaping, while the paladin that possessed him manipulated and compelled a few demons to enact long term goals (and to prevent the stone from ever being used again).

The minotaur united his peoples, and began to gain control of their ancestral lands once more... and started a tradition that every year, they would visit the demon stone and remember its secrets - and the sacrifices made.

The drow rogue was faced with a decision - become the queen of the drow, or serve the current queen (her adopted sister) as spymaster. She chose the second route.

And the dwarven cleric, dedicated to the destruction of undead, become a demigod of sorts, imbued with a fragment of the stone's divine energy. He is using this power to hunt down undead, with the eventual goal of slaying Valagr, the Fury of Undeath ("Furies" being my campaign's term for evil "gods").

The halfling hasn't announced what she'll be doing yet... which is really just like her.

Anyways. It was the first time any of us had finished a campaign, and this is one that has been going on since about a month after the 4e books were first released. We've been playing once a month, for about three to three and a half hours per session (approximately).

Next up, we're going back to 3.5. We're playing a Pathfinder version of Dark Sun, using the e6 rules variant, which should fix up most of my problems with "modern D&D". We make up characters in a few weeks, and everyone's excited about it. But we've already discussed returning to my Shattered Isles setting in a year or two, and I have to admit, I'm really excited to see what's going to happen.

Just felt like sharing. :)
 

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Celtavian

Dragon Lord
Cool

Cool. Sounds like a fun and interesting campaign. We recently finished Kingmaker. It was great to finish a campaign.

Good to hear your moving to Pathfinder. They just released the Ultimate Combat. I am really pleased with the new martial arts rules. I've been waiting for years for D&D to come out with a cool martial arts system. Lo and behold, Pathfinder finally does it. You can really imagine the kung fu movies of old with the new martial arts feats. They give you a lot of fun for a reasonable investment of resources.

Hopefully you get to use them in E6. They really add a great deal of flavor to the game.
 

NewJeffCT

First Post
sounds like a great climax to a great campaign. Like your idea of asking them where each of them are after a year - I should have done similar.

I finished up a 2 1/2 year long 3.5E campaign about 18 months ago and swore off DMing 3.5E ever again, and Pathfinder is too similar to 3.5E for me. So, my feelings on editions are just the opposite of yours.
 

Jhaelen

First Post
Okay, so I am not a big fan of 4th edition. After having run it from 1st to 30th, I can honestly say that it is not my edition of choice. And I will probably never run it again (I may play it again, but as for running it? No. Not unless there were some HUGE changes released).
Do you care to elaborate? What was so bad from a DM's view?

Next up, we're going back to 3.5. We're playing a Pathfinder version of Dark Sun, using the e6 rules variant, which should fix up most of my problems with "modern D&D".
Considering the part I bolded, would I be wrong to assume you also wouldn't be interested in running a 3.5 or Pathfinder campaign from 1st to 30th (or 20th)?
 



ThunhusDM

First Post

Wik

First Post
Responses!

NewJeffCT said:
I finished up a 2 1/2 year long 3.5E campaign about 18 months ago and swore off DMing 3.5E ever again, and Pathfinder is too similar to 3.5E for me. So, my feelings on editions are just the opposite of yours.

I actually swore off 3.5 a few years ago, right before we switched to fourth. After running Savage Tide, I got incredibly frustrated with the game at around 10th level. But it looks like I'm crawling back. :)

Jhaelen said:
Do you care to elaborate? What was so bad from a DM's view?

Okay, before I get into this, can we just agree that this is from my own personal view, and not some blanket assumption? I don't want to start an edition war, and it bugs me when I say "this is what I did", and then I get people telling me that I was obviously looking at it wrong, or arguing about why my perceptions are not accurate.

Anyways.

What I didn't like from a DM's point of view was that the game was very much divorced from "what's going on". Or rather, it felt like we were playing two games - the mechanical game, and the story game... and often, the story was secondary to the mechanics. Having to figure out why the great evil villain who never likes to enter close range combat would fly down to the ground to enter close-range combat with a world-renowned fighter simply because his power said so really bugged me.

Or rather, the GM's role is simply to react to PCs, and his ability to control the pacing and layout of the encounter can be severely limited by player choices and actions, to a degree that is not seen in almost any other roleplaying game.

There was also a point where I had PCs that, even with monsters well above the group's level, simply couldn't be hit (for example, the Dragon of Tyr monster cannot, apparently, hit our artful dodger rogue on an OA, even if he rolls a 20; likewise, our fighter is able to hit the dragon on anything but a 1)

In other editions of D&D, I felt I could ignore the game rules in favour of the game world reality. But because of the way the game is presented and character ability choices are so important to the play, doing so would have felt like cheating this time around.

Not to mention that, to really challenge your group, you need to throw many encounters at them over the course of the day, whereas I've usually been more of a "few large encounters" type of person. The game works less well at high levels with that sort of playstyle, because PCs get more chances to go nova.

Considering the part I bolded, would I be wrong to assume you also wouldn't be interested in running a 3.5 or Pathfinder campaign from 1st to 30th (or 20th)?

you are absolutely correct. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that Pathfinder would be even worse at those levels, though I'm not 100% sure. I tended to wing stat blocks (hell, I still do, it was my 4e signature move!), so they might not be as big a problem for me as they are for others.

blargney said:
That was a hell of a fun campaign to play in! Thanks for seeing it through to the end, Wik. It really does feel nice to have concluded the story.
-blarg

It was a lot of fun. It was also fun to have you guys tease me every time I got fed up with the system. Your running bet on how long into the session it'd take for me to bitch about the system cracked me up.

And of course, the story isn't "concluded". Because it's possible we'll come back to the Isles sometime in the future... and see what's happened in the interim. :) I'm thinking I need to run a campaign from the tiefling side of things. Tiefling versus Genasi could be a lot of fun.

ThunhusDM said:
I was wondering how you handled experience and level ups? Do you followed 10 encounters per level rule (that will take 300 encounters and at least 100 3,5 hour session to level up to 30)? I use 6 encounters per level (takes 3 4h sessions).

Up until about level 8 or 9, we followed the game rules as written, XP-wise. At that point, I started awarding double XP, simply because we knew we wanted to finish the campaign and move onto something else, while also seeing how all 30 levels played out.

I rarely gave out quest XP... mostly because I forgot it was there. :p

At around 12th level, we made a few minor houserules, and one BIG house rule that changed the game drastically. Essentially, I let my players pick all their treasure. I was tired of the wish lists/treasure packets (the biggest drain on the GM EVER, in my book), and so just cut out the middle man and let players pick their own gear. This did lead to some hyper specialized PCs, but meh, it saved me the headache of rewarding treasure... I just focused on giving out cool stuff every now and then.

We also played around with a wealth bonus, though it was rarely used. We handwaved a lot of purchases.

When the players hit around 22nd or 23rd level, I got really drained during one fight, where I looked at the group and said "I can't keep playing this game". I was no longer having fun, because my entire play experience was setting up encounters that, unless I really manipulated the mechanics, could not go the way I wanted them to. There were no stories in combat for me, anymore... just mechanics. I told the group that, and we decided to fast forward through the epic tier, and end the game with one last dungeon crawl at 30th level.

While it sucks that we missed out on levels 23-29, I know myself and at least 2 players were sick of 4e, and it was nice to finish the campaign while we were still having fun rather than watch the game fizzle out due to burnout.
 

Congrats on going all the way and getting a nice conclusion at the finale.

I've only ever played two campaigns that went from level 1 to 20/30.

1st was a campaign I ran for my roommate about 10 years ago, he played 2 characters and this was with the 2E AD&D ruleset. He advanced to the status of demi-god with one of his characters and king of the barbarians with the other. It was probably the best campaign I'd ever run to date.

2nd campaign was concluded in June, this was for a group of 5 characters running 4E. I ran this campaign on a real fast track as far as experience went. We played weekly for 3-4 hours per week. They started at level 1 and ended at level 30. I found that I enjoyed the campaign a lot, but to me the 4E combat system was very grindy, it just took too long to run the encounters so I'd do things to speed up the fights including adding more damage to NPCs and lower hit points giving a sense of danger and accomplishment when the PCs knocked down something that hit so hard. The other thing I didn't care for was the number of conditions that - as a DM - I had to try to keep track of, especially at the epic tier levels. Other than that, I had a lot of fun and was happy with how it concluded, they saved the world from the god of chaos breaking free of his prison in the void and went on to fulfill their epic destinies.

P.S. My experience with 4E is in no way an aim to start an edition war. I love all editions of the game, I was just expressing my personal experiences with the system in an abbreviated paragraph to sum things up and my expression of how I agree with the OP on some things that happened in his campaign.

Trav
 

NewJeffCT

First Post
Thanks for the response Wik.

My 4E game is now at level 8, so I have not gotten up past that level 10 range that you mentioned. However, my old style from 1E through 3.5E was the one big encounter per day where both sides could go nova... I'm still adapting to the 4E rolling series of encounters style to challenge the players.

My 3.5E game went from level 1-18, but it didn't get too hairy for me as a DM until they hit double digits...so, I'll see once my 4E game gets up higher if it becomes a burden for me as DM.
 

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