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Re Building the Halls of the Undermountain
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<blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 5890392" data-attributes="member: 13107"><p>Hey, thanks for the reply!</p><p></p><p>50,000 words in a month is none too shabby.</p><p></p><p>Spreading a story across a sandbox environment sounds challenging. I'm thinking there would need to be fragments of the story spread liberally. Even then, keeping players on track is hard, especially if the game is run over many sessions.</p><p></p><p>One of my favorite story threads was in the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords (1999, Skip Williams), where the adventuring party encounters a prior adventuring group. One of them had his brain taken over by a mold, or something like that. Also, the pictures in Return to the Tomb of Horrors (1998, Bruce Cordell), which showed an adventuring party and their several fates. The last scene has a now-blind survivor evidently recounting the tale. I spent a while puzzling over the images to relate them to the actual encounters, as well as to figure out what I could about each of the party members, and their fate.</p><p></p><p>With 4E, I've always found the strong structure to rather get in the way of telling a story, since the game structure seems to carry too much of the burden of making the game work. There doesn't seem to be enough space left to hang the story, in the sense of having the story convey important details that matter in the play, that is, of having a story that matters.</p><p></p><p>Thx!</p><p></p><p>TomB</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="tomBitonti, post: 5890392, member: 13107"] Hey, thanks for the reply! 50,000 words in a month is none too shabby. Spreading a story across a sandbox environment sounds challenging. I'm thinking there would need to be fragments of the story spread liberally. Even then, keeping players on track is hard, especially if the game is run over many sessions. One of my favorite story threads was in the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords (1999, Skip Williams), where the adventuring party encounters a prior adventuring group. One of them had his brain taken over by a mold, or something like that. Also, the pictures in Return to the Tomb of Horrors (1998, Bruce Cordell), which showed an adventuring party and their several fates. The last scene has a now-blind survivor evidently recounting the tale. I spent a while puzzling over the images to relate them to the actual encounters, as well as to figure out what I could about each of the party members, and their fate. With 4E, I've always found the strong structure to rather get in the way of telling a story, since the game structure seems to carry too much of the burden of making the game work. There doesn't seem to be enough space left to hang the story, in the sense of having the story convey important details that matter in the play, that is, of having a story that matters. Thx! TomB [/QUOTE]
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