Dorloran
First Post
I’ve been thinking of starting this thread for a while now, but haven’t known quite what to say exactly or what to ask. But I think now that Biohazard has posted elsewhere on these boards about his departure from RPGing, and especially considering the reasons he gives, it’s maybe time. When he talked about board games being ready-to-run, no prep time, one-evening affairs with simple and discreet rules, that’s what I’ve been trying to imagine for DND. I’m thinking about an approach to make DND more like a board game than it is (ducks thrown tomatoes and rotten cabbages). Here’s what I mean.
Take my group, for instance. I’m lucky enough to game with guys that I’ve gamed with since the beginning—and I do mean the beginning, right from the White Box till 3.5, about 30 years. But, as Biohazard pointed out, we’ve grown up (groan) and life is starting to interfere with our gaming: kids, jobs, kids’ activities, need for longer and longer periods of sleep, etc. Our situation is that we love to get together, we love DND as our game of choice, and we have a group of six when everyone can make it. But that’s getting rare.
We have less and less personal time to prepare adventures. We have less time to play (usually every Friday for about 4-5 hours). From one week to another, some players can make it while others can’t, so players and characters are constantly in and out of campaigns, scenarios, and even specific adventures. It’s hard to maintain continuity, harder to keep all the players on the same page, and even harder to keep all the characters of equal enough level so they can reasonably travel together. It also seems that we’re constantly creating new characters whenever someone does have the time to start a new adventure series because we prefer low to mid-level play, or, perhaps worse, players have well-liked or even favorite characters “trapped” in scenarios that have petered out because the DM didn’t have time to follow through, or the DM has taken a hiatus, etc.
Point is, it seems to me that our group, and perhaps other groups like us, would be served by some system or set of rules that would pretty much emulate board game type playing, with the added element of campaign play (by that I mean playing the same character from week to week in whatever adventure someone might have ready for the evening). It might look something like this (forgive the randomness of the thoughts):
• Be based on a series of short scenarios (what I think I might call Delves) instead of campaigns so that players can come and go with less impact on continuity.
• Maybe take some clues from DND minis, but maintain the element of the DM and maintain the most important element, Role Playing.
• Uses DND as its base system (so doesn’t switch to DND minis, etc.)
• Accounts for the fact that experience points will vary from player to player because of their sporadic availability to play.
• Maybe tweaking gaining levels so that players were rewarded and characters advanced in other ways, perhaps awarding something like Hero or Action Points on level-up, or perhaps as characters increased in level they would “unlock” their access to stronger magic. For instance, you could check the DMG to see how much and what power of magic that a character of a certain level is expected to have, and then the character is allowed to "control" that much magic.
• Rules that would maintain characters at mid-levels for long or longer periods of time.
• Finding ways to cut down on prep time for creating adventure scenarios/delves.
• Find ways to cut down on combat time so the whole evening isn’t a combat or two.
• Doesn’t mean we sit down to actually play Risk or Monopoly, even though that sounds like the obvious fix for a group in our situation. We wanna play DND!
Has anyone else been thinking along these lines, or have any comments or suggestions??
Thanks.
Take my group, for instance. I’m lucky enough to game with guys that I’ve gamed with since the beginning—and I do mean the beginning, right from the White Box till 3.5, about 30 years. But, as Biohazard pointed out, we’ve grown up (groan) and life is starting to interfere with our gaming: kids, jobs, kids’ activities, need for longer and longer periods of sleep, etc. Our situation is that we love to get together, we love DND as our game of choice, and we have a group of six when everyone can make it. But that’s getting rare.
We have less and less personal time to prepare adventures. We have less time to play (usually every Friday for about 4-5 hours). From one week to another, some players can make it while others can’t, so players and characters are constantly in and out of campaigns, scenarios, and even specific adventures. It’s hard to maintain continuity, harder to keep all the players on the same page, and even harder to keep all the characters of equal enough level so they can reasonably travel together. It also seems that we’re constantly creating new characters whenever someone does have the time to start a new adventure series because we prefer low to mid-level play, or, perhaps worse, players have well-liked or even favorite characters “trapped” in scenarios that have petered out because the DM didn’t have time to follow through, or the DM has taken a hiatus, etc.
Point is, it seems to me that our group, and perhaps other groups like us, would be served by some system or set of rules that would pretty much emulate board game type playing, with the added element of campaign play (by that I mean playing the same character from week to week in whatever adventure someone might have ready for the evening). It might look something like this (forgive the randomness of the thoughts):
• Be based on a series of short scenarios (what I think I might call Delves) instead of campaigns so that players can come and go with less impact on continuity.
• Maybe take some clues from DND minis, but maintain the element of the DM and maintain the most important element, Role Playing.
• Uses DND as its base system (so doesn’t switch to DND minis, etc.)
• Accounts for the fact that experience points will vary from player to player because of their sporadic availability to play.
• Maybe tweaking gaining levels so that players were rewarded and characters advanced in other ways, perhaps awarding something like Hero or Action Points on level-up, or perhaps as characters increased in level they would “unlock” their access to stronger magic. For instance, you could check the DMG to see how much and what power of magic that a character of a certain level is expected to have, and then the character is allowed to "control" that much magic.
• Rules that would maintain characters at mid-levels for long or longer periods of time.
• Finding ways to cut down on prep time for creating adventure scenarios/delves.
• Find ways to cut down on combat time so the whole evening isn’t a combat or two.
• Doesn’t mean we sit down to actually play Risk or Monopoly, even though that sounds like the obvious fix for a group in our situation. We wanna play DND!
Has anyone else been thinking along these lines, or have any comments or suggestions??
Thanks.
