Search results

My assumption is that the milestones are a fixed thing and, once set and told to the players, cannot be moved or altered; same as any other story or setting element in the game. (I view levels as actual things in the setting rather than as a metagame construct - you know what level you are...

Which in a way brings up yet another variable, leading to a question: When playing, is your* primary goal "to level up" or is your primary goal "to just play"? Put another way, is levelling up your main reason for playing or is it just a once-in-as-while happy side effect? For me it's very...

Well, those who survive the funnel, I suppose...... :)

While I sort of agree with this in principle, the moment you have more than one player I find it often becomes an exercise in cat-herding: what's a great and highly-interesting adventure for one player holds no attraction whatsoever for another.* And so I just run what I run, with the players...

Which is fine until they bump a level and realize that because all those random encounters they farmed didn't provide a lick of treasure, they now can't afford their training... (see, training rules do have a use!) :)

Confidence and ease go hand in hand. If a module's hard to run due to lack of clarity, page-flipping, too many buried details, poor mapping, etc. then that will quickly lead to a loss of confidence.

There's been a few adventure modules I've read (and at least one that I've converted and run) that expressly tell the DM to level up the characters when they reach a certain point. If one goes strictly by the book, that means if for some reason the PCs never reach that point - even if they do...

@ilgatto , I'm starting to think you're worrying too much about whay "they" were thinking at the time, where the true usefulness of this exercise in fact lays in redesigning the SA and EA lists - and maybe all of Appendix E in the process - such that "we" can make more sense of them today.

Which completely discourages them from doing anything other than the mission given to them, becuase that's where the milestone is, even if it's something that doesn't capture their interest (either in-game or at-table). Fine for AP play, not so fine for anything remotely sandbox.

Still doesn't account for some characters earning more xp through their in-game actions while others earn less, and that also can lead to imbalance after a while. It also strips out the idea of items or effects granting bonus levels or xp (e.g. Deck cards, some of the major magic tomes, some...

Pardon the terrible pun, but that would be a messy poll as you'd have to list each level by each edition. 15th level in 4e ain't the same as 15th level in 1e.

The big thing milestone xp doesn't do is reward individual characters for what they do and-or not reward them for what they don't do. Everyone gets the same reward at the same time, which (unintentionally, I hope!) encourages a mindset - particularly in a larger party - of letting others take...

Are you talking as a player or DM here? If yes, does this mean as a player you count the number of encouters your character has had this level? The thread is asking your xp preference as a player.

Anything I do is still done as if being printed on paper, usually 8.5x11 or close. Similar to the classic adventures, I'll put as many area write-ups on a page as happen to fit. The map is detached so you can always see how an area or room relates to the others around it; your thumbnail idea...

Crits and fumbles are fine in principle. In practice, however, having each occur 5% of the time is too frequent meaning confirm rolls of some sort are needed. I do like the idea that the worst roll you can do always fails (in D&D, a nat 1) and the best roll you can do (in D&D, a nat 20) always...

Too much white space for my liking (to me white space = wasted space) but I really like having the thumbnail map at the top corner of each page. Brilliant idea.

To a point this is fine, but the obvious risk is crossing the line into advising the GM to lead the players by the nose such that the situation or scenario works as intended. And far too many GMs by default need the opposite advice! To the thread topic: while writing a module as a hard...

Huh. I've got some modules here that are worth a fair bit of money (relative to their purchase cost) these days in part because I didn't write in them when I ran them. I also unknowingly at the time cost myself somewhat dearly by writing in some modules that turned out later to be worth a fair...

So, disposable rather than collectable?

Hard, hard no. If I'm paying for a printed module I don't expect to then have to pay again to print or photocopy it, thank you very much. Again, hard no. If you make a module easy to run from a book (i.e. minimize page flipping because everything you need right now is right there) you're also...