Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 8058834" data-attributes="member: 58197">I think it's mostly a failure of imagination on the part of adventure designers. If you want to write the same kind of adventure at every level--hear about a dungeon, go to the dungeon, clear the dungeon, kill the boss, you win--then you end up with a treadmill where you fight giant rats and kobolds at low levels, and monstrous half-dragon rats and kobold sorcerers at mid-levels, and epic tarrasque rats and Pun-Pun at high levels. (And this has become a self-reinforcing cycle with the rise of MMOs, which are actually designed to keep you on a treadmill, and this has the effect of training the next generation of adventure designers to imitate them.)But, as you observe, it doesn't have to be that way. Red Hand of Doom follows what I'd call the "Winter Is Coming" model: There is a huge impending threat, and the low levels are spent uncovering the scope of that threat while fighting its scouts and harbingers. It makes for a great story and it also provides a natural progression of enemies as Winter draws closer.Another option is to use high-level threats throughout, but have the players engage with them in different ways--evading, hiding, and sneaking at low levels, setting traps and ambushes at mid-levels, and wading in to slug it out toe-to-toe at high levels. This one is trickier because it requires the players to be okay with a shifting style of game; you can't just murderhobo from start to finish. But it could be really interesting if done well.</blockquote>

Verification