Castles & Crusades - has it helped you deepen your campaign world?

Mythmere1

First Post
Although I started playing (DMing) Castles & Crusades mainly to allow combats to go more quickly, I found out quickly what we all know - that C&C requires far less DM prep time than 3E. The result, in my campaign, has been that I've had a lot more time to flesh out details that matter more to me - cultures, NPC personalities, plotlines, etc.

I'd found that before, using 3E, I tended to have a good "opening show," with the cultures and backgrounds of the campaign fairly well detailed; but as the game proceeded from session to session, I never had time to revisit and revise the background.

Mainly I've used the extra time to build plotlines - we've got high level characters, so they interact with a great many influential people in the campaign world. I've had the time to flesh out the political ambitions and the interpresonal relationships that drive the political situation.

Anyone else find that the extra time is resulting in a better-developed campaign?
 

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Mythmere1 said:
Anyone else find that the extra time is resulting in a better-developed campaign?
What I have found is that I am gathering all my old unfinished fantasy homebrew stuff, to turn it into a whole setting for C&C. As ever, I am also in the process of adding specific classes for this campaign... Fortunately, C&C makes it far easier and faster to create these classes (mainly adapted from existing 3e stuff). Then, I also noticed that spending much less time to create NPC stat-blocks is relieving. :)
 

Given my work load this winter/spring, I would have had to stop DM'ing altogether if I had stuck with 3e.

So switching to C&C has helped me keep my campaign world going. Consequently, it is 'deeper' (I've had to come up with more ideas, etc.)...

The time I do devote to DM 'prep work' is now fun. I can focus on plots, characters (in the dramatic sense), history, and so forth. The stuff I like about DM'ing. Gods ... no more 3e statblocks to worry about.
 

One of the biggest benefits of switching to C&C for me has been the ease in creating adventures compared to 3e. Most of the time I ( and I assume all DMs ) create adventures and plot lines months or years in advance for an unknown group of PCs.

With 3e I felt that I was writing adventures with skills and feats in mind; how to make it challenging\possible with the plethora of skills and feats that may or may not be used by the PCs. I spent more time deciding feat\counter feat posibilities for the Big Boss finale than on plot twists.

Now with C&C I know what spells a 4th level wizard will have available without having to worry about what flavor of wizard he is. I know how challenging a trap needs to be for a 10th level rogue without having to worry about him having not put skill points to disarm traps. I also know what a 4-6 member party will most likely consist of because of the necessity of the each archtypical class.

In short C&C gave me faster development times which allowed me more creative opportunity to produce adventures that can also be shared with the C&C community. :D

Xzuatl
 

While I like the C&C system better than 3.x overall, I havent found it to be quite the timesaver that maybe others have. I used ETOOLS for 3.5 extensively, which cut my prep time in D&D down by a large percentage. It takes about as much time to make a paper C&C character as it does to work one up on etools (etools is even faster if I just use the quick characters they have on there, but I usually dont). I will say this however: C&C lets our imaginations get a better workout than our calculators and battlemats.
 

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