Well, I've done something in my AD&D campaign that I've never done before in 30 years of gaming. Yes, I've given one of the PCs a vorpal sword.
This wasn't any of your "choose a treasure package" or "wish list" items; this was one randomly rolled on the AD&D DMG tables. (A 0.11% chance or approximately 1 in 900 chance). The character who took the item is all of 5th level.
And I'm fine with it. Really, really fine. There's no doubt that the weapon - with a 20% chance of beheading any human-sized-or-smaller creature and a 15% chance of beheading any larger-than-human monster with each attack - is an extremely good one which laughs in the face of balance, but it's going to be fun and memorable in the game, and it's rather unlikely that another one will enter the game.
Probably.
If the blasted thing does become just Too Good and sucking the fun from the campaign, I'll take steps, but as I'm mostly running an old-fashioned Dungeon Crawl Campaign, at the moment it's the thing that distinguishes Paul's character from all the other half-orc fighters in the group.
We're sixteen sessions into this campaign, which at times has two DMs, and 22 players have played at least one session. The "core" group is about 12 players who split time between the AD&D game and other games (Dresden Files and Scales of War 4E).
Meanwhile, after a bout of Illness and Easter, we'll finally get to the third session of our Pathfinder campaign this Sunday. Looking forward to that. Even though it doesn't have a VORPAL SWORD in it.
Anyway, does anyone want to guess as to how long it'll be before I get sick of the Vorpal Sword in the game? (And create immune-to-vorpal monsters?
)
Cheers!
This wasn't any of your "choose a treasure package" or "wish list" items; this was one randomly rolled on the AD&D DMG tables. (A 0.11% chance or approximately 1 in 900 chance). The character who took the item is all of 5th level.
And I'm fine with it. Really, really fine. There's no doubt that the weapon - with a 20% chance of beheading any human-sized-or-smaller creature and a 15% chance of beheading any larger-than-human monster with each attack - is an extremely good one which laughs in the face of balance, but it's going to be fun and memorable in the game, and it's rather unlikely that another one will enter the game.
Probably.
If the blasted thing does become just Too Good and sucking the fun from the campaign, I'll take steps, but as I'm mostly running an old-fashioned Dungeon Crawl Campaign, at the moment it's the thing that distinguishes Paul's character from all the other half-orc fighters in the group.
We're sixteen sessions into this campaign, which at times has two DMs, and 22 players have played at least one session. The "core" group is about 12 players who split time between the AD&D game and other games (Dresden Files and Scales of War 4E).
Meanwhile, after a bout of Illness and Easter, we'll finally get to the third session of our Pathfinder campaign this Sunday. Looking forward to that. Even though it doesn't have a VORPAL SWORD in it.
Anyway, does anyone want to guess as to how long it'll be before I get sick of the Vorpal Sword in the game? (And create immune-to-vorpal monsters?
)Cheers!
