Discussion - General Discussion Thread '09

[orsal]

Alright then I'll do a breakdown of the adventure email (who?? two judges thought there was only one doing adventure approvals)

The judges' email addresses are listed at the bottom of the first post in the Guide to LEW thread. There are 10 of us. It's best to email all of us, since you don't know who will read your proposal. Some of us may be too busy on any given day. Others may be hoping to play the adventure, and so won't want to read it. Email all of us, and it's pretty likely you can get at least two to give a serious look-over.

Two approvals are necessary to make the adventure official. Only one judge needs to actually follow the adventure.

"After the group is filled and the adventure thread starts, the DM will need to record all awards information as the thread progresses. After every point where experience should be awarded, the DM needs to email the judge that has offered to watch their game with this information. The judge will keep these notes on experience and treasure, and will use them to award the party at the end of the adventure (or if the adventure ends prematurely). This is done because it is very important that the judges have ready access to the DM’s notes in order to deal with a missing DM or other problem." end quote

How much info and how do I get people interested pm them first??

When you start the adventure thread (only after you've recruited the PCs by some roleplay in the Tavern thread), hopefully a judge who isn't playing in the game will post to the thread saying "I'll judge this." If nobody does, post to General Discussion reminding us that there's new game in need of a judge. In most cases there isn't any need to email the judge. As long as the judge has enough info from the proposal, and you post treasure and XP rewards in the game thread and in the character tracking thread (as soon as your game starts you should make a post in the character tracking thread), the judge shouldn't have a problem.

 

[stonegod]

I don't think all of those are still judges. Someone should update that post.

 

[Trouvere]

I did take Rystil off it.

 

[Trouvere]

Well, since What's Wrong With LEW is in the air again, and I've been musing on this:
[sblock=The main problems]

• Lack of DMs, yes.
• Lack of (the right sort of) PCs. Right now, we have PCs available for one 8-10th level party, one 4-6th level party, most of a 2nd level party, and a very unbalanced Fighter-heavy 1st level party. Not great material to work with.
• When we do run games, they bog down and collapse.

[/sblock][sblock=LEW's future]

• As 3.5 becomes dustier, we're going to see fewer new players, but the existing PCs will keep on leveling up, increasing the average character level
• If we don't have (m)any low level PCs, we 'level up' the entire world, that is, make it increasingly more dangerous to accommodate the higher level PCs, but this shuts out new low level PCs
• In 10 years or so, all the existing PCs will have reached 20th level. Most will retire then, if not long before, since the epic rules don't work so well. 10 years might seem like a long time, but LEW has been running for 6 already, so we'd be a significant way through its lifetime already.
• I'm sure LEW will die someday, and I'm not convinced that isn't just around the corner, but I'd prefer not have a lifespan fixed by closing the gates
• If we're not to have a finite lifespan, we need a continued influx of 1st level PCs - and ideally we should maintain some sort of numerical balance between tiers (did that sound a bit 4e?). If right now we can handle, say, five 3rd level PCs (I don't think in fact we have any), then we should have at least five 2nds coming along to replace them as they reach 4th. Natural attrition of players, retirement of unwanted PCs and brutal deaths should all ensure that we still have a narrow topped pyramid structure, with more low level nobodies than high level heroes, as it should be. If we don't have enough new players, then we should allow 4th (then eventually 5th, 6th...) PCs for existing players, or we're back to a finite lifetime. And since at the moment, we have zero active 3rd level characters, only three 2nds, there are no 1st level wizards, and our sole 1st level cleric, Midias Sunchosen, has just stepped out of the RDI to work on his tan, and so on... maybe that point is here or not far off. Another influx might help with formation of better 1st level parties, too.

[/sblock][sblock=The Orussus area should be safe, and World Verisimilitude]

• 1st level PCs can't afford horses. Lots of them can't even afford a month's trail rations. They do the bulk of their adventuring within a couple of weeks' travel from home base, which is almost always Orussus. If we have low level PCs, Orussus and the surrounding area need to stay relatively safe. Indeed, such a lot of good work has gone into developing the local area that it would be a crying shame to obliterate any of it with high level threats.
• It's no good deciding that there's a young adult red dragon living just a few miles outside Orussus just because someone now needs a CR 13 challenge. If it was there all along, how did the city survive when no one was above 9th level? But if it has just arrived, then we have other problems: it becomes vital that the adventuring party that faces it wins, and the players know that, which takes away a lot of the tension. If there is a TPK, then (a) the threat has to go away again mysteriously, which woud become lame very fast, (b) NPCs have to deal with it offstage, which is also lame, (c) it would realistically chew its way through the next most highly ranked adventurers, taking out Rilithorne, Volidar and Joe along the way, until everyone died, which we really can't have happen, so (d) we'd have to just ignore it. In which case, the countryside would eventually become littered with deadly threats that somehow were not killing all the nearby peasants and which somehow low level parties never bumped into. End of all attempts at a 'realistic' world.
• Similarly, we can't have a major dramatic threat to Orussus too often, fun as zombie apocalypses are. You have to wonder why only 4 to 6 of the capable people in the RDI bother to put down their drinks to face it. What are the other people doing??
• I realise this we-only-ever-meet-appropriate-EL-encounters, even-the-bandits-are-personally-tailored-for-us problem isn't exactly uncommon in D&D, but in a living world of PCs of wildly different levels, it is more important to consider
• Since the local area needs to be safe for 1sts who cannot afford to travel, and since we've largely established in many adventures that there are lots of pleasant fairly civilized towns in the western central lands which all have decent trade and communication links with one another, higher level adventurers will need to travel progressively further to find level appropriate problems to solve (if they are monstrous. Humanoid antagonists with class levels can level up alongside the good guys, I suppose)
• There's a slight problem with this in that some character backgrounds have indicated that there are safe, stable, human-dominated areas on the far sides of the disc, but oh well, Enworld is a big place. There's room for those and for hellish lands of terror too.
• I was a little perturbed, for instance, by Halford's (subsequently, Heckler's) Lion's Second Face, since it put a behir, an efreet and several other monsters (which I can't mention in case the adventure resumes) close enough to Orussus that they, if they wished, could have wiped it out in an afternoon. Now that we're starting to get higher level characters, more thought needs to be put into adventure design.

[/sblock][sblock=The problem of travel]

• Up to about 9th level, when PCs travel, they do so by foot and on horseback, predominantly (after 9th, teleport and phantom steed help a great deal). Beyond lowest level, it would be best if parties travelled out of the primary map area, or at least into the lesser known areas of it. Unfortunately, perhaps, Enworld is very big. We're often talking trips of hundreds of miles, lasting weeks or months.
• A DM can handwave travel time: "You board the ship and enjoy a pleasant uneventful 3 month journey"; "The 6 month trek to Sairundan is surprisingly dull". But this can't be done every time! It gets silly. Besides, other adventures might have established that the last thing you could expect along a particular route is a quiet uneventful trip.
• Moreover, if a journey to somewhere distant is simply handwaved, there'll be a temptation to pop back and forth more often than is strictly realistic, and the time-slip between active adventuring PCs and those who stay behind in the timeless neverland of the RDI will become ludicrous.
• So then, at least some of the time, at least some of a journey is played out. This means a couple of encounters along the way, which leads to...

[/sblock][sblock=Adventure imbalance]

• Right, so suppose we're travelling a thousand miles to the Badlands, which is going to take 2 or 3 months in-world time, so there'll be, oh, at least two or three encounters along the way. The pre-departure shopping trip will take a real time fortnight to get sorted, even though it won't be RP'd out, and each round of combat in these journey encounters will take a week.
• As a result, a DM sitting down to design such an adventure will generally feel compelled to counterbalance the travel portion with some worthwhile major events at the eventual destination. It's no good travelling to Sairundan just to whack an orc in an alleyway on the head (bad example!).
• This counterbalancing leads to big, expansive, ambitious adventures, which will take a year to run, if things go well. Which they never do. People get busy, they have the unmitigated gall to take their vacations without synchronising, things just come up. The adventure lasts 9 months before the posting rate falls, players begin to drop, and the game peters out after 12 or 18 months, unfinished, too often leaving the PCs in an inextricable limbo. Look at Sojourn to Sairundan, which began so well, and ended with the aforementioned orc in an alley, or the ill-fated Bizarre Bazaar, which - on its second DM - after wererat bandits, rescuing a child from a cave cat, fighting some undead dogs and a skeletal archer, and a side-adventure for one PC with duergar, reached the titular Bazaar - and promptly collapsed. Or Undine the Sea, which left the frustrated party stranded on the Plane of Water, no less.

[/sblock][sblock=So?]

• So. What we need, to belabor the obvious, are adventures that end after 12 or 18 months because they've actually finished. Or better yet, mini-adventures that take only 3-6 months. To complete something so quickly, we need a way to minimise the travel time that leads to overlong or misshapen adventures - or, sadly, to fast-forwarding over the beautiful world we've made to quickly get to a particular Point B
• We've seen an increasing number of portals of late - in wizard's basements in the heart of Orussus, earth nodes, mysterious standing stones. They're not really my personal stylistic preference, but I can see they help get people where they need to go, fast. They can have the side-effect of lessening the geographical cohesion of the world. It's almost a throwback to the very early days of LEW before a serious effort was made to develop consistency and a real map, when adventures all took place "a day's ride out of town". Now they're "on the other side of the portal".
• Or... we could develop one or more secondary locations.

[sblock=Secondary locations]If starting from Orussus every time becomes wearying, then we need a place from which mid- to high-level characters can strike out on short forays and instantly find themselves in dangerous lands - places in which it's possible to run a quick, simple, completable two or three encounter probably combat-heavy game. Possibilities that occur to me are:

• the sunken half of Rivenblight (though that might grow tiresome fast, and it's a bit too nearby, though at least Underdark denizens generally stay underground of their own accord, should PCs fail)
• the city of Brimbor on the eastern side of Medibaria, which I hear was recently destroyed by dragons (where did they come from, and where did they go??) and which must be just full of lootables and perhaps looters
• or the haunted city on the way to Sairundan which gives travellers an unpleasant few hours every time they pass. Maybe someone wants to reclaim it for the living
• or, you know, there's an enormous expansionist aggressive empire, Carduth, on the far side of the Stonespike Mountains, just off our main map, which everyone but Nurlan seems to have forgotten about. They didn't even send an envoy to the M-A Council of Rystilrond. Perhaps Bainlund, Stonepike, Medibaria or Hendralia (which is also woefully underused!) or someone else would be interested in funding a band of irregulars to harrass Carduth, to delay the day the Empire makes its move on their lands. Or perhaps the Empire itself would appreciate some expendable foreign mercenaries acting beyond their eastern borders where the centaurs/stone giants/whatever live.
• or, we could take a slightly different tack, and modify the fairly blank SW or NE corners of the Orussus region map without changing the nearer world very much. Perhaps some distant world events have led to a Volkswanderung, and new peoples are moving in, making new towns, bringing their own troubles.

Whichever, Those Darn Portals could be used to connect the secondary location with Orussus, or somewhere near enough to it. There are, I suppose, if need be, such things as teleportation circles and ring gates. All of which, it strikes me, is as much to say as L4W got a lot of things right that LEW didn't.[/sblock][/sblock]

 

[Boddynock]

Wow! Trouvere, you've got way too much time on your hands!

Those are all good points you raise. A great summary of the state of play, and some good ideas. Thanks!

I don't have an aversion to the judicious use of portals, although I'd hate to see them as an over-used plot device. (I say that despite the fact that I've always loved the nature of Sigil in the Planescape setting as "City of Doors". Mind you, I think that works because Sigil is designed to be the centre of the Multiverse, and yet separate from everywhere else.) If we just relied on instantaneous travel to get everywhere, we would lose the immersion in the world which, as you say, has been developed over time.

Still, a judicious use of a small number of fixed portals (with an explanation of how they got there ... hmm, perhaps Darque's fiddling with the portal in The Darque Portal might trigger the emergence of a new portal between Orussus and our secondary location) could well solve some of the problems you've raised without changing the nature of the world altogether.

I do think it's unlikely we're going to get huge numbers of new players coming in, now. But an emphasis on a 3.5 living world where players could take on multiple characters (beyond the base three), might be attractive and sustainable.

I do think, however, that there might well be a quid pro quo - where a one-off expenditure of DM credits is required to activate a 4th, 5th and successive characters. This means that, if anybody wants to play a lot, they'll simply have to DM some games as well.

 

[Manzanita]

Nice to see so much activity on the discussion thread. How long has it been since we had a new DM? Though I think the main blame is 4E, it's also just the natural attrition of players and DMs that is not be replenished. I haven't looked at the playing the game board in ages, but maybe could advertise in the talking the talk board. We've done that before? Are there many people starting 3.5 games? Somehow, I don't think many of our PCs will reach 20th level.

 

[Theroc]

Nice to see so much activity on the discussion thread. How long has it been since we had a new DM? Though I think the main blame is 4E, it's also just the natural attrition of players and DMs that is not be replenished. I haven't looked at the playing the game board in ages, but maybe could advertise in the talking the talk board. We've done that before? Are there many people starting 3.5 games? Somehow, I don't think many of our PCs will reach 20th level.

Well, I'm in at least 6 different talking the talk games. All 3.5 games.

I'm there because I don't feel I'd be a worthy DM, and so can't really interact with LEW much. But yeah, there's still 3.5 activity there.

 

[Boddynock]

Hmm. Six games takes a certain stamina, even if you're not the DM.

That does seem to indicate that there are players out there, and one of our now absent players managed to recruit from the general forum, so it probably would be worth putting up a recruitment thread there!

Between us, we can probably come up with something.

 

[Scott DeWar]

in the talking th talk/playing the game forums there are even more then those 6 homebrew and publish campain games going on in 3.5, some of which have been going on for a very long time.

There is no reason that if those long running games can recruit new players, so can LEW. Ther eis bad press from neysaying peoples out there athat seem to be purposely exibiting negative verbal inteerfearenc and have reduced intentionaly the attitude of 3.5, saying it is too broken to be fixed and should be abandoned.

Yes, 3.5 has problems. every edition has had, and will have problems. That being said, i must also say that there is still ways to enjoy a system like 3.5 and we, as 3.5 users must speak out when the recruiting is started to invite people to LEW.

Sorry, but I tend to talk too much and will now get off the soap box.

 

[HolyMan]

in the talking th talk/playing the game forums there are even more then those 6 homebrew and publish campain games going on in 3.5, some of which have been going on for a very long time.

There is no reason that if those long running games can recruit new players, so can LEW. Ther eis bad press from neysaying peoples out there athat seem to be purposely exibiting negative verbal inteerfearenc and have reduced intentionaly the attitude of 3.5, saying it is too broken to be fixed and should be abandoned.

Yes, 3.5 has problems. every edition has had, and will have problems. That being said, i must also say that there is still ways to enjoy a system like 3.5 and we, as 3.5 users must speak out when the recruiting is started to invite people to LEW.

Sorry, but I tend to talk too much and will now get off the soap box.

Morning Scott looks like some coffee is in order lol

Are we going to try new recuritment first or should I send my adventure proposal through and use the guys at the RDI??

I know a few of the new guys that have resently jjoined EnWorld and they have almost all of them made a LEW character so we have some of the "raw material" needed for Trouvere's ideals

HM