NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 8214524">People have very different tastes. And our tastes evolve over time. I can definitely understand differing points of view. When I first started I fully embraced every facet of the advice in 2E Ravenloft, and in the 2E books, and ran my games that way. Over time though, I did become  a bit frustrated with how story was handled (I particularly noticed it when I would read the examples of Van Richten's hunts of the monsters in the van richten books and realize they sounded a lot more fluid, free and open than my adventures). That, and the whole "Living adventure" thing with independently minded NPCs in Feast of Goblyns, shifted my thinking over time. I had a number of evolutions as a GM beyond that (I also played 3E, as written, as intended, and grew very frustrated with the way those adventures were handled). For me, one key thing I realized was frustrating me was advice discouraging us from discovering events organically through the dice. If someone dies, even if it is unexpected and possibly frustrating, it actually made game play more exciting in the long haul for me. Especially for horrorI designed a horror game about two or three years ago, and while it was totally different from a ravenloft like setting, it was definitely in part built on that experience I had as a GM running Ravenloft. One thing I did right away is what people have been advocating: I made characters killable but competent. That is, you have paths, which are like classes, and you can advance in level, but generally speaking you never increase or decrease how many wounds you can take (and you can only take a couple before you go down)-- there are two exceptions to this. So characters gained more abilities, but they remained vulnerable. The first adventure I ran to playtest the system resulted in a total party kill, and I was happy with that (didn't want total party kills all the time, but I wanted to know they could happen---particularly if characters were not cautious). One thing that also did, even if it was just by accident, was let the players know very loudly: you can die in this. All of this is taste of course. I understand some people find it more scary if they are playing one character who is unlikely to die over a long campaign because they invest in that character, but I find this approach more scary personally because it means you don't know if you will survive opening that door or not</blockquote>

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