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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4503431" data-attributes="member: 74166">A Type Of GameThe first and thus far only game I'm running with 4E is being run using the mysterious "Internet", with a bunch of friends using <a href="http://gametable.galactanet.com/" target="_blank">GameTable</a> for a battlemat, <a href="http://www.skype.com/" target="_blank">Skype</a> for table talk, and IRC as a final place to pose actions and effects. The game runs weekly.A Goal For A GameThe game is an explicit takeoff of the Mysterious Dungeon genre of RPGs. They're also called "roguelikes" and that's a fair starting point, but some Mysterious Dungeon games have many interstitial towns and they're all built with the assumption and in some cases the expectation that people will die before the end and have to restart. On subsequent playthroughs different plot events happen, and sometimes people can prevent some of the items they pick up from being lost on death. Anyway, the way I decided to model this all is with the story of "Avandra's Path". The goddess Avandra was once a real person, and the course of her life still remains in the world, charged with divine power. At important places in her life, or places where she spent a long time, are "oases of peace", where the words of devils and demons cannot hold sway. The path itself shifts randomly, to throw the wicked into confusion, and it's rumored that if you walk it and Avandra is merciful to you, you will find whatever you truly seek. It's also rumored that at the very end are the material wealth and power that Avandra discarded to take the last step into the Silver Sea to join the gods. Certainly, from the Shrine of Avandra's Birth, there shines on a distant mountaintop a mysterious rainbow gleam, promising nothing and everything.I want my players to feel like big damn heroes, so they are explicitly going places that no one might go again for hundreds of years, finding lost things and interesting new developments in equal measure. I also want them to have goals to accomplish, which is why I asked them what they were looking for when they stepped onto the path. By the time they hit paragon tier they'll have found it, but that will only be the beginning of their journey.What I ChangedOh, lots of things. In case it wasn't apparent I'm rolling up random dungeons to create "floors" of about five encounters each, with extended rests only possible in between. Initially it's because the players are following Avandra's River, which carries anyone who falls on the path back to the shrine to be reborn, and it's got some protective powers but occasionally vanishes into the earth and they have to find the other end. But I think at paragon tier they'll depart from that and use a variant on the exodus knife to move between "floors". Every 4 floors is a "dungeon town" where they can buy supplies and advance their personal story through sidesessions in just IRC - and on complaints from the paladin's player I'm going to allow them to sidesession during the extended rests as well. There's not a lot of meat for a paladin of love to get hooks into with just combat and the occasional skill challenge.I tweak the random dungeon generation rules, obviously to first make only one set of entrance and exit stairs, but also to generate a dungeon in hex tiles instead of squares, and also to not put a dragon on every floor. I take "dragon's den" to be the "boss goes here" sign and put an elite in the next encounter I roll up. If it's "dragon's den" again then a solo gets in. Major quests take a couple encounters to discover the story of Avandra's life and pick up a relic of her passing; minor quests are small problems a town has that can be resolved by walking the path. Personal quests also count as 1 minor quest for the whole party when they're advanced.I don't place loot explicitly - I have a system that uses skill checks and player descriptions to distribute the same number of parcels, but chosen randomly, and with some extra little self-designed bennies to make up for not being able to extended-rest more than once every 5 encounters.Obviously I use the tweaking system in the DMG to make elites out of normal monsters, but I've made several other not-strictly-covered tweaks as well to advance player stories. The starlock eventually wants to sail the sea of stars, so when I dropped a crashed ship which resembles one you might find in a scenario rhyming with "bellslammer" into the middle of the forest, I modified some stormclaw scorpions to deal radiant damage with their claws and psychic damage with their poison, because the kobolds were feeding them from a crate in the hold that had been contaminated with stardust. The ranger is off on something that rhymes with "gyro chest" to bring the rain to his nomadic village, so I created alternate mythic personas for the entire party and we had a fight that was telling part 1 of the story of How Strong Legs Tamed The Storm, where Strong Legs hunts down the Six Prey who are also being quarried by Storm's Wolf, Lightning, and we all posed in IRC in the third-person past tense. It may have mechanically resembled a fight with six heavy warhorses who ran around a lot, and a lightning hazard, but it felt very different. Also I'm rewarding my players for their minor quests not with treasure or magical items, but with a flavor upgrade for one piece of gear based on the story - a little minor enchantment that does something cool. The ranger, for example, is going to get as a result a +1 subtle scimitar of hunting lightning, which when he is adjacent to only one enemy makes a Dex vs. Reflex followup that deals 1d6 lightning damage per tier. (When he completes the second part, How Strong Legs Broke Storm's Steed, Thunder, his other scimitar will be called of charging thunder and do 1d6 damage per tier but only if that's less than or equal to once/twice/thrice the number of squares he moved that turn.)</blockquote>

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