GAHH!! Time to take a break from 3.5

[Steel_Wind]

Best of luck with RM2! I would be very interested to see if you could convert Spectre of Sorrows or Price of Courage to Rolemaster without losing the bulk of the adventures' meat, but as you say it's far more interesting to kitbash a campaign yourself.

Oh, its doable. I converted 1st edition classic DL 1-4 and parts of DL10 in the past to RM2. So I know it works.

If anything, it's more doable than converting classic DL to 3E, where the dragons have to be scaled back as they are just too powerful for the first few adventures (not that RM's dragons are wusses - far from it).

So yes, the DL AOM adv path could be converted without too much trouble. And I don't mind running modules - but I have now run them for two years straight, more or less. And it's weighing on me heavily now.

It was nice in the beginning. Vastly reduced prep time was a great luxury - as my immediately prior DL campaign was all kitbashed/ worked up from scratch, it seemed like a breath of fresh air. The DL campaign started at first level and went to about 10th when we stopped and went with AoW.

Which, looking back, was about the perfect time to end it, power wise, under 3.5.

But one of the things that is BEST about being the DM of a campaign is that after the session ends - the DM's gaming time continues. It's back to design and crafting the next adventure.

Too much of that - and it starts to feel like a job. None of it - and the game begins to feel like I am turning pages in a book and rolling dice; little else.

Like all things, it's a happy medium. Moderation in all things works best.

Whether that's combat, power level, magic items, or using pregenerated adventure materials.

 

[Doug McCrae]

For a lot of people, myself included, D&D breaks at high level. The designers have recognised the sweet spot as being 4-14 so 4e seeks to preserve it, extending it out to 1-30. So it might be more to your taste than you suppose. Also magic items will no longer be a necessity, due to the buffs they provide being so great.

I've been allowing magic item purchase in my current game but I think I'll disallow it for my next campaign, and try to make magic items more interesting - the basic stat buffers are just too boring.

I don't agree with your point about consequences though. In a way, raise dead needs to be in the game precisely so PCs face long term consequences. After all if PCs are dying all the time they won't have to stick around to 'face the music'. They will never see the bad effects their actions may have caused.

You're probably right to change system altogether. D&D just doesn't do grim n' gritty.

 

[Steel_Wind]

But honestly, I am also not sure if I really like a "grim & gritty" campaign. My fellow players used to played CoC, for example, long ago before I was in the campaign.
One of the complaints they have in retrospect is: If your character dies (or goes mad, and both happens in CoC fairly easily and often) to often, you detach yourself from him. You also will begin to break verisimilitude when creating your characters - suddenly, everyone is heavily armed, in the hope at least this time, they will get to kill the cultists and monsters in time.

Call of Cthulhu was something I was strongly considering running as an interlude between 3.5 and RM2. I started to read CoC adventures earlier this week.

As one of the posters above mentioned, a break from High Fantasy might be best - and I appreciate that too.

The thing with CoC is, you have to enjoy the game for being what it is - an adventure mystery game. The overall elements of the mystery are what drives the fun; not the characters.

If you are in it to get attached to your character and work it up - it is certain to end in disappointment. The game is lethal by design. That is both the game's charm - and its weakness.

I could try a SF game for an interlude instead I suppose. That might be interesting. The last time I tried it, it was with LUG's Star Trek TNG. It had its moments, but I find SF games for me to be very hard to run and stay involved in it. It's very hard to tell the players with a straight face to invest time and emotion into a campaign that everyone knows will flare out pretty quickly.

If I had managed to acquire a suitable amount of Star Wars D20 - I might have gone that route. Except my wife is a major Star Wars geek and knows the setting better than anyone at the table - and I'll be damned if I'll have my wife rolling her eyes at me during a game that I'm GMing

 

[IcyCool]

While I'm not entirely in agreement with you about this being a failing of the system, I do feel it is a failing in the default campaign assumption.

And there are a couple of ways to deal with it. My preferred way is to rotate the systems you play in (which sounds like what you are doing now). Not only does this let you recharge the creative batteries while still gaming, but it exposes you to the wealth of wonderful games that are out there. I just wrapped up my 7th Sea campaign, and it's been one of the most enjoyable experiences I've had.

Another way to deal with this (and it sounds like I'm not telling you anything you don't already know here), is to change the default campaign assumption to one of your liking. Set limits on how long someone can be dead before life-returning magic no longer works, change "save-or-die" spells to "save-or-dying", etc. The game system lends itself remarkably well to tweaking.

And finally, if there is one thing that I've learned about comic books and super heroes, it's that you don't hurt Superman by punching him. You hurt him by punching Lois Lane. There are always consequences.

 

[Planeswalker Maloran]

Wouldn't it be cool if everytime you want to resourrect someone you would have to enter the "Underworld"/"Afterworld"/"Twilight Zone" and get your man out?

A while ago, I made that a house rule in my campaigns. The players very quickly got more careful about not dying. I've also ruled that even True Resurrection brings you back one level lower; and at 5th level or higher, if you die and make a new character, the character is one level lower than your previous character was.

And for individual campaigns, I've sometimes banned clerics entirely, and typically encouraged everyone to not play a cleric.

I agree, it's utterly ridiculous that 8 hours or so after a fight that nearly killed the whole party, they're all perfectly fine, back to full health and full spells. I have ruled that there is no spell that will cure ability damage, it has to heal on its own. I have ruled that ability drain can only be converted to ability damage, not removed; and only with high-level magic even then.

But, what I found was a lot easier than all of that was to run a mortals-only campaign in White Wolf's World of Darkness. There are no healers. No matter how much experience the party gains, absolutely everything is bigger and badder than them. The whole party versus one freshly sired vampire is a serious challenge, possibly lethal. Damage will heal, but very slowly; measured in days or weeks. The game was intended to have somewhat of a horror theme, and the players never broke character. They feared for their lives! Of course, it helped that the flaw Dark Fate was mandatory for that campaign, so they knew from the start they were all going to die horribly, if they were lucky. And I didn't find it made them detach from the characters. If anything, it made them determined to get the best role-playing experience possible from the characters before they died.

(On a side-note... is Regeneration just a silly relic from a bygone era, or is there actually something in D&D that is capable of severing people's limbs? I've never encountered a mechanic for it, so presumably it can only be done through story and role-playing; and yet it's still nowhere near permanent. Though admittedly, a character losing a leg would really suck. But there are ways around it! Get a Carpet of Flying and always sit on it, for instance. Actually spend money and effort to find a work-around for the problem, rather than just *POOF* it's all better!)

 

[Steel_Wind]

While I get what you're saying, and don't completely disagree, this just seems a funny argument, coming from you of all people, SW. Heck, you were the pioneer here to use a video game to enhance your table top game. BTW, you gonna keep the projector set up for RM?

Computer role playing games are great. I enjoy them a lot. I enjoy making them. I enjoy integrating in to PnP gaming the sizzle and ease of use of computers too.

And when it comes to integrating tabletop projection and creating new computer programs to make pnp gaming more fun to play - believe me - ba ba ba baby you just ain't seen NOTHIN' yet

But the idea of fight - rest heal - fight - rest heal - fight. DIE. Reload. is not an element of computer gaming that I think leads to overall superior game play in a PnP game. At least - it does not for me.

I know it's just fine for a lot of people. I'm just not one of them.

From 1983 to December of 2005, I never allowed a person to be raised from the dead in any campaign I ever ran. There were hiatuses from gaming in that 23 year period - probably enough for ... 9 or 10 years of hiatuses I guess, overall.

Still - 13 or 14 years of gaming and not one raise dead or resurrection ever did not seem to cause any players to leave from my table. It's MORE than doable. You pull punches here and there to be sure - but players adjust quite quickly to permanent death. They play in a way which does not court it quite so much - and which prepares to stave it off with much more vigor, discipline and creativity.

In the end, the players think more and prepare more. They rely upon game mechanics less to preserve their lives. It makes for a superior game overall if everyone is accepting of it. But a lot of people are not accepting of it - and for them - it just won't work.

 

[Eytan Bernstein]

I'm not a fan of raising magic at all. I'm perfectly comfortable in campaigns where it's not allowed and often shock "raise-happy" DMs and players when I tell them that I don't want my character raised. The CLW wands are an entirely different story. I think the way to solve that is as a DM, don't allow such huge amounts of down time. Don't be afraid to go against typical D&D conventions.

Some of this is a player mindset vs. DM mindset problem. I suspect that people who enjoy playing primarily, like D&D a lot better than people who are much more comfortable as DMs. I've seen many a DM find that their best efforts just couldn't cut it because they would never spend as much time maximizing their encounters and baddies as any player does on his single character. This is completely understandable. Some of these DMs tend to just give NPCs random abilities that have nothing to do with the design of the game to add mystery. Players randomly find that the NPC is immune to some effects. This can frustrate players who use enchantments, fear, and other abilities because DMs can arbitrarily decide that they don't want the monster going down so fast. There has to be a balance between the DM having fun and mysterious encounters and the players feeling like the DM isn't just pulling things out of nowhere when he miscalculated how challenging a fight is.

Personally, I don't care for super gritty games. I sometimes feel like these can be a power trip on the part of DMs, very much setting up a DM vs. players mode. A game (regardless of which system you play) should never be a battle between DMs and players to see who could kill the other. If it feels that way, perhaps it is time to look at other systems and reassess. A lot of this is perspective - how you look at the game and how you enjoy it - but that doesn't make it any less valid. If it doesn't work for you, change it, try something new, or make a compromise. Ironically, I do enjoy Call of Cthulu, but I am aware that I can become detached from characters in such a game because of how high the mortality rate is.

 

[Tarek]

I couldn't run a 3.5 campaign under the default assumptions.

The biggest change I make is this: hand-placement of all magic items, and all magic items that can be used by monsters WILL be used by monsters. That wand of Cure Light Wounds? It's going to be used by the goblin shaman... Most magic items will be "expendable", like potions, scrolls, and wands, or low-level weapons and armor.

The second biggest change, is that wizards don't get to pick their spells at level-up. They get one spell, and it must be one that their teacher knows, and their teacher must like them enough to give it to them. They can choose to purchase the opportunity to learn more spells, or trade for them, but they only get one spell at level-up.

Naturally, wizard scrolls are rarer than cleric scrolls, and usually contain "utility" spells like, say, Tenser's Floating Disk or Identify.

The third change I make is a campaign thing; I keep track of time. If the cleric wants to create a wand of Cure Light, or the magic user wants to create a wand of Magic Missiles, I rule that the item creation feat gives them the knowledge to do so, but not necessarily the materials (which usually have to be hand collected or purchased at great expense from other wizards or the church) or the time (which has to come out of the campaign calender). I also boost the level of item creation feats other than Create Scroll.


Wizards of the Coast seems to think the "resource management" part of D&D is "not fun." While that's true to some degree, what WotC is missing is that without that "resource management", there is no thrill of overcoming a challenge.

If Wizards in 4.0 become Warlocks, constantly blasting things, if Clerics heal party members by hitting monsters... then the resource management game is thrown out the window and there's very little challenge in the game. Even overwhelming numbers of creatures just becomes an exercise in dice-rolling.

 

[SuStel]

Ooh, I know what you need, Steel Wind. You need to run a game of Paranoia, in the Straight style, which will actually let you make a campaign out of it.

Paranoia is, as we all know, the game in which the GM only rewards the players when they entertain him.

So go on, let those players have their ressurrect— er, clones. Kill 'em dozens of times! They'll just be there to give you the giggles anyway.

 

[Son_of_Thunder]

Preach it!!!

Steel_Wind,

All I can say is I AGREE. It's why my group and I went back to 2e.