D&D 5E Merwin said it better than Schwalb

[The Black Ranger]

Well, seeing as one of the final adventures assumed that the party consisted of the same PCs as the when it began, and it was a meatgrinder, I'm not really sure what they were thinking. It was great for a good belly laugh, though.

Probably got a bit carried away.

 

[Hussar]

Do you have a copy of that build?

While Age of Worms is a well liked adventure* it doesn't set the bar for Pathfinder or D&D. I've heard from many people that the adventure may have been written harder than it should have been. The writers are sometimes capable of making an adventure too hard. I seriously doubt it was created with pure optimization in mind.

You asked for a module where optimisation was assumed. Asked and answered. Go back into the Paizo board threads talking about the design of AoW and you'll see that they most certainly did deliberately design with the idea that the players would bring their "A" game.
[MENTION=5038]Greg K[/MENTION] - yes, it's true that a 2e specialty priest could have a wizard's THAC0 and d4 HP. However, in return, that priest generally got the ability to cast wizard spells (and a LOT Of wizard spells) a good chunk of which were combat spells. IOW, it turned the cleric into a wizard that could heal. Hardly a non-combat character.

What official rules in 3e contained the "Cloistered Cleric" btw? Weren't those variant rules from Unearthed Arcana and not even part of the base core rules? IOW, the rules were included for people who wanted to build campaigns specifically for this type of character. Let's see you bring your Cloistered Cleric into Age of Worms and see how well your group does.

 

[Greg K]

delete. double post as computer froze up

 

[Greg K]

You asked for a module where optimisation was assumed. Asked and answered. Go back into the Paizo board threads talking about the design of AoW and you'll see that they most certainly did deliberately design with the idea that the players would bring their "A" game.

[MENTION=5038]Greg K[/MENTION] - yes, it's true that a 2e specialty priest could have a wizard's THAC0 and d4 HP. However, in return, that priest generally got the ability to cast wizard spells (and a LOT Of wizard spells) a good chunk of which were combat spells. IOW, it turned the cleric into a wizard that could heal. Hardly a non-combat character.

What spells they got depended on the deity and their spheres. Many specialty priests could not heal or had very minimal healing. Similarly, not all specialty priests got damaging or save or die spells.

What official rules in 3e contained the "Cloistered Cleric" btw? Weren't those variant rules from Unearthed Arcana and not even part of the base core rules? IOW, the rules were included for people who wanted to build campaigns specifically for this type of character.

Unearthed Arcana is official rules variants. Is it official core? It depends. True, the cloistered cleric is not in the core rules. However, it is an example of using customizing a character (which is in the phb and the DMG) and the tailored spell list variant (which is in the DMG). So the cloistered cleric could be build using just the core books (I built a lot of 3e "specialty priests" with tailored spell lists and abilities long before UA).

Let's see you bring your Cloistered Cleric into Age of Worms and see how well your group does.

Why? I have no interest in adventure paths nor do the people I know (personally, since 1986, I have had no interest in modules or Adventure Paths). Which is exactly my point? How D&D is played and what is useless varies by table. Some people want Adventure Paths and combat heavy games while others don't and run games with very little combat. (Btw, the DMG tells DMs that they should be tailoring modules (including opponent's combat abilities, DCs, etc.) to the party they have. Therefore, if the group is not very combat oriented and the DM is not altering things accordingly, one could make an argument that the DM is running 3e wrong )

 

[The Black Ranger]

You asked for a module where optimisation was assumed. Asked and answered. Go back into the Paizo board threads talking about the design of AoW and you'll see that they most certainly did deliberately design with the idea that the players would bring their "A" game.

[MENTION=5038]Greg K[/MENTION] - yes, it's true that a 2e specialty priest could have a wizard's THAC0 and d4 HP. However, in return, that priest generally got the ability to cast wizard spells (and a LOT Of wizard spells) a good chunk of which were combat spells. IOW, it turned the cleric into a wizard that could heal. Hardly a non-combat character.

What official rules in 3e contained the "Cloistered Cleric" btw? Weren't those variant rules from Unearthed Arcana and not even part of the base core rules? IOW, the rules were included for people who wanted to build campaigns specifically for this type of character. Let's see you bring your Cloistered Cleric into Age of Worms and see how well your group does.

I am a frequent lurker of the Paizo boards and I haven't seen anything in the Age of Worms from the writers, or even quotes from writers stating their intent as to the difficulty of Age of Worms. In fact, what have seen is a comment where a DM finished running it and a beguiler made it through all the way to level 22. We all know that a beguiler is not a very powerful class.

Basically what you have is a Paizo AP where it's more than likely the exact difficulty of it was not intentional, challenging yes, but not the difficulty ot has achieved.

Besides, this AP doesn't set the standard, nor does it validate your argument in any way. GregK said it best when he pointed out that the DM may need to adjust the adventure to fit the PC's.

 

[Hussar]

I agree with that. Do you agree that sometimes the problem is the player as well?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

While Age of Worms is a well liked adventure* it doesn't set the bar for Pathfinder or D&D. I've heard from many people that the adventure may have been written harder than it should have been. The writers are sometimes capable of making an adventure too hard. I seriously doubt it was created with pure optimization in mind.

Am I right in thinking that unless we find an adventure that specifically, in text, not subtext, not by implication, calls out the need for "optimized" characters, you won't accept it as an example? If so, fair enough, but let's be clear on that.

I've not read Age of Worms, but I have PLAYED Age of Worms, and our DM knew that it was very hard, and had somehow become aware that PCs were expected to be very tough (presumably from reading through and seeing it expected the same PCs, not replacements, but I have no idea), and he is very much NOT a person who reads message boards or the like. So that information about difficulty was communicated somehow - presumably in the text.

We brought not just semi-optimized PCs to the table, but Gestalt PCs (If you remember those rules), and man, that adventure was HAIR RAISING (we didn't finish the campaign because the DM had to move away, sadly).


Also, re: your "Accidentally hard" theory. Uh. No. AoW was not accidentally difficult - the difficulty was SUSTAINED across an entire AP (well, across all I saw, and everyone I know who has played the rest seems to concur). It wasn't just the "Whoops!" difficulty of the goblin encounter in KotS (where the goblin "boss" can potentially cause a TPK very easily), it was tough through and through, which is a big part of why people liked it, actually.

So I find it hard to believe that whoever wrote the adventure, where he assumed PCs would be alive, not replaced, wasn't aware of this.

 

[Pickles JG]

We played AoW for a couple of levels until we got TPKed so it's a small sample but the part we did was difficult

 

[pemerton]

you don't want to throw the party against skill checks they can't make, knowledges they don't have, and the like.

That's not an issue in 4e - it has level-relative bounded accuracy.

I find I monster (for when the villains are monsters) that will fit based on their role in the world or what they're known for and add that to the story. And then I pray they're close to the right level/challenge.

What I had in mind was - when you introduce an NPC or monster into your gameworld, how do you know that s/he is a villain?

In my game, that's generally a decision for the players to make, in the playing of their PCs.

Let's look at White Plume Mountain for a second. There's a big room full of boiling mud, a room that's a spinning cylinder, a room that's under hot spring, and a frictionless room. And so many others. Rooms were interesting because monsters were boring.

If WPM is the standard for "story and imagination", then I will put this up against it: caverns rather than rooms, but not uninteresting. Or this: I wouldn't really describe the Soul Abattoir as a room, but as a location it was memorable.

Let's look at Keep on the Shadowfell.

I've never played KotS, but I thought its most interesting location was the one with the portal. The WotC 4e module that I know best is H2. It has a room that is a pool of blood with an animating statue in the middle, another room with various teleporting and trapping mirrors, a room with a giant pit that a dragon flies out of, etc. Plus the kitchen/dining room in the chamber of eyes has all the usual furnishing, stores etc.

The rooms don't need to be interesting or memorable because the fights are. The gameplay is fun. So that becomes a crutch and all the fun rests on the gameplay and not the imagination.

I don't understand why imagining scenery is superior to imagining characters. "The Phantom Menace" has more elaborate scenery than "My Dinner With Andre", but I think by just about any measure the latter is a superior film.

Despite their many and evident flaws as written, I think The Bastion of Broken Souls, or OA7 Test of the Samuari, are both more interesting scenarios than White Plume Mountain. I got about 2 years of play each out of the premises of those modules: the latter a fallen demigod trying to turn the world's air into a poison that he will be able to breath and thereby regain his immortality; the former about the fate of the souls of the world, suffering as a result of an ancient pact by the gods that seemed like a good idea at the time. I can't remember any scenery from Bastion of Broken Souls (other than the positive planar stuff that I didn't use); from OA7 I remember the underground, water-filled caverns of the snake cult (because the PCs had a reaosonably dramatic fight there) and also the Momoben Forest where the Peachling Girl lived (the PCs rode through the forest on the backs of great tigers).

In both cases, though, I remember characters - the banished god in Bastion of Broken Souls, whom the PCs befriended; the angel who had to die to open the gate to said god, whom one PC persuaded to let herself be killed, breaking her obligation so as to honour the higher values she was called upon to serve; the dream sorcerer and night hag whose backstory as written I can't remember, but in my game was a secret child of a former Lord of Karma, with great insights into the dreams of all living beings. And in OA7 I remember the Peachling Girl, Za Jikku the fallen demigod, the somewhat hapless peasant monk (Setsu Ikki?) who was the plot device around whom events turned, plus the various NPCs and PCs from my own campaign world who got bound up in the whole thing.

For me, character is not a "crutch"; it is of the essence of story and imagination.

Encounters are only memorable when things are outside the norm: lucky crits, dramatic reversals, improbably strings of luck, etc. I.e. when the rules are not behaving as normal.

This is another case where you speak in the third person when I think you really mean to be speaking in the first person. You seem to be talking here about what makes encounters memorable for you. For me, encounters are memorable because of what was at stake, and who was confronted. Here are a handful of those that I've written up as actual play posts. None of those turned on lucky crits or improbable strings of luck. (There was the odd dramatic reversal, but in 4e that is not the rules not behaving as normal - the whole point of the 4e action resolution mechanics is to produce dramatic reversals.)

Of these four examples, only one - the last - involves scenery (an earthmote from which Vecna fell with the paladin falling after him Gandalf-style; and the Red Grove where the PCs bound a demon to their service). I think the first remains probably the most satisfying social scenario that I have GMed, and the second still stands out to me as one of the tighter moral crunches into which my players have ever got themselves.

The catch is, as much as the rules hinder my ability as a GM to make up outcomes, they also hamper the players'. The rules are equally restrictive on what we can or cannot do.

To be honest, as I said upthread, you need better rules. The links I've posted above are only to a portion of the episodes of play I've written up on these boards, but they contain illustrations of the players making choices that are as imaginative as any I've seen in multiple decades of RPGing. 4e is not the most flexible system I know of (I would probably give that label to HeroWars/Quest, though I imagine there are Fate diehards who would contest that). But it is certainly the most flexible version of D&D, or any other remotely trad FRPG, that I know.

It's certainly far more flexible in play than AD&D, for instance.

If you're only playing The Mechanics, if there's no narrative overlay apart from perhaps talking in story, there is less substance. There are fewer layers. By definition there is less going on.
Can you still have fun? Yes, of course you can. Is it wrong? Nope. But there's less going on.

It's genuinely refrehsing when someone is candid. I respect that. But I have a lot of actual play posts on these boards. I've linked to some of them above, and can provide more links if you like. I may be wrong, but I really believe you have no conception of the sort of game I'm running.

 

[Jeremy E Grenemyer]

Wow...12 pages. Not what I expected.

Thanks to everyone who participated. I can't say I read every post, but I enjoyed the posts I did read.

Some of them left me wishing I had a game to run (it's been awhile).