New Realms = Old School

[Thanlis]

That would shake my world beyond the level of seeing my stuff getting used by other people. See, I've been busy flaming away at how harmful the RPGA has been in influencing 4E's design for the better part of 2 years now. So if you really pull a hewcrawling game off in a LFR/MyRealms environment - any crawl, really - replete with random loot and unbalanced encounters.... then I'm going to eat my proverbial hat.

I was thinking about this for a local hexcrawl campaign, actually, although I stopped short of recommending it -- no reason they should change from something that's already working for them. The trick is to treat each encounter as a single MYRE adventure, which really ramps up the amount of experience you can use for each encounter. So in theory, piece of cake. Practice is always different.

I think the biggest problem would be the economy; the LFR economy is pretty laughable. Functional, but not very realistic or (ahem) immersive.

 

[Kurtomatic]

I'm thinking about doing a hex crawl with RPGA 'My Realms' adventures utilizing your stuff. I think that I can pull it off, I think I've got players willing to try.

Great minds, and all that.., I had exactly this same idea. I was already thinking about troubleshooting a 4E sandbox format, while also playing LFR regularly and looking at the MYRE guidelines; so when Windjammer posted this thread a fiendishly perverse notion entered my head.

Why not leverage the social engineering aspect of LFR to run an open sandbox by wrapping game sessions inside the MYRE campaign interface? When folks talk about West Marches-style sandboxes, they focus a lot on the old-school gameplay, but I was particularly interested in Ben Robbin's development of the campaign as a social problem-solving exercise:

A secondary goal was to make the schedule adapt to the complex lives of adults. Ad hoc scheduling and a flexible roster meant (ideally) people got to play when they could but didn’t hold up the game for everyone else if they couldn’t. If you can play once a week, that’s fine. If you can only play once a month, that’s fine too. link

Ever had the problem as a GM where you have a stable of good players, but like herding cats, you can never get more than 3 of them into the same game session for two games in a row? West Marches-style games are session-bound affairs where you get done what you get done in the time available, and that's all you get done. Just like LFR. While I would never pretend to run an authentic OSR game in LFR, I think there are some interesting synchronicities that offer the opportunity to inject some old-school flavor.

Working against you are general 4E issues with sandboxing, 4E issues with sandboxing aggravated further by the LFR campaign rules, and finally the MYRE-specific module guidelines.

I don't want to noise up this excellent thread with my LFR scheming, but as an example, as noted above, there are strict campaign rules about experience and treasure in LFR that simply cannot be ignored if you're trying to participate in the official campaign. You can do what you like for a home campaign, but in that case you don't need My Realms anyway. So what you have to do for MYRE games, is award XP and gold normally, up to the maximum allowed for the level band you're in, at the end of the session. Anything in excess of that turns into funny-money that evaporates into a cloud of ale and whores. However, within the session, all that cash is still good as long as its spent on consumables or other swag (rituals!) that you don't mind losing when you leave the table. Unbalanced encounters I don't see as much of a problem; If you make a bad choice and get squished, you better hope you scrounged some 'surplus' loot to pay for your raise dead before you leave my table, so that 500 gp doesn't come out of your persistent campaign stash.

My view of the MYRE guidelines is that as long as you leave my games with only what is allowed by the campaign rules, I don't completely abuse the setting, and I stick to running 4E rules-as-written (with perhaps a few table-rules), I can pretty much do what I want inside the context of my game sessions.., including hex-crawling.

 

[JohnSnow]

To me, Ravenloft got it right. A campaign setting should be about a month's travel side to side. For me anyway.

OTOH, if it's that small, you have a much more limited choice for terrain and climate.

I guess I just prefer much more focused than diverse in my settings.

Totally a personal preference there.

I think a lot of people want their settings to reflect the adventures of legendary, mythical, or fictional characters. And MANY of those have experiences that extend far beyond one country.

Just as a few examples, Alexander's empire stretched from India to Greece. Caesar fought from Britain to Egypt. Augustus conquered "the whole world." Even King Arthur was credited by Geoffrey of Monmouth with exploits in France. Charlemagne fought battles from Germany to the Pyrenees. Richard the Lionheart and many others went on crusades to far-off Jerusalem. Henry V spent years trying to press the English claim in France. The list goes on and on.

Mythological heroes like Hercules, Beowulf, and Jason are usually worse. And don't get me started on literary fantasy heroes like Conan, Elric, or Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser, all of whom trod the face of their entire world (sometimes even going further than that).

A setting the size of France works for low-level heroes or early medieval (dark ages) settings. That's the size of Brian Boru's Ireland, Robin Hood's England, or the actual historical King Arthur's Britain (if he existed). However, by the time you get to the high middle ages (1000 or later), continent-spanning adventures make sense for many heroes. By the time a setting starts to feel like the European Renaissance, it needs not just many countries, but multiple continents.

Of course, the settings need to be much more heavily populated. Personally, I like the feel of a slightly more mature dark ages. It's sparsely populated enough to be manageable, while having a big enough geographic scope to feel epic.

But you're right that it's largely a matter of personal taste.

 

[S'mon]

I don't want to noise up this excellent thread with my LFR scheming, but as an example, as noted above, there are strict campaign rules about experience and treasure in LFR that simply cannot be ignored if you're trying to participate in the official campaign. You can do what you like for a home campaign, but in that case you don't need My Realms anyway. So what you have to do for MYRE games, is award XP and gold normally, up to the maximum allowed for the level band you're in, at the end of the session.

Can't you run a sequence of back-to-back 'sessions', with the adventure for that 'session' determined by which hex the PCs enter?

I think the whole linear-sequence-of-encounters model exemplified by Kobold Hall in the DMG has been very damaging to the development of 4e. And I can see how RPGA play has encouraged this. Anything that brings back an exploration component is welcome, in my book.

 

[Windjammer]

Working against you are general 4E issues with sandboxing, 4E issues with sandboxing aggravated further by the LFR campaign rules, and finally the MYRE-specific module guidelines.

Are these open to the public? I'd like to have a look at them. I'm tempted to log my own campaign onto MYRE, although I'm unsure whether that's possible and wortwhile.

 

[UniversalMonster]

Well, you could just login to the RPGA.com website, set up an event, and download MYRE1-1 to start with.

Here's an easy breakdown for you though:

There are two tiers: 1st-2nd and 3rd-4th.

For the low-tier version of your adventure, you have an
experience point budget of 375xp per PC. Therefore, if
you have 5 players at your table when you run your My
Realms adventure, your total XP budget would be 1875
to create your encounters.
You can also include up to 25xp (per player) in "discretionary" XP- often it is used for Quest XP. So a full reward would be anything up to 400XP.

The high tier version (3rd and 4th level) is 525 xp per PC (with 35xp discretionary or quest XP). So at the 3rd-4th level we are talking about 560XP.

As far as the gold/treasure goes:
Low tier it is up to 75gp each, plus a treasure bundle. (High tier is up to 100 gp). In addition, at the end of the adventure, the PCs have access to take what the Living Forgotten Realms campaign calls a “treasure bundle.”

Here are the possible bundles:
• Any magic item from the Player’s Handbook
series (Player’s Handbook, Player’s Handbook 2,
etc.) of the PC’s level or lower.
• An extra 50gp at low tier or an extra 75gp at
high tier.
• A potion of healing at low tier, or a potion of
healing + 25gp at high tier.

 

[Thanlis]

As far as the gold/treasure goes:
Low tier it is up to 75gp each, plus a treasure bundle. (High tier is up to 100 gp). In addition, at the end of the adventure, the PCs have access to take what the Living Forgotten Realms campaign calls a “treasure bundle.”

Here are the possible bundles:
• Any magic item from the Player’s Handbook
series (Player’s Handbook, Player’s Handbook 2,
etc.) of the PC’s level or lower.

The key here is that it's player choice. This is probably going to be the biggest source of dissonance. I think if I were trying to do hexcrawling, I'd ask my players to agree to forfeit their choice -- or more specifically, allow me to choose for them. This isn't against the rules, but does require the players to be on board with the concept.

Then again, they presumably already are since they've signed up for a hexcrawl, right?

Other notes -- I wouldn't limit myself to one MYRE per hex. If a hex has two encounters in it, you might want more experience points to work with for each encounter than a MYRE provides.

Also, it's worth asking why you're shoehorning a hexcrawl into LFR. When I think about it for the local Western March style hexcrawl, it's because one of the players has been a little worried the campaign will die and he doesn't want to lose his investment in his character. But the only real win from the player point of view is that they can pick their characters up and go play in higher level LFR games somewhere down the line.

From the DM point of view, it's just additional bookkeeping. If all you want is the DM rewards, you can sanction your home games as non-LFR games and still get ship tiles and Dark Sun boxes and so on.

I think it'd be more useful and interesting to merge the two if you had an existing LFR player base and you wanted to do a hex crawl with them. I.e., it's a tool for going from LFR to hexcrawl, not necessarily the other way around. The Glen Burnie, MD drow campaign is a good example of this, although it's not a hex crawl -- the architects are using the LFR framework to run a more traditional campaign for LFR players, and it's working very well.

 

[Kurtomatic]

Can't you run a sequence of back-to-back 'sessions', with the adventure for that 'session' determined by which hex the PCs enter?

I think the whole linear-sequence-of-encounters model exemplified by Kobold Hall in the DMG has been very damaging to the development of 4e. And I can see how RPGA play has encouraged this. Anything that brings back an exploration component is welcome, in my book.

I don't disagree with you in general, and if you (or someone) is running a 'home' LFR game, and one of your players takes his PC to a con, no one is likely to care how you ran your game as long that PC fits the expected LFR norms.

However, my situation is a little more complicated, since I'm intending to run MRYE events at a public sign-up venue with a 4-5 hour time slot. In the lower heroic tier, at least, the starting hex will always be Loudwater; the players will pick a intended site-based adventure/delve, explore/resolve wilderness hexes during overland travel, and hopefully find and complete the site-based encounters.

Public sign-ups lets me draw on a large pool of players (part of the old school sandbox formula), while allowing players to mix conventional LFR mods (which will often have better magic item bundles) with MYRE events for a change of pace.

Are these open to the public? I'd like to have a look at them. I'm tempted to log my own campaign onto MYRE, although I'm unsure whether that's possible and wortwhile.

Each level band (H1:1-4, H2:4-7, H3:7-10, P1:11-14, etc.) has its own MYRE 'module', which is just a shell containing the MRYE guidelines for that band. So technically, you'd need to schedule a MYRE event to download the PDF.

The question is, are you interested in your player's characters having portability in public LFR campaign events (conventions, game stores, etc.)? If not, then MRYE is like hanging a giant anchor around your neck. You can always sanction your home games as generic RPGA events to collect the DMing bennies, and ignore all the LFR rules.

If you are interested in PC portability in the public LFR campaign, then MYRE is a gift from the LFR gods.

Here's an easy breakdown for you though...<snip>

Since Peter brought up the high/low mechanism, let me put that in context with sandboxing since this is another trade off where you can go all subversive on LFR's fat ass.

Normally, I've signed up for a slot, I sit down, the players all introduce themselves to each other, we discover our party composition (race, level, class, etc.), the DM reads the mod intro, and then asks "high or low?" This is when the OSR grognards start wadding their panties (JUST KIDDING!!!). Basically, you get to order your difficulty level off the menu before the meal is served (OMG, VIDEOGAME!!!). The DM has two sets of stat blocks for high and low, and also has guidelines for adding or reducing critters from each encounter based on the number of players at the table. As Peter mentioned, the high vs. low decision also impacts the total XP award, since the encounters are budgeted in advance for the difficulty level chosen.

I think MYRE events can safely chuck all that internally. As long as the PCs leave my MYRE1-1 event with 520 XP or less (and I don't commit any serious rules or setting faux pas), then the precise details of how they earned that XP is a black box of my own design. To use a software development metaphor, I think of the MYRE format as a design by contract interface to the public LFR campaign continuity.

So, instead of picking 'high' or 'low', the players start the session in town looking for adventure leads (skill challenge). For each potential site-based adventure they discover, they will be given a general idea how tough it will be, and make a decision based on how strong they're feeling tonight. If they're feeling lucky, they can ignore even that hand-holding, and just start poking around in hexes if they like; it's their 4 hour time slot, and its up to them to figure out how they want to get that 520 XP.

That magic item bundle Peter mentioned? They have to find and secure a treasure chest/vault/stash in order to earn that bundle. That target stash also has the 'Quest XP' attached to it, so there's another XP booster. If they manage to ace the 520 XP early, they can declare victory and go for soda if they like; if they keep playing I'll make sure they know that they're XP capped for the remainder of session; maybe they still need that bundle or they're just having a good time? Its not true old school, but it certainly injects a sandboxy vibe that LFR (otherwise) utterly lacks.

I still have lots of prep work on this scheme (all sandboxes are hugely front-loaded this way), but I hope to give it a test drive this summer.

 

[Thanlis]

That magic item bundle Peter mentioned? They have to find and secure a treasure chest/vault/stash in order to earn that bundle. That target stash also has the 'quest xp' attached to it, so there's another XP booster. If they manage to ace the 520 XP early, they can declare victory and go for soda if they like; if they keep playing I'll make sure they know that they're XP capped for the remainder of session; maybe they still need that bundle or they're just having a good time? Its not true old school, but it certainly injects a sandboxy vibe that LFR (otherwise) utterly lacks.

That's pretty hot. Are you going to go with "choose your own magic item" and all? I guess that works better if you're fixing to the four hour slot time period.

 

[Kurtomatic]

That's pretty hot. Are you going to go with "choose your own magic item" and all? I guess that works better if you're fixing to the four hour slot time period.

Thanks!

Yes, the format is fixed: the DM decides which bundles the players can choose from (they only get one each) during the MYRE adventure (if any), but in the case of the magic item bundle, the players get the narrative power to choose a PHB-series item of their level or less. Which is actually pretty gimp compared to some LFR mods. Here is the treasure rules from MYRE1-1 so you can see exactly how it works.

The amount of treasure given in your adventure depends on whether the adventure is played at the low or high tier. At low tier, your adventure can be stocked with non-magical treasure (coins, gems, art, etc.) worth 75gp. At high tier, the non-magical treasure value you can reward is 100gp.

In addition, at the end of the adventure, the PCs have access to take what the Living Forgotten Realms campaign calls a “treasure bundle.” For this adventure, the treasure bundles include one of the following:

• Any magic item from the Player’s Handbook series (Player’s Handbook, Player’s Handbook 2, etc.) of the PC’s level or lower.
• An extra 50gp at low tier or an extra 75gp at high tier.
• A potion of healing at low tier, or a potion of healing + 25gp at high tier.

If a PC chooses the first treasure bundle (any magic item), that bundle counts against the limit of one found magic item per level (see the Living Forgotten Realms Character Creation Guide for further details on treasure bundles and found magic items). Note that the player makes the determination on the magic item selected for the first treasure bundle, not the DM. This treasure number includes any rewards paid to the PCs, or any other wealth they picked up during the adventure. The PCs may not take more than the treasure listed above away from the adventure.

Savvy LFR players will almost always take the bonus cash or perhaps the healing potion bundle at H1, depending on class, build, etc.