Piratecat ruined my D&D game

[Kelleris]

--- good advice ---

This is all excellent advice, but there are a few of these points that I have more trouble with than others. More specifically, my version of the "dying's not the only penalty" and "use a zillion plot hooks so you can pretend you had your brilliant master plan in mind all along" sounds a bit different than Piratecat's. I generally start a campaign by figuring out the deep, dark secret that's driving the action, in my case usually some quirk of planar cosmology or campaign history, and the players that are interested in exploiting the deep, dark secret. As a result, what's at stake in most important battles is either information or time - I'm not an especially good roleplayer, and my players tend to avoid close factionalism like the plague, so I have a hard time with Piratecat's "someone else suffers politically" plan, but the PCs are always on the clock, even when they don't know it, and they're always trying to figure out some momentous secret of the campaign world, even when they don't know it.

That's an interesting different, actually. I tend to prefer one overarching arc, while Piratecat and maybe Quasqueton from his post seem to favor something more episodic - like a television show that progresses overall, but also has seasonal story arcs. I wonder if there are any different considerations for that more episodic style? Those of you with more experience, how do you connect one overarching sequence to the other? Piratecat, surely you didn't have one single problem in mind for the whole of a 15+ year campaign...

 

[Zaruthustran]

I've recently gone to a no-xp system (using action points instead) that creates story-based penalties for dying. It seems to work really well. Details if you want 'em.

Want 'em!

-z

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I searched but didn’t find the RttToEE story hour. I found 3 other stories, though. Link please?

Contact's Story Hour - I think they lost 18 PC's up to 9th level. The story continued on to another story hour with less death toll - once they got raise dead, the body count obviously dropped. Only 1 PC survived from 1st level on - all the way to Epic levels.

 

[Thyrkill]

I just wanted to thank Quasqueton for making this post. It expresses many of the same feelings that I have faced recently with my gaming group (to the point of stepping aside from the DM's chair for awhile). I also want to thank everyone for their replies...they have helped me (sitting here at work) rekindle the DM spark inside me.

And to Piratecat...thanks for one of the best examples of story writing, campaign creation, and DMing I have ever had (and I'm only reading the stuff).

Thanks,
Matt

PS. Henry...did you start at a higher level when you ran your newer campaign?

 

[Jolly Giant]

Is there a way to have party/PC consistency over long times with a let the dice fall as they may attitude?

I've found that the simplest way to ensure PC consistency; while simultaneously maintaining a let-the-dice-fall-as they will DMing style, is the Raise Dead spell. If the PCs aren't high enough level to cast it themselves; I make sure they have higher-level allies who can, or place a scroll of Raise Dead among the treasure somewhere. (Giving them scrolls of higher level healing spells can help keep them from dying in the first place.)

 

[Harm]

What system are you using? DnD has Raise Dead so death is only an inconvenience. Spell Compendium etc. added Revenance + Revivify so death isn't even an inconvenience, it's just 1000G.

 

[Piratecat]

A lot of people have excellent insight and advice in this thread. I'm taking notes.

I've found that the simplest way to ensure PC consistency; while simultaneously maintaining a let-the-dice-fall-as they will DMing style, is the Raise Dead spell.

The problem with this is that many people (myself included) detest the idea of consequence-free resurrection. I think that for the purposes of world-feel in a story-based game, it's important to have societal or religious implications to coming back from the dead. In other words, definitely use raise dead when necessary to ensure party consistency, but make sure that the heroes never feel "Whee, I'll axe myself and it doesn't really matter!"

There have been a lot of threads here about how to handle this, and I think it's down to each DMs preferences. Sagiro handled it by having the God require a promise from each of the other party members. I've handled it by giving people a glimpse of their afterlife, which both marks them and tends to alter their behavior (one big plot involved a King who died, was raised, and then went insane because he had got to Hell and subconsciously knew that his soul was doomed.) Other folks use other great methods.

I currently have people raised carry some taint of death back into the living world; until they do a quest for the God who raises them (and that quest is as big or as little as I wish), people recognize that they've been dead and react to them poorly if thewy're superstitious. They look sickly, with hollow circles under their eyes, and animals flinch at their touch. This is all just window dressing for the negative level that I'm using instead of a lost level, but it has a continuing feel that I like.

I'll grab my house rules for eliminating xp and substituting action points, and I'll post them here later.

 

[Janx]

I too have had some thoughts on the vein of how to make a campaign have a story, and be enduring.

PirateCat's methods seem to work, what's odd, is by slowing the XP rate, he's making it take longer to advance, and thus at greater risk of campaign death (ignoring what's he's done to prevent that, slowing down the rate, making the campaign take longer allows more time for bad things to happen that kill campaigns).

I've been looking at the problem from a different angle. If you read books, or watch TV or movies, the kinds of events, solutions to problems, drama, etc, all seem geared to moving the plot forward (or twisting the plot with setbacks and revelations). However, in few encounters, are the entire party killed off. Nor does the party in a movie face as many encounters as a D&D party, just to face the bad guy. It seems, the pacing is different, and scale is different.

Consider the following common movie scenes that are handled by rules in D&D:

In a fight: the good guys always, win, except the red shirts. Exception: the good guys have to retreat, a major character is killed or captured. TPK's don't happen. (Challenge: find me a movie, TV show or book, where the main characters all die, before the climax of the movie (meaning there's more movie and resolution left, it doesn't count if the heroes die at the end of the movie).

In a puzzle situation: the good guys always figure out how to get out, usually at the last minute, before something bad happens. The science guy always finishes the big technogadget to save the day. It's never impossible to rewire something. The key question, is it done ahead of time (and then does it actually work when needed), or does it get finished right before the critical moment.


D&D approaches the above scenarios entirely differently. As a result, you don't get movie-like effects.

Based on that, I'm pondering, if an entirely different kind of RPG can be made. One that emulates movie or novel storytelling. Maybe there's dice, maybe there's cards involved, but have the entire encounter design system, and resolution system tailored to mimic what happens in fiction.

I'm thinking, that for combat, players like having a play-by-play interaction for the fight. I think the outcomes of the fight should be similar to movies (what moves the plot), and few players would enjoy fight resolution to come down to a single die roll to determine one of my "common fight outcomes". So, it's a tought problem to solve. Action points, Swashbuckling cards attempt to alleviate some of this.

 

[Darklone]

Hmm.

Usually I don't kill chars in my games (they get themselves killed).

My last campaign went about three years IIRC... perhaps a little less. And at some point pretty much to the end we noticed that only one of 8 chars was from the original party.

I was shocked. Yet somehow the whole thing kept on walking because the new chars got included into the running story-arcs or varied them.

 

[MerricB]

Piratecat - how often does your group play? That's another factor in longevity, I think.

CHeers!