Piratecat ruined my D&D game

[Piratecat]

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

Action points definitely help with this. The other thing I do is plan for cinematic locations and encounters, but not necessarily cinematic results from the heroes.

For instance: I start planning encounters by considering what would be coolest for the PCs. I get an image in my mind -- the PCs desperately fighting their way up a waterfall, a hall full of mirrors reflecting beams of sunlight throughout the dark and dusty space, a red dragon lairing in a cavern of sentient lava -- places that would look neat if you dumped them onto a movie screen. Then I try to think of neat tactics for the bad guys who are there and who know their own surroundings. When the heroes show up, I try to rule on the side of creativity when they try cool or clever tactics. When the bad guy and the location seem cinematic, the heroes usually try to match them, and more often than not they succeed dramatically. Are they sometimes going to flub terribly and fail? Heck, yeah. But better to fail in a memorable encounter than in a minor, forgettable one.

When you can't make a location memorable, try for a NPC. Change the appearance or age of your generic monster encounters. The albino troll, the ancient and wrinkled mind flayer - these tend to stick in a player's mind as unique. That way, if you tie them into some plot later, the players will easily bring them to mind.

Merric, we play every two weeks, always on the same night (Thursday), usually for three and a half hours. Figure 25 times a year on average. We hit year fifteen this June, which approximates to about 375 games. The biggest frustration has been players moving away; we've had very few people drop out, but a lot of folks over the years have moved to the west coast. When my wife's long-time bard was eaten, we were left with only one character from way back in the first year. Every other PC has been with the party only about five-eight years or so.

 

[Holy Bovine]

My 'Rage of Dragons' campaign has seen alot of character turnover. Lets see

Jubal, 5th level druid killed by a Zombie Gold Dragon - dead permanently
C'Nauir, 3rd level drow wizard killed by a 5d6 fireball - dead permanently
Yuna, 4th level Cleric murdered by an unknown assassin - dead permanently
Knottbeard, 8th level Fighter/Rogue arrested for fraud and embezzelment - imprisoned indefinately
Riz, 8th level Monk called away to his monestary - out of the game indefinatly
Lovril 9th level elf Rogue - reduced to NPC status as the player had to drop out of the game.

Only 2 original PCs (a Fighter/Cleric and a Fighter/Ranger) remain and yet I think i have been able to keep the story going and engage th e players and PCs alike by being relentless in driving key point home over and over again. It also helped that 2 new PCs were directly linked to the party via their exsisting contacts and one has a vested interest in what is happening to the world's dragons (being a Dragon Shaman - awesome class btw).

Personally I really do think it is ultimately up to the DM to find ways to engage the PCs and players alike. You will always have that player (you know the one) who wants to go his own way and seems to take delight in throwing curveballs at the DM. I have learned to catch and run with such things now and playing 'off the cuff' still rears its ugly head but i always make sure I have a variety of avenues open to getting the PCs back on track. Some, of course, will call it railroading, I think of it verisimilitude as the events of the campaign world are not going to stop just because Bob the fighter croaked. Phil his second cousin twice removed will just have to take up the slack.

 

[el-remmen]

We advance at what some people consider a glacially slow pace -- one level every ten 3-hour games.

Got ya beat for slow. . . My "Out of the Frying Pan" game averaged 9.3 six hour sessions per level - but it ended at 11th level, which is just about where I am comfortable taking the game power-wise.

 

[Kaodi]

Obviously, revenge is your only recourse. Kill piratecat.

But, as PirateCat said, there are penalties every bit as terrible as death! I says we take 'is peg leg, and 'is freakish little bird too!

 

[Desdichado]

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!"

Yeah, there are plenty of ways to maintain a sense of danger without actually killing PC's right and left. My most successful implementation of this was my Dark•Heritage homebrew, which also used a very diverse and eclectic mix of d20 rules. There was no resurrection. There was no Raise Dead, Reincarnate or anything like that. In fact, the only magic in the whole setting that was available to PC's was the magic system from the d20 Call of Cthulhu book. I really played up the angle that the setting was a fantasy horror setting, and the players bought into it. I also started the campaign off by giving them some relatively high powered pregens to play, and promptly killed them all before seguing over to their actual PCs.

After several months of play, though, and several pretty close calls, we hadn't had a single player death ((EDIT: player character death! Although we haven't had a single player death either, thank goodness!)). There were a number of reasons for this (Action Points being used for auto-stabilize was a big one, and the Unearthed Arcana "armor converts a portion of lethal damage into subdual damage" rule was probably the biggest factor, though) but the point is that there are better and usually considerably more effective ways to frighten your players than to be a hard-ass and kill their characters with frequency. In fact, that tends to have the opposite effect, in my experience. If characters die easily and frequently, players tend to get more flippant and casual and shallow about their characters, rather than really taking them seriously. Although an occasional death certainly goes a long way. They need to actually play their PCs for a while to get some attachment to them, develop them as characters, and then they feel more at risk when something might happen to them.

The biggest contributor to having an epic campaign of that nature is having players that facilitate it. Some of those great roleplaying moments from reading, say, Piratecat's story hour are completely dependent on players who actually roleplay them out rather than "I draw my sword and attack!" any time anything looks even vaguely fishy, which is an all-too common theme with many D&D players.

 

[Henry]

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

For our last campaign, it was run by another DM in our group, who started us at 17th level and we went up from there... It ended at 24th level, when we were flinging around empowered time stops, spheres of ultimate destruction, brilliant-energy-equipped Whirling Dervishes doing Dances of Death against squads of 20th level clerics, fighters, and mages, Druids splitting the earth and consuming armies in tornadoes... We'd never run at that level, where every action caused shockwaves for the rest of the world (one artifact we'd let get stolen from us almost caused another Karsus Incident in Faerun), but it was a blast.

In another campaign, I DM'ed a group from 1st to 10th level in an Eberron Campaign over about six months of play in 2004; we then picked up the group of PCs again a year later from 10th to 16th, where we ended last August, and it was really neat to pick up those plot threads where I had left them, showed how different NPCs had changed and grown (or changed and betrayed the PCs, depending on circumstances)... how PCs they'd been cowed by were in turn cowed years later, and how they went from running for their lives to fighting tooth and nail in Ashtakala for their survival. I learned that play over 10th level is VERY different, and keeps you on your toes. However, I also learned that DM'ing high-level play really isn't for me. It may work for Pkitty, and for my DMing friend, but it just is so much to keep track of that I start to lose focus on the characters and place it too much on how to challenge them. (Political intrigue is well and good, but the butt-kickers in the group start getting bored over too little combat!)

 

[Rel]

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...

One thing that Piratecat told me one time is that "Nothing is set in stone until the players KNOW it. And really not even then". And another thing I've learned is to talk to other GM's and beg, borrow or steal ideas from them. Here's an example:

When I started my current (Warhammer FRP - Pirates of the Caribbean) campaign a few weeks ago I gave out sealed notes to each of the players. Each one had a little plot hook on it in the form of an optional "secondary mission". One way that I made this more interesting was to give them out randomly such that I had no idea which player had which hook. Anyway, one of them said that the PC's sibling had been murdered by "someone with an extra eye". It was strongly implied that this was a Mutant with an extra eye that was concealed somewhere on his body.

I didn't know who the murderer was. I didn't know why they killed the PC's sibling. Hell, I didn't even know if the sibling was truly dead. I just figured it might be something that they showed interest in.

Then one day I was talking with Enkhidu and telling him about that particular sub-plot. He said, "What if the 'extra eye' isn't a real eye and it's just a tatoo?" BRILLIANT! So the next session one of the sailors (a guy named Volkhard) on board the PC's ship was lashed for insubordination. When they tore open his shirt, one of the PC's saw that he had a tatoo of an open eye at the base of his back, just barely peeking out of his shirt.

Was this the murderer? I still hadn't decided. What I did decide was that Volkhard wasn't the only one with an eye tatoo. It would be a secret organization. Dedicated to what? I had no idea. But they were up to SOMETHING, that's for sure!

So a couple weeks ago I was having dinner with some lovely folks here at the NC Game Day and I said, "You guys wanna plan my next session?" They said "Sure!" I explained that the PC's were currently in port and there were some rumors that SOMEBODY was trying to sabotage the ship they were on and also the PC's were going to go to a party at the Governor's Mansion. After some chit chat it was decided that there needed to be a big explosion at the Governor's Mansion.

So, I had this secret organization of eye-tatoo guys try and blow up the Governor and all the sea captains who were at the party. The PC's intervened and only about half the sea-captains were killed. Why? I still wasn't sure. But some ideas were suggesting themselves.

The country the PC's hail from is at war with another country (Estalia). A third country (Bretonia) was debating entering the war on the side of Estalia. So I decided that the "Hidden Eye" were plotting to try and get the war started as soon as possible by framing a Bretonian Sea Captain for blowing up the Governor's Mansion.

The PC's got involved and are now headed off to Tortuga where they believe they might find the headquarters of the Hidden Eye and get to the bottom of what they're up to. And best of all, guess who turned out to be one of the ring-leaders of the whole thing? Volkhard! He barely escaped from the PC's clutches and onto a ship headed for Tortuga. So I've even got what amounts to a recurring villian out of the deal.


So what I'm saying is don't tie yourself down in advance. Keep the plot loose with a lot of questions that you don't know the answers to. When the time comes then the answers will suggest themselves and you can go back and tie up things that you never thought had anything to do with each other. The players will have fun and you'll look like a genius.

 

[Jolly Giant]

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!".

In my heart I agree with you, and at first I was very restrictive on all raise/ressurrection effects in my campaigns. In time though, I decided to ease up a little to maintain PC consistency. This worked so well (for our group, at least), that I eventually became quite the liberal and now I just treat Raise/Ressurrection like any other spells.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

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...

One thing that you can do to make yourself appear to be a devious mastermind is to fit your various plot threads together retroactively. If session A involved Bullywugs in an ancient, sunken temple lost in the deep, dank marsh... and session C pitted the characters against slimy monstrosities overrunning the city's sewers... Then you can make a later session into the "Revenge of the Slimelord" who is pissed off because the party has twice thrawted his plans, even when they didn't know about the slimelord. This works even better when you have players that like to speculate as to what is going on. They can often-times come up with even more bizarre and convoluted plots than you can. When one of your players comes up with, "Oh, no! Its Count Huckita Huckita Patoo come back from the grave to revenge himself upon us!" and that happens to be cooler than what you had originally planned. You should reply with, "Yes! And this time he's got some new tricks up his sleeve! Ha haha ha ha!"

This is, of course, the absolute cheatingest way to do things. But it is also very effective.

Later
silver

 

[Shallown]

PC inspired me to run a more epic game and I did A few things that helped.

1) No one died immediately regardless of how negative they were. They had one round to be healed back up. It's surprising what players can accomplish in a round. It was also very cinematic to see how characters scrambled to beat that deadline (No pun intended well maybe a little). As long as the character was brought back up to at least -10 + con modifier they were not permanently dead.

2) the Gods had an investment in the players succeeding so Raising people was a little easier for the PC's. But there was always a cost. Seldom did I actually charge them gold straight out (though the players knew if they could afford it they had better offer the gold or risk upsetting the Gods). When someone died basically the whole party had to contribute. I took each player off to the side and asked what they were willing to give up to have their friend and fellow party member come back. I got all sorts of answers.

for example when the character died that the campaign practically hinged on at this point died the dwarf fighter offered his life for the Dead Character. All he heard was "Accepted". The next time the dead character got knocked down below 0 hit points the dwarf fighter found that he instead plunged to that total and effectively gave his life for him. Of course the dwarf fighter was tougher and had a little bit more negative HP wiggle room and survived but from then on he didn't let the other PC out of his sight for fear that would happen again.

As far as weaving a plot over the long term I let the players know a few things that were meta issues. Such as the campaign had a time limit. It was not an overly oppressive one but I set a date for the bad guys to win. As the players did things that impacted the bad guys plans that date shifted forward and backward and eventually the characters had a much more concrete idea of when that date was. I could apply pressure as needed to move the game along and the players enjoyed the benefit of seeing how their actions impacted the world.

Though the plot thread was tied closely to one character I chose that player/character carefully and never made the plot dependent on him alone. If the PC died or the player left or tired of him the plot had a fall back position though it may have made things bumpy for a session or three, the risk was worth it.


Later