Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 3312150" data-attributes="member: 2">This is true. We advance at what some people consider a glacially slow pace -- one level every ten 3-hour games. I think you could do the same thing with a level every 5 games, though. There's a couple of tricks to making this work. 1. Death is not the worst thing that can happen to a hero. Far from it. I'm not adverse to taking PCs captive at a time when I might otherwise kill them. I'm not adverse to a villain blackmailing the PCs, or using them as pawns against a mutual enemy. It helps keep things challenging without a huge body count. In addition, the slow advancement means that the players really develop good tactics for their PCs, and that helps prevent death. 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.2. Drop a bajillion plot hooks. Make prophecies where you don't know what everything means. Then watch your players -- and when they start to put together hooks that you've left scattered around, grab those hooks and run with them. I could never have come up with my campaign arcs at their beginning, but I try to make a framework that I can then build on without the players ever noticing.3. Script NPC motivations, not their actions. After every game I think "what happens as a result of what the PCs did tonight?" Maybe they made friends who will later help them, maybe they made enemies or left a huge hole in the power vacuum. I then use that as my next plot hook. It's self-encouraging; as the players see their actions changing the game world, they become more invested in that world.4. It's the illusion of danger that's important, not the danger itself. Sure, maybe a NPC is a brutal combatant - but maybe he isn't, and the PCs just think he might be because he looks scary. You don't have to kill people to scare the bejeezus out of them. But don't let your players ever think that you'll pull punches to save them, because then they have no drama. A game where the DM won't kill your PC just isn't fun!  There are better ways to balance encounters, I think.5. Always keep your players on their toes. Don't fall into a rut. One of my goals is to figure out what the PCs expect and then do somethign different; and if you only do this some of the time, you'll still keep the players on their A game because they won't know what to expect.6. Create penalties for failing that are different than dying. Political or religious-themed games generally do this; if the heroes fail, it's not them who pay the ultimate penalty. It's their faction or church that suffers. Since they can fail and still live, they can then try a different tactic to later win and out-maneuver their foe.Anyways, thanks! Your problem is one I and everyone else faces, I think; I'm honored to share some of the ways I've weaseled around it.</blockquote>

Verification