Scales of War Outline Revealed

[tomlib]

Well, it's better than nothing. At least it gives you a vague idea of which locations the PCs are supposed to occupy, for the heroic tier. The paragon & epic tiers are so vague that they tell you nothing, which reinforces my assumption that they don't actually have the whole thing planned out.

I couldn't have put it better myself. The fact that they don't even know of the titles of the adventures past #4 is a clue to their haplessness as well.

According to WotC, this was put together by Research & Development which is an interesting team to have done it. I would have thought the Adventure Path team might have been the people to give us an overview of their product. If, as Randy suggested, they have it all detailed out with amazing reveals they should have been able to do better than this.

But, in the spirit of the game I love. Thank you Wizards of the Coast for at least giving it an effort.

Now, can we please have maps with Castle Rivenroar and the Antler and Thistle on them? That's probably asking too much. I apologize for my greed.

Tom

 

[Azgulor]

Full Disclosure: Not on the 4e bandwagon; amazed at some of the PR blunders committed by WotC. I still poke around 4e boards occasionally to see what direction the 800-lb gorrilla thinks the industry is headed or that they are trying to influence the industry into following (which you'd expect from a market leader).

1) I applaud the fact that WotC responded to the cries of 4e fans and provided this AP overview.

2) The overview, unfortunately, is almost useless. For 4e DMs who were hoping for more, I sympathize. If I were DMing 4e and looking at this AP, I'd still be squarely in "wait-and-see" mode.

3) I really don't understand the views of "better than nothing". It's pretty much a given that WotC (and the D&D brand) is the juggernaught of the industry. Their marketing budgets alone are more than many RPG publishers sales in a year. Shouldn't the industry leader with the golden brand be setting the bar? That outline barely even registers as an attempt.

 

[Kishin]

Good. Now on to new things we can angrily demand.

Yeah! Now can we get some freaking pie in here? What kind of organization is WoTC running! We DMs need our pie to run effective games!

Heh, neat to see a response so soon, but that hardly qualifies as an outline. They clearly do not have the whole thing planned out yet. I'm not surprised, Scales of War has been pretty mediocre so far.

 

[Shroomy]

Its obvious to me that the provided outline was written rather hastily. Given the reaction, we're likely to see something more solid in the future (hopefully).

On the subject of SoW, while "Rescue at Rivenroar" was pretty average (with some good ideas) and the first Dragon article was needlessly generic, "Siege of Bordrin's Watch" was a very solid adventure, with a cool new monster (cave troll), the re-introduction of the orog, and a really good backdrop section for Overlook.

 

[Nahat Anoj]

Good. Now on to new things we can angrily demand.

Putting barbarians back into the September Dragon? ...

 

[humble minion]

It's like the campaign outline you get when you don't have a campaign outline!

Seriously, they seem to understand that people want a campaign outline, but not why. It's there, but it's devoid of anything even marginally useful. THe paragon and epic tier summaries in particular could have been copied direct from the tier descriptions in the PHB/DMG. Utterly non-descriptive.

I find it very hard to believe that a DM could extract even a morsel of worth from this thing. I mean, they don't even tell anyone who the campaign bad guy is, or the general theme of the campaign, or even name a single place where the PCs will travel in the final 2/3 of the campaign.

Shaking my head here, to be honest.

 

[MerricB]

I find it very hard to believe that a DM could extract even a morsel of worth from this thing. I mean, they don't even tell anyone who the campaign bad guy is, or the general theme of the campaign, or even name a single place where the PCs will travel in the final 2/3 of the campaign.

Despite the major flaws it still has, I can, at least, understand the structure of the first 1/3 of the campaign.

For me, it now sounds cool enough to run the Heroic section. I particularly like the sound of episodes #4 and #6. The actual implementation? I'll have to wait and see.

Cheers!

 

[Keefe the Thief]

Yeah! Now can we get some freaking pie in here? What kind of organization is WoTC running! We DMs need our pie to run effective games.

There is no pie, i´m afraid. The pie is a lie. Another PR blunder for WotC - i was promised pie. And there is none. And let´s not talk about the useless outline. Shame! They do not even tell us who the pie is! Ah, i mean the BBEG.

 

[Hammerhead]

It's a pretty poor campaign summary. I liked the first two adventures, but this outline raises significant questions if the writer even knows the overall plot.

 

[wayne62682]

It's a pretty poor campaign summary. I liked the first two adventures, but this outline raises significant questions if the writer even knows the overall plot.

I would bet money that they don't know the full plot yet, which is why the paragon and epic tiers "overview" pretty much said absolutely nothing.