So...anything on Craft?

[Zogmo]

Wow.

That's really...alien.

I'm not saying you're wrong, obviously, you have no reason to lie, but it just seems so...weird.

What, do these people stand on street corners with a module and a sign reading "Will DM for food"?

I mean, for about the last two decades, I've always played:
a)Discuss a game I'd like to run. Find out who's interested.

b)Send out a detailed pile of notes on setting, background, and especially what kind of characters I'm looking for.

c)Get PC concepts back. Get players talking with each other to work out connections between their concepts. Pure mechanics can come later, I just want to know backgrounds/personalities/plot hooks.

d)When I have a good idea of the PCs and they more-or-less meet what I was looking for, write an intro adventure. Make sure each PC has a plot hook or two in it.

e)Then the game more-or-less runs itself as I react to whatever the PCs did last session and try to plot just enough ahead to keep them busy for the next one.

If a fight is going too hard -- or too easy -- I start fudging rolls. I don't do this if the PCs are being exceptionally clever -- or exceptionally dim -- but only if I, the DM, misjudged the intended threat level. Intelligence and stupidity is rewarded by the dice; my own screwups should not be taken out on the PCs.

I'm going to assume that since 4e was designed with a very different playstyle in mind, that "my way" isn't very common.

I do the exact same thing before and during play, for the same reasons too.

But, I got the exact opposite out of 4e than you did. It's not going to change a single thing you do but make it easier.

 

[hong]

4e, the design philosophy is, "We've built the world. Now we'll sell you modules for it." This isn't just limited to this one example. Many of the design blogs, etc, have talked about the need to make it easier to write adventures, produce art, and so on. The assumption that the DM is a worldbuilder is reduced; the assumption that the DM will buy, and run, modules is increased.

No. Stop it.

 

[hong]

This isn't just arrogant, it's outright wrong. Players will always understand their characters better then you, the DM. And if you don't allow those players/characters to affect or change the story, your game isn't worth playing.

Not that this has anything to do with Craft/Profession.

 

[Lizard]

No. Stop it.

I suppose I'll know for sure in about 6 days.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Wow.

That's really...alien.

I'm not saying you're wrong, obviously, you have no reason to lie, but it just seems so...weird.

What, do these people stand on street corners with a module and a sign reading "Will DM for food"?

Nope...They are just really into their own storylines. I knew one DM who had no group of players at all. He just had what he thought was a great idea for a fantasy world. He'd spend some of his nights detailing out one country or another in a campaign book. After he was done with the world, he started writing an adventure that took place in that world. He knew some of the details(although not detailed) of what would happen to the players when they got to 20th level. And this was before he even knew who his players would be. And he knew he was starting them at first.

He eventually asked nearly every person he knew who liked D&D if they'd have time to play in his campaign. I was asked and declined due to lack of time. However, he eventually found a group of players. Some would leave and he'd just ask more people he knew until he filled the spots in the middle of the campaign.

I know another DM who really liked the idea of running a World of Warcraft RPG game. He started writing an adventure encounter by encounter in almost the exact same format WOTC or LG uses for their adventures. He double checked the stats of every monster and NPC he wrote up and listed them in full stat block format, complete with boxed text(to be fair, I played in the first group he ran his adventures with and his boxed text only said "This is placeholder text" until after we played them and he filled them in afterwords). Our first group fell apart after a short while and he found an entirely new group of players and asked them to play through it. I know he now has 11 "chapters" of his adventure written up and his players are only up to the 5th. He has months worth of stuff written up just in case he falls behind.

I'm nowhere near that organized or want to spend that much time on my games. But I feel I'm doing a disservice to my players if I just plan things on the fly. So I normally run prewritten adventures that I get from dungeon magazine, online, or purchased.

The couple of times I've actually made up my own adventure, I at least have an outline of the whole adventure "chapter" in my head. For instance, I started one game where the PCs were hired by a noble to kill an orc tribe who had been stealing cattle from a village in his region. I knew in advance that the Lord had paid the Orcs to attack the village and had put out the help wanted sign in order to lure adventurers to their deaths. It was part of an elaborate plot to become King(he was eliminating anyone who might be able to stop his plans). I also knew that the PCs would end up defeating the Orcs and therefore stumble onto clues that the Lord might be involved.

I figured this would lead into future adventures where the PCs would slowly learn more details about the plot until they confronted him directly. And find out that the real power behind it was his adviser, a powerful archmage disguised as a lowly noble.

And I had at least that much planned out before the first session even started. I knew who was playing in the game, but not what characters they'd be bringing. I assumed the details would change as things in the campaign developed, but the theme of the campaign was going to be "Stop the Lord from destabilizing the entire country and staging a coup to take control" and I knew it would take until the PCs were around 15th or 16th level before it would be completed.

I'm going to assume that since 4e was designed with a very different playstyle in mind, that "my way" isn't very common.

There are a number of people who play that way as well. I found it was more common back in the 1st and 2nd Ed days. However, even my 1st Ed DM used to spend his days in his University classes writing up encounters and boxed text for our D&D games.

 

[hong]

Basically, Lizard fails to realise that adventure design is a common intermediate step between world design and "do anything you want"/"follow my railroad". I don't need to have my group's storyline plotted out to 20th level and beyond to know that for THIS session, they're going to escape some ninjae, go into a dungeon, kill Fred the evil wizard, and take his stuff.

 

[Blackeagle]

I actually expect to see a craft system based around the Rituals mechanic at some point in the future.

That's interesting. My guess for a craft system is one based on skill challenges. Get 4 successes before 2 failures and you've got a sword. Get 2 failures first and you've got a mishappen steel rod. Want masterwork? 8 successes before 4 failures. Maybe throw in an endurance check every third or fourth roll (swinging that hammer is hard work).

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, I gotta admit, I spend far more time detailing up the next adventure than I do developing a new world. Not that the next adventure is necessarily a rail road (at least I hope not) but, there will be a general plotline (at least what the bad guys want to happen) and sequence of events that may or may not occur depending on the PC's actions.

Heck, even way back when, I'd draw the map, stock it with monsters and then throw the party into the dungeon. Things haven't changed that much. The dungeon may be a lot broader, there's a lot more feedback and loops involved, but, adventure as general flowchart isn't all that out of line.

Heck, look at Wolfgang Baur's article on adventure design on the WOTC site.

 

[Blackeagle]

4e, the design philosophy is, "We've built the world. Now we'll sell you modules for it." This isn't just limited to this one example. Many of the design blogs, etc, have talked about the need to make it easier to write adventures, produce art, and so on. The assumption that the DM is a worldbuilder is reduced; the assumption that the DM will buy, and run, modules is increased.

If that's so, then the people at Wizards are complete idiots. The easier they make adventure creation, monster creation, NPC creation, and the less prep time they require of DMs in general, the fewer modules and MMs they're going to sell. If creating adventures, encounters, and monsters is easy, more DMs will do it for themselves rather than buying WotCs stuff. If Wizards wants to sell modules and MMs, they should be trying to make adventure, encounter, and monster creation nigh impossible. Clearly, that's not the case.

Based on my KOTS experiences, 4e is fun to run combats in, no doubt there, but it's really hard to see how a DM can have any fun worldbuilding with it. The pieces seem to be just too big. 3e was lego; 4e is duplo.

Are you kidding? The biggest selling point for 4e for me is that it will make my world creation so much easier. 3e may have been good for world creation IF you wanted to make a world that reflects the 3e rules (high magic, lots of magic items, divine/arcane split, etc.) If you want to draw outside the lines the rules system lays down and make a world that doesn't have a lot of magic items, or where there are no divine casters/white mage types, everything goes straight to hell. 3e isn't lego, it's a pre-assembled model where everything is glued together and there's no way to take anything out without breaking a bunch of stuff.

 

[Lanefan]

I'd like to second the motion made further upthread to bring back the 1e previous profession/secondary skills table. Your past profession can sometimes come in handy in the game - a jeweller can appraise gems found in the field; a stonemason can tell if a wall is going to fall down or not; an engineer...well, they're just plain useful no matter what. And so on.

And the rest of the time, it's character-background fluff.

Lanefan