Li Shenron
Legend
Well I finally got around DMing Ravenloft as a one-shot, except that of course I failed to make it really finish in a single session so we'll need at least a second evening. To my defence, we had planned to have 4-5 hours for the game, but between being late to start and then having kids wanting to go home, we really only played 2 hours, so we're not that far from the original time expectations.
That said, the adventure (played with 5e rules but following the original slimmer version) requires high level characters. Not wanting to waste an hour watching them build their characters from scratch, I told them I was going to create pregens. But I also didn't know if we were going to have 3 or 5 players, so I decided to make them level 10 to be on the safe side, should we ended up being 3.
I've never actually started a game at such high level, and now I know that creating PCs already at level 10 is a PITA!
It's not the complexity: that, I can live with, and it's not as bad as 3e 10th level characters.
The problem was, that 10th level spellcasters have a fair lot of spells to choose from, either to learn or prepare. I chose not to pregen a Wizard which I expected to be the most time consuming one, but for example the Cleric had ~25 spells to prepare and even the Paladin had something like 17.
What I think is the reason, is that the classes are designed for long-term campaigns rather than one shots, so they wanted them to be a bit ready for everything. You can design a PC focused on a certain area, if you are willing to take the risk of being under-performing in certain adventures but over-performing in others, or design it more balanced to be decent-performing all the time. In addition, levelling up gradually allows you to withstand occasional bad choices (i.e. choosing an ability that won't come up frequently) because you have plenty of abilities.
But as I was building them already at level 10, and I knew what the adventure was about, I had a tougher work. If I had picked all spells and abilities that I knew were gonna be useful in this adventure, the PC would have been possibly too good. If I had purposefully put some useless junk in the build to balance the goodies out, I would have felt like planting red herrings to the players. I could have buried the responsibility behind desiging "stock" characters with the most common spells selections, but after 10 years (or 30, depending on what you count) I am a bit tired of the seeing PCs with vanilla builds.
So I ended up doing the unthinkable that would irritate anyone on a D&D forum: I gave them less stuff than what their class grants according to the PHB, but I only gave them good stuff that fits with the adventure. It's a bit like "hiding" a quota of stuff that the PCs could have had on their characters sheets, but statistically ends up being unused on a given adventure. And anyway, the players were not irritated because (as usual for me) they are casual gamers so they do not really know how their PC should be by the book.
What would you have done in my place?
That said, the adventure (played with 5e rules but following the original slimmer version) requires high level characters. Not wanting to waste an hour watching them build their characters from scratch, I told them I was going to create pregens. But I also didn't know if we were going to have 3 or 5 players, so I decided to make them level 10 to be on the safe side, should we ended up being 3.
I've never actually started a game at such high level, and now I know that creating PCs already at level 10 is a PITA!
It's not the complexity: that, I can live with, and it's not as bad as 3e 10th level characters.
The problem was, that 10th level spellcasters have a fair lot of spells to choose from, either to learn or prepare. I chose not to pregen a Wizard which I expected to be the most time consuming one, but for example the Cleric had ~25 spells to prepare and even the Paladin had something like 17.
What I think is the reason, is that the classes are designed for long-term campaigns rather than one shots, so they wanted them to be a bit ready for everything. You can design a PC focused on a certain area, if you are willing to take the risk of being under-performing in certain adventures but over-performing in others, or design it more balanced to be decent-performing all the time. In addition, levelling up gradually allows you to withstand occasional bad choices (i.e. choosing an ability that won't come up frequently) because you have plenty of abilities.
But as I was building them already at level 10, and I knew what the adventure was about, I had a tougher work. If I had picked all spells and abilities that I knew were gonna be useful in this adventure, the PC would have been possibly too good. If I had purposefully put some useless junk in the build to balance the goodies out, I would have felt like planting red herrings to the players. I could have buried the responsibility behind desiging "stock" characters with the most common spells selections, but after 10 years (or 30, depending on what you count) I am a bit tired of the seeing PCs with vanilla builds.
So I ended up doing the unthinkable that would irritate anyone on a D&D forum: I gave them less stuff than what their class grants according to the PHB, but I only gave them good stuff that fits with the adventure. It's a bit like "hiding" a quota of stuff that the PCs could have had on their characters sheets, but statistically ends up being unused on a given adventure. And anyway, the players were not irritated because (as usual for me) they are casual gamers so they do not really know how their PC should be by the book.
What would you have done in my place?
