"Unscaled Adventures" -- good, bad or ugly?

[hong]

That, and a lot of the most common archetypes make a point of not acting at all like SWAT teams. E.g. Barbarians, swashbucklers, paladins played as high on valour and low on discretion, chaotic alignment PCs who are chaotic at a tactical level as well as a personality level, dwarves who don't co-operate with elves etc. Maybe the style of play appropriate to the campaign should consistently be a point of discussion before PCs are created, where it isn't already.

Exactly. Intelligence is overrated.


Hong "and you can quote me on that" Ooi

 

[rounser]

Exactly. Intelligence is overrated.

Intelligence? I would have thought it was more a wisdom thing, as in:

"Stay here. I'm going to sneak up on the lich and give it a wedgie."
"Crikey! This giant crocodile's a big feller, lucky I have animal handling."
"All the best dragonslayers use lassoes, honest."

Hong "and you can quote me on that" Ooi

Done.

 

[rounser]

(Actually, that gives me an idea for a PC in a not-so-serious campaign...Stee Verwin the Ranger. )

 

[nopantsyet]

It's a pity that DMs can only overtly signal to the players that for this adventure, it's time to change pace and go into "Tomb of Horrors" style pensiveness. The singing mushrooms adventure was fun, but now it's time to break out the 10 foot poles and the paranoia, guys.

I don't find my games shift gears that quickly, but that's probably because I run homebrew and so I can easily overlap and intertwine the adventures. But I've done it both ways. If you're connecting unrelated adventures, I think travel is a great way to do it. Make the party move to an unfamiliar place, and give them a reason to be afraid of what might be there. Between the two of those, there's plenty of ways to provide just enough information that the players figure out what's happening without being hit over the head with it.

 

[Whitey]

Consider the following situation.
Some ordinary guy/gal just out of high school - in other words, much like a first level adventurer, steps out on a busy highway. Then they get struck by a semi going 70. On second thought, don't consider that, as the result would be disgusting. In a 'scaled' world, that couldn't happen. The highway would be filled with kindergartners on Big Wheel trikes. Now, if the hypothetical highway-crossing guy/gal leveled up the day before, it'd have those trikes somehow transmogrified instantly into old-model VW beetles. Or something similarly 'level appropriate' (along with conveniently posted NPC crossing guards and traffic lights that just happen to appear and be red, allowing the adventurer to cross).

The solution? Do not step in front of speeding semi trucks. Now, a high level character could do so, and stop the thing with their bare hands, and then expect XP and to lewt the truck's hubcaps. In a D&D setting, replace semi with black dragon or lich or whatever. It's not even about verisimilitude. A world that caters to and effectively depends on the abilities and perceptions of an adventuring party - in other words, a world that's no bigger than one dungeon or level or screen at a time, is a piece of a game. Players will treat it as such.

 

[reiella]

My real problem with adventures that don't scale is they intentionally self-limit their available audience.

There's also the problem of handling the adventure's pacing if you use a different leveling rate (or experience rate, amounts to the same thing).

It also tends to create a few too many situations where the party is a significantly higher level than expected at a given point if they had other quests or adventuring during that module.

Similarly, for most the same reason that the party's 9th level patron doesn't do all the adventuring work for them, the party's 9th level enemy doesn't go after all his enemies personally when he has mooks to work for him.

 

[rounser]

Consider the following situation.
***snip highway analogy***

Instead of resorting to an analogy that might or might not map onto the topic at hand, it would perhaps be more relevant to talk about the issues as they actually stand.

Here's my attempt...the scenario this thread seems to suggest:

Most DMs probably wouldn't put a great wyrm black dragon in a dungeon designed for 1st level characters (though they might put in a benign crazy lich, or a workaroundable golem, or something easily evadable like juju zombies, none of which really count), yet they would in a wilderness; but (and I think it's a big but)...
...as other posters have suggested, most DMs probably would fudge the encounter so that the PCs were guaranteed the opportunity to escape said great wyrm if they wanted to. Few DMs would obey the "who spots who" rules in the front of the DMG and have the great wyrm surprise and turn the whole party into pools of acidic goo within a round. TPK, nothin' but net.

I would argue that this is pure tradition - let me explain. Wildernesses are firstly not really designed for any particular level party, and are often not so much adventuring environments that PCs are supposed to seek out unto themselves as randomly populated hazards that they have to get past before getting to the real adventuring environment (such as a dungeon or city). And, the DM figures, if they run into something out of their league I'll fudge it so they get away (or it doesn't notice them, or something) unless they do "something stupid".

The question I think this raises is, if wildernesses are so CR blind, what's so special about dungeons and adventures that they shouldn't also be CR blind? The answer, I think, is pure tradition and discrimination against the wilderness as a legitimate adventuring environment unto itself. As was touched on in another recent thread, there are few or no D&D equivalents in approach to treatment of the wilderness as the Fighting Fantasy books such as Shamutanti Hills and Forest of Doom do, where it is is the adventure, not just an obstacle on the way.

I think there are good alternatives to the traditional way of handling wilderness - here's one:

As a prerequisite for being considered a non-TPK-prone self-contained adventuring environment, I'd suggest that there are some good reasons why wildernesses might be successfully "zoned" by CR. For starters, there's some good verisimilitude logic behind why high CR monsters probably wouldn't hang out near civilised areas. The most compelling reason is that if that's the case, then they probably wouldn't be civilised areas for long. If verisimilitude's your thing, I think it's hard to justify hamlets in the range of a troll tribe without some compelling reasoning. Also, unless mid-to-high level adventurers are ultra-rare (which they're generally not under the standard rules) then the dragons, liches and assorted other rabble have probably been driven away by these folk at some stage. For those of us worried about "why the high level NPCs don't deal with the kobolds", there's a reason right there. They're off on a crusade to stop a flight of wyverns from the north.

When the PCs reach mid-to-high level, they'll probably have to deal with incursions into civilised areas of say, an army of trolls. Perhaps, as the PCs gain levels, they stray towards the frontier areas of the kingdom they're in, and deal with more deadly wilderness beasties. By high level, they may settle a true wilderness, and face the real nasties. Just another reason why adventurers may be needed to carve civilisation out of the wilds. Of course, these are just ideas, and probably have holes, but my point is that there are alternatives to The Way Things Are Done when it comes to the wilderness, as handed down in the DMGs.

It's not even about verisimilitude. A world that caters to and effectively depends on the abilities and perceptions of an adventuring party - in other words, a world that's no bigger than one dungeon or level or screen at a time, is a piece of a game. Players will treat it as such.

Eh? D&D is a game. Some people may play it more as an opportunity to show off worldbuilding, or as some attempt at an interactive novel, and I think their games tend to suffer a bit for that. What I would consider an over-emphasis on verisimilitude is a symptom of that kind of approach to D&D, I think.

 

[S'mon]

But I think you are right that it can get wearisome for both DM and players to flag these things without just out-and-out telling the players. The standard argument is that players should always assume that something is very dangerous until proven otherwise, and develop tactics accordingly. That, certainly, is how the game started out (read EGG's descriptions of play to get a feel for this style). But not everyone wants to play a game where the party better play like a Special Forces squad or they die. For a more 'fun' romp, this flagging of monsters has to be explicit. And no-one can say this style is wrong: some of us want to escape from worries when we play!

Hm, I like to escape from my worries by playing a skilled warrior who uses good tactics to triumph over superior forces! I don't see much precedent in fantasy literature for 'be an idiot but still win by being much tougher than everyone else' - I guess maybe there are some movie examples. I love the Midnight campaign I'm playing in, where the default assumption is that the enemy _are_ more powerful than the PCs; and choosing to stand anf fight rather than flee like frightened bunnies is a genuine dilemma.

That said, D&D 3rd ed in particular has an _incredibly_ steep power gradient and this causes problems in that what's trivial for a 5th level N/PC is overwhelming for a 1st level PC. Ogres are not a big deal to mid-level (5th-6th) adventurers, but will easily slaughter droves of 1st levellers. So do they have a "You must flee!" reputation, or not? Likewise looking at an exotic monster there's often no way to tell if it's CR 10 or CR 20. I think the way 3rd ed is constructed, you do need to cut the players some slack in springing unavoidable party-killers on them. If the 11th level PCs go out hunting the BBEG they KNOW is CR 20 (as happens regularly IMC), that's another matter.