Daztur
Adventurer
We've already had several insightful posts about some of the downsides of CaW, but I'll try to add one more. Tone. I feel like CaW almost unavoidable adds comedy to any game. There's a reason why the excellent example of CaW in the original post and most of the other examples are funny. Because most CaW tactics are crazy and gonzo, and that's almost always funny. A relatively serious heroic game, or gritty game, is kinda difficult to keep compatible with CaW, isn't it?
Good point about how CaW often gets comedic. A lot of CaW player plots tend to be goofball Wile E. Coyote antics. If you want more serious gameplay what you need to do is take away the Acme catalogue from the players by making sure that the players are faced by a lot of constraints. When you have CaW without the proper constraints you get things like Scry and Die, 15 Minute Adventuring Days, fistfuls of CLW wands, Rope Trick, etc. etc. and a lot of silly play.
A good way of avoiding this is removing abilities that strip away big and important constraints from the players and making sure that they have to cook up a lot of their plots in places where they can’t easily rest and resupply.
Another thing you can do is take away the PC’s initiative, most fun CaW scenarios are the players plotting how to screw over someone or trying to escape being screwed over and it’s good to alternate them. If there’s a monster behind you chasing you RIGHT NOW or something like that you don’t have time to make up crazy-ass Wile E. Coyote plots. Attrition is also a great way to strip away the silliness.
Let me give you an actual example from one of our B5 module (Horror on the Hill) games. We’d taken too many risks and gone too deep into the wilderness and were low on food, the cleric was stabilized at negative hit points, the thief was almost there, the hirelings were scared, the magic-user was down to one spell and the fighter (me) was at half HPs. We’d found a (somewhat) safe place to hole up but we couldn’t wait long enough for the cleric to wake up, we didn’t have enough food, and we didn’t dare try to carry him back to town, since it was a day’s march away.
The magic-user and my fighter left the others behind to go to the bush with magic healing berries (which we hadn’t picked since we were afraid of them going old and losing their mojo) to pick some and bring them back to the cleric so he could wake up and heal us. We were on the edge of our seats the whole time since one random encounter could doom the whole party. All that happened is the DM rolled one ogre, who we surprised and killed. Combat took less than five minutes and nothing tactically interesting happened, but it was more exciting than many boss fights (even for the player whose cleric was unconscious but who was staring nervously at the surprise dice) because of the context and there was nothing comedic or goofy about it.
We were on the edge of a TPK but there was nothing about it we could blame on the DM, none of his decisions had made anything more difficult, all of the decisions that brought the PCs to the edge of a TPK (going too deep, not hiring more than two hirelings, not buying dogs, not picking the berries earlier, etc. etc. etc.) were made by us and were almost all made out of combat. Damn fun session, especially since the thief found some hidden loot while we were gone berry picking, despite most of the combat being uninteresting from a CaS perspective (with some fun exceptions).
I think that also shows why tracking boring logistics stuff is important. Logistics is important since having the players think, “Oh god, we’re almost out of X, we’ve got to get the hell out of here!” is a great way of lighting a fire under their asses. It doesn’t matter what X is as long as you can track it, it runs out during adventures, it can’t be replenished in the field and the players can’t easily get back and forth between the place where they can get more X and the place where the gold they want to take is. Some game rules make it too easy to replenish any given X, which can make CaW play go sideways.
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