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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 5817547" data-attributes="member: 55680">We played the B5 module with 0 XP 1ed AD&D characters with DMG rules about negative hit points in effect and 4d6 drop the lowest rolled in order. It took us many many sessions to clear it (which is one reason I don’t think that CaW is so high-prep, make the content nasty and random enough and you can string out a limited amount of prep across a whole bunch of sessions). My fighter didn’t gain a level until the end of session four.I’d say that if you have an experienced DM and newbie players CaW is generally a superior introduction. In order to appreciate CaS you have to understand the tactical rules and how to use them, which is hard to get across to new players, while you can play a fun CaW game with players who don’t have a clue how the game works (in my view a key advantage of CaW play, there’ll always be players who NEVER learn who the rules work well enough to understand how to use them tactically, but they can still come up with clever CaW plans). For a newbie DM with players who know the rules, I’d go with CaS for the reasons you state. For a game in which neither the players nor the DM have played before; I’d go with CaW with a well-written module with clear and specific DM instructions that provides a small sandbox with high walls.You bring up some good points here. It’s impossible to remove DM partiality entirely, but to make CaW work the players always have to feel like they won it was because they were lucky and smart (not because of the DM let them) and when they lost it was because they were dumb and unlucky (not because the DM is a bastard). So there’s tension here.As for as how to relieve it keeping the sandbox small (at least to start out) so the DM has to fiat less in play can help as do random tables, as has already been mentioned and rule systems like Adventurer Conqueror King has (which answer a lot of questions about “what can an angry thieves guild do?”). Another trick I learned from my current DM is when you have to decide something out of the blue, don’t decide it, decide the range of options and then roll randomly. It’s still fiat, but the fiat is blunted a bit. If you do that, have random tables/notes to fall back on and make sure to only make decisions that really screw the PCs over if they’ve given you enough rope to justify hanging them (for example when, in an old campaign, my character murdered a priest he mistakenly thought was evil he noted a journal lying open in his bedroom, which my character didn’t bother looking at and when the lynch mob was on my character’s heels all I could do was be angry at myself for not reading the journal rather than the DM for tricking me) it’ll hold together, but the illusion that they’re interacting with the world rather than with the DM’s brain will always be to some extent an illusion, but it’s an illusion that’s important to roleplaying.</blockquote>

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