What do you think of Living Greyhawk

[buzzard]

I play plenty of LG. I'm not one of the travelling fanatics, but I have played everything in my region which has been available, as well as all cores and metaregionals from year three.

Let me give you my anaylsis.

Positive:
Lots of players- you can always find a game. You can find players, and you can travel and find games.

Lots of adventures: With 8 regionals, 8 metaregionals, and I don't even know how many cores per year, it has the greatest quantity of adventuring available in any living campaign.

Structure: The game is structured, and you can expect certain things. This also serves to put some cap on the twinks.

Good Authors: Owing to the fact that it is the biggest, it attracts plenty of authors for the modules. Some of which are actually quite talented.

Negatives:

Lots of players: Since it is the biggest, you end up with players of all stripes. If you are playing at a con and don't know the people there, you could end up with a table that is composed of rather undesirable players. This can be either because the party is ineffective or the people are just plain painful. I've had some of both. I'm experienced enough in my gaming community now that this really isn't much of a problem anymore.

Lots of Adventures: because there is so much written, much of it is crap. You ride plenty of railroads and witness plenty of contrived nonsense created to make things harder. Plenty of modules really ignore the rules to make things harder.

Structure: The Circle often seems to be a bunch of power mad pests. Their decisions often seem to be arbitrary and unwise. They also tend to consider their own work holy writ (try some of their modules, those by David Christ are all meat grinders which find rules to be inconvenient, and thus something to be ignored). Also the structure changes all to frequently. Say you're got a character build in mind, and you've been working on it for a while. Bam. A new LGCS comes out and you're blown out of the water as the rules have changed. Some of this isn't their fault as RPGA is a part of WoTC, and thus must push the new books. However many of the rule changes seem arbitrary.

Bad Authors: the flip side of good authors are the really bad ones. I've come out of plenty of modules wondering what exactly the point happened to be. I've also come out of some just plain pissed off.

Power Gamer Central: LG's biggest problem is the power-gamer vicious circle. The game has always had powergamers, however the circle and various triads have tried to compensate by making things tougher. This just makes the powergamers adapt, and the non-powergamers have to take on some of those traits just to survive. Role playing is not a priority at all. Survival has come to be everything. Then as the powergamers got worse, the modules compensated again. Thus the escalation.

Now in the face of all this, one would wonder why I continue to play. Well I happen to like my character. I'm also pretty high level, and LG is just about the only living campaign with any high level adventuring (since Living City died). I also like many of the people who only play LG as their living campaign, so if I'm going to play with them, it's the only option. Lastly, the plethora of opportunities is hard to pass up.

We've had a local resurgence of people who gave up on LG coming back simply because they liked their characters. However they are being extremely choosy about DMs and adventures. This is a wise course, and will likely make it a much more pleasant campaign. I'm more willing to play all that's available, but then maybe I just like to have a wealth of things to complain about.

buzzard

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I've played LG for a while, as well as running games. I have a lot of fun both playing and DMing. Although, as someone said, a lot of it depends on what kind of DM is running the adventures. Also, some of the adventures are more interesting than others. They run the gamut from "intensely interesting, tied into the history of Greyhawk and the region they are set in" to "bad dungeon crawl".

You just don't really want to play LG casually. It has a story arc, and a lot of things are going on. It's not so interesting if you play one adventure, than another one the next year. You will miss a lot of the references, as they generally refer to other adventures.

I say try it, it's a lot of fun. Yes, there are a lot of rules, and you aren't able to take all the feats and equipment you want, but you can gather a large community of LG players in your area and play with any of them any time you want. And it's free. I say that's a good deal.

 

[moticon]

Myself and my kids have played it and still do occasionally. I was frustrated that many of the mods seemed to be way over powered, perhaps this is in response to power gamers.

The second problem, noted here, was the range of DM's. We wanted to have fun and enjoy the challenge, but playing on a table where the judge takes it personally when "his monsters" and "his characters" are "losing" didn't cut it for us. We ran across a couple of DM's who we figured out were out to kill everyone since every time we had to play at their table someone (usually more than 1) died, regardless of the rules that needed to be bent or buffed to make it happen.

On the good side we found some good groups in the area and we enjoy being able to join games ad-hoc when we have time. Not having to commit to a long term group helps a lot for playing the occasional game.

now that we know where to go and who to play with to avoid the problems, it's something we still enjoy.

Moticon

 

[Anthraxus]

I really enjoy the Living Greyhawk setting. For me, the positives completely outnumber the negatives on a scale of 8:1(to throw an arbitrary number out there ).

Part of it may be the Regions I have played in being well managed by the triad members(Shield Lands and Highfolk). Part of it may be the local LG group that I play in. I volunteer to run modules at Cons. I have co-written an interactive module for a recent Con.

I tend to ignore the problems people have with the Circle, even though I have had my own (slight) trouble with a ruling or two of theirs.

There are many good modules available to play(out of ~18 cores/8 regional/6 meta-regional per year), although a few of the modules do suck, yes. I have had a few problems with bad players and DMs at Cons and such, but that seems to be a general problem with folks at Cons, and not just LG.

-A

 

[RPGgirl]

I think everyone's pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's all about the DM's and Triad. This region has a pretty good Triad, but my area's DM's are very hit and miss. The biggest problem I see (and the one that has more or less convinced me to give up on LG) is that our local game day coordinator uses his personal friendships as the main criteria for being a DM - not rules knowledge, experience, or the ability to run a fun table. That pretty much leaves a sour taste with the non "in" crowd.

As far as players and scenarios, I am a big fan that with the right party and right DM, any scenario can be fun - and with the wrong party (or players) even the best module can suck big time.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

Power Gamer Central: LG's biggest problem is the power-gamer vicious circle. The game has always had powergamers, however the circle and various triads have tried to compensate by making things tougher. This just makes the powergamers adapt, and the non-powergamers have to take on some of those traits just to survive. Role playing is not a priority at all. Survival has come to be everything. Then as the powergamers got worse, the modules compensated again. Thus the escalation.

Bingo. This is the biggest problem--if you're not into power-gaming, you can get spanked really easily in the mods. This weekend, my dwarven fighter took about 90 points of damage in one round from one opponent. If you can't dish that right back at them, you're toast. Though there are creative ways around this (one recent two-round mod had *no* combats for the first round--that was a nice change of pace and everyone *had* to role play for a while), the power-gaming escalation is still pretty much the norm.

Aside from that, I still play it a lot. As many people have noted, part of it depends on what DM you get. Also, the players you get (if you're not playing with a set group) can really impact your fun. I've had a good DM and players really make a bad module fun ("Brendigund's Bride")....and I've had bad judging and/or players ruin what should have been a fun mod to play.

Finally, which region you're in can make a big difference. I'm in Highfolk, which is a pretty nice region to be in, and I'm close to Verbobonc, so I get two regions to play in very frequently. These two regions are very fun to play in (I think), and I have two other regions are fairly close (but I don't travel much to play LG). Someone stuck in the middle of a region they don't like probably won't have a good time; I'm just lucky.

LG is also great to get a gaming fix when your group implodes. Sort of like drinking the brackish water when you're trapped in the cave in. Sure, you won't drink it again when you've been rescued and have access to good water again, but when it's the only thing you have it tastes fine.

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

I think everyone's pretty much hit the nail on the head. It's all about the DM's and Triad. This region has a pretty good Triad, but my area's DM's are very hit and miss. The biggest problem I see (and the one that has more or less convinced me to give up on LG) is that our local game day coordinator uses his personal friendships as the main criteria for being a DM - not rules knowledge, experience, or the ability to run a fun table. That pretty much leaves a sour taste with the non "in" crowd.

As far as players and scenarios, I am a big fan that with the right party and right DM, any scenario can be fun - and with the wrong party (or players) even the best module can suck big time.

So, get a group of 7 together. One of you attends the gameday, and can then run the mod for the rest of your group. You can rotate the DM, so no one has to be the one attending the bad gamedays all the time. If just four of you judge, you only have to go to 25% of the gamedays. And you get to run mods and play with a group you like 75% of the time.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

My first convention was Gen Con 2000, when 3e was released and Living Greyhawk started. My wife and I spent most of our time playing RPGA games, both Living Greyhawk (LG) and Classics.*

I enjoyed the classics far more than the LG games.

I'm an old school Greyhawk fan myself, and my home campaign is set in Greyhawk, so I was hoping for a great deal of that "Greyhawk flavor." While I did get some of that I also found that the living campaigns tended to foster a playing style that I didn't enjoy. The main goal was to survive the session and get as much stuff as possible. I knew I wouldn't be playing that character again for quite some time since I didn't (and still don't) get to many cons. So gaining certs and XP wasn't all that exciting to me. I wanted to enjoy the game itself.

The classics were another story completely. There the goal was to take on a role and run riot through the adventure. Perhaps it was the quality of the DM's (very high) at the classics, but those games were just fantastic. And I got to play a multitude of character types - including Yrag (an old school fighter) at around 12th level and Mialee at about 14th - something I couldn't have done if I'd only played my character in a living campaign.

For all that, it comes down to personal preference and committment. I wasn't able to commit to a attending conventions or starting a local LG campaign to keep a character going. And I loved jumping into new characters every four hours.

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*for those of you not familiar, Classics are one shot adventures where the characters are provided for you.

I wanted to finally get a chance to play 3e at the con I went to last fall only to find that there were only "Living" games that I could create a first level PC for....no thanks. I missed the old cons where I got a new PC and had to roleplay an unexpected character.