Why do Dragonlance campaings never work?

[Kichwas]

Why would a Kender -not- steal from his companions when it's an uncontrollable trait?

Here's a situation to put a Kender in:

The party are all chain below decks in a slavers ship caught in a terrible storm, above them they can hear the sailor yelling and shouting, trying to keep the vessel afloat and avoid crashing into the reefs around a nearby shore. Below where they are the hold is filling with water and at least one NPC slave has drowned from being chained too low.

It's a miserable moment, the DM describes the tension and horror with pure wonderful form.


If a Kender is played properly, this is about where he breaks out in show tunes...

They're cheery and immune to fear.

 

[Desdichado]

I haven't read it in several months, but I'm pretty sure the new DLCS book does have a section that encourages roleplaying. Specifically, I think that they strongly recommend that the GM make use story awards mentioned in the DMG.

That's good, but you've gotta admit, that's not much. Certainly not to the point that you can make sweeping generalizations like:

I should mention, however, that DL is not a power-gamer world and I'm sure that plays something of a role in some peoples' distaste for the setting. DL places a MUCH stronger emphasis on role-playing and story than it does on combat encounters and gaining levels.

That's much more a factor of the GM of the game than it is of the setting, relative to something like Forgotten Realms, for instance.

 

[Starman]

Why would a Kender -not- steal from his companions when it's an uncontrollable trait?

Here's a situation to put a Kender in:

The party are all chain below decks in a slavers ship caught in a terrible storm, above them they can hear the sailor yelling and shouting, trying to keep the vessel afloat and avoid crashing into the reefs around a nearby shore. Below where they are the hold is filling with water and at least one NPC slave has drowned from being chained too low.

It's a miserable moment, the DM describes the tension and horror with pure wonderful form.


If a Kender is played properly, this is about where he breaks out in show tunes...

They're cheery and immune to fear.

Which does not preclude the other player's from being afraid. Not to mention, if you remember the novels, Tas had a few moments where he was actually afraid or realized that humor and cheer were not in order.

Starman

 

[mmadsen]

Just because canonical characters are fulfilling certain events in the world, doesn't mean that your PC's don't have just as big a part to play.

If the canonical characters are fighting and winning the conflict of that time and place -- the War of the Lance, the War of the Ring -- your PCs do not, cannot, play just as big a part.

While I can certainly imagine a fun campaign fighting alongside the Knights of Solamnia or skirmishing against Orcs in the north, it's not just as big a part as the role of Tanis, or Aragorn, etc.

 

[kigmatzomat]

When I started our current DL campaign, my players were worried about rail-roading and didn't like the idea of playing the original heroes. That was fine b/c I had no intention of doing either. Our campaign takes place right after the War of the Lance and I'm happy to report the P has never met any of the Heroes (the only famous people they've met have been wizards of high sorcery, i.e. Dalamar, Par-Salian).

My group's been in a DL-based campaign now since shortly after 3e came out. The players range from DL-afficianados to people who were knew nothing about the setting. Our game is set 400 years after the Chaos War, during which time the dragons have taken over Krynn. I've significantly rewritten the world's origin and basically turned the concept of the setting on its side without messing up the details.

I've also given the players a bit of destiny to deal with. They aren't *necessarily* the primary movers and shakers of the world but they are catalysts. Their actions will hasten changes in the world. That and the players are not "The One." However they have been "The First." Which are great DM tools and highly recommended.

Besides, no one can predict what mayhem PCs might cause; best harness that unpredictability for your own uses. They were supposed to influence a proto-god's future actions but managed to basically evacuate all the nasties of the abyss to Krynn. It doesn't derail my plot and in fact furthers it quite well, but significantly changes the game world for quite some time, if not permamently.

 

[Desdichado]

There's always a problem with "epic" stories being turned into game settings in that you have to sacrifice one of the important elements of the book/movie/etc. that gives you the setting in order to get the rest of it.
DL, Star Wars, the Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, etc. all have the same problem. Namely, that the epic nature of the original tales the setting is based on can't be maintained if the details of the setting are also maintained. In DL, the heroes of the Chronicles novels are the ones doing the most epic plotline by far that can be squeezed out of the setting. Trying to have someone else have a plot just as epic that happens concurrently stretches the bounds of reasonableness. Because the actions of the heroes drastically change the nature of the world, you can't just move the PCs in time or place from the action in the books either, unless you want to lose out on all the detail that makes the setting interesting in the first place!

The same problems happen with Star Wars; you can set your game after Return of the Jedi (I would) but then you don't get to take advantage of a lot of the setting as seen in the movie because it's no longer relevant. Or, can you imagine a Middle-earth game without the threat of Sauron? It wouldn't feel like Middle-earth, but nothing anybody does can compare to the quest of Frodo and Sam.

The only way to pull it off is to make an alternate timeline, or make do with PCs that aren't as epic as the "PCs" who are the stars of book and movie. For instance, I'd do Star Wars after all the main characters from the movie are old and gray (or dead) and have some kind of Sith menace pop back up. For Lord of the Rings, I'd go with the alternate that Tolkien himself proposed in which Gandalf takes the Ring, otherthrows Sauron and puts himself up as the new Dark Lord (meanwhile Saruman completes his own Ring research and sets himself up as a viable rival -- this is from the author's Forward wherein he describes how the plot might have differed had Lord of the Rings actually been more allegorically connected to World War II.) I'm not familiar enough with Dragonlance to know exactly how I'd get around that problem, but I'm sure there are ways to do it, but not without excercising a bit of creative problem solving.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Some people here apparently worry about violating canon or some such nonsense. That their characters will always be in the shadows of the original crew around Tanis.

Well, we've recently started a new Dragonlance campaign set around the beginning of the War of the Lance. And let me tell you, no matter what some book says, in our campaign it was our characters who recovered those bloody discs of Mishakal for Goldmoon. Never mind that we lost half of our equipment while being captured by the draconians (including all the stuff my character carried around), and that we were were actually close to starvation while we were waiting in those underground ruins for that black dragon to go away. We got them, and not some half-elven ranger and his plucky companions.

And that's a damn fact.

 

[Desdichado]

Some people here apparently worry about violating canon or some such nonsense. That their characters will always be in the shadows of the original crew around Tanis.

Well, we've recently started a new Dragonlance campaign set around the beginning of the War of the Lance. And let me tell you, no matter what some book says, in our campaign it was our characters who recovered those bloody discs of Mishakal for Goldmoon. Never mind that we lost half of our equipment while being captured by the draconians (including all the stuff my character carried around), and that we were were actually close to starvation while we were waiting in those underground ruins for that black dragon to go away. We got them, and not some half-elven ranger and his plucky companions.

And that's a damn fact.

That's another way to handle it, but it's got it's problems too. Namely, that PCs likely know what needs to be done, since it's already been done by the NPC heroes of the books! As I said earlier, that will eventually be a proscripted way to play (now that we've finished playing Dragons of Winter Night we can move onto replacing Tanis and Co. in Dragons of Spring Dawning) or you diverge into an alternate version of the setting that eventually bears little resemblance to the setting as published.

It's unfortunate, in a way, that the novels were so successful and that the setting resolves so much around them. Or, from another perspective, it's unfortunate that the novels are so epic in scope that all of the major, setting-changing things that could happen already did. There's still not really a good way to work around that without changing something about the setting that makes it appealing in the first place.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

That's another way to handle it, but it's got it's problems too. Namely, that PCs likely know what needs to be done, since it's already been done by the NPC heroes of the books!

That doesn't apply if you have mature players who can seperate OOC knowledge from in-character knowledge.

Take the quest for the discs, for example, and what motivated the characters:

- The barbarian undertook the quest because the shamaness of his village (i.e., Goldmoon) asked him to.
- The dwarven proto-cleric and the human proto-druid went along because they were eager to learn of the gods (and the fact that some of the stars went missing proved that something big was going on).
- My scholarly rogue went along because this was a real opportunity to learn about history, and be a part of some great history-making events (and despite the loss of all his equipment and money, and an unpleasant imprisonment at the hands of the draconians, considered the whole thing to have been worth the effort).
- The newly-minted wizard of the Black Robe went along in the hopes of finding something to plunder (and was well rewarded for his efforts, too).

I dunno what the elven ranger/wizard thought about this, though. I guess he was just bored...

And likewise, just because I know the whole backstory doesn't mean my character does. For example, my character, upon first seeing the draconians, theorized that they were the actual dragons of legend, and that legend had just exaggerated their size (a theory he had to retract soon afterwards when he first met his first real dragon...).

Or put it another way: If you had read The Lord of the Rings, would that keep you from watching Peter Jackson's movie interpretation? After all, you know the plot now...

As I said earlier, that will eventually be a proscripted way to play (now that we've finished playing Dragons of Winter Night we can move onto replacing Tanis and Co. in Dragons of Spring Dawning) or you diverge into an alternate version of the setting that eventually bears little resemblance to the setting as published.

Whatever happens, whatever path our characters might take, I have faith in our DM that we will be in for a cool ride - whether the setting will end up the same in the end or not.

 

[Dogbrain]

The idea that the main heroes from the Chronicles leads to railroading is utter rubbish. Just because Tanis and Co did their thing doesn't mean that your characters can't do yours. Its not railroading to use events from the novels as flavour, otherwise you have to accuse FR of the same.

Funny you should say that, because I lost all interest in FR as soon as that gods war crap came out. I had quite a lot of time invested in fleshing things out, and now all the "official" stuff dropped dung on that--well screw TSR, I'll never buy another FR item, again--and I haven't, ever since.