Witchfire Collected Edition

[Wrathamon]

ad 3. Are cutscenes really rpg tools?

that is what the "block text" is right?
A verbal cutscene... a transition between events is one way to look at it.

I wouldnt use it too often and I wouldnt use it for a climatic event either.

 

[Wrathamon]

Climax of railroading and "The Longest Night" will come this Sunday.

Until now, I managed to hide railroading scenes, my players even begin second chapter from the end and nothing bad didn't happened.

So, my question, to EnWorlders don't familiar with Witchfire too, is about a ways to handle with railroading climax as such:

There is artifact hidden in a church.
There is 10th level necromancer with her 500 skeletons storming the church to take away this artifact.
There is 12th level wizard who appears and try to take the artifact for himself.
And there are 2nd (max 3rd) level PCs in the church, who can... what they can do? - this is a question.
To makes things worst, the necromancer must win, because in two next books the PCs will follow her to take away the artifact.

Men, what to do?

This is what I did...

I had setup events and objectives in a time line of rounds.

The group had to protect the church and hold back the hordes.

there were several choke points the undead would come from (two bridges) One group would hold off one side and another group would defend the other bridge.

Depending on how the PCs role-played they would have a certain amount of NPCs they could command to help defend the Church.

Every 1d4 rounds more undead would storm the bridge.

On the 4th round several undead emerged from the shore between the bridges (new objective)

After round 7 I believe the skeletons were using seige weapons or arrows (new objective)

If the PCs had made allies they would either be at the church or would arrive in a timely manor to help out.

Each event would have victory points associated with it. If the undead army reached its objectives in victory points (taking a bridge, reaching the church, etc) then the undead would swarm the PCs and they would get the "failed" xp bonus.

If they were able to hold of the Undead and score their objecitves in Victories they would "win" xp bonus.

I still did the "cutscene" for the final ending but then dropped a timer on the table and said decide! I made sure the NPCs were buffed to prevent any PCs from trying to be marters...

The Negative Levels can be an issue ( I made it so that it would only happen if you tried to USE the sword not hold the sword).

Overall, I just made the last arc event based... very fast paced and tried to be very epic. I made the undead very weak but a lot of em.

 

[Felon]

Y'know, I have written all of four reviews at ENWorld, and one of them was for Witchfire. I played it and I own it.

Over time I have come to realize that what I loathed about it isn't that the game railroads, rather that it does a hack job of railroading. It's very transparent and ill-conceived, with the author suggesting that character actions be negated by things that are clearly contrivances, like events that "suddenly" happen and characters that "suddenly" act out of initiative sequence, or attacks that miss simply because it would be inconvenient for them to hit.

It's been a while, but I don't recall that final battle even stating why the PC's can't interfere, simply that they can't. A 10th-level sorceress and 12th-level wizard can still be tackled or otherwise thwarted.

I also think it should be noted that when we talk about railroading, we mean the characters' actions are scripted. Now, the problem with the final battle is that characters barely have a speaking part.

 

[Thomas Percy]

I didn't read the entire thread (Shame on me for being lazy) but I happen to be selling my copy of Witchfire Trilogy Collected Edition on eBay right now

Shame You didn't tell this one week ago

 

[Thomas Percy]

I would probably check out Heroes of Battle and maybe Red Hand of Doom and use the Victory point ideas from those to modify the ending.

But don't give them a chance to change things and then not let things change when they manage it.

I've used these two advices, and with a little luck, I ran successfuly infamous climax of "The Longest Night".

First, Privateer Press added (in Collected edition) to Alexia's equimement ring with wall of force spell - very handy thing to railroad some scenes.

Second, I have had some luck, because durning cathedral siege ALL my PCs fled at belltower, and when they realized Alexia and Van Oberen are present five floors below, they ran down to be stopped by single door blocked by wall of force. So my PCs could watched a scene and couldn't interfere (for their own good, because cone of cold and empowered quickened magic missile in one round is not healthy for 2nd level characters).


.

 

[Korgoth]

My suggestion (free advice and you get what you paid for here) is to just let them 'break' the adventure if they manage it. "Aw, man, I shot Alexia in the face!" Fine - shoot her in the face and blow her brains out. Then the party has to deal with the consequences! Maybe one of them ends up with Stormbringer, or whatever the heck it's called. Just run with it. There can still be a reason for them to go to the temple in module 2 or deal with the stuff in module 3, etc. But because the trilogy (I have the 3.0 version) is the Reading Railroad ("I was going to write a fantasy novel but instead I serialized it as these three modules") you would have to accept, on this model, that much of the material therein could be rendered unuseable by the PC's free will.

That's how I'd want you to run it if I were one of your players, for whatever that's worth.

 

[Thomas Percy]

Everyone of my 5 players paid some bucks for this adventure.
I promised them 10+ game sessions.
And I warned them about railroading and they agreed to be patient.

I think they can be very dissapionted if after 3 game sessions I will say "game over, you are out of railroad track".