I ran two games at GenCon. The first was Forlorn Memories for Living Greyhawk, and I had a whole table of jaded players with PCs of 6th to 8th level. At the very beginning, one guy ran off to go to the bathroom, and the other players told me to "Just start and read the boxed text. He'll be back by the time you're done."
*sigh*
I loathe boxed text, and haven't used it since 10th grade, when I realized that disrupting my natural flow of speech to say pretty, pre-written things just makes the storytelling sound worse, rather than better. I refused to just hold up the module and read what was printed there, and tried desperately to overcome how uninterested they all seemed.
Admittedly, I did make some mistakes, like forgetting that underwater you deal half damage with all non-piercing attacks, but I think I did a good job of making a rather bland adventure and avoiding its boxed-text-iness. Case in point, the start of the adventure has an NPC appear to the PCs and ask them for help, as is so often the case. I instead tried to make it clear that she was warning them of dangers that could possibly get them killed, so that the group would have a reason to help this complete stranger.
Then there was the second adventure I ran, Endgame, also for Living Greyhawk. This one was completely the opposite of above, and was very fun. Why?
Well, it wasn't the adventure itself. Both were about as good as you could expect for a campaign where you don't know what PCs you'll have. Actually, I was more afraid of Endgame, because it was part 6 in a 6-part series, and was one of those "Save the World" type adventures, intended for characters from level 6 to 14. I had little idea what had happened in the previous 5 adventures.
But then I got a table, and it was an average party level of 2. Five brand new characters, and one 4th level wizard. In an adventure designed for a minimum party level of 6. And we had a blast. The players were all 5 to 20 years older than me, but they weren't jaded or bored. They had fun, got into character, and used their heads instead of waiting to be led by the nose.
I had to rewrite the beginning, middle, and end a bit to make the story better. Like instead of starting with the classic "Stranger comes to you in a bar, asks for help," I used the also classic, but more exciting "Bar is attacked by monsters, and stranger helps you escape, then tells you he knows what's going on."
They avoided combat with anything for the first 2 hours of the 8 hour game. They spotted an ambush and ran around it, and instead of fighting a big monster that was slow, they only fought one weenie monster that could chase them. But of course, that one monster was enough to scare them ****less about what they were facing.
In fact, their general tactic was to run away from everything. This was a slight problem because they ran away from a few spots they could have gotten useful information, but I worked around it, and dropped an NPC into the dungeon they ended up exploring. The young girl, named Sanni, was a refugee, hiding there from the same monsters they'd run from earlier, and she was just there at first to tell them what had happened. But they took to her, and the barbarian half-Orc gave her a dagger and shortbow and basically adopted her as a sidekick.
They ran away again from some more monsters, and when I gave them a few different courses to take to explore, they of course took the easiest ones first, which resulted in me making stuff up on the fly for an hour until they realized that, of course, the important stuff was all behind the scary doors, and not the safe-looking doors.
The adventure reached the climax as they took a quick, sprinting jaunt over 100 ft. of the Elemental Plane of Fire, then hopped back to the prime material plane in time for an Encounter Level 8 fight. . . .
And they kicked its ass! Through remarkable group cooperation and smart tactics, they took on numerous nasty monsters, and only lost one PC. Heck, I think the battle was actually influenced by the girl Sanni that the half-Orc befriended. With her -4 non-proficiency penalty, and -2 Strength penalty, she managed to get off a shortbow shot against one monster, deal 4 damage, and knock it out before it could take down another one of the PCs.
All in all, the second game was really fun. Not quite as much fun as what I heard going on when I eavesdropped on Pkitty's Spycraft game, but still, quite fun. I wish I could've rewarded them more, but I had to play by the rules of the RPGA and Living Greyhawk.
And yes, in Living Greyhawk, it is stupid that you can't loot the badguys and keep their stuff in later adventures. You're free to use the stuff in the current adventure, but if you want to keep any of the magic items, you have to buy them with your money. So the 1st level PCs I had, which managed to all bull rush and grapple an 8th level sorcerer at one point, weren't able to keep any of his magic items when they took him down. Ah well.
