Me-from-three-years-ago was even worse at campaign organisation than I am!
And seriously, me-from-three-years-ago, was it really necessary to change the spelling of a guy's name when he went undercover if the pronunciation wasn't changed?
@AlexP Undermountain makes more sense when you remember that Halaster backed up his insanity with godlike power. After his death (at the beginning of Expedition to Undermountain) all semblance of order began to rapidly fall apart
It doesn't have to make sense if the crazy guy in charge can simply force reality to conform to his delusions.
I'm saying that the Undermountain stuff I've seen leans towards being very static because there's very little of a discernible "ecology" to the place. Anything could just be everywhere, because godlike crazypants logic.
@AlexP Check out the 3.5 Expedition to Undermountain module. It does a lot better on explaining the ecology of those creatures that actually have to eat.
Obviously the golems and undead can be anywhere and don't give a single damn.
Yeah, but overall the setting feels like a collection of unrelated set pieces that remain unchanging unless and until the PCs trigger their predetermined interactions/progress.
It's like a video game where the door in the alley is locked until you overhear the valet mention that the star's understudy is sick.
I've got a setting I designed for a D&D game that I want to use in a Fate Core campaign. However, I feel as though a good chunk of the setting was designed to take advantage of or work around issues specific to D&D 3.5 mechanics--kind of like how Mxy's blog entry here describes the influence of levelling and XP on adventure design.
My question is something about how to differentiate and extract the bits of a D&D 3.5 setting that only exist to accommodate that system's mechanical.... uniqueness.
Like, what are common markers of such elements, or has anyone written about this before?
Hrm... that's an interesting question, really. It's almost like you're going from one extreme to the other, though; extreme mechanics to extreme narrative.
I also recall people being unhappy with a more integrated WHFB and WHFRPG that occurred in 2nd edition or so. Before that, they shared backstory and flavor, but nothing more. And then suddenly Emperor Karl Franz was not just an astute politician, but also a griffon-riding badass general (with a mini and everything).
Hrm. Depends on how you want to portray them, I guess. One way to do a Chessmaster is to cheat as a GM and just have them always be prepared for whatever PCs are doing.
Hmmm. This is making me reevaluate my entire story premise....
> Generally speaking, the impending doom shouldn't be a world-ending event or you force your players to choose it. Impending dooms should be sinister enough to get your players' attention but not so dire that they have no other choice but tackle it.
My original concept was, to put it in terms of fronts, that every front tied into one major hidden front which, without the influence of the PCs, would have a catastrophic impending doom signalling the end of the entire island city-state the campaign was set in.
So no matter which front the PCs chose, they would ultimately still be tackling the Chessmaster's plan.
So, a meta-front that gets advanced by other fronts. Works.
Fronts are usually a write-up of what would happen without PCs, and it tends to end poorly. Unless some of the triggers are caused by an expected PC action.
If you're trying to follow the AW/DW GM advice in order to have the fronts do "what it says on the tin," I think they basically have to be impending negative events. Because of how they fit into the moves.
My understanding is that the events aren't 100% defined. The big bad portal will open and... what happens next? Who knows! But that mostly the "plan B" is more at the level of the individual actors (represented by Dangers) rather than the fronts themselves.
(and if it helps you think about it, you absolutely can have several triggers for one step, or even a couple of branches of steps leading to the same Impending Doom)
> I assume lists of the actual elements themselves would be prohibitively long/silly, so I’m asking for procedural advice on how to recognize them when I see them.
Modified the formatting to de-emphasize the examples.
So you're looking to understand the principles behind how mechanics inform design, which I think is an awesome topic, but it seems too... big... for the Stack to handle it properly.
At very least, it would take a laser focus and an iron grip to keep it from turning into either a battlefield or a circus.
Conclusion: you should write that book, and I would buy a copy. I would buy ten copies.
As a side note, I now have a personal goal to work the phrase "cirque de sang" into casual conversation this week.
i don't have the players yet, but I'm realizing roll20 might actually be something for me and the potential for finding the right people where ever they may be is there -- but the efforts would be craaazy
Players are lost. They keep walking until they decide otherwise. Say there's a river. They decide to follow it one way. They come to a bridge with a path leading away from the forest (other side) or back into the forest. The follow the road and start recognizing the area. They end up back at the Goblin camp.
They did fumble some survival rolls that would have helped them figure out they were going the wrong way, but ultimately they chose the direction in which to go.
yeah.
This is hypothetical by the way, my players didn't get lost
I'm not entirely sure I want that. But I want to consider it honestly and thoroughly. Want to see if it's doable
Because even if I reject it ultimately (cause while getting lost is a legitimate choice for the character given his knowledge it might be a suboptimal choice for the player who's being deprived of entertainment caused by quest).
Yeah, but you can draw on the maps too, and I'm a fast drawer
also that only matters for battle maps anyways, otherwise I can pull up scenery shots for all I care. Players don't need to see the big picture, but I want it to be there... :D
Either a) you limit the range of the area to a very small region, like a Treasure Island type location, or b) you're okay with having general notes on everything but only filling in the details as the players arrive in an area--so you know the general idea of what they'll encounter, but you don't have the specifics pre-made.
The alternative is c) going mad from creating, documenting, and keeping track of thousands of bits of information that your game will never actually use.
How do you record the details that you came up with so that if they return later it's still the same
Alternative c. also has the problem that you have to pull up the reference as fast as you could have made it up
But I'm not at the "is it worth it" stage yet, I'm still in the consideration phase where I'm asking is it even possible at all?
I will definitively start with a small region to test it. - goblins may be fast runners, but they're easily distracted so they don't travel far. So it wouldn't have to be too big a region for quite a while... hopefully
@Julix That requires active recording, like making notes reflecting on the game at the end of every session.
@Julix Of course it's possible! But you spend weeks/months on the prep before you can ever begin the game, and a large amount of the work is never used.
@BESW that doesn't make it possible yet. because you have to pull up the reference fast enough in game. - with so much content it doesn't matter if it's your own or someone else's you can't be familiar with it all at the same time
(And, frankly, it's a little boring because unless you're also constantly updating the unseen parts of the setting, the party's actions have no effect on the other parts of the world.)
@Julix So your question is one of in-game data access? Easy, just memorise it all.
(Actually, I'm partly serious. If you spend as much time as it takes to create that much of the setting beforehand, you're living and breathing it. I've done it, and needed only minor notes on each area to bring the details to mind.)
You refer to your more details notes on the area the party's in before you start each session, and if they move to a new area you call for a snack break to review that area's notes.
@BESW I'd prefer a solution that makes it possible for someone who didn't create the content to present it... but I guess even with normal modules you can tell when the DM has to constantly read up on what's happening in the next room if he's not prepared enough --- while an improvising DM would instead have the documenting problem, where the last room you were in suddenly changes cause he forgot what he last said
Because at the end of the day if you want to truly, actually, literally pre-construct an entire setting so that every single possible issue or question or problem is already addressed...
Here are some important questions my players have needed to know the answers to:
@BESW Only things that are predictably relevant to the story. If that nut stash does become relevant I'll make it up then, or randomize, or what ever. But whether or not there's a village 2 days that way (in case the goblins do cross the bridge) matters.
I would want a few facts for the Mayor ahead of time so I can roleplay him when they first interact with him. A few mannerisms perhaps. But if the first interaction is them breaking in and he's sleeping and they'll kill him and his silence is a warning to his wife....
so again my question is it even possible? - and the answer at this detail level is no, because info would be infinite, and thus how would you retrieve it fast enough (can't search through all the info for what you need to know)
How much does this elephant statue weigh? What happens if you're five minutes late to a meeting with Ciang the Arm? Are the engravings on this wall deep enough to hide a spy camera?
@Julix Right, so your question becomes unanswerable because a) you haven't set a limit on the level of detail you feel the need to prepare, and b) it's impossible to know how quickly you're able to retrieve data--it depends on your memory, your ability with computers, whether you have to mutter the alphabet song under your breath...
but that requires familiarity with the image. I can't pull up that kind of information from a data bank. - Thus why computers can't GM properly because they don't know how to react to strange inputs
Ideally quick enough to not slow down the game, that is without really interrupting the game at all. -- then again if the characters chat amongst each other you'd not be interrupting
You're asking for a flat "possible/impossible" answer to a question based on a dozen different "good enough," "quick enough," "detailed enough" vagueries.
Back when I was playing AD&D, I had quite a deep familiarity with several regions of the Forgotten Realms, from reading sourcebooks and playing the relevant computer-games.
Could I have run a sandbox campaign there? Sure. Not because I had every location and person memorized, but because I was familiar enough with the terrain to improvise.
@BESW I don't know if such a group exists. I don't know what parameters would work well... That's why I'm asking for other people's experience. With what parameters is it possible.
Either I remembered it later on, which was great, or I forgot and my players reminded me, which was also fine, or we both forgot, so I invented something else.
There are plenty of tools available to organize campaign notes. I've tried 4x6 cards, files on my computer, notebooks, and more. I have thought of trying mind mapping software such as FreeMind, note taking applications like Evernote, or even setting up a wiki somewhere.
What tools (electronic ...
It had a very sandboxy feel to it. The gob chief was hungry so they go out to find food. Survival check says you could catch something and lists a few locations where and what they could do. And that there's a lumber jack outpost thingy not too far away and though more risky they might have food. They pitch the idea amongst one another and go do that. and hilariousness begins. - There happen to be other goblins there and they plan to co-operate, but the others run off with the good stuff.
Could have gone many other ways, mainly because the players could do what they want the and the world was ready to react appopriately
The distinguishing feature of the sandbox isn't the knowledge that the GM knows everything about everywhere, it's that you're free to go wherever you like.
right, but in order to create that where-ever meaningfully I either have to make stuff up on the spot (and document the results in case you come back) or have it prepped. If you want to go somewhere (no matter when the work is put in or how) content has to be generated.
Apocalypse World/Dungeon World. Its philosophy is that you put big blank spaces in your world and see what makes sense to put in them when you get there.
Random and pre-gen isn't too different either, since you could randomly create all the content ahead of time and then document it. Only difference is that makes it have the data retrieval issue rather than the data generation. Not sure if it takes longer to find the notes for that piece of forest on what the dice said when you created the forest or just roll something right now.
Randomizing openly might reduce immersion by breaking the illusion that the world is real (or at least exists as reality for those characters), or increase immersion as they can see the world being created in front of their eyes... -- same goes for rolling random encounters I guess.
But the mermaids turned out to be an advanced Atlanean-like civilization of water-adapted humans with massive superiority complexes and access to some epic-level spellpower.
(Basically a shameless underwater/magical ripoff of the Cetagandans from Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.)
I think we talked about that before, but I had a GM pull up a wight and then a werewolf as a random encounter because she wasn't using any kind of setting based encounter table that time - and so it felt out of place due to lack of setting/context. I felt much like I was playing a complicated board game rather than participating in a story telling experience. Which is fine. Beating it up was still fun. -- But I guess in my own games I want to never have that feeling creep in :D
Heck, at one point I had Excel files with about two dozen different random encounter charts based on location, climate, and nearby settlements, and I'd match them together to create a new semi-custom list for every area.
Then I realised that unless my players' only reason for playing D&D was to fight monsters for no particular reason, random encounters are a waste of my players' time.
After that the only "random" encounters I ever threw at them were secretly relephant to something more important.
Yeah, but if you're low level goblins lost in the forest and walking deeper into it random encounters can become very plot like... stayin alive, stayin alive, uh uh uh aaaah, stayin allliiiiiiiiiiiiiveeee :D
See here the random encounter wouldn't be very random... I remember in some module an important monster (if not encoutered elsewhere before) had a certain chance of being at it's lair at arrival, else he'd be roaming in the forest. Realistically it wasn't chance that would make him be in one room or another but say time of day, or something, but that's more detail than that particular character deserved. Basically randomizing here has all to do with simulating realistic character behaviour...
It's realistic to wander through the woods all day and never have a dangerous encounter with anything because none of the beasts are hungry enough to mess with a group of five noisy strange things.
That's why some random encounter charts have "nothing" entries.
Like you show up at the dragons lair and the dragon ain't home. Left a note "Nephew is sick. Don't steal anything, I swear I'll chase you down, have magical mark on all my stuff. Congrats on making it this far though, here's 100 gold. I'll be back in three days tops, if you still want to fight."
But seriously, if you're rolling on a random encounter chart are you doing it to see what's realistically going to happen, or are you doing it because you want to fight a monster?
However who was awake when the dice turn bad matters if anything does happen...
And you want to avoid metagaming, and such, so I think routines is a good way to deal with that. If there's a standard order, then the GM can do all the rolls quickly and take up less time for finding out we had a good night's rest
Then again some people like the tension of not knowing if something's about to eat their sleeping characters, though since the rolls still happen (just faster) I don't think they'd lose much over it... :-S
See @waxeagle, the questions I hate come in two varieties: the ones that deal in contested topics where one side has no idea what they're talking about (Vow of Poverty) and social questions about how to handle mechanics at the table (because it picks fights)
Vow of Poverty and its cousin questions deal in situations where one side has hard numbers and mechanical proof, which the other side ignores while slashing their wrists and screaming that we don't get the game.
I formulated a theory: VoP might be good, but it's too situational to be reliable. It works only against some types of opponents, in some tactical situations, with some DMs
I personally know a guy who made a lvl 10 monk with AC 100 and stopped some epic monsters by standing at the door. Very powerful. But really situational.
@Zachiel Thing is, it's only tolerable in those situations, because unless the DM straight-up never gives out magical items you're always better off not taking VoP and using the wealth instead.
Upon death, you terraform the land beneath your corpse into a mausoleum of a magnitude equal to your wealth upon death. At level 10, 15, and 20, you may add a dungeon level to your tomb, consult table 7-3 for populating the dungeon levels based on total wealth at time of death.
> You gain all extraordinary and supernatural abilities (both attacks and qualities) of the assumed form, but you lose your own supernatural abilities.
I'm...not actually sure. I've never seen someone lose class features when shapeshifted but that might just be a persistent houserule or misunderstanding.
Need to check if polymorph any object lets me retain my (Su) - I don't really care about not gaining those others when I can just cast a non-persistent shapechange to take care of that.
Must also find a high Int, not Sarrukh creature with ok Str and Dex to morph into for combat. Possibly pouncing.
@Zachiel They do, so long as they don't require an appendage that you no longer have
LIke you can't have a breath ewapon if you turn into something without a head
"You retain all supernatural and spell-like special attacks and qualities of your normal form, except for those requiring a body part that the new form does not have (such as a mouth for a breath weapon or eyes for a gaze attack). "
I'd have been a lot happier with Wild as an armor property if the armor check epanlties and such still applied, but just saying "sure you can have boatloads of AC for free" annoyed me
@Zachiel Ah, I see what you mean now. Those properties wouldn't work while shifted
It's still a case where you shift into something with good natural armor and then get a bunch of extra AC from the wild armor. IT's not so bad on what Druids can normally wear, what I don't like is cheesing something like dragonhide full plate without proficiency and avoiding the penalties
(Course, a DM can respond in kind by using the dragonhide rules to say "sure, go kill a colossal dragon and you can make that armor")
(But that kind of thing doesn't tend to lead to a fun game)
There are plenty of tools available to organize campaign notes. I've tried 4x6 cards, files on my computer, notebooks, and more. I have thought of trying mind mapping software such as FreeMind, note taking applications like Evernote, or even setting up a wiki somewhere.
What tools (electronic ...
