Rescue at Rivenroar - Retrospective

Ok guys...lets review the Rescue at Rivenroar campaign. The overarching themes of most of these are moderation, roleplaying, and streamlining.

----------------------------

Combat vs. Story vs. Fun:

We cut our teeth pretty hard on Rivenroar. Two characters changed classes mid-campaign and it sounds like two players will be changing characters entirely between Rivenroar and the next campaign. What was supposed to have taken four nights instead took seven, and that was after I cut out a large amount of the monsters in Rivenroar. Speaking of Rivenroar, have you seen the file for it? Now that we are done, I'd like anyone interested to see it, so they understand a little better how our campaign resulted like it did.

So we learned a lot and made changes on the fly. Having read ahead into the next couple of months' worth of campaigns, I would say that the campaign designers did, too. So far, none of the other campaigns have so much consecutive combat like there was in the Rivenroar castle section. Seriously, 15 combat encounters and only 1 social challenge? I wonder if you think the way I do, but it seemed like too much fighting with not enough story elements. There was some backstory to be extracted from the captives, but it wasn't that much.

Think back to the first 2 nights - think of them as 1 night. If we had them to do again, I bet we could have done them all in 1 night. Bar combat challenge, Ogre Cart combat challenge, Town Mayor social challenge, Interrogation social challenge, and the Travel challenge. That's 40% fighting, 40% talking, and 20% rolling to not get lost and die. A lot of the content for the coming months is close to this format and honestly I think that will be a good thing. Keeping the role-players happy is just as important as giving the combat-happy warmongers something to smash.

I initially wanted to stick to the letter as far as the written campaign went; I think I want to still follow the campaign pretty closely but to make some changes. Besides the above about keeping combat and story in balance, I'd like to compress the campaign so that it runs 3 or 4 nights tops. I'd like to get to the paragon tier before people start moving away again. This will accelerate the xp gain and loot gain, which I'm sure most of you would agree cannot be a bad thing. I think I will empty monsters from a few rooms, or maybe even remove rooms entirely (most likely the former, that way you can still explore the locales). Some of this can be done without seeming too cheese-balled, so stay tuned for how we pull this off.

----------------------------

Party Balance:

Some of you are of the "We need each role/class represented in our party" mindset; others are of the "Role/class representation would be nice but it's more important to play what I want to play" mindset. I need you to know that I, personally, support both mindsets and really don't care which you go with. As I figure it, you can die horribly in a balanced party, and you can have surprising success with an unbalanced party. Either way, I'm still eventually going to kill you guys so it's really just a matter of when, where, and how exactly the body is affected by a high velocity impact with the bottom of a chasm. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Seriously though, I recommend that everyone just respect the mindset of everyone else. Feel free to civilly explain your position and maybe you'll sway them to your point of view, but if that doesn't work, please don't hold that against anyone. This sort of leads into the next point.

----------------------------

Skill Challenges vs. Skilled Players:

We learned pretty early how effective having a character who isn't a bluffer (+0 Charisma modifier and +0 skill in bluff) is when attempting to bluff in a skill challenge where the DC is 20 - not effective at all! But, should that player be disallowed to make that attempt? This is something I've thought about a bit.

If that player believes that his character would make that attempt anyway, saying he can't do that denies him of a genuine opportunity to role-play. On the other hand, saying that he can make the attempt will almost always be progress towards failure of the challenge.

What I would like to do, and you saw the beginning of this with the travel challenge and the social challenge with Mirtala, is make very clear the following:

1. A social challenge has started
2. It has a definite goal that should be worked for
   
3. Party will be told what the primary skills for the challenge are
   
4. Party will be told that there are secondary skills, but not told which skills those are
   
5. Open up the initial interaction in the challenge to only people who are skilled in the skill which they are attempting (not trained in bluff? then you can't start the challenge bluffing).
6. Once the challenge is 50%-75% complete, then I'll open it up to others to everyone to participate, skilled or not skilled.

This can, of course, be tweaked further with how this actually works and your feedback. It just needs to be clear what the goal is and everyone needs to work towards it. It's important to me that no single person carry any whole challenge. Like the Mirtala challenge, Blake did 3 of the 4 successes, he could have easily done the final one, but I put that on the party to finish. Equally important to me is that party members do not torpedo the skill challenges by insisting they attempt skills they have little to no chance to succeed in.

I hope you all see what I mean and can agree with at least a few points here.

----------------------------

Roleplayed vs. Tableplayed:

Table is table-talk, out of game talk, out of character talk, and just being the people that we all are normally. Role is role-played talk, in-game talk, in character talk, and sometimes being someone that we aren't normally in real life.

Sometimes choices made both at the table and in the role can frustrate others. We've seen this enough times that this needs to be addressed here. It's not uncommon that the role-played choices of one player can encourage the others to react negatively at the table. While I am sure this will be an occassional struggle, we all need to make an active effort, dungeon master included, to make sure that our characters' reactions are our characters' reactions; do not let your table reaction become your character's role-played reaction.

----------------------------

Railroaded vs. No Momentum:

Worded another way: too fast vs. too slow. Everyone, I'm sure, agrees that both extremes should be avoided but not everyone has the same definition of those extremes. One person's "just right" is another person's "too fast"; that person's "just right" is the first person's "too slow". Some compromise somewhere in the middle needs to be reached and everyone needs to settle for it.

I think I lean a little towards the fast side, and for the most part, I think 4e does, too. While I will restrain myself from pushing the party through the content, I will try to keep the objectives at all times clear so those same objectives are what the party is constantly working towards.

If party members push so fast that the rest of the party is dragging behind, it's too fast. If the whole party wants to move on but cannot because one or two people are dawdling, it's too slow.
Everyone please be sensitive to this as it will take giving from both sides to arrive at a "party speed" that is mostly comfortable for all.

----------------------------

Wish Lists and Assigned Loot:

Yes, there will be wish lists; no, the loot will not be assigned to you. Basically, you will contribute to what could potentially show up on the loot tables. If something you picked gets selected to go on the loot table, it still has to be decided who will use it; "because I wished for it" will not be reason sufficient. If two or more player both want it, you need to resolve that conflict with role-playing.

One could initially lay claim on the item, then choose to withdraw to avoid conflict. The players could roll a d20 as a sort of "short straw" to see who wins the loot. The players could actually battle each other dealing subduing damage to bloodied, or to zero. Bottom line is that your character should really just do what your character would do anyway.

----------------------------

Continued Blogging:

I hope you enjoyed the blogs as much as I did making them. They have been a great outlet for some repressed creative energy that I haven't tapped as much as I used to. Like the campaigns themselves, I will likely be consolidating the blog posts so that they are shorter, and this so that I make sure that I get them done within 2 days of each D&D session.

If someone wants to make dramatized posts about your exploits, even something like a field journal of your adventures from the 1st person perspective, I can give author permissions to the blog and you all can be my guest. I guess that is more of a roleplaying thing, but if that rings your bell, please talk to me about it. Even multiple people doing that would be really cool.

----------------------------

What else did I miss? Oh well, I guess it's time to end the post. :D