|
One thing I don't see often enough in D&D adventures is an explicit ticking clock. This generally applies to anything that has per-day resources that need to be managed. This is particularly true in something like a dungeon crawl where the PCs are launching some kind of proactive assault and the NPCs are playing defense. The ability to fall back to a secure position and rest is a HUGE advantage, and games with per-day resources were usually designed that this is the exception, not the rule. Going nova in the first fight should leave the party at a very significant disadvantage; not because of some antagonist GM/player relationship but because that's how the system was designed and balanced in the first place, and will massively favor PCs that have limited recharge powers. Even outside the context of number of fireballs per day, this has relevance because the overall power level of the PCs is almost always magnified when they have time to burn. When given infinite time to do additional prep and legwork, option paralysis can quickly set in and suddenly there are twelve additional things the party wants to do to amass a series of small advantages to go smash against the major objective. While there is nothing wrong with this in the abstract, most of the times this happens in adventures where sidestepping the dungeon entirely was not the idea, and the system you're running may not be designed to do this in a way that is fun or exciting. Hint: most aren't. After every encounter, it's worth considering what is pressing the PCs to keep advancing RIGHT NOW. Or perhaps more accurately, what are the disincentives to heading back to a safe position and doing whatever is the equivalent of Healing To Full? If none, it is almost guaranteed that the PCs will do that. Meaning every encounter needs to be calibrated against a full nova party, which may or may not be the way you want to go.
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2014 18:17
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 06:56 |
|
|
SageNytell posted:In the two or so hours we played, the players only managed to interact with one NPC and got through exactly one encounter, a 'combat' against a possessed library maze. The majority of the session was spent in combat against the library. That's about right for two hours of play. Combats take a long time, even more so in a con or one-shot condition where the players are not familiar with each other or the system. In a con game which is intended for system novices, the most I would ever build would be two combats - one extremely simple one just to teach the basics, and a second fight which throws a single intermediate-advanced wrench into the works. There is a reason that the structure for the D&D 4E stuff intended for pick-up play is either three fights with almost nothing inbetween (dungeon delves) or one complicated fight with more setup beforehand (lair assault). In the context of a game where combat is mechanically complex, fighting just takes a long time period. The only way to really speed that up is for the person running the game to be prepped to the gills (can set up the entire combat space in 3-5 minutes) and/or the players to be intimately familiar with the system so the first round doesn't consist of everyone staring at their character sheets and not knowing what to do. As the adventure author, all you can really do is call those factors out in the text and explicitly say that if you don't do these things, you will most likely run 1-2 hours over the projected length of the game.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 27, 2014 18:54
|
|