D&D Stuff and Nostalgic Musing
I've recently started playing D&D again, after about five or six years off. I started off as a player in a group with a DM who - though he had good ideas and might have been a great player - was just not cut out for running a game for players who like to drive the story.
So after a few weeks of trying to make that work, it became obvious it wasn't going to happen. I didn't want the group to completely fall apart, because we've got really good players, so I stepped up and volunteered to DM.
I've been running a campaign in Mystara which is (so far) very similar to the last campaign I ran, while I was in college. I've got a campaign website going at http://www.quasadu.com/dnd if anyone is interested in taking a look.
We have two or three more adventures before we start getting to the point where the last campaign ended, and while I have a lot of ideas about where to go after that, I'm not completely sold on any of them just yet. So, looking for inspiration, I dug up a lot of my old notes from campaigns I ran or played in back in the 1990's.
Reading through some of that stuff amazes me. A lot of it I just can't see myself writing anything like that now - both the quality and volume of stuff. Part of it is being out of practice, and part of it is lack of free time (and free brainpower). But part of it seems like I've forgotten how to let my imagination loose and really immerse myself in the world. I want that back.
Keeping players in the (Under)Dark
Changing direction slightly, one of the things I read through was something I still consider my greatest blunder as a DM. It should have been my greatest moment, but I screwed it up. I won't go into a lot of details because I might want to use it again one day, and do it right, but the basic issue was this:
I had a really epic story going on behind the scenes of the campaign. It tied together most of the major villains of the campaign, brought back "the one that got away," and culminated in the players getting the chance to save the world (well not the world, but close enough). Sounds great, right?
The problem is that I didn't see the connections or have this planned at the start of the campaign. It wasn't shoehorned in, exactly - it all made sense, if you could read the notes. But of course the players can't read the notes. They needed clues. And since I had not planned it out ahead of time, I wasn't able to drop the clues in when they should have been. So the players had no idea that there was a deep and complex plot going on until they kept getting to "the end" and finding out that it wasn't the end at all, there was more going on, but they didn't know why. In short, the players were utterly confused and frustrated.
So, I still think that my epic plot was a good one - I just bungled the execution. And don't get me wrong, I think everyone still had fun with it. There were still epic battles and cool stuff happening, and the heroes did "save the world." But still, I'd like to get the opportunity to try it again, knowing from the beginning what's happening and being able to drop the clues in at the appropriate times. I'd like to see if I could get the big impact that I was hoping for.
What a world, what a world...
One thing for sure - I'm kind of wishing that I'd gone with a Forgotten Realms campaign instead of Mystara. And I'm kind of wishing I could convince the group to play 2nd Edition, instead of 3.5 edition. At least they didn't demand 4th...
I chose the Mystara campaign because I had already run it in 3.5 and I figured it would require the least amount of extra work, since I don't have to convert everything. And that's true, but it also is just a harder world for me to immerse myself in. It is a good campaign world and it's got a lot of history and material, but it's a little disjointed (which makes sense, given the history of its development as a mishmash of projects that were being worked on independently) and some of it is a little... well let's just face it, some of it is a little too silly. I try to cut that stuff out, so that's okay, but Realms and Greyhawk are just much easier to build a deeper campaign from, because of the more coherent history and the richness of the world.
He who makes the rules...
I'm also inclined to resume work on a project I started about the time that 3rd Edition came out. By that time, my usual group had been playing 2nd edition for so long and will so many custom rules, that we'd already kind of developed our own 2.5 edition. New players (when we could find them, which was hard enough) would have a pretty hard time keeping up with it all. So I set out to create a 2.5 edition Player's Handbook.
I got pretty far into it before I quit. And I didn't quit because it was a lot of work (it was) but because I went to college and couldn't play with those guys anymore anyway. And no one at college wanted to play 2nd - they were all into 3 and, soon enough, 3.5. So it didn't seem that there was a point anymore.
But now I find myself in a metropolitan area where there are a lot of gamers (as an example, we just lost two of our players to other obligations and put out the call for replacements - within a couple days we had four people looking to join us). And there are a lot of different games and rules systems being played. I think there might be some people open to playing a heavily modified 2.5 edition, as long as it's presented clearly and consistently.
So I think I may take that on as a side project. It'll be slow, since I won't have a lot of time to work on it, but there's no hurry.
But what's wrong with...
What's wrong with 3.5 rules? Well.. not a lot, really. I like the modular nature of things - it's very easy to customize, from a DM's perspective. And there is a rule for everything so you don't have to do a lot of 'winging it' with rules decisions. But that actually is the problem...
There's a rule for everything, and a lot of times I feel like those rules get in my way. Especially in combat and mapping. In combat, you need a tiled map with minis, or something like it, because the combat and movement rules are so rigidly defined. I find we spend a lot more time getting through a combat scenario than I'd like.
I've thought of ways to try to fix this - maybe just getting rid of Attacks of opportunity altogether would be enough. Or that, and trying to be less rigid about movement in general. I'd rather be drawing the map out on paper or whiteboard than having to make it fit a bunch of miniatures. And I'd rather have combat be more fluid and cinematic and less like a board game. I'll have to talk to the players about it...
But even more, as much as you can customize 3.5, it doesn't hold a candle to how much you can customize in my modified 2nd edition. Because we used a more refined version of the character points system from "Player's Option: Skills and Powers," there's almost nothing you couldn't do with a character. Sometimes with the 3.5 rules, I find that trying to make a character the way you want it requires a lot of shoehorning into things.
And of course there is the fact that I have mountains of material for 2nd edition and not so much for 3.5.
But in the end the rules don't matter THAT much and I'm just happy to be playing.
So after a few weeks of trying to make that work, it became obvious it wasn't going to happen. I didn't want the group to completely fall apart, because we've got really good players, so I stepped up and volunteered to DM.
I've been running a campaign in Mystara which is (so far) very similar to the last campaign I ran, while I was in college. I've got a campaign website going at http://www.quasadu.com/dnd if anyone is interested in taking a look.
We have two or three more adventures before we start getting to the point where the last campaign ended, and while I have a lot of ideas about where to go after that, I'm not completely sold on any of them just yet. So, looking for inspiration, I dug up a lot of my old notes from campaigns I ran or played in back in the 1990's.
Reading through some of that stuff amazes me. A lot of it I just can't see myself writing anything like that now - both the quality and volume of stuff. Part of it is being out of practice, and part of it is lack of free time (and free brainpower). But part of it seems like I've forgotten how to let my imagination loose and really immerse myself in the world. I want that back.
Keeping players in the (Under)Dark
Changing direction slightly, one of the things I read through was something I still consider my greatest blunder as a DM. It should have been my greatest moment, but I screwed it up. I won't go into a lot of details because I might want to use it again one day, and do it right, but the basic issue was this:
I had a really epic story going on behind the scenes of the campaign. It tied together most of the major villains of the campaign, brought back "the one that got away," and culminated in the players getting the chance to save the world (well not the world, but close enough). Sounds great, right?
The problem is that I didn't see the connections or have this planned at the start of the campaign. It wasn't shoehorned in, exactly - it all made sense, if you could read the notes. But of course the players can't read the notes. They needed clues. And since I had not planned it out ahead of time, I wasn't able to drop the clues in when they should have been. So the players had no idea that there was a deep and complex plot going on until they kept getting to "the end" and finding out that it wasn't the end at all, there was more going on, but they didn't know why. In short, the players were utterly confused and frustrated.
So, I still think that my epic plot was a good one - I just bungled the execution. And don't get me wrong, I think everyone still had fun with it. There were still epic battles and cool stuff happening, and the heroes did "save the world." But still, I'd like to get the opportunity to try it again, knowing from the beginning what's happening and being able to drop the clues in at the appropriate times. I'd like to see if I could get the big impact that I was hoping for.
What a world, what a world...
One thing for sure - I'm kind of wishing that I'd gone with a Forgotten Realms campaign instead of Mystara. And I'm kind of wishing I could convince the group to play 2nd Edition, instead of 3.5 edition. At least they didn't demand 4th...
I chose the Mystara campaign because I had already run it in 3.5 and I figured it would require the least amount of extra work, since I don't have to convert everything. And that's true, but it also is just a harder world for me to immerse myself in. It is a good campaign world and it's got a lot of history and material, but it's a little disjointed (which makes sense, given the history of its development as a mishmash of projects that were being worked on independently) and some of it is a little... well let's just face it, some of it is a little too silly. I try to cut that stuff out, so that's okay, but Realms and Greyhawk are just much easier to build a deeper campaign from, because of the more coherent history and the richness of the world.
He who makes the rules...
I'm also inclined to resume work on a project I started about the time that 3rd Edition came out. By that time, my usual group had been playing 2nd edition for so long and will so many custom rules, that we'd already kind of developed our own 2.5 edition. New players (when we could find them, which was hard enough) would have a pretty hard time keeping up with it all. So I set out to create a 2.5 edition Player's Handbook.
I got pretty far into it before I quit. And I didn't quit because it was a lot of work (it was) but because I went to college and couldn't play with those guys anymore anyway. And no one at college wanted to play 2nd - they were all into 3 and, soon enough, 3.5. So it didn't seem that there was a point anymore.
But now I find myself in a metropolitan area where there are a lot of gamers (as an example, we just lost two of our players to other obligations and put out the call for replacements - within a couple days we had four people looking to join us). And there are a lot of different games and rules systems being played. I think there might be some people open to playing a heavily modified 2.5 edition, as long as it's presented clearly and consistently.
So I think I may take that on as a side project. It'll be slow, since I won't have a lot of time to work on it, but there's no hurry.
But what's wrong with...
What's wrong with 3.5 rules? Well.. not a lot, really. I like the modular nature of things - it's very easy to customize, from a DM's perspective. And there is a rule for everything so you don't have to do a lot of 'winging it' with rules decisions. But that actually is the problem...
There's a rule for everything, and a lot of times I feel like those rules get in my way. Especially in combat and mapping. In combat, you need a tiled map with minis, or something like it, because the combat and movement rules are so rigidly defined. I find we spend a lot more time getting through a combat scenario than I'd like.
I've thought of ways to try to fix this - maybe just getting rid of Attacks of opportunity altogether would be enough. Or that, and trying to be less rigid about movement in general. I'd rather be drawing the map out on paper or whiteboard than having to make it fit a bunch of miniatures. And I'd rather have combat be more fluid and cinematic and less like a board game. I'll have to talk to the players about it...
But even more, as much as you can customize 3.5, it doesn't hold a candle to how much you can customize in my modified 2nd edition. Because we used a more refined version of the character points system from "Player's Option: Skills and Powers," there's almost nothing you couldn't do with a character. Sometimes with the 3.5 rules, I find that trying to make a character the way you want it requires a lot of shoehorning into things.
And of course there is the fact that I have mountains of material for 2nd edition and not so much for 3.5.
But in the end the rules don't matter THAT much and I'm just happy to be playing.