Emirikol end notes
Dec. 13th, 2007 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
subplotkudzuWe actually have one more session left, but it's mostly for dalliances, subplots and for a woman with danishes on her ears to give the PCs medals in a public ceremony. Since much of my mental efforts are now focused on the games for 2008 I thought I might put down some closing thoughts in advance.
To my mind, the game was a staggering success. It wasn't exactly what I'd originally planned, but that was because the PCs meandered a bit, fleshed themselves out more and otherwise made themselves at home in the city. This made each plot idea take longer, but it was time well spent. The things I made up on the spur of the moment in sessions 1 and 2 turned into a nicely complex plot arc for the beginning and end of the 1 year campaign. Obviously I can't NOT plot, but I managed to not go nuts.
The middle of the game was the pirate plot that had some elements merge into the endgame and other elements resolved enough that if we never return to Emirikol we can call it done, but there are several things we can easily come back to if we choose.
D&D 3E ended up being a workable mechanism. No, it's not a great choice for fencing or wars, but the fencing matches and wars worked well enough. The class/level rules went as planned, with two PCs hitting prestige classes at the end of the game and Cambias securing the one feat he'd been aiming for just at the end of play so the PCs feel like they reached some milestones. The rules for the spellcasting classes handled the tweaks of the setting well, and40yearsagotodayhas obviously enjoyed working out which spells count as Dramaturgy for Bards.
More importantly, it was easy for me to plot, easy for me to eyeball opposition and well known to all the players. This minimized the time and energy it took for me to prep the game, and the concentration the players required to run it (what with a 3 year old running about for half of each sessison). I expect we'll end up back here in 6 months, in part because we'll now have TWO children at each game, and a comfortable, forgiving mechanic in a friendly, free-wheeling world is a good place to settle for a while.
To my mind, the game was a staggering success. It wasn't exactly what I'd originally planned, but that was because the PCs meandered a bit, fleshed themselves out more and otherwise made themselves at home in the city. This made each plot idea take longer, but it was time well spent. The things I made up on the spur of the moment in sessions 1 and 2 turned into a nicely complex plot arc for the beginning and end of the 1 year campaign. Obviously I can't NOT plot, but I managed to not go nuts.
The middle of the game was the pirate plot that had some elements merge into the endgame and other elements resolved enough that if we never return to Emirikol we can call it done, but there are several things we can easily come back to if we choose.
D&D 3E ended up being a workable mechanism. No, it's not a great choice for fencing or wars, but the fencing matches and wars worked well enough. The class/level rules went as planned, with two PCs hitting prestige classes at the end of the game and Cambias securing the one feat he'd been aiming for just at the end of play so the PCs feel like they reached some milestones. The rules for the spellcasting classes handled the tweaks of the setting well, and
40yearsagotodayhas obviously enjoyed working out which spells count as Dramaturgy for Bards. More importantly, it was easy for me to plot, easy for me to eyeball opposition and well known to all the players. This minimized the time and energy it took for me to prep the game, and the concentration the players required to run it (what with a 3 year old running about for half of each sessison). I expect we'll end up back here in 6 months, in part because we'll now have TWO children at each game, and a comfortable, forgiving mechanic in a friendly, free-wheeling world is a good place to settle for a while.
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Date: 2007-12-14 03:32 am (UTC)And we really are going to try to do something about the kids. Grandma is much closer now.
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Date: 2007-12-14 10:32 am (UTC)Bec
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Date: 2007-12-14 10:18 pm (UTC)How long did the game run for and what levels did the characters reach? I ask, as our group has only just hit 5th level after about a year of play, and I'm beginning to think I should ask for a refund.
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Date: 2007-12-15 12:40 am (UTC)The PCs started with 0 XP and end this session with 26,725 each, putting them well into 7th level. That's 6 levels of gain, so 1 level every 10 hours of play. A calculation of XP per hour would be meaningless, since the XP gain scales based on level. I can tell you that they will end with 82 encounters, which at 13.33 encounters per level means they should be 7.15 level right now when they're actually 7.81 level. Obviously I'm slipping and being too generous.
If you're interested, of those 82 encounters 12 were "easy", 14 were "easy with a trick to them", 40 were "challenging", 12 were "very difficult" and 4 were "overpowering". This is very close to the suggested encounter ratio in the DMG, though it is sligtly high on Tricky encounters. They completed 3 of the 4 Overpowering encounters - once through role playing (recruiting and rescuing the Green Dagger Gang rather than killing them), once through abusing magic (peppering the room with the owlbears with every limited use magical attack item they had) and once through PC guile (the true striked, keen edged, fireball laced ballista bolt to soften up the cloud giant). The fourth (a flight of 3 Chimera) they ran from, and wisely so. One chimera was dealt with later by throwing a cockatrice corpse at it to petrify it.
I hope this helps when you call your DMs customer service hotline.