paizo.com Recent Posts in Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"paizo.com Recent Posts in Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"2012-11-15T19:40:53Z2012-11-15T19:40:53ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Grimcleaverhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#92007-11-13T19:48:41Z2007-11-13T19:47:00Z<p>I get the idea that the new part here is that rather than making some game setting open-ended enough that you can add whatever you want to it, or churning out tons of "generic" adventures that you have to plunk somewhere yourself, that they're making the settings (hopefully) well-defined and all mapped out, keeping the core setting open for modules and home campaign worldbuilding.</p>I get the idea that the new part here is that rather than making some game setting open-ended enough that you can add whatever you want to it, or churning out tons of "generic" adventures that you have to plunk somewhere yourself, that they're making the settings (hopefully) well-defined and all mapped out, keeping the core setting open for modules and home campaign worldbuilding.Grimcleaver2007-11-13T19:47:00ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Verminlordhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#82007-11-13T13:58:50Z2007-11-13T13:58:50Z<p>What bugs me is: whats new? The Wilderlands Campaign, who are old as stone, had exactly that kind of setting. So back to the roots?</p>What bugs me is: whats new? The Wilderlands Campaign, who are old as stone, had exactly that kind of setting. So back to the roots?Verminlord2007-11-13T13:58:50ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Grimcleaverhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#72007-11-11T23:50:03Z2007-11-11T23:50:02Z<p>The take I get is that the setting happens just after the fall of some great near-world-spanning civilization (think the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome). Things were a lot more cosmopolitan. Races lived together and understood each other a bit more than even what you'd see in games like Forgotten Realms. While the recent disasters have caused some races to pull back a bit, I get the feeling it's a relatively recent development (last couple hundred years or so)in response to the fall of civilization. For the most part, most communities have some elves, dwarves, halflings, etc. living among humans as part of their society. That's the impression I get anyway. So while there are mysterious elven forests, and dwarven mountain fortresses—there are also elven bartenders and dwarven blacksmiths. That sort of thing.</p>The take I get is that the setting happens just after the fall of some great near-world-spanning civilization (think the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome). Things were a lot more cosmopolitan. Races lived together and understood each other a bit more than even what you'd see in games like Forgotten Realms. While the recent disasters have caused some races to pull back a bit, I get the feeling it's a relatively recent development (last couple hundred years or so)in response to the fall of...Grimcleaver2007-11-11T23:50:02ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Nero24200https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#62007-11-11T22:30:42Z2007-11-11T22:30:40Z<p>ERm...problem...</p>
<p>If most of the world hasn't been mapped out...won't it be rare for ...say..a dwarf...to travel as far as to meet an elf? Or the other way around?</p>
<p>If it is rare...how are adventuring parties, which usally have a wide vareity of races going to work together?</p>
<p>"Whoa, an elf all the way out here, hey, won't to come adventure with us?"
<br />
"Sure, never seen an elf out here before?"
<br />
"Well...yeah actually we have, he went off with another adventuring group...which also had a dwarf in it...and a gnome...and a were-wolf..oh and a half-dragon...even though we all live on completely different corners of the world..."</p>
<p>Previous versions of Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk etc work as settings because seeing a bunch of different races in one area wasn't an uncommon sight. If just venturing outside your doorstep is hazardous to your typical non-adventurer, how are all these races going to meet? I can understand one group of different races meeting up by coincidence, it'll get stupid after it happens 4 or 5 times.</p>ERm...problem...
If most of the world hasn't been mapped out...won't it be rare for ...say..a dwarf...to travel as far as to meet an elf? Or the other way around?
If it is rare...how are adventuring parties, which usally have a wide vareity of races going to work together?
"Whoa, an elf all the way out here, hey, won't to come adventure with us?"
"Sure, never seen an elf out here before?"
"Well...yeah actually we have, he went off with another adventuring group...which also had a dwarf in...Nero242002007-11-11T22:30:40ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Grimcleaverhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#52007-11-10T18:59:12Z2007-11-10T18:59:11Z<p>Yeah, that's one big problem I've been mulling over since reading the Wyatt example. He says "don't worry about the macro map—just fill in the spaces where the characters concievably would go".</p>
<p>This guy doesn't know my players. My players are of the sort that love to explore. They'd head north, run into another small hamlet—bleah and head north again in the morning. They'd march right off your cool little arrows and roads map and start exploring all the stuff "out there". There's no hedging our group onto a railroad track and figuring they'll play nice and stay there. You'd have to abort to the tacky "wall of ogres" model to try and hedge them in—where the environment becomes so artificially hostile beyond a certain radius that the players are kept from moving through or around the obstacle. But really how many of those can there concievably be?</p>
<p>I don't see the POV of the game as being "farmer" in nature so much as "Dark Ages". People tend to wall themselves into cloistered settlements. They tend to only travel the roads in the daytime and only then to visit their neighbors. Everyone is in fear that if they travel too far they'll run into everpresent bandits—or worse, who will torture them into revealing the location of their homes and families. So at that point even the innkeepers would have a pretty narrow window into the world's fog of war.</p>
<p>I've been tinkering adapting a module—one of the few ones I own, into a 4e style gaming environment. Basically you've got a small city called Dragondown at the center—a magiocracy run by a cabal of mages who once destroyed the dracolich that had oppressed the area gave the city it's name, and the tumbledown ruins of the caverns that were this abomination's lair still lie unremarked in the nearby Dragondown Grotto. About a day's journey following the stream that provides water to the town will take you to the Forest Cliffs, a region of verdant forest that locals will not go near—for it is the lair of the green dragon Sekkatrix, a cowardly creature by nature but with designs of learning about and dominating the surrounding world. Beyond the forest is a gray ask waste, called the Dragon Graveyard. Of course that's beyond mosts folk's ken, since they never go anywhere near the forest in the first place—much less anywhere so overtly ill fortuned. The odd adventurer has swung through town with the odd story offered in exchange for some food or a free night's stay at the inn. Usually the stories are just accounted as outsider lies. There's also a hidden dragon egg nursery out amongst the sprawling caves that dot the hills beyond the fertile plain of farmland. Nobody knows about that though—and those that do, only heard about it from a handful of adventurers claiming to have already cleared it out.</p>Yeah, that's one big problem I've been mulling over since reading the Wyatt example. He says "don't worry about the macro map--just fill in the spaces where the characters concievably would go".
This guy doesn't know my players. My players are of the sort that love to explore. They'd head north, run into another small hamlet--bleah and head north again in the morning. They'd march right off your cool little arrows and roads map and start exploring all the stuff "out there". There's no...Grimcleaver2007-11-10T18:59:11ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Ernest Muellerhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#42007-11-10T13:50:35Z2007-11-10T13:50:31Z<p>Well, it was obvious that was the goal - easy to stick in any scenario. But I don't like it so much and here's why.</p>
<p>In early 3e, I was forced to do something similar with all the third party scenarios that came out. All of them, due to designer laziness, were set in some little town surrounded by 100 miles of trackless mountains. It really begged the question of why are the PCs there. Unless you pick one "town", like Sandpoint or whatnot, and decide you're going to host a whole campaign there, you have a lot of trouble getting PCs from place to place. What I did was give the campaign a pirates theme and convert all the "lazy maps" from the modules so the isolated town was on an island, which means easy access for the PCs but constrained environment for the adventure, which was the goal of the "middle of nowhere" maps. But I found that players really reacted a lot better to having more of a "real world" to be playing in; once I added in Freeport and its (light, admittedly) surrounding world, they enjoyed it a lot more. </p>
<p>Even with something like that, after PCs get to level 5 or so they start to become "big dog" enough that they want/need to have larger scope - big cities, regional impact, etc. This feeds into one of the complaints I have about changes since 1e really - in 1e, once you got to 9th level you were considered a billy badass "Lord" or the like, and were likely looking to set up a keep, have retainers, and phase into some larger scale stuff. Now, it seems, twentieth level characters are still considered errand-runners. </p>
<p>The Adventure Paths have realized this, and though they may start in a little hamlet, they know at some point PCs are going to (plot related or not) say "screw this, let's go to a big city." </p>
<p>Sometimes it seems like a lot of adventure designers would be much more happy in a milieu like the original Star Trek - exploring the unknown, where you have writerly justification to have the next plot location be a unusual as you want and the PCs have no claim to ever have heard about it before. Which would be interesting, but most of the time it's hard to concieve of that being possible in a normal D&D campaign world - ok, it's pseudo-medieval, so the peasant in the field may not know anything except the name of the town the next link down the trail (although that's quite a disservice, as most D&D worlds are more pseudo-Renaissance and even the average French peasant had a good bit of political knowledge). But the innkeepers, merchants, etc. all know "yeah, that city over there, it's all green-skinned people and they put you to death if you sneeze" or whatever bizarre conceit the writer's cooking up. </p>
<p>Anyway, a "points of light" could be done well, but I have no confidence that there's enough thought being put into this that it is.</p>Well, it was obvious that was the goal - easy to stick in any scenario. But I don't like it so much and here's why.
In early 3e, I was forced to do something similar with all the third party scenarios that came out. All of them, due to designer laziness, were set in some little town surrounded by 100 miles of trackless mountains. It really begged the question of why are the PCs there. Unless you pick one "town", like Sandpoint or whatnot, and decide you're going to host a whole campaign...Ernest Mueller2007-11-10T13:50:31ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Grimcleaver--HappyErikMonaDay (alias of Grimcleaver)https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#32007-11-08T19:49:26Z2007-11-08T19:48:53Z<p>I'd argue that the Points of Light is mostly a way of having an open-ended core setting. In other established settings it will probably have less of an impact. I'd imagine a general darkening of the shadowy places. Cloakwook is creepier. Candlekeep is more remote. Chult is well...Chult.</p>
<p>I think the biggest impact is going to be that individual "generic setting" adventures that previously felt frustratingly disconnected from everything, will become like little worlds your characters can adventure in for long periods of time—rather than being weird grafts of places that don't belong or one shot bon-bons. Well gee Hommlet was fun—so what's over there? Instead you'll stay a while. Presumably start to care about the little towns and villages instead of just beelining for the capital city. The places become the important thing—like characters in their own right.</p>I'd argue that the Points of Light is mostly a way of having an open-ended core setting. In other established settings it will probably have less of an impact. I'd imagine a general darkening of the shadowy places. Cloakwook is creepier. Candlekeep is more remote. Chult is well...Chult.
I think the biggest impact is going to be that individual "generic setting" adventures that previously felt frustratingly disconnected from everything, will become like little worlds your characters can...Grimcleaver--HappyErikMonaDay (alias of Grimcleaver)2007-11-08T19:48:53ZRe: Forums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Lathiira (alias of Allen Dawson)https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#22012-11-15T19:40:53Z2007-11-08T19:14:51Z<p>An enlightening read. I've seen ideas in this vein in the past, but time will tell. I don't know how it'll be applied to established game-worlds, though. For example, one of my group's complaints about the Realms is that each and every square inch seems to have already been mapped out and detailed. Not quite true, but the premise isn't all that far off either, if you consider the decades of material we have for the FR. The other side of the coin, however, is that characters there might come from all over the continent (or further) to one point (whatever town we're in). The points-of-light idea makes me then ask how such a party might form. Need to think about this a bit . . . .</p>An enlightening read. I've seen ideas in this vein in the past, but time will tell. I don't know how it'll be applied to established game-worlds, though. For example, one of my group's complaints about the Realms is that each and every square inch seems to have already been mapped out and detailed. Not quite true, but the premise isn't all that far off either, if you consider the decades of material we have for the FR. The other side of the coin, however, is that characters there might come...Lathiira (alias of Allen Dawson)2007-11-08T19:14:51ZForums: 4th Edition: Re-evaluating "Points of Light" in view of Wyatt's "Setting"Grimcleaverhttps://paizo.com/threads/rzs2hoxf?Reevaluating-Points-of-Light-in-view-of#12012-11-15T19:40:53Z2007-11-08T19:08:54Z<p>Here's the full article. It's big—but interesting.</p>
<p>Room to Adventure
<br />
By James Wyatt
<br />
[Spoiler omitted]</p>
<p>So it would seem there's a layer to the Points of Light model that hasn't gotten addressed. It's Module-World. You have small settlements with some adventurey stuff right on the doorstep. There's no worldmap to speak of because the premise is most folks don't know that much—or care. So you have this strangely decentralized core setting where everything is precisely "points of light", little mapped areas that share a common world but the developers go to pains never to map it or even name it. In anonymity it can remain public domain. Your core campaign and mine could be just across the river from each other—or across the world and no one can tell us different.</p>
<p>I have to tell you. I really kinda' like it.</p>Here's the full article. It's big--but interesting.
Room to Adventure
By James Wyatt
[Spoiler omitted]
So it would seem there's a layer to the Points of Light model that hasn't gotten addressed. It's Module-World. You have small settlements with some adventurey stuff right on the doorstep. There's no worldmap to speak of because the premise is most folks don't know that much--or care. So you have this strangely decentralized core setting where everything is precisely "points of light",...Grimcleaver2007-11-08T19:08:54Z