Chris Danford's page

As a reminder, please PM me or teribitha if you are wanting to join Hammerfall or the Marsh Wardens. Or go to our guild launch site and apply there. We would like to have a way to contact you for settlement matters.

Giant slug eat/destroy your home?

Come stay in Hammerfall and have a few drinks at the tavern. And when you are ready to go take your home back, we have discounted blocks of salt.

Edit: additionally, if you play up for 9 adventures in a row currently (nearly a third of your career), you will shatter the WBL for your character level which is exactly what the developers are trying to avoid. Playing up from level 5 you would probably have well around 10-20K more gold than you should at that point.

1) fame still limits what you can buy

2) Without holding records you would only be playing up for 1 or 4 games (depending on your viewpoint for 5th)
3) yes you could start holding from your first level 3 game and get a ridiculous number held. My main question is how does anyone plan to deal with the person who does hold to many? Because a new player could go back and play 1-7s along with current tiers and end up with to many records by miscounting.
4) there is no great solution, because some group is going to disagree and with any game more complicated than tic-tac-toe several people will figure out how to game the system

If you have to play up for 9 adventures in a row then there are other issues at work that no solution is going to address.

All you have to do is miss one session with group of friends that all started characters at the same time. Or be taking that last chair at the only available table. I have played more than one con with the same person that I have never met before at every table who was 2 levels behind. While 9 may be unlikely, it is not impossible especially when you have limited play options.

Personally l am against the delayed record. Let's say that my character in record short of 5th level and I go to two cons and play up for 9 adventures. Now are going to tell me I can't play that character because he already has enough records to bump him to the next tier?

Or my only choice is to be penalized and have to take the lower reward even though I was the person who made the table along with 3 seventh level characters? Also people have been saying as partial compensation that I can replace my consumables with the money that I am losing? Before I do that, could someone tell me how I recharge my wand? Or do I get to replace the entire wand every time I play up? And that is just the starting point. This will (not could) go very quickly into okay, let's use the low level guy's wands, potions and blanches because he will get to replace them with his over cap.

Chris Danford wrote:

My suggestion is similar to one already provided. Make the adventures levels 2, 5, 8, 11 and people can play the adventure if they are one level off. This means one set of monsters/traps no varying dcs. Plus 12th level characters would have more to choose from.

Chris I like this idea!

Tiers would be:

1-3
4-6
7-9
10-12

basing the GP off of levels

2
5
8
11

Sounds good to me.

To be honest this is a monster thread and many people have put out some great things. Lets just say this happens - that fixes the issues being brought up during Season 5 and on.

What would be the option for Seasons 0-4?

Fixing the past is much harder than trying to fix the future.

My first thought would to be leave them as they are, sooner than later people will have played them out and have moved on.
Second thought would be to just average the gold between the tiers. Granted players will get more gold at the bottom half but if they spend unwisely they will probably regret it. Yes they may have the money to cooler stuff earlier, but will they have necessary FAME?

My suggestion is similar to one already provided. Make the adventures levels 2, 5, 8, 11 and people can play the adventure if they are one level off. This means one set of monsters/traps no varying dcs. Plus 12th level characters would have more to choose from.

I have a few reasons why I do not like the limiting of the sanctioned modules to characters of the appropriate level only.

Personally I like being the current flexibiity of leveling up a character to play a high level module. It allows me to explore a path of feat selections and items to see if they are viable. I know that some people can read over everything and just see how it will all fall together but for me it helps to actually play it through and it is much more enjoyable.

With the group of people that I play with we range from people who game weekly to ones who primarily go to conventions because they cannot make the times that the games are run at game stores to people who only want to play occasionally. With being able to adapt our characters to the level of the module it gives us a PFS game that we can play when there is not a regular PFS module that our characters can sync up on.

I have had a module come out that I thought looked like a lot of fun and I wanted to play it immediately. However the character that I wanted to play was no where near the correct level. With leveling I was able to go ahead and play. If I could not have leveled I still wouldn't be able to play it for several months and to be honest I probably would not have encouraged the GM to buy the moudle.

I can see that there is a problem with the ways that people are abusing the leveling process. Consumables are the biggest one that jumps out. Adventures get much easier if everyone plans to burn an entire cure light wand during the course of it. I don't have a great solution to this or any of the other abuses, but I feel that restricting to appropriate leveled characters is downgrading the fun level.

My few suggestions.
Tier the price of consumables, ie if the module is 1-4 normal price, 5-9 double the price, 10+ triple the price. This will help to reflect that the character used a few of these to get to that level.
If a character dies in the module and cannot be raised in the module then the charater suffers the normal penalties. If they have the PA/gold to get raised then all is okay, if not too bad.