I've run an investigation-heavy campaign and my general take on most of the questions here are that the answers are going to depend a lot on what your looking for in a D&D campaign.

So I went with the 'investigators' are essentially sub-contractors of The Watch version but there is definitely a possibility of making the players more like a group within the bureaucracy. Though for that to work your probably looking at a pretty heavy role-playing campaign because 'fighting the bureaucracy and its issues' is presumably a sub-theme of the campaign. This also only likely works if the main stage of the adventures is a large city.

Another element you will need to decide in a 'we be cops' type campaign is the style of the adventures. Are you playing Murder on the Orient Express or Justified? In other words are the adventures generally actual investigations. heavy on the problem solving and role-playing or is this more of a background theme to exciting action-packed adventures. Obviously, in either case, one can dip into the other style of play but you should know what your going for and what your players are interested in.

Might be different for your group but since I did focus on more investigative type adventures I found that I had to switch things up quite a bit. Anything even close to a who-done-it is really mentally taxing for the players and I would not run two of them in a row.

If your making investigation type adventures for your campaign I can offer some more specific advice based on the things I learned from running them. They can be very satisfying but they come with some unique pitfalls.

Classist versus Modernist in Adventure Design
As my PCs headed for the Abyss – specifically the first layer of the abyss, Pazunia the Plane of Infinite Portals for the final encounter of the Campaign I found I needed to write some flavour text for when they got through the gate and ended up on Pazunia. At this point it dawned on me that I don’t, exactly, know what Pazunia is like. I mean I have a kind of basic idea – I’ve read D&D supplements that describe it and places in it in every edition but I’ve never had PCs visit the place. Still not a huge issue – I pulled one of the texts off my shelf and looked it up – I’m particularly fond of the 3rd edition text on the Abyss which had Eric Mona as one of the authors.

This is turn got me thinking that different authors must approach this problem in different ways. Here I’m calling them Classists and Modernists because hubris – well and I had to call them something. What I mean is that, when it comes to something like D&D with its huge history and vast numbers of supplements adventure designers are likely to fall into one of a number of camps. The two primary camps are people like myself – Classicists who really on vast libraries of background material to support their adventure design by essentially looking up information from supplements and utilizing that to support their work. For example when I utilized a Beholder in my adventure I first went and grabbed my copy of the 2nd edition supplement I, Tyrant as well as rereading the relevant section of the 3rd edition supplement Lords of Madness before even placing the monster in my adventure.

That said I am sure that there are a great many DMs that would not have gone through such measures – most of the DMs I know don’t have vast libraries of material dating back to 1st edition. They would simply have used a Beholder and been done with it – they make up what they need for the adventure and move on. Call them Modernists – or at least that is what I’m calling them in this post. Nothing really wrong with that either – at the end of the day the material I read regarding the Beholder was all pretty much just background information. At least an hour of research went into that endeavour and I probably did little more with it then add material to the written part of the adventure that was known only to the DM (myself) in terms of why the Beholder was there – my players never really found out – they just killed it. I got a bit of flavour text in terms of having the Beholder use its disintegrate eye ray to do some custom work on its lair, I got the sneaky idea of using a pit trap and having the Beholder hover over it and finally I gave the Minotaur leader a specialized power that let him have a 50% chance of essentially ignoring the dominate condition because he was so used to being dominated by the Beholder and yet acting independently of close instruction…a power that never came up in the fight with the Minotaur Leader because my players never dominated him.

It was much like that again when my players got to Pazunia – I read them flavour text inspired by 45 minutes to an hour of my research – but they don’t really know or care that this is the case and would not have been able to tell if I just made it up. The encounter exists in the form it does because I knew that Pazunia was the Plane of Infinite Portals and that therefore it could be that PCs could get from one place to another by passing through the plane which is something however. It is a bit of an edge I have as a Classist DM, I can draw on all this knowledge I have spent decades packing into my brain and sometimes use it to make some interesting encounters that maybe would not have existed otherwise.

It also dawns on me that there are those – like Eric Mona at Pazio that are essentially Classists forced to become Modernists. Paizo needed to make its own campaign world and therefore Eric Mona became a defacto Modernist – he had to start making things up from more or less scratch. That said one can see a strong Classicist approach to the Endeavour. Pazio’s homebrew has essentially grown to become its own well detailed world meant to support a classicist style of play.

In some ways that is always the case for a DM that runs their own campaign world. While I am pretty heavily a Classicist myself the fact that I have my own unique homebrew means that I am also a modernist. In fact over time it became clear that there are some significant issues with the classicist approach in D&D. At one point I sat down to write my campaigns core creation mythology and had meant to weave this so that it includes a great many conceits of classic D&D only to recognize that core D&D mythology was never created using what TV producers would call a ‘Bible’. It is chalk full of stories that simply cannot all be true. For example the world creation story that leads to the Blood War between Demons and Devils and the Orc Mythology about the Gods of Elves and Humans and Halflings etc. divvying up the world and Grumash using his spear to gouge out places in the world for Orcs to live are mutually exclusive. They can’t both be true. It was something I really struggled with when I tried to wrap everything together to form an overall coherent mythology when I created my homebrew.

It dawns on me that I have encountered this before – many years ago I was at a gaming convention and I got a chance to ask Ed Greenwood how it was possible for the Gods of Forgotten Realms to have both the Kura-Tur mythology of a Celestial Bureaucracy while the western Gods of the Inner Sea and such seemed to have no such thing. Either there was a Celestial Bureaucracy that mirrored everything in the world or there was not – can’t have it both ways. Ed Greenwood pretty much just said that this was a mystery of the Forgotten Realm Cosmos. Never did like that answer but there it was and such things are rife in D&D. Hence even a classicist such as myself – at least one that wants a consistent answer – simply becomes a classicist of their particular homebrew…or they learn to live with the contradictions…chances are your players will never notice after all.

The Battle With the Dragon Calastrix
As my players closed in on the end of the adventure and the campaign I threw them up against an Iconic Monster as the penultimate encounter.

Calastrix is Iconic on a number of levels. The big Dragon battle is pretty much the most iconic of encounter types in all of Dungeons and Dragons and in 4E in particular Calastrix is iconic as one of the four well thought out and designed Dragons of 4E – and the most powerful. Coming from the Monster Book Threats to Nintir Vale Calastrix is essentially the epitome of 4E monster design, especially in regards to Dragons. Threats to Nentir Vale gives us four Dragons (Sadly no Blue) each of which is unique but comes with all the bells and whistles of late 4E era Solo’s. Specifically Calastrix has three heads and gets the ability to take actions at three different initiative counts, can make saves and otherwise shake off conditions at the end of each of her heads turns. All of this is supposed to help her handle the weak points of Solos in the ability to remove conditions and overcome the limited actions issue.

That said while this was the base design of Calastrix the version I eventually went with saw some significant changes in the build on my part. I believe I expanded out her condition removal abilities but this was pretty much to just include the ability to get rid of every really brutal condition in 4E. Her original build allowed her to get rid of lots of them but not all of them and it seemed like more of a design oversight then something intentional. The Unconscious Condition is not something that is really common in player powers but it comes up and it is so powerful that players take it whenever they get the chance – so allowing her to get rid of that goes right along with allowing her to get rid of the stun or dominate effect. I swapped out one of her major powers in that I removed her ability to grow a new head when bloodied. This was primarily for fluff reasons – multi-headed Dragons are core to the lore of my campaign and a three headed Dragon fit right in…but not one that could grow a new head.

I replaced that ability with a power that let her recharge all her breath weapons – made her Rip and Tear power recharge when first bloodied, gave her an action point and maybe the biggest of them all ‘all effects of powers on Calastrix end’. That one was likely the most significant effect of all. You can bet the players have (and will have used) all sorts of potent ‘until the end of the encounter’ powers on her and this got rid of them when she was first bloodied.

All that said these where essentially cosmetic changes. A bit of swapping and such. Par for the course in how I design 4E monsters. However for this fight – the last of the huge Solo fights of the entire campaign and quite possibly the last big Solo fight in 4E we ever play I wanted to do something special and also maybe take this final opportunity to do some 4E testing.

When I first put together her stat block and ran my usual modification on it I came upon a bit of a problem. She had a great stat block but it looked a lot like what we had seen in Solo’s recently. Specifically she had fantastic defences, very good hps, yadda yadda. The problem initially was her great Will defence. Needless to say I had kind of gotten into the habit of giving my Solo’s good ability scores that helped out Will and such but now I was staring at a stat block that really reminded me of both the Beholder and the Tyrannosphere. The Tyrannosphere in particular had great defences (in my version of 4E each monster class gets some kind of a benefit and Controllers have great non - AC defences).

It makes for a challenging encounter but it does so by making it hard for the players to hit with their powers and the non-stop string of high Will Solo’s means the Cleric is nerfed by not being able to connect with his powerful nerf powers. For this fight it did not feel as authentic as it had with the Beholder and the Tyrannosphere. Calastrix is a Brute and they are low defence high hp creatures. Once I started thinking along these lines though it dawned on me that maybe it was time to really break the rules in terms of monster design. Not just fiddle with the stat block but make something that the Stat Block simply does not generate on its own but might well be fun for my players and still make a good encounter.

My, maybe not so unique, idea was to make a challenging encounter that still allowed my players powers to work. Basically I decided to lower Calastrix’s defences – though nothing super low, and give her extra hps. I pretty much set her defences in the low to mid 30’s. This meant that my players would generally hit her so long as they rolled better then a 7 (and this could well go up if the players first layered on powers that would give them bonuses – which they like to do).

I initially set her hps at 2000 but ultimately went with 1800 hps. That made her, by far, the creature with the most hps of the campaign. I believe the Tyrannosphere was second place and it had just around 1000 hps.

There was also a bit of an unusual element to the design of the encounter. Calastrix was being used as a Gate Guardian, for a planar gate on an island and my players had to get to the island which they did with a large raft. The Encounter was supposed to have the water suddenly start boiling in front of the players as she emerged from the Lake after which she would make a pass over the players using her breath weapons and then fly off for a final encounter at the Gate itself. This was meant to keep it so that the battle would be fundamentally ground based. Dragons can fly but in reality they are actually melee combatants at heart. They have a breath weapon but it is pretty short ranged and needs to recharge. The real bread and butter of most Dragons is their physical suite of attacks. This is true even in 4E and was true of Calastrix. This would also be better for my players who had a number of melee combatants and having Clastrix flying around to breath on the players whenever her heads recharged seemed to possibly to turn the encounter into something not very exciting. That said it would not work like that at all.

It is worth noting that I was somewhat concerned with this encounter going in. Fundamentally it is very reminiscent of a lot of the weak points of early 4E monsters. Calastrix, ultimately, does not actually have all that many powers. She is a pretty simple design. She has massive numbers of hps however. This really stands out as what one tended to see early on in 4E. Monsters, especially Solo’s, with tons of hps that take forever to die but which seems to bore the players as they spend an inordinate amount of time slowly working their way through all of these hps. I was especially concerned as the early Hydra’s where often cited as the quintessential example of this problem and the reality is that Calastrix seems a lot like an early 4E Hydra. I did say this was something of an experiment to see how that would work out.

So how did the battle go? Well Calastrix emerges and my players are certainly freaking out. She starts getting most of them in the blasts of her breath weapon but pretty quickly my players begin to alleviate the situation. For one thing they don’t even bother with the idea of saving their powers for later encounters – deciding right off the bat that this was a single daily encounter and it was going to be one where they would use their daily powers up as fast as possible. They very quickly find ways to either get at Calastrix or use powers to essentially pull her to them. The reality is her defences are low so their powers pretty much work and that means that their battlefield shaping powers work.

It soon becomes apparent that I am never going to get a chance to fly away with Calastrix. They drag her in and lock her down and then begin to dish out the damage and I realize that Calastrix really just does not have the ability to get away. If I try and fly away with her she will lose her attacks while my players won’t loose theirs for the most part and they can bring her back and lock her down. The reality is this is going to be a stand up knock down fight with very limited maneuvering for Calastrix as she will be under the effects of ‘stay where you are’ powers and my players simply can’t maneuver to much because they are stuck on the raft (they could and occasionally do dive into the drink but swimming is slow so they don’t do it much).

One of the stand out features of this encounter is that one of the players has a Barbarian that has really been designed to pair with an enabling Warlord. Now the Warlord player has not been showing up so I have not seen how this team works but for this session an old member of the group is visiting town and it is decided that he can cameo for the session and run the Warlord. Needless to say the Barbarian, always good, is just brutal with the help of the Warlord to provide loads of attacks and auto criticals and such.

The players ability to layer on the nerfs and such is in full effect since their powers can hit the low defences. Especially as the cleric often likes to utilize defence lowering powers.

The dice are not really gong my way in the fight. Calastrix has a phenomenal +26 to hit. That is high enough that normally it should allow her to overcome anything but the most devastating of nerfs but my players do get -6 down pretty consistently and while +20 to hit is still pretty good it is closer to a 50/50 chance to hit and I think I was rolling pretty poorly for the encounter, straight out missing a lot of the even odds attacks.

Calastrix could still dish out pretty good damage but not enough to counter the large amount of healing my players could put together. Ultimately the encounter was significantly shorter then I had expected. Calastrix lasted a mere 4 rounds, the most notable facet of that was really the sheer amount of damage the Barbarian could put out with the Warlord giving him extra attacks – the Barbarian probably did 800 hp worth of damage in 4 rounds meaning that a single character (though in truth its two characters) did about 40% of the damage in the encounter.

My players never really ran out of good powers in this combat 4 rounds is not really enough to drain them. The possible exception was the Ranger who is designed to be a really dedicated Nova build but even he was just getting in the neighborhood of running out of powers – not actually tapped out.

In the end, despite all the build up, of how powerful Calastrix was, the encounter was a bit of a push over. Don’t think any character went down, healing not really tapped out, the players where just not actually pushed toward their limit here. Ultimately large hps, at least in this case, don’t make up for low defences, though the combo of the Barbarian and the Warlord in some very real ways threw a wrench into the experiment by so significantly upping the groups damage output. Still even if the Barbarian had only been able to do 400 hps damage – which is about what he can do over 5 rounds without the Warlord I don’t think an extra round would have changed much and the rest of the party could probably have gotten the other 400 hps in. with another round, maybe round and a half.

The bottom line was this Dragon was just overmatched in a way that some of the other more difficult encounters recently where not. She had stamina and the ability to get out of most of the debilitating effects that the party could lay down but, despite appearances, simply could not put out enough damage or effects to stop the PCs from doing what they wanted to do each and every round. They are 18th level PCs and even her breath weapon was only doing about 32 points of damage, 16 on a miss and that is maybe a ¼ to an 8th of any PCs hps. Reality is at this level the opposition really needs to be pulling out huge guns to even phase the party – something along the lines of 50 points of damage, and your prone and your stunned (save ends) and tell me about it when you make your save because then I’m going to f!@% you some more – anything less and it simply won’t phase the players. Their hp totals are around 100 for each character but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Grand total there is another 700 or so hps behind that for the group in healing and they won’t really start flipping out unless that 700 points behind is on the verge of being tapped out. If one wants to get them to sit up and take notice one really has to use an anvil and Calastrix had no anvil though her very high HP total made for a reasonable facsimile for this one encounter.

OK so this was an experiment about whether high hp monsters akin to early 4E ones would cause grind. I’d say the answer is yes though there was no grind in this specific encounter. The dichotomy comes about because grind is not an objective state but a perception – this combat was not a grind because my players never realized that actually it was. If I did encounters along this lines, say using some early Hydra’s and the like, my players would catch on after three encounters or so and would be falling asleep. In this specific instance the ever rising HP count, instead of boring them had them enthralled – you can’t really pull that rabbit out of your hat as a DM more then once however. Eventually the big number no longer keeps them interested…instead it bores them by telling them that they still have another two hours of slogging before the monster inevitably dies.

Official Campaign End
While I'll likely still be adding posts to this thread for a little bit longer as I do a denouement for the campaign and then go on to provide my players an adventure by adventure campaign summery (which will involve a lot of looking over the posts on this thread) for the next few months the campaign officially ended on Wednesday March 9th, 2016 with the PCs completion of the Island in the Sea of Time Adventure.

Treasure Woes
With my PCs off on a lost tropical island for the remainder of the campaign I have bumped into an issue with wealth by level – well I have bumped into two issues and only one of them was really wealth by level. One of them was a ‘bonus surprise’ that basically backfired.

OK the first issue is simply the fact that out on a tropical island and the promise that the campaign ends when the PCs return to civilization has essentially made the vast piles of gold the PCs are finding worthless. In truth this bothers me not at all. My players are pretty min-maxed and high level and it did not bother me really at all that they could not convert their gold wealth by level into magic items. They don’t need the extra power provided by the magic to be potent. I was also somewhat interested in getting a bit of a taste for 5E in this regards after all no one will be buying much in the way of magic items in that edition.

Despite me pointing this out I would say that for some (though not really all) of my players the inability to take their monetary wealth and convert it into magic items was not at all a hit. They have complained bitterly about the situation and one player even retired a player character seemingly primarily because he would get to choose new magic items using the bringing in a new character rules. Though I’m not actually certain that was exactly why that player retired the character. Simply that this was his stated reason for doing so. This player does have something of a tendency to get bored with his PC every so often and bring in a new one and he was the one running the ‘focus on Slumber of the Winter Court and Dominates’ build that I noted some time back is a trap build as I won’t let his auto win powers work in any encounter I have put real time and effort in designing. So it might well be in part a desire not just for a change but also to get out of a build where every encounter with something other then the ‘random encounter’ Dinosaurs ends up being one where Slumber of the Winter Court simply won’t actually work.

In any case I certainly have no fans in terms of eliminating the ability of the players to convert their gold wealth into something useful in the adventure and if I where to do this all again I think I would have provided the NPC tribes with at least alchemy items the PCs could have bought. I think that would have made the issue less problematic. I do wonder how this is going to go over in 5E where gold eventually really does become pretty worthless.

My other issue actually stems in part from this first one. I decided to compensate to some extent by having a one level only wish list. So when the players went through the big finale dungeon off to kill the Minotaur leader after every encounter they would get to find one item from their wish lists. I gave my players a month to choose wish list items and when half of them failed to get around to it I gave them a two week extension….which resulted in exactly no new entries to the wish list. At this point I threw up my hands and used the wish list for the three players (of 7) that had provided wish lists so their characters got pretty decked out.

This was allowed to fly but led to fighting among the players when one of the players that had not submitted a wish list (same player who changed his character actually) then argued that he should get a share of the wish list items – he had a point in the sense that using the magic item picking rules for who got dibs on regular ‘random’ treasure drops he might well have a turn but was argued down by the players that had made the wish lists insisting that they got the items because they where wish list items and he had opted out when he choose not to submit a wish list. These players got their way (in large part because the other players that did not submit a wish list actually sided with the wish list players – agreeing that they don’t get anything because they never made a wish list).

End of the day though this all felt like far to much anger and hurt feelings. This was supposed to be a fun bonus but it really just felt like squabbling and hurt feelings. Even the players that had managed to submit their wish lists did not really seem all that thrilled and ultimately I would say that I would probably have just been better off if I had stuck with handing out random loot. Though I also think that a big issue here was the usual campaign fatigue. Two years ago I would not have had a situation where most of my players could just not be bothered to submit a wish list. At this stage expecting them to just show up is asking a lot – I need to stay away from actually making them do any work.

Still it was also a clear boo-boo for there to have been any issue with wealth by level or any of that sort of thing. If one is going into the grand finale for ones campaign then it is time to be DM Santa Claus and make sure that the really phat loot flows and there is no reason for ones players to be unhappy in this regard. Now is not the time to be trying to help out play balance by cutting off the loot tap…better to just up the power of the opposition.

Did monsters change a lot in the "D&D Essentials" run? I know that classes from Essentials tended to be less power oriented, by and large, and I wondered if monsters were too.

I've done a number of posts on monsters in 4E but pretty much the bottom line is monsters changed a lot throughout the course of 4E. To the point where I attempt to use monsters created after the release of Darksun and avoid using those made before that date.

This can get to extremes with the monsters made around the time of the original Monster Manual being just aweful - a failure by WotC to really understand the role of Monsters in Dungeons and Dragons really.

Monsters improved as time went on. The original design of monsters had emphasized simplicity. The monsters had few powers and the goal was to make monsters that would fit into small stat blocks and be easy to run. It is worth noting that at this stage WotC still believed that 4E was going to have fast combat. The monsters where not only too weak - especially in regards to how much damage they did (trivial amounts) but where straight out boring - having awesome PC powers is only 1 part of the fun - beating boring monsters it turns out is not actually all that entertaining.

By Monster Manual Two the first fixes where in and this pretty much involved generally giving monsters more powers to make them not only a little more powerful but also more interesting. It helps a bit and some of the monsters have interesting powers but low damage out put still means the monsters are very weak.

Monster Manual 3 (and monsters made in books from around this period) continue the trend, damage remains far too low but monsters start to get a more focused suite of powers, which is to say not just attack powers but other kinds of helpful powers more often. Powers a better designed not to 'overlap' as much. Basically giving a monster 3 attack powers that all require a standard action is usually not ideal. It is usually only going to use one of them. However by this stage when this happens usually they at least do different things - a focused attack and a ranged attack for example. If the monster really fits I'll customize an MM3 Monster where as I will alomost always simply skip over an earlier one.

Darksun was the real watershed moment in Monster Design - they finally serously upped the amount of damage monsters can do and some of the Darksun Monsters are the most nasty creatures in the game. I don't really hesitate to use Darksun Monsters though a few of them have powers that are actually to powerful - usually something along the lines of 'first failed saving throw = death'. Also the Solo problem still exists with Darksun Monsters.

Essentials is nearly perfect - I still do some customization for my very min maxed group to make most more powerful but the tweaks are needed least for Essentials (and the books that come after). This is the best place to find Solo's in particular with most of them being designed to take into account the fact that PCs are going to try and stun or daze them. They have ways out of this sort of stuff and usually ways to take a lot of actions in a turn to challenge a larger group.

There was one final evolution right at the very end of the edition where we seemed to kind of go full circle with monsters becoming much simpler - however they where extremely hard hitting. I assume this was kind of testing for 5E. I'm not super enamored with this last design. It just does not save that much time in the long 4E combats but makes the monsters less interesting opponents but they are still basically fine and can be good for some roles.

So the answer actually is that Essentials Monsters are more power orientated not less but that is for the best...but one should avoid using more then two of the same type of monster if they are fairly complex (after effects to powers - lots of encounter or recharge when first bloodied type powers - interrupts).

The Odd Complex Monster Problem
I was running an encounter in which my PCs faced off against a sizable pack of very potent magical spiders and bumped into an issue that had come up a few times before but which was actually a little counter intuitive. Basically the spiders all had a plethora of powers along with elements like powers with after effects and such and I noticed that the encounter was really difficult to run. It seems counter intuitive as one would sort of assume that if all the monsters where the same that would make running a bunch of them easier but my experience has been that it actually makes them harder as you have to try and track which monster has used which of the many powers and which have not and this puts quite a strain on the DMs cognitive carrying capacity.

I actually find that having a whole bunch of different monsters even if all of them are complex to be far easier to run simply because it is actually so much easier to track who has done what. Not to say that a bunch of different complex monsters is actually easy – you still find it slowing the encounter down and such but your less likely to find yourself lost. At this stage I would say that it is probably a bad idea to use more then two complex monsters of the same type in an encounter. If there needs to be more then two then it may well be worth it to either use different monsters or to simplify the monsters and rely on a few big hit type powers to keep the encounter challenging.

Rethinking some lessons learned about 4E skill checks in encounters
Looking at the above mini-dungeon encounters they – and especially the 2nd one really played out well, highlighted 4E style encounters and where enjoyed by all. Weirdly enough the encounter with the Tyrannosphere involved an element that I had thought of as both quintessential 4E and problematic. Way back on page two or three of this thread I covered an encounter where the PCs needed to make skill checks to open a magical sewer gate while Minotaurs just kept showing up and would eventually overwhelm the PCs (this was way back when the PCs where 5th or 6th level and a Minotaur was a really nasty opponents – the minotaur encounters with 16th level PCs had the Minotaurs as Minions for the most part).

In that encounter the players who had to spend their time making skill checks to open the sewer complained that the encounter was really boring for them and I believe after that I made it so skill checks in encounters would just be move actions so the PCs could still use their powers and participate.

Technically that was true in this encounter – all the skill checks where move actions but the mage and cleric had to do a lot of running in this encounter and then used their standards to convert them to move actions to make more skill checks. Nonetheless they really did not complain about it and seemed to have a really good time in the encounter despite not using their powers.

Why the discrepancy? Part of it could just be the players involved. The player that was complaining in the original 6th level encounter complains any time his PC is rendered ineffective for any reason. He complained in a later encounter where he got restrained and could not use his melee combat abilities and complains every single time his character gets stunned and looses his turn. So maybe I learned the wrong lesson. All that said even if I was dealing with a player that was particularly unhappy at not getting a real turn my choice to make most skill checks in combat into move actions was one I think was a good one – giving the players some ability to really participate if they wanted to makes for more fun encounters – I still recommend that.

That said I think two other aspects helped in this encounter to make not using combat powers seem fun. The fact that it was mobile, that there was choices in terms of using the skills to dispel spheres or keep moving or try and shut down a sphere producer meant that the skill checks kind of felt like using powers and the PCs felt like they where progressing and making their own choices. It is all a matter of perception but at the end of the day there is a world of difference between spending your turns just standing there making a skill check against an inanimate object while your buddies play an encounter and progressing through the middle of an encounter running all over the map – while potentially under fire and dodging your way through danger to make skill checks at different parts of the map. The first one is boring while the second one is actually pretty exciting even if you are not unleashing your daily’s.

Magical Mini-Dungeon Redux (or what a difference a little knowledge makes)
My players returned to the two encounter mini-dungeon that they had escaped by the skin of their teeth some time back (See the Retreat above) and really the story here is how much better this went with them having some idea on how to handle the encounters.

This was true of the first encounter but was especially true of the second encounter.
In the first encounter the PCs mages had to make pretty high arcane checks to teleport either themselves or their comrades into the dungeon at which point the PCs would be scattered somewhere in a large room where the floor attacked them, there where two powerful Volcanic Iron Golems and each corner of the room had crossbows that targeted the closest PC. Interestingly the PCs new exactly what they wanted to do to handle this encounter – get to the elevator that led down because if they where standing on that they would not be attacked by the floor and it was in an indent that would mean they could not be attacked by all the crossbows. The Mage could then stick up a fire wall to make it so no crossbow could hit them and the encounter would be easy. Interestingly this knowledge helped significantly but not really significantly. The reality is that the players figured this out pretty quickly last time they ran this encounter and the real issue was always the fact that the whole sequence of events was unpredictable and hard to control. One simply could not help being scattered or the fact that the party entered over a number of turns. In a lot of ways the second play through of this encounter felt significantly like the first play through. It starts off feeling absolutely brutal and once the PCs manage to get the whole party through the portal and to the safe zone of the elevator it is a complete pushover. The difference that took place in this second play through is that my players had a plan and that plan involved only the most minimal use of daily powers which they knew would have to be saved for the next encounter. Basically speaking it went according to plan but cost more then they would have liked.

The second encounter with the magical spheres and the Tyrannosphere was a whole different story. Here the players planning felt like it made all the difference in the world. I had thought the fact that my players had gained a couple of levels would be a big deal but in retrospect it really was not. The difference in power level between 16th level characters and 18th level characters is actually really small. The new powers don’t count for much because the players don’t have any more powers really. Just a couple of their powers are, maybe, are a few shades better and damage has gone up by a small amount as well the PCs have an extra +1 or so to hit. Maybe they are 5% more powerful…maybe.

Nonetheless where the first time my players did this encounter it had turned into a chaotic fiasco with players leaping off a high elevator, caught in large area effect blasts and being swarmed by magical spheres that screwed them over here it all played out differently. My players used the mages teleport power to enter the room and their plan was to get to the source of the spheres and shut them down one by one before the encounter was just crawling with them.

The reality is that worked and it worked better then I expected. The PCs could pretty much get up on one sphere producer almost right off the bat and then they kind of naturally progressed to the point where the main mage PC and the cleric more or less ran around the room counter clockwise shutting down each sphere producer in turn while the strikers and defenders spread out around the Tyrannosphere and began to lay into it with their powers starting with the best daily’s and just working their way down.

It still felt like a tough encounter – the Tyrannosphere’s high Willpower meant it could not be debuffed by the cleric. Nonetheless once the defenders and strikers pretty much got around it they could not easily be targeted as a group by the Tyrannospheres area effect powers and the players where shutting down and dispelling the spheres fast enough that they where no more then a nuisance and, eventually the PCs worked there way through the 1000+ hps of the Tyrannosphere and won.

The difference that planning made in the second encounter as compared to the first seems to me to really come down to the fact that the PCs could control a lot more with the second encounter – they teleported in at a location of their choosing and then executed their plan while in the first encounter there simply was no way to control where they would end up. The result was that they could use foreknowledge to dramatically improve the situation in the 2nd encounter but only mildly improve their results in the 1st encounter.

The Angel Battle
This was another standout interesting fight worth taking a look at. It took place near the end of a pretty classic 5 encounter dungeon and being second to last of the fights my players where playing pretty cautious with the battle trying to save what Daily’s they had not already used for what they assumed was a final battle coming up soon.

In this case I had 4 Angels (of an evil God – in 4E Angels are sometimes the opposition) in an encounter where the other major element was that the floor was kind of like a moving sidewalk – the PCs would be shuffled forward 2d6 squares at the start of their turn.

The design on the Angel encounter was unusual in a couple of ways. Generally in 4E encounters the bad guys don’t have any ability to protect their own or heal but here one of the Angels was an Angel of Protection who could help out the other Angels and all the Angels gave each other temporary hps when they where either bloodied or destroyed.

This gave the Angels a lot of stamina in the encounter. Interestingly when I looked the whole thing over I actually thought the Angels would be pretty easy for my players to beat. The Angels damage output was nothing too impressive and tended to lean toward single target melee attacks. Lowish damage and only against a single player simply felt like something that would not unduly test my players. Though one of the angels had a really nasty power to put ongoing 20 as a minor, something that did not seem that impressive when I first glanced at the stat blocks but would turn out to be pretty impressive in reality.

This started off seeming to work out for my players with them opening up with a bunch of area attack immobilizing powers that seemed to stop the Angels from really being able to do much at all due to the fact that the Angels primarily do melee attacks.

My players even seemed to figure out the best way to work their way through the Angels by bringing the Angel of Protection to them so they could kill it first so that it could not support its Allies.

I was actually rather surprised when this encounter seemed to go south on my players. They had polished off the Angel of Protection without to much trouble but along the way seemed to start running low on good encounter powers. The groups only striker is melee orientated and had a very difficult time dealing with the flying Angels and their reach of 2. The floor eventually brought the players closer to the Angels and the players ran out of ways to immobilize the Angels and the Angels ability to fly around targeting the soft PCs really became apparent. When the cleric went down the PCs started to really freak out – they had to use a potion to bring their cleric back which, at this level, does not even give the cleric enough hps to take a single hit and uses up a very valuable surge. At this point the players decided that the game plan of saving their Daily’s was just not viable – they would loose the encounter if they saved them and for a couple of rounds they really went off with their good stuff. This finally turned the combat around and when they managed to take out more Angels the combat swung well back in their favour as every dead Angel significantly reduced the amount of damage the Angels could dish out. When the combat went down to just the last Angel this really stood out as the Angel was not really able to do more damage then the Clerics daily heal power was able to heal a round and my PCs finally prevailed.

In the end the ability of team evil being able to support itself was not really put on display because the Angel of Protection went down so fast but the constant boost from temporary hps when the Angels where bloodied or died was extremely noticeable in a party that often did area effect damage spread out over all enemy targets as the Angels would tend to negate all the incidental damage that they tended to take and the PCs had difficulty putting out enough damage in the encounter especially after they ran out of encounter powers.

This was definitely a long fight which ran three sessions mainly due to the fact that the Angels could absorb so much damage and the PCs dished out low damage but it was at least an interesting combat. The pure length of the combat meant that powers like ongoing 20 eventually really added up. If the fight had been fairly short it would not have been that brutal but with one Angel pumping this power out every round it eventually really started to drain the PCs, particularly when they ran out of ways to get extra saving throws or raise their saving throw numbers and the power started to stick for multiple rounds.

The fight never really felt like a grind primarily because of how difficult the Players where finding the fight. This jives with my experience throughout 4E at least the way I play it – grind is not really so much about how long a combat is but how long a combat with a forgone conclusion runs. The closest thing I get to grind is the big daily combats with the Dinosaurs. Not usually actually a problem as my players use their Daily’s but they certainly avoid this type of encounter when possible because they are going to win and there won’t be any real long term impact.

Odd – Killer Solos
So in recent encounters I have found that the Solo’s often seem to be some of the most brutal encounters for my players. This actually really surprises me. It goes completely against what I was finding for most of the campaign and even seems to be at odds with the basic theory of D&D in general, including 4E. Essentially Solos are supposed to be easier then expected encounters because conditions or power effects (such as Pacification) laid down on a Solo mean that the Solo looses its entire turn.

Nonetheless in the recent part of the campaign my players have come within a hairs breadth of a TPK against a Tyrannosphere and the last PC I killed died when A Beholder opened up on the player with all of its eye rays.

In trying to figure out why the Solos seem to have become more dangerous then earlier in the campaign I have a couple of theories and suspect that it is a mix. One aspect that is always important is party design. My players have 3 controllers a defender, 2 leaders and a striker. Controllers are weak to Solos and my party is stacked with them while having a bit of a weakness in damage dealing so the Solo gets to hang around and use its potent powers.

Another element that might be significant is that I have had more players join the campaign. At first blush one would think that having 7 players instead of 5 would make the Solos weaker but I have a suspicion that it does not. With 5 players the PCs fight a Solo that is at their level or a couple of levels above them but if one is spending the XP budget for 7 players on a Solo then the PCs start facing a Solo that is 4 or so levels higher then them and now the Solo starts to get a bunch of benefits that stand out with the Solos in recent fights. The Solos bonus to hit starts to get really, really high. My players like to apply penalties to their targets to make them miss but if the Solo has +30 to hit even pretty high penalties don’t really mean the Solo miss – often it still hits. The Solo also has very high defences when it is a bunch of levels above the PCs. Often one or two of the Solos defences are so good the players actually need to roll a 14 plus to actually hit. This results in the PCs often simply missing with their attacks which generally makes them pretty ineffective.

At this stage I’m guessing that the combination of the fact that the Solo’s are able to hit despite my players best efforts to stop them from doing that and the fact that the players often miss the Solo despite their best efforts is allowing the Solo to get off more attacks and when it comes down to it Solos often have crazy good attack powers – its just that they tend to not be able to show off their crazy good powers when the players are layering on conditions and penalties.

Do Your Job and Get in the Pit
NAME OF PC: Salasie
CLASS AND LEVEL: 17th level Male Human Ranger
Catalyst: Fell in a pit and was convinced to stay down there with a most hostile Beholder.
Long Version: The PCs are slogging through a high level dungeon crawl attempting to get to the Commander of the Minotaurs whose assassination is the reason they came to this island in the first place.

Having fought their way through an army of Minotaur Minions and defeated a hired band of Fire Giants they enter a room where they come upon the Minotaur Commanders ‘advisor’…An Eye Tyrant (or Beholder).

The PCs are pretty freaked out when I show them a picture of a Beholder. None of my players have ever fought such a creature but its power is legendary among all D&D players. As the fight ensues it soon becomes apparent that the Beholder is capable of dishing out some pretty mean effects with its eye stalk rays but maybe more notably it has the ability to shake off pretty much anything including a power that lets it remove the ongoing effects of powers placed on it which means its pretty much impossible to pin down.

As Salasie charges the Beholder it turns out the cunning creature is hovering over a large pit trap which Salasie falls into tumbling 60 feet. Nonetheless while battered such a fall does not really put too much of a dent into a 17th level Ranger. The pit however has my cunning PCs thinking and they hit the Beholder with a power that forces it down to the bottom of the pit and then set up a wall of fire in such a way that the Beholder can’t get out without going through round after round of being in the fire wall.

This would all be all right but of course Salasie is already down in the pit and when he opines that he should crawl out the rest of the players demand that he stays down in the pit and do his job of fighting the Beholder while the rest of the party supports him from the top of the pit.

Unfortunately it soon becomes apparent that 60 feet down (12 squares) is actually to far for most of the PCs to manage to do anything to support their brave Ranger Companion. Nonetheless the Eye Tyrant is bloodied by Salasie along with peppering fire from some of the longer ranged powers among the PCs. Bloodied however triggers an extremely potent power of the Beholders. When bloodied it fires every single eye ray at a random target in range. The problem is that Salasie is the only target in range and he sucks down every single eye ray. When we get to the 8th eye ray – a disintegration ray Salasie finally is knocked past negative bloodied damage while the warlord and cleric – who should be supporting him look on helplessly unable to effect the outcome and Salasie becomes so much dust at the bottom of a pit.

This is the first death my players have experienced in some time so no real problem on that end. The player I killed just joined the campaign for this last adventure but he has played in my campaigns in years past and actually thinks of me as a really brutal DM who kills PCs by the bucketload…it’s a tad odd but I’m actually glad to have managed to maintain that reputation with this player by having it come to pass that once again I’ve bagged one of his characters. My Dungeon however is now in some trouble as the player will bring in another 17th level character next session and the ever so careful draining of the PCs resources that is part and parcel of a 5 encounter dungeon crawl will be a little thrown out of wack. But ce le vie…I bagged a PCs and that is all a DM can ever really hope for.

It sounds like some mojo has returned to the game.

The definite end date that is not to far in the future has done that more then any other single thing. Basically just knowing that this is going to come to an end and as soon as this adventure is completed got them somewhat out of the rut.

The Retreat
One of the more interesting series of encounters took place when my PCs took on a mini-dungeon of two encounters. Now the mini-dungeons in this adventure have been designed very specifically to play to the strengths of higher level 4E. This means encounters featuring interesting complex combat environments and at high level, usually magic is heavily involved in making the combat encounter interesting.

In this mini-dungeon the PCs needed to make pretty hard arcane checks in order to teleport a companion through a teleporter into the encounter which consisted of a room with a floor that randomly did nasty things to the PCs standing on it (unless a mage made arcane checks to ‘shut the floor down for a turn’. All the while a couple of powerful Iron Golems attacked the PCs and some crossbow turrets blasted at the PCs from the corners of the room. Even when the PCs got teleported into this very large room they would be ‘scattered’ to a random location in the room.

The entire thing was pretty entertaining to play out in that the PCs where kind of being dribbled into the encounter in the first place just as fast as one of the Mage PCs could teleport the PCs in. Then they where scattered and unable to effectively support each other and being attacked by these Iron Golems as well as being peppered by the Crossbows.

The entire situation was kind of unnerving my players and the seemingly unfavourable situation along with the PCs being very used to only having single daily fights led them to go crazy with using their powers so that they where pretty much tapped out on Daily’s by the time this encounter ended. When it further became clear that they would not be able to take a long rest in this room and must push on to the next encounter things went downhill.

In the second (and last) encounter of this mini-dungeon the PCs faced a room that was somewhat maze like and produced these magical spheres that tried to touch the PCs and if they succeeded again there would be nasty results. The main opposition in the room was a Tyrannosphere (though my players called it a Warforged Beholder – which would have been a much cooler name). In any case the PCs seemed to end up scattered being overwhelmed by the magical spheres while the Tyrannosphere just tore them apart with it powerful area attacks. Very quickly in the fight things just seemed to turn south and with the PCs having started by taking a rather slow elevator into the room it quickly became apparent that their was no way for them to easily retreat.

With the Tyrannosphere tearing the party apart it started the seem to everyone, both myself and my Players that we where about to experience a TPK. That fate was very narrowly averted when the mage PCs noted that he had a daily power that could create a portal between any two spaces. Somewhat funny scene ensues as the rest of the players at the table yell at the mage player for not bringing up this power much earlier. Then there is a hair raising event where the mage player gets targeted by a sphere and if I had rolled 7+ on the attack roll the player would have gone down at which point there would be no teleport and well before he could have been brought back the whole party would have started to drop. Fortunately for my players I missed the roll and they fled the dungeon.

Been some time since my PCs where forced to flee an encounter (the Legendary Kraken would have been the last such encounter though that one was rigged and my players figured that out when it was finished). At this point my players decide to continue on with the adventure and come back to retrieve the key from this dungeon later. Likely a good move as they will gain two levels before trying to tackle it again and will be taking it on with some understanding of what they are in for.

How my Attrition Theory Worked
So above I outlined how I would make this adventure into a kind of a mini-campaign by including an element of attrition in it where the PCs would slowly loose surges as they adventured on the island but could get their surges back if they rested in specific safe zones.

I’d say that the results are pretty much a failure with some bright points. The idea behind this attrition theory was supposed to get the PCs to feel pressured by the island and treat it somewhat strategically by having them work around the safe zones - retreating back to them if their surges got to low. Sort of a system where the PCs would venture out of the safe zones a certain distance looking for the next safe zone or at least the fastest route to the next objective. It was also designed to get it so that the ‘random’ encounters where not actually irrelevant (because they would attrition the PCs who could not get all their surges back with full rests).

Thing is that did not happen like this. My PCs simply refused to treat the adventure strategically. They essentially made it clear that they would head out and push forward to the next objective no matter the cost and if it turned into a TPK well so be it. They where never willing to turn back or treat the adventure strategically and I would say that at the heart of that was that they where not willing to go through more ‘Random’ encounters then absolutely necessary. At one point I pretty much subtly influenced them to ‘conquer’ a safe zone (this would be the ship at the Minotaur Port) because if they had not taken it they would have entered the biggest mini-dungeon in the adventure with only 2 or 3 surges apiece and would have certainly lost the adventure.

It is always interesting as a DM to find oneself in this sort of situation. I’m essentially rigging the game – if subtly, so that the campaign does not end on a sour note with a big defeat after 9 months in an adventure and 4 years of a campaign. There where a couple of moments during the course of the adventure that it looked like my Players where going to TPK and I would have been willing to live with a more standard TPK that ended the campaign – but not one where the PCs just died from not being able to get their surges back. Having the Campaign end in the final adventure because the PCs suffered a TPK in battle would not have seemed completely out of place for how the campaign wrapped up while a ‘drained of surges by the island’ type ending would, I think, have just left too much of a sour note to be acceptable.

All that said the redesign did have some bright points. OK it did not get the players to treat it like I wanted them too…but on the other hand they never caught my subtle influence to get them to capture a safe zone. They are sure it was all their idea and therefore have been happy that they managed to get such a zone when they where so low on surges. Furthermore the surge loss has convinced the PCs to treat the ‘Random’ encounters with a certain amount of respect – they are not complete throw away encounters as far as my PCs are concerned. It is just that they are still these big long encounters that my players are very motivated to avoid so far as possible – but more because they want to get this thing done and even they can see that the ‘Random’ Encounters do not push the plot forward.

At the end of the day I’d say that 4E remains the wrong system to run this type of adventure in. The other issue is simply how long big 4E encounters are. In a much faster system the PCs might be willing to treat the adventure strategically because they would be far less motivated to keep the ‘random’ encounters down to as few as possible. In 4E each encounter takes a full session. Hence 4E, at high level anyway, is the wrong system and this is the wrong time because my players are burnt out and want this to wrap up. If I did not have this combination of Players highly motivated to end this campaign and therefore highly motivated to avoid multiple extra session long combats maybe then I could have managed to push my players to play this strategically but the reality is I do have these underlying motivations driving my players so true strategic play in this island sandbox did not really pan out.

Overview of How Island in the Sea of Time is Playing Out
Normally I would not do a post like this until after the adventure was finished but this thing has been so big that I’m going to take a look at a bunch of elements in the adventure and it seems best to get what happened (and a little of what will happen) explained first.

So My players went through the Sea encounters initially and there is no real out of combat decision making in those. The final encounter was with the Kraken that destroyed their ship and that has been covered above.

Once on the island the initial part sees them on a peninsula and it is pretty similar to a road adventure at this part because the players really can’t go anywhere but up the peninsula so they encounter the hostile natives and beat the snot out of them (again I covered this encounter above). They take over the Natives village and make their first real campaign effecting choice here in that they leave the rescued crewmen along with the Captain of the ship, Challi Assam, in the cleared out natives village. They also rescued some cat people in the village and learned a bit about the island. This is where my players clue in that they are on King Kong’s Island and that Oonga is King Kong.

After this they climb the great wall that cut the Peninsula off from the rest of the island, note that there are two paths they can take from here, one leading north to the Bird People (Aarooka) and Gnomes as well as a path leading east toward where the cat people live. The cat people are trying to convince the PCs to go to their home and having no real reason to choose one of the routes over the other the PCs agree.

They make their way to the Cat peoples lair bumping into a couple of dinosaur encounters along the way and learning a bit about how the island works (attrition of surges) and ‘random’ encounters with Dinosaurs and the fact that the cat people think the PCs are extremely loud and inept along the way. There are a couple of fights which the PCs win pretty easily.

Once at the home of the cat people they meet their Matriarch and learn a whole heck of a lot about the island including that their have been other explorers to the island before searching for something called the Rook of Rao. The cat people have a powerful magic item they found on the bodies of one of these adventurers and the PCs get the item, they also learn that the Aarooka and Gnomes have some other magic items from these other adventurers and that the Gnomes used to travel off the island by a magic gate. The PCs also learn that while the cat people have seen the Minotaur Ships out to sea they don’t know of any Minotaur Base on the island but that the cat people pretty much only really know where the evil natives are as well as where their allies the Gnomes and the Aarooka are. They have not really been to the middle or western end of the island in at least a generation and did not venture out that way much even before that. The island is simply too dangerous to undertake trips that are not necessary and what the cat people need they can get closer to their home for the most part.

Not having any particular reason to make alternate choices and being lured by the idea that the Arrooka might know more about the island (because they fly) and especially the lure of powerful magic items the PCs choose to back track and head north. But first they hang out with the Cat people for a week or some such as the disease effects have begun to hit the PCs and they won’t venture forth while suffering penalties. Eventually they all get or beat the disease and are ready to continue their expedition.

More encounters with Dinosaurs. For the most part these are on the easy side but here there are a couple of encounters that are on the tougher end. The T-Rex type Dinosaurs are potent enough that they give my players pause and they are ambushed by two Purple Worms which push my PCs to the very limit of their abilities with their generally powerful stats and swallow whole power – the Purple Worms where gobbling up PCs at a reasonably good clip and the cleric got swallowed which removed healing from the party and also just about killed the cleric who did not have skills or powers that made escape reasonable (some of the other PCs either had such great athletics that they could make a skill check to escape or had powers that let them leave the Purple Worms stomach).

The PCs make their way to the home of the Aarooka where they get their magic item, learn that only the Gnomes know about the magic gate but get a pretty good background on the layout of the island. The Aarooka know of the Minotaur base in roughly the east coast of the island as well as the location of the gate in the middle of the island.

The PCs then continue on to see the Gnomes. By the end of this journey they have made enough skill checks and fought enough Dinosaurs that they are beginning to be able to travel for days without suffering random encounters. When the PCs speak to the Gnomes they learn that they will need to retrieve a magic key to use the gate and that the Gnomes are related to the Gnomes from their homeland and that once these Gnomes used to use the Magic Gate to get to and from the land of the Gnomes in the PCs homeland. With their ship lost this looks like the best way for the PCs to return home. The PCs get a general idea where the magic key is located. They decide that getting the key is almost on the way to the base of the Minotaurs and they head for that location. More Dinosaur encounters – a couple of which a slightly tough, particularly an encounter with Rocs, but for the most part the PCs can use Slumber of the Winter Court to pretty much autowin an encounter.

The PCs get to the place where the key is located and attempt to retrieve it. Here everything takes a major turn for the worse. I’ll go into more detail on this mini-dungeon in a later post but the bottom line is that the party gets within a hairs breadth of a TPK and just barely manage to flee the dungeon with their lives. Unable to re-enter this dungeon for three weeks due to how the magic there works the PCs choose instead to press forward to the Minotaur Base. They are following paths and for one of the few times during the adventure the PCs choose to follow a path that does not seem to lead them toward the location of their target and instead up into the north east portion of the island where the path ends in the cave of one of Oonga’s female mates. In this case however she is not home and there is little for the PCs to find. They back track, bumping into encounters along the way and then start to press toward the coastline not liking where the paths lead and figuring that the Minotaurs must have a port. If they reach the coast they can press south until they find the port.

Here my PCs come to something of a decision point as PCs start to really suffer from the attrition of the island. The last full, surge restoring, rest the PCs managed was back where the magic key is located and many members of the party are down to two and three surges. There is some suggestion of turning back and trying to return to the safe zone provided by the location of the magic key. Here they could rest, restore surges and because they have been improving in their ability to navigate the island without attracting Dinosaur encounters might be able to get back to this area with significantly more surges. However the players do figure that even if their overall situation would improve it would nearly certainly mean having to run through at least two extra encounters and they elect to instead press on. They find the Minotaur Port and scout around it ultimately finding the Minotaur Base and determining that the Minotaurs are transferring forces between the port, which has a ship at dock, and the Base every day. Eventually the Players elect to attack the port which turns out to be not that tough an encounter, then fight off the Minotaur forces that return from the base, which is actually a super easy encounter as the PCs start cutting attacking Minotaurs down from a great distance away with the Ballista’s at the base and then blast the Minotaurs apart when they finally get close to the port. At this stage the PCs can sleep on the ship and restore full surges (the ship is a safe zone).

The PCs then attack the Minotaur Base, I’ll do a couple of write ups below detailing some of the encounters there but it boils down to them fighting their way through five encounters and finally killing the Minotaur Commander.

At this stage no matter what happens afterword the PCs have ‘won’ the campaign. The loss of the Minotaur Leader results in the Minotaurs abandoning their attacks on the PCs homeland and returning to their far off home. Mission Accomplished. The PCs can all die in a TPK at this stage and it will still be a victory.

Nonetheless they still need to return to their homeland and bring the lost Gnome Tribe home if possible. So the PCs elect to head back to the Magic Key location as the requisite time they need to wait to use the magic gate to get in has passed and they bump into an encounter on the way which they easily beat.

This is actually where we are while I write this post so I’ll eventually have to update the end but they should now redo the Magic Key dungeon. I have high hopes for them after all they now what they are in for and should not make the same mistakes twice. Also they have gained two levels so the encounters will presumably be at least a little easier. Once they have the key they need to travel to the Portal itself – that will involve a Random Encounter and then fight the Gates Defender which is a brutally potent Dragon. Beat that and they can enter the portal and deal with the final encounter of the Campaign, a drawn out, race against time and numbers Demon Encounter at which point the campaign will wrap up with a Dénouement on my part wrapping the whole thing up.

Just a Second – This is King Kong’s Island
There was something of a surreal situation at my table when my players get onto the natives wall and survey the island soon after learning about Oonga. Thing is some of my players are reasonably familiar with King Kong and all the popular culture lore that surrounds King Kong but I personally am particularly ignorant of King Kong and its lore. Never saw any of the movies, never read any of the books. I mean I knew Oonga was inspired by King Kong but I assumed that it was just really that. Gygax had decided to have a big ape as the apex creature on the island. Thing is it now seems that the entire island was inspired by King Kong’s island which Mr. Gygax had translated into D&D. I never knew that. So my players are making all sorts of King Kong references and drawing conclusions that seem reasonably accurate about my adventure and I’m just kind of staring at them confused – which has them confused. After all how the heck did I design an entire adventure based on King Kong’s Island and yet have no real knowledge of King Kong at all. That said I did tell my players that the setting was based on a 1st edition module by Gary Gygax…which allowed me to blame Mr. Gygax at a later point when my players realize that the entire geography of the island does not work. Gygax has the island be a bowl with high sides and a low middle where it rains daily. That does not work. The centre of this island should be dry and desolate because it is in the rain shadow of the mountains and highlands that ring the island.

This Has Become a Mini-Campaign
Been awhile since I have done a post on my campaign and yet it still continues despite a clear end date for the campaign when this particular adventure ends. At this stage it has become clear that what I had originally envisioned as an adventure and what was then upgraded to a larger adventure when it became clear that this adventure would be the last of the campaign has morphed beyond that into almost a mini campaign. My PCs had just levelled to 14th level when Island in the Sea of Time began and at this point they will be 19th level (for a single encounter) when the adventure ends.

I had not originally planned this adventure to be anywhere near this long, though of course when I first sat down to write this thing I was under pressure to get it so that my adventures ended with the PCs getting two levels each just to have a chance of making the campaign fit into 30 levels.

Once this became the final adventure of the campaign I was freed from that restriction which in the case of this adventure was, in some ways, for the best as it pretty much just did not fit. Even in 1st Edition Isle of the Ape was essentially a mini-campaign and since that is the backdrop for Island in the Sea of Time it is still pretty much a mini campaign.

Nonetheless, I never quite grasped just how big this thing was. Once I redesigned it and went through the trouble of counting combat encounters it became clear this was going to be big. The adventure comes with 3 encounters while the PCs travel to the Island of the Ape, a good 10 or so set piece encounters on the island (not including 5 or so non-combat encounters), up to 14 ‘random’ encounters – though my PCs will only ever run through 12 of those, and two mini dungeons with a total of 7 encounters between them. That is a total of 32 combat encounters and since I usually level my PCs after 6 or 7 combat encounters it is clear how this all adds up to 5 levels over the course of this adventure.

In this case it is going to take my Players around 14 months before the adventure ends. I note that I wrote my first post about this adventure on January 1st of 2015 and I estimate that I’ll be done with the adventure (and the campaign) in roughly March of 2016. That is a pretty long time for an adventure and I think my exhausted players will be happy to have finished this thing – though it has not been to bad as the adventure itself has provided a reasonably good mix of different types of encounters including some on water, wilderness and magical dungeon type encounters. No urban encounters but the whole rest of the campaign has had a lot of those so the mix is pretty good.

All of that said this adventure has turned out to actually be the longest of the campaign. My players would be freaking out completely but the fact that the campaign wraps up when the adventure ends and they want to wrap it up properly keeps this thing going…but I am pretty sure that if I had told them when this started that the adventure would take 15 months to finish that would have been unacceptable.

Yeah, I've read them. They generally start with round one - a dragon surrounded (somehow) by a couple of hundred militia at short range. I know lots of people enjoy those kinds of analyses, I just don't find them very instructive as to how the game plays (which is what I care about).

In game - there's no way a hundred militia can kill a dragon. They'd always prefer to hire four heroes than traipse off, hoping to surround the dragon unnoticed, and then engage in a fight where more than half of them will die before they might have a chance to kill it.

I think it is worth pointing out that the fact that the army of any sizable urban centre can stop a dragon does not mean that they don't prefer to send in 'experts'.

After all with a reasonably smart dragon fifty through to maybe a couple of hundred soldiers die plus possible collateral damage. Far better to send the experts to deal with a dragon then face that.

Truth is I don't really think you and GreyWolfLord are disagreeing - except maybe in regards to the Epicness of hero's in 5E versus PF.

In this I agree with GreyWolfLord. In PF PCs are far superior to other men by 5th level and by 10th they are pretty much Demi-Gods, admittedly in a world full of other Demi-Gods and creatures that can poise a threat to Demi-Gods.

5E hews closer to a baseline where the PCs are really just more like Hero's and do not, at least nearly so quickly, reach the point where no number of lesser beings poise a threat. That army that can stop a Dragon can stop the 10th level PCs as well. In PF only the other Demi-Gods residing in the city can stop the PCs not the army.

Considering ‘Broken’ Character Builds
I was thinking about some of my PCs in terms of ‘broken’ character builds. I’m thinking about this not in regards to every kind of optimized build but to a specific subset of optimized build. Specifically I have a Player that has created a wizard that is focused on domination as well as the power Slumber of the Winter Court (by handing out huge penalties on the save). It is by no means the only kind of optimized character build, in fact all of my PCs are pretty heavily optimized but this build is different then say a Ranger build that can go Nova and dish out insane damage or a Defender with a phenomenal AC. Essentially the specialized Wizard PC presents a particular problem because the design of the character is either overwhelmingly good or practically useless in any given combat encounter and I decide whether or not the build works or not. This stands in stark contrast to all the rest of my PCs. My phenomenal Ranger PC is essentially challenged by me merely by increasing the potency of the opposition. If the Ranger can do 400 hps worth of damage in one round I make sure that the opposition has enough hps to still be able to provide a challenge after the Ranger carries out his Nova attack. The wizard build though is really a special challenge because the design of his character is essentially all or nothing. Either his ability to autowin the encounter works or it does not. It is practically the same story with his domination capabilities (though it is not quote as bad). Either the enemy is perpetually dominated or they are not.

After running a sizable number of encounters with this character in the party I have noted that everything tends to come down to one of these two extremes – either the character works as advertised the encounter is a push over and the PCs clean up the opposition without any trouble or, alternatively, I build in immunity to charm or sleep, or the ability to easily shake off conditions into the opposition and this PC becomes practically useless.

I am not really a fan of this kind of build as neither answer is really a good answer, it is no good if the encounters turn into gold fishing, especially in 4E, because it is still 45 minutes to an hour to resolve even if it’s a blow out. On the other hand it is never ideal if a PC really can’t do anything meaningful to impact the combat.

All that said while I’m unhappy with the fact that this build even exists I have to say that a lot of this issue is really on the head of my player who decided to go with this build. Needless to say he expresses a great deal of frustration whenever his character is rendered useless and yet seems to, at least partly, understand that the build is broken. Furthermore I kind of don’t have much sympathy for the player because this player has done this before – building this sort of all or nothing character that either works and essentially auto wins encounters or does not work and is pretty much useless. I even get the impression that the other players around the table have kind of clued in on this as the most recent encounter where the PC realized that the Golems where immune to his powers and started to complain about it another player pretty much said ‘that is what you get for having all your eggs in one basket’.

In the end there really is not to much I can do to resolve this issue. I find myself ‘balancing’ this build by pretty much including encounters that are not designed specifically to counter this players abilities, and then he wins and building encounters where the opposition can’t be put to sleep or dominated (at least not for long) at which point the Player has to deal with the fact that his character is really sub par. Unfortunately for this player these encounters are not exactly even – I’m willing to let him blow out throw away encounters but if I’m really interested in the combat – if its against major opposition and I have put a lot of work into the design of the encounter in terms of interesting terrain effects and exciting opposition then I make sure that this encounter won’t just be won by this player. Pretty much if I just draw out the Battlemap quickly with wet erase markers that is a pretty good sign this player can win the coming fight – but if I spent 6 hours building the layout of this encounter in GIMP and it is going to be tactically interesting you can bet I won’t let this player spoil all my work by turning this into an autowin encounter. In other words this PC gets to autowin the less interesting encounters but is rendered very weak against the really exciting encounters. Truth is I think the player actually looses out with this type of build because of the way I handle his build.

Ultimately there is actually a lesson here for players more then for DMs – don’t make this sort of build because you can bet that it won’t work – it can’t work and the campaign continue. Either the DM essentially tells the player to make a new character or the DM adjusts to what the player is doing – and you can bet that almost no DM is going to adjust ‘fairly’. I suspect that almost any DM would behave in a manner similar to what I describe myself doing above. The players all or nothing build might be allowed to work – but not against the opposition that the DM is really excited about running – not against the big boss types.

Of course not every DM is creating the encounters himself – many are running modules or other professionally published adventure in which case the DM has less of a vested interest in altering the opposition in order to nerf this PC during some of the encounters because said DM has not had to spend hours slaving over the creation of the encounters.

Thing is if one thinks about it the result is still always going to be bad for the player in question because in the end the DM either goes with a kind of personalized punishment of the player in question – in the case of published adventures the DM might be beefing up the interesting encounters so as to allow them to still present a challenge to the party – which would take place because this players build was being nerfed. This can easily be the case in a party with this type of character as chances are all the PCs are somewhat optimized and the DM has to up the power level of the encounters in any case so along the way he chooses to make sure that the most interesting encounters are immune to the PC with the autowin button or, alternatively, there is collective punishment for the whole group.

The collective punishment is well disguised as it is actually the DM allowing the PC to work as advertised in every encounter. Sounds great for the PCs except of course it is not – the players think they want to win every fight easily - but the reality is the players don’t. The first few times the players turn an encounter into a gold fishing event they might be elated but not the 12th time, not the 13th time. Eventually numbing boredom will set in. Mindless number crunching to an easily achieved overwhelming victory is not actually entertaining at all.

The bottom line with this kind of build is the player that has made it always actually looses out and this is true in pretty much every system. Certainly it was true in 3.5 (where I used the collective punishment option to make the point when faced with this sort of build), it clearly exists in 4E where, with this being the final adventure I don’t have time to make the point via collective punishment and so am using individual punishment and no doubt it exist in 5E as well. Nonetheless whatever the system that this type of character exists in in the end the player that creates this type of character will always find that he or she is being punished for it – because even when it works the player is punished.

There's a very good article on Alexandrian.net on the "uberness" of casters in 3E, and that it a side effect of the 15-minute workday, which is in turn (or so asserts the article) largely due to the death of the wandering monster table.

What it boils down to is that the wizards' super-blasty ability is intended to be spike damage, rather than reliable output, while the fighter's damage is steady and dependable. The idea then is that the fighter does most of the actual work, and you hold the wizard's big booms back for the most crucial of moments because you don't know when you might need it later.

Unfortunately, when the group can simply blow all of their resources on the first encounter and then rest, that effectively changes the wizard's big boom from a "daily" to an "encounter" ability (to use 4E parlance), thus making it regular damage instead of spike damage.

When the wizard's big boom becomes the norm, then of course the fighter is screwed.

The way to fix that, assuming you don't like the 4E model of "give fighters their own big boom," is to get rid of the 15-minute workday, re-emphasizing the resource management aspect of the game; and I think he's definitely on to something there. But "more, smaller encounters" and things like wandering monsters are somewhat incompatible with the storytelling mode of most contemporary gaming. It works in a dungeon crawl context, but not so much in a "move from set piece to set piece" context.

While I think the reasoning here has historically been how it is viewed I think it actually faces some significant issues. If you view the period between long rests/sleep as something that uses up resources you don't actually benefit, much of the time, in saving your spike damage. Going off early and often is generally just a better option then saving your spike damage. Basically going off early might mean your short on spike damage later but it also means that those earlier encounters where a lot easier and you and your group suffered a lot less (used less of your health resource) in defeating them. If you save your spike damage you might find that by the time you eventually deploy it it is already to late to recover from a situation that has gone south, or, more likely, chances are you find that you have come to the point where you can take a long rest and failed to utilize all your spike damage.

Basically the real trick is not so much in saving your spike damage (and this applies to things like save or die spells etc. for this exercise I'm saying that this is a form of spike damage) but in saving it at the point when you have so overwhelmed the current opposition that the encounter is no longer capable of doing any meaningful amount of damage to you or your party - at that moment it makes sense to stop using spike damage and saving it for the next encounter but until that moment your better off using all available spike damage as fast as possible.

Basically speaking it is better to make the first three encounters into complete cake walks and have a hard time on the 4th encounter then to have a harder time in all encounters but still maybe have some juice left for that 4th encounter because who knows if there is even going to be a 4th encounter and furthermore your probably better off mathematically if the first 3 encounters where a cake walk and you come into the 4th encounter short on spike damage but high on health resources versus coming into the 4th encounter with more spike damage but much lower health resources.

Note of course this is all just theory - depending on the system in use and even the design of the adventure the basic theory might not be valid. Nonetheless at least on a theoretical level one does not usually want to save spike damage.

Change of Plans
So above I do quite a bit of soul searching regarding issues I have with my Bubble in the Sea of Time adventure in regards to trying to make sure that the Adventure does not overstay its welcome for my PCs. Thing is once it was decided that this adventure was in fact the last one of the campaign suddenly the issues with trying to make sure that the adventure does not drag no longer seem quite so important. I am no longer trying to make sure that the adventure is only a two level adventure. I’m perfectly happy to allow the adventure to span three levels and the desire to make sure that the plot keeps moving forward quickly in order to keep the campaign moving is no longer really so important.

Certainly my goal is to make sure the adventure does keep up some kind of a reasonable pace – after all I am motivated to make this adventure good. I want my campaign to go out on a high note and I don’t want my players to have their last experience of my DMing for a while to feel like a drag. Nonetheless a large part of what was pushing me to make sure that this adventure wrapped up at a reasonably quick pace was the idea that I was already loosing my players to the length of the campaign and I still thought I had 40% of the campaign left to run to get my players to level 30 and through the rest of this campaign.

If I’m not trying to shove 40% of a campaign that has run 3 years into as little time as possible it is no longer necessary to get in and out of this adventure at high speed. In fact now the goal is to make sure that this adventure includes as many interesting high points as possible. The result is a number of the sub themes are extended. The material that has been added to the adventure is not so much the random encounter elements. I don’t really think the Random Encounters are the best element of the adventure – though I am no longer motivated to try and keep them to a minimum. I expect my players will run through between 12 and 14 of them during the course of the adventure but at this point I’m OK with that so long as it contributes to the feel of the adventure.

The elements that get added are an expansion of the core set piece scenes of the adventure. The PCs need to retrieve a magic key to open a gate to the Abyss to pass through the Plane of Infinite Portals to get back home. Originally that was going to be 1 single encounter. I’ve expanded that out two encounters and focused on elements in this type of encounter that feel really 4E - Interesting terrain and fantastic traps. I’ll focus on adding some unique high level monsters including adding an encounter with a really powerful Dragon that sees guarding the Demon Gate as its duty and can’t be convinced otherwise. Of course I’ll also make sure to add a larger – if role playing focused – dénouement to the adventure to emphasize the PCs contribution to the overall campaign and hopefully provide a meaningful ending.

In the end I think this makes for a better adventure overall which is good in itself but, in a back handed sort of way this also emphasizes why campaigns can’t be allowed to overstay their welcome. In retrospect it seems clear that I was compromising the quality of the adventure itself because I was so keen to try and save a campaign that had reached, and passed, its best before date. If, for whatever reason, we where to try and keep the campaign alive then the choice to force the adventure to be as short as possible would have been the correct choice – improving a campaign is more important then improving any given adventure in that campaign when one is forced to choose but it does make sense to try and never be in a position where one has to choose.

Adventure Path Design Lessons
So following along from the last post I’m going to look at this campaign in particular and consider what I did, why I did it and how I might have done it better.

Chapter #1: Cell Block F
The campaign started with Chapter #1: Cell Block F In this adventure the PCs where tasked with recovering some prisoners from a secret political prison and returning them to the capital. Of course everything had gone to heck at the political prison. The adventure set the stage for the campaign and most importantly introduced the characters to a major NPC Blessed of Hern who has information regarding another critical NPC Heldane Crafter but this info is not introduced until later in the campaign. For the moment the PCs handed over the prisoners and the campaign continued.

Chapter #2: The House on Swann Street
In this adventure the PCs stopped a serial killer which made them hero’s in the capital and put their name on the map as investigators. I wanted both of these effects to take place in the campaign but the adventure itself did not deal with any real core plot line. I probably should have found a way to wrap this into another adventure because it was clearly to long a period of time to spend in one adventure.

Chapter #3: The Menagerie
Here the PCs rescue a business when the proprietors critters escape and cause havoc. Again this is pure sub plot – the PCs meet an NPC that owes them and can give them rituals but the main plot is not being addressed.

Chapter #4: The Sapporo Caves
Here the PCs travel to the lands of the Chin-Tuo kill some goblins and are involved in some scenes that set in motion the entire goblinoid invasion of the campaign finally starting up on the major background element of the whole campaign. I am of two minds here. I had the PCs go to the lands of the Chin-Tuo because of a lesson I learned in the campaign I ran earlier – introduce the PCs to the major peoples of the campaign. In effect my players in that campaign had been unhappy when it ended with them in the lands of the Chin-Tuo and yet had never been there previously. I learned that if my PCs where supposed to be saving various peoples they need to have some kind of a connection to those people at some point in the campaign for it to be fulfilling. I needed an adventure like this and I needed to get the main campaign theme rolling but the reality was I never addressed main plotline directly here. Still an adventure of this kind might be worth it so long as they are the exception rather then the rule and maybe I could have wrapped this in with more major plot development.

Chapter #5: The Oakbridge Murders
In this adventure the PCs put a stop to a series of murders. During the course of the adventure the PCs learn that the individuals being murdered where merchants who had been delivering supplies to a group called the Chosen who are the guys behind the Goblinoid Invasion. They also meet an NPC that can later take them into the Darkwood which will eventually be important and they get their first clue about the villain Spider who is pulling strings for the Chosen in the capital. I would say this is really the first adventure after Chapter #1: Cellblock F that is really putting the PCs onto the main plot line though they are really only just starting on the trail when the adventure itself ends.

Chapter #6: Salvage of the Ocean Empress
The adventure gives the PCs the ship they will use to fight the Minotaurs who are allies of the Chosen.

Sigh…this is kind of where I really start to feel the constraints of the campaign design. This is pure side quest giving the PCs access to something they need to further what is really just another side quest. Thing is this really brings to light the fact that my whole campaign is just too big to fit. The whole major war theme with all these factions invading the Empire is just too big a story to be told in a single campaign. I mean my PCs never need to deal with the Minotaurs but they are a major sub theme of the campaign. Never addressing their part in the plot because it just does not fit makes me sad. I want the Minotaurs addressed in this campaign…but in putting this into the campaign I pretty much had to admit…and of course I never did…that this was a story that could not be told in a single campaign. In any case this entire adventure needed to just be cut if I was to stick to the main plotline. In adding it I needed to recognize that I would never finish the campaign and should have aimed for a resolution…interestingly the resolution actually kind of needed to end right about where it will actually end in this campaign though that is, of course, unintentional.

Chapter #7: The Telhran Job
Here the PCs have learned that Blessed of Hern is a key NPC with information they need and it starts with them getting a clue as to where he is being kept prisoner and ends with them rescuing him and getting the information from him that Heldane Crafter is someone the Chosen are looking for and whatever Heldane Crafter was trying to find is the key to this whole mess. Here we have another adventure key to the main plot line.

Chapter #8: The Soldier of Kezeus
The PCs follow up on information received in the Telhran Job and go looking for Heldane Crafter. Here we are on the main plot path for the whole adventure.

Chapter #9: Re-Creation
The PCs search leads them to the southern part of the Empire where they get involved with the Humans and Lizard Folk down here and go back through an adventure that they went through in a campaign previous to this one by insuring that the Draconian base that their last adventuring party destroyed stays dead. This adventure is really big and sucks up a ton of time before its complete – it’s the point where I start to loose my PCs and its roughly the two year mark for the campaign. It is pure flavour as well. Truth is I probably could have done this whole adventure in a mere fraction of its length and would have achieved what where really flavour objectives. This is kind of the counter part to the Chin-Tuo adventure except now it introduces the rest of the country side and the Lizard Folk as major players. Ultimately this adventure was pure sub plot but it was significant for the flavour elements and maybe more importantly because it tied this campaign to the previous ones and brought the accomplishments of the last group my players ran to the fore. This focuses on the benefits that accrue from running campaigns in a consistent campaign world.

Chapter #10: Telhran Inflamed
Here the PCs have learned that the answer to their inquiry regarding Heldane Crafter is all the way back where they started in the Capital and the adventure begins with the PCs returning to Telhran. They have learned that they need to talk to the Great Hero’s who where their previous group. The PCs spend the adventure trying to get into contact with the Great Hero’s but I designed it so they never meet up with themselves (imagine trying to role play that!) but that all the information they need has been handed to a third group – The Princess Swords who are being hunted down by Spider. This is another adventure which gives out the major plot line but the PCs don’t really have it until then end of what is sort of a sub plot adventure. Still by the time it ends the PCs have all he information their previous group had and know that the person Heldane Crafter was looking for was some one named Mordev – Mordev is the ultimate BBEG of this whole story so at this stage my players finally on the main plot path of the campaign…and I don’t realize it yet but we have been gaming beyond two years at this point and my campaign is on borrowed time.

Chapter #11: Pax Tharkas
With the clock ticking on the end of my campaign my PCs set out on another adventure that is pure sub plot. They attack an old dwarven base that the Chosen have been using to arm their goblinoids – save the slaves form an army from them and win a major battle in the war. None of this is critical to the main plot – but it was good story.

Chapter #12: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spider
Again we are into sub plot that feels important. The PCs finally hunt down Spider herself eliminating the threat of the Chosen manipulating Telhran and the people in it. They fight the BBEG of much of this campaign and beat her but she is just one important member of the Chosen. That said this is the capstone for what the PCs where throughout the adventure. This is the adventure where my PCs – who have been an Investigators for the whole campaign and eventually became, defacto, Telran’s Counter Intelligence finally fulfill their core role. I made them Investigators as opposed to Adventurers because much the campaign would revolve around this investigation and counter intelligence theme.

Chapter #13: A Bubble in the Sea of Time
The PCs take their ship the Ocean Empress and sail off to confront the Minotaurs – they’ll win and stop the Minotaur threat by the time this adventure ends and that will also be where my campaign ends. This of course is sub plot but its major sub plot that has been running through this campaign and the previous one.

OK so I started writing this post with the objective of identifying what I was doing wrong in campaign design that kept resulting in my campaigns ending before I resolved the main plot…but this is not the opinion I have now that I have gone over the whole campaign. Truth is I’m not so sure any of this was really a mistake – the real problem with my campaign is less about sub plots – it’s the story I have chosen to tell. I mean I conceived of the basic story line way back when I was 15 years old or some such and it was heavily inspired by Dragon Lance. The problem I have come to believe in writing this post was not so much that I get side tracked in campaigns but more that I have chosen to tell a story that is so huge that it just does not really fit in a single campaign. Sure I could get it to fit with a laser focus on getting through it and only hitting on the main plot line – but that kind of seems to miss the point of telling such a huge story – why have this massive epic if I’m not going to take the time to cover all its bases? I doubt that I’ll ever try and run something so huge again in my life but maybe it is not such a problem that one decides to tell one epic tale in their life. That said if it is not such an issue to take three campaigns to tell a single story as I am now concluding I really want this to be done when I choose to run the next campaign so I had best design it so that it both fits within the level range of the system I choose to run it in and that it is a story that can be told in about two years of real life. I think that is doable…crazy thing is by the time I’m done with this post I’ve gone from being sad that my campaign has ended prematurely to being interested in how I can tell the tale in my next campaign. In the end it will need to be focused but maybe not really any more then the current campaign – here I managed to tell half the story and delve into a lot of interesting sub plots including interesting elements intertwining what had taken place in the first campaign with what took place here. I think I can do the same in the next campaign – tie up some more of the sub plots and make sure that I intertwine elements from the first two campaigns and still manage to tell the rest of the story…that will be my goal in any case.

I wonder if the issue is a bit simpler than that. With my guys, the game stretched for years. And they forgot stuff. Details I'd been putting in as foreshadowing just passed them by. Important clues got forgotten. Key turning points became fuzzy. As a DM this stuff is in your mind but a lot of it the players will forget, and they get detached gradually from the game. Then it gradually becomes a series of encounters, which they don't necessarily easily comprehend. It's hard to care about it then as it just gets confusing.

In the end, we stopped just shy of the final encounter - the rebirth and (hopefully) defeat of Nerull - because they were surprised when he showed up. So the whole multiplanar conspiracy angle they'd been playing through for years simply didn't register. Since they had reached level 30 at this point, they were just burnt out and didn't fancy the final encounter, so we folded. I think it is an understatement to say I was somewhat annoyed at the time, but in retrospect it's an important lesson. I think one of the reasons the PbPs can last longer (eight years for my longest running here) is you can at least go back and read what the hell happened four years ago.

I certainly noticed elements of this with my campaign as well. Not exactly forgetting the plot so much as the way my campaign was set up the points between the adventures where pretty straight forward even if some of the adventures themselves tended to be complex.

Nonetheless there is certainly something about the passing of time that turns big accomplishments into little more then faded memories which essentially makes the campaign just seem disjointed if it goes on for long enough and seems to sap the excitement out of it.

Perhaps. I have had World of Darkness games last quite a long time, and I owe that to not having a linear progression tied to the narrative. That having been said, I am hoping to recreate that success once I begin running my games. It's about planning for that increment, but it also takes a heck of a lot of trial and error, unfortunately. I've had experiences similar to yours, and can only hope that I get more chances to right those wrongs.

And to speak to the nature of fewer high level adventures, it is... shall we say, difficult to write for those for many reasons. I think that it should be recognized that a party will not only be more powerful, but also varied into the high levels, to say nothing of established norms, backstories, and expectations. It's a sticky wicket for sure, but an area that is open for creativity and personalization that cannot be replicated by modules and so on.

This might owe to the problematic nature of the Wrath of the Righteous campaign, as it takes all of those troubles at the high end, and brings them down to the lower levels. This is also true of Exalted, but that's a topic for another day.

I could see how this could work with World of Darkness. I have only 1 experience with that system and what essentially happened is everyone made their characters and man what deep and interesting characters they where...and then we very quickly came to the conclusion that our characters had no interest in working with each other particularly and we sure as hell had no interest in following along with whatever the DM was trying to hook us in with. I no longer remember any of the other players characters except that they where all interesting and deep. I recall that my character ran a tea shop in Hong Kong and was in some ways stuck in the past as she had been the wife of a British Officer during the Colonial Era.

In any case I could see how a skilled DM could essentially work out plots around what all the players are doing and then, kind of like a soap opera, lay down plot points so that the players personal interests keep leading them to each other while having interesting over arcing plots that build up. The key to all of this is that the players recall all the plot details because they drive the whole thing.

This can presumably be generalized to most RPG systems as the key element is not about the system it is about the players creating the plot by following the motivations of their characters and the DM simply staying in front of them. The Story Teller system is very good at this because it starts the ball rolling by giving the players characters with complex and interesting back stories but in theory this works so long as the players eventually create complex and interesting characters.

All that said not every group actually wants a character driven campaign. One of the elements of such a campaign is characters can only die very rarely or the whole edifice of having the players build the plot through the motivations of their characters falls apart. This is a very co-operative way to play the game. That is fine as far as it goes but many groups prefer something more confrontational where their characters face grave dangers and overcome brutal challenges. That only works if sometimes some of the PCs don't overcome the challenge and die. Worth noting that in my group one has to keep the challenge level high - when the other DM was running things we went for 12 levels without a single death and then there was a mini-revolt where we told the DM to up the danger or he would no longer be the DM. Until that point the players where doing all sorts of things to try and alleviate the boredom of facing challenges we always beat. Several PCs where having a feud with each other, some of the players where swapping characters every five or so sessions etc. Basically my group is not looking for self directed gaming but for phat loot gained after overcoming death defying challenges. Preferably involving their PC doing something totally awesome.

That having been said, it might simply be as you say, and that D20 fantasy roleplaying at large is simply not meant for long term campaigns. Whatever magic allowed that to happen previous to 3rd edition might be something that an old schooler could illuminate for us.

I doubt it...I played and ran BECMI right through 2nd edition before I moved to 3.5.

The problem is most of the players playing these games are young and the campaigns die all the time. People change schools or they discover girls (or sometimes boys) or they get new friends or discover booze and/or drugs or they have crazy schedules etc. etc. Life changes a lot when your young and the discipline needed to have a long running campaign just is not there. I ran 4 campaigns during these years and had 3 others fizzle and die after only a handful of sessions during these years and the longest one was a little more then 2 years. Most where about a year.

The most obvious example of this can be found in Dungeon Magazine (though the module offerings are indicative of this as well). Check your Dungeon Magazine collection or go find an index on the web. Note how rarely a high level adventure is written? I mean maybe there was one every six months and I suspect that it is not even that high. There was no demand for high level adventures even then. Sure there are stories of groups that run campaigns for a really long time but these are exceptional and by no means the norm.

That having been said, it helped me in being a player to understand what it was that might have otherwise evoked a story. If it were not for my time as a player, I would be lost behind the screen, trying like a TV executive in throwing things at a wall and waiting for something to stick, as it were. Indeed, I felt myself doing just this many times without much success before renewing my perspective. It also helps to show others what a GM turned player can do to push a story forward, possibly shifting attitudes around as well.

While I think being a player is a very good experience for any DM I would also note that it can be deceptive. On the upside I would say that my experience as a player definitely reinforced my feeling that for almost all players if they love their character your going to have an easy time DMing because your players will overlook a lot of DM sins if they love their character. That said I noted that I apparently have a particularly high attachment to my characters compared to most of the players around my table. When I was a player I played my Death Cleric through to 12th level and when he died I played my new Merci nary with a bizarre mechanical Crossbow Ranger (Ranger/Alchemist Hybrid - use all the Alchemist weapon improving powers on your crossbow) until the Campaign ended. I loved them both but I was one of only a couple of players at that table that did not decide at some point in the campaign to retire their character in order to play a new build. So here I might have taken the lesson that players that love their characters are easier to please a trad too far because I apparently become more attached to my characters more then most of my players.

Furthermore I would have argued - and I believed at the time - that part of this DMs problem was absolutely zero interest in the campaign world itself. We where told we were in a fantasy world that included anything and everything in the character builder except Darksun stuff. All the Gods could be chosen and all of them worked - but of course they exist only to provide the PCs with 4E powers or feats otherwise they pretty much did not exist.

To me this campaign world sucked - I hated it. I wanted my character to be part of a world where there were NPCs that had beliefs and values and Gods and such. The DM had no interest in that sort of thing and I suspect that many of the players where fine with that - they certainly had no issue with all the builder being open. You could do some powerful stuff by combing worshiping Forgotten Realms Gods with Ebberon Runemarks. So I believed lack of a coherent campaign world was a big problem with the DMs campaign...but is that something I learned as a player that I could apply to make myself a better DM or is it just a facet of me as a player and not a reflection of the other players at all? This is of course the problem with being a player - you bring your own interests with you when you become a player - and importantly there are probably traits that a player that wants to also DM has that may not be the norm among the majority of players that don't want the responsibility of being the DM.

That having been said, it helped me in being a player to understand what it was that might have otherwise evoked a story. If it were not for my time as a player, I would be lost behind the screen, trying like a TV executive in throwing things at a wall and waiting for something to stick, as it were. Indeed, I felt myself doing just this many times without much success before renewing my perspective. It also helps to show others what a GM turned player can do to push a story forward, possibly shifting attitudes around as well.

Lots of points worth considering in this post - I'll split it up over several posts.

I'll note that I have been a player - I talk about events in this campaign and how they relate to a previous campaign that I ran quite a bit but there was an intervening campaign as well. In effect there was a 3.5 campaign that I ran that was the first part of this story.

That campaign dies when the group was 14th level. At the time I attributed it to the fact that 3.5 becomes broken at higher levels. I know think that this is true but not the whole story - that campaign was also at about the three year mark and the players where just becoming unfocused despite the fact that I felt the final adventure - a slightly adapted Maure Castle, was fantastic.

Then another DM took the DMs chair and ran us through the first 18 levels of Scales of War. I'm guessing we where at it almost 3 years. At that point the DM faced a Players Revolt and I took the DMs chair again. At the time we attributed the problem to the DM. Partly true mainly because there was no player at that table that wanted to play D&D less then the DM. Don't get me wrong if we were going to be playing D&D then he wanted to be the DM but he would just rather that we not be playing RPGs and would instead play boardgames and Magic. He would try and convince the group that next week we could not play D&D every week - we mostly forced him to keep running the campaign but every 3rd or 4th week he would refuse to DM and we would play board games. In retrospect I would say that the DMs behavior contributed to the problem but there was also the difficulty with the issue that we had been in a long standing campaign for too long now.

Finally we get to my current campaign which - as we got past the two year mark began to have problems and it came to a head at about the 3 year mark that I needed to wrap the campaign up...or I might have my ego deflated by a Players Revolt...they where getting close to one.

I find that group dynamics have a large part to play in the success of a long running campaign, and that includes the unfortunate problems of people moving away, scheduling issues, and the like. But even when everyone is able to make it and is committed to being there, it can be a challenge to maintain interests. The unfortunate part is that it sometimes take years to understand your players well enough to know what they want, how to deliver it, and what will keep them wanting more.

That a system can change or become overshadowed by newer editions in that time does not help. This is perhaps why I sometimes go to older houseruled systems, but that's just personal taste.

But the ultimate question as it relates to your experience is thus: Are your players interested in the destination, or the journey? Do they like leveling up, adventuring and learning about the story, or do they play to get to the juicy bits where they fight monsters and get reveals. Most of these game systems assume the former, and if you don't just enjoy the fight itself in 4th edition (and really, Pathfinder too), then it becomes difficult when these encounters encompass entire sessions (or dare I say, more than one).

The key is to know your players, and you may have the best opportunity to do so by being a player yourself. I can't stress how important it is to take a turn in the player's seat, even if only to remind yourself what it's like on the other side of the table.

I simply question the idea that making really long running campaigns work is a function of knowing ones players. I'll admit that I have heard of and read about some truly long running campaigns but my take is that these are pretty much rare as hen's teeth. I have heard or read about campaigns that burn out far, far, more often. Groups that would actually finish the first three APs where exceptionally rare and those that did invariably reported being very pleased with themselves for pulling it off but also almost invariably reported being completely exhausted by the whole experience. WotC originally planned to have a series of books devoted to the Heroic Tier followed by books devoted to the Paragon Tier and finally books devoted to the Epic Tier. The Epic stuff was all eventually cancelled and the development refocused on the Heroic and Paragon Tier when it became clear that very few groups ever managed to get a campaign that ran to Epic levels and keep going.

There is a post on this thread, I'm guessing it is around the year and a half mark of the campaign, where I comment that I wish I knew how to bottle whatever I was doing right because at that stage in the campaign I had player buy in like I had never seen it before. My players where unbelievably stoked to play in the campaign. When I would tell them that we needed to play board games for a few weeks so I could write the next adventure they would whine about the delay and each week we would play board games they would be pestering me to know if I would be ready to continue the campaign next week and this had been going on for about a year. By the following year I was well on my way to loosing them. They had now grown tired of their formerly beloved characters and where increasingly less focused. There was no dramatic change in the style of gaming I was delivering - in fact I think my work was actually improving. Hence I don't think knowing ones players is sufficient - knowing them simply can't, after a point, over come the ennui that seems to build up in a long running campaign. Eventually everyone just seems to burn out and that seems to be true for just about every campaign run by the vast majority of groups - which is why finishing an AP or Campaign that takes 5 years to run is both so rare and so exhausting to those that accomplish it.

My bottom line here is that this is not about knowing your players - important as that is - but about knowing that campaigns come with a best before date and if you really want to run exceptional campaigns it is best to design them so that they wrap up before they hit that best before date.

Lessons for Adventure Path Design
There are pretty much two elements to considering what it was that brought my campaign to a premature close and what elements I should keep in mind building this sort of campaign in the future. As I commented above when considering why the campaign is coming to a close I think that its length in real life is the core issue with the campaign. In effect I very much doubt that any campaign can really survive for much more then three years and really my players where beginning to fade out after the two year mark so ideally I think campaigns should be designed to run for two real world years or less. I don’t think this is really limited to my group but is something that is more fundamental to human nature.

Interestingly I think Paizo has actually done a reasonably good job of hitting that sweet spot with their adventure paths though I don’t think they necessarily did so because they recognized the sweet spot itself but more because the 6 large module format was ideal for their release schedule and because it worked well with Pathfinder in terms of getting the PCs to 13th – 15th level and ending the campaign. The reality is that Pathfinder increasingly starts to breakdown as a game system beyond twelfth level and really starts to fall apart from 16th level and beyond. In fact when we consider the original three Adventure Paths that ran to 20th level we sometimes read of groups that finished the campaign and they are usually elated to have finished the campaign but it took them five years and they are utterly exhausted. In any case whether or not Paizo just kind of lucked out into roughly the right length for an adventure path is kind of irrelevant – the fact is that they hit the sweet spot and because of that they have enjoyed strong sales for a long time in their flagship product. No doubt that if they had chosen poorly they would have modified their offerings in order to get to this sweet spot.

Two of the elements that I think are worth considering in this regards are length of sessions and game system chosen. I think length of the sessions can impact this two year ideal a little bit but certainly it is not a one for one exchange. I don’t think the factor is about total hours played but really about how long they have simply been playing in real life. So smaller sessions might allow a group to run a little longer and be content. Our sessions where around 3-4 hours long. If sessions are more like 2 hours maybe the campaign can be pushed a bit but I suspect that despite the much shorter sessions the group is still going to start loosing interest after 2 ½ years or so. Very long sessions like 8 hours might result in the group burning out a little faster but again I think we are talking about only a shift of around six months so for these really long sessions maybe a year and half is closer to ideal (though its worth noting that if one runs such long sessions the group might be able to get through a pretty sizable campaign).

In the same vein I don’t really think the system chosen impacts this very much. In effect a fast system like 1st edition or 5th edition probably allows longer campaigns to be run then say a system like 4E or Pathfinder because players cover more ground in any given session but I suspect that we are still talking about a situation where burnout starts to occur after about two years and whatever the system chosen it should be designed so that its over by the time the two year mark is being reached. In a faster system that can mean that the campaign can run for more levels then a slower system and could have more adventures but whatever the system chosen the length in real life of the campaign remains roughly the same.

Yes. This is pretty much what I mean when I'm thinking of a game as Rules light versus Rules robust (and these days since I play 4E I'd call that maybe rules medium).

In 3.5 I simply got used to creating adventures that had circumstances and looking up what that meant. What where the DCs - chances are very good that there was a specific DC set for whatever I had in mind. If one fell into a swift flowing river - well there were specific rules for that. I actually recall an instance where there was going to a situation where my PCs where fighting on a ship and the ship was on fire and I was becoming very frustrated because I could not find the rules for fires on a ship...I actually went to the message board to ask for it and it turns out I just did not own the correct supplement book and I believe some helpful Paizoian filled me in on what the specific rules where for a fire on a ship.

4E and 5E moved away from this model - if there is a fire on a ship the DM decides what that means. Nonetheless compared to 5E I am getting the impression that 4E is still a pretty rules heavy game. My take was that 4E was trying to provide a rule for most things but do so as briefly and as simply as possible - it was still in a very real sense meant to be a system where the players knew what their characters could do - where their actions where clearly spelled out by the rules.

5E strikes me as a system where that is not really a goal - its more like older systems in this regard where what the PCs can do in anything but the most common and basic cases is essentially the preview of the DM who interprets the possibilities and the effects the PCs actions have on the world.

The rules for it are in the stat blocks of the monsters who do it. The purple worm for example has the details for swallowing pc's under its bite attack.

Thanks - I do suspect that this type of situation will call for a fair amount of DM calls in terms of corner case situations - rules in a monsters stat block will be geared to covering the basics and would avoid having 4 paragraphs to cover all possible circumstances.

So I ended up in a debate with my players on a corner case ruling in my 4E game last session which turned into something of a debate on 4E versus 5E and what rules light meant. I was searching for an example of 5E being a rules light game and it was difficult - because I have not read 5E. I came up with rules for being swallowed whole and contended that this was likely an example of something that the rules would cover in 3.5 as well as 4E but was more likely to be something that the DM would adjudicate in 5E.

Of course that got me wondering if it was actually true - are there any rules for being swallowed whole in 5E?

Lorathorn wrote:

Role Playing Games being "extinct"

I never implied extinct, I implied that the 30 foot tall, 6 inch toothed D&D has evolved into a small feathered, flightless game. Still alive and well just unlikely to scare the pants off you.

I agree that systems are going away, and that was due to as you point out in the video market, saturation of a limited resource (i.e. people to buy your game).

I guess I focused on the last paragraph of your article, remembering people tend to remember the first and last item in a list, which hits out against WotC and their refusal to supply PDF's. I just don't agree that lack of PDF = peril. But your blog, your opinion, and that I have no issues with! But I reserve the right to disagree that is all.

S.

Worth pointing out - as the entry points out, Video Games did not almost go extinct. Game Consoles almost went extinct. Basically home computers are now a reasonably affordable price and they are better at games in every imaginable way. They have far superior games that look far superior and the home computer can be used by the whole family and has non-gaming applications as well.

The console market was facing essentially the same problems as video arcades would face about 10 years later - the home computer was just so much better for games. The fact that the console market was compounding this by not just naturally having inferior games because the consoles could not compete with home computers in memory, graphics, etc. but then going out of their way to make sure that the games where really exceptionally inferior by creating tons of truly awful games to go along with their far inferior systems and that the market was saturated by large numbers of really inferior consoles made the bust that much worse but it would have been hard to compete in any case.

The opening adventure is pure awesome. Sadly, the AP quality plummets after that. A wood elf druid would be a decent PC tho.

It was always one of the APs that intrigued me personally. Some APs are very tight and there is not a lot of room for the DM to add or subtract much but Serpents Skull is pretty much the opposite of that so I suspect that a lot of how good or bad it is - especially in a conversion - may have a great deal to do with how the DM tailors it to his group.

I've not read one way or another about mind reading Psions...Everyone has Psionic powers but usually only pretty much one and it is kind of random so truly potent diversely talented psions are not that common no doubt there are some talented individuals working for the Sorcerer King of Nibenay but it is a lot less likely that some small outpost has such an individual.

Your also going to have to decide whether this campaign is 'taste of Darksun' and your not going to sweat the details or if you want to be more focused on specifics. If your not sweating details then one Darksun City is as good as another but if your being more specific then you should use Google or actual source books to get an idea about Nibenay but the basic gist is Nibenay is ruled over by a very neglectful Sorcerer King who has pretty much let his Templar-Wives run the whole show for centuries and they eventually learned that their master never checked up on them so it turned into a kind of covert war for influence and power among the Templar wives.

The Revolt in Tyr and the death of the Sorcerer King there got all the other Sorcer Kings attention and Nibenay suddenly stirred and looked at how his city was being governed and was not happy with what he found...he has instituted a purge and large numbers of Templar Waives have been killed.

Needless to say if you delving into more detail then when your PCs are on Athas is significant in terms of how the authorities they are likely to interact with are going to behave. In a more detailed version where Nibenay is specifically Nibenay and not a generic 'we are here for the look and feel' Darksun City then the Templar Wives are either scheming among themselves and trying to figure out how they can use the PCs to their advantage or terrified and likely trying to pass on any decision making regarding to another Templar Wife because strange off worlders are an unknown and every unknown in the current environment can result in one being purged, tortured and killed...the key to surviving is not being noticed.

Magic is a difficult one...really the PCs should not be displaying magic in public at all. There can't really be gladiatorial games with anyone using Magic...that is the sort of thing that needs to result in immediate death because the peons are both highly superstitious and also because the rulers will brook no opposition. Generally speaking one does things to hide the fact that one is casting magic (normally you have to take feats for this sort of thing but with your PCs 'alien' magic and the fact that you don't plan to stay...well maybe you just make sure that the PCs pick spells that don't have obvious visible effects, at least coming from them, and have to actively be trying to hide their magic use if they want to not get caught.

Not sure it really matters which version they are playing. Giving the OP some pointers on how to keep the campaign alive for long enough to get a taste of Darksun before they return to Planescape seems like an edition neutral task.

If they are off worlders they likely fight with somewhat unusual tactics and Gladiatorial Games - Dark Sun or otherwise - are about entertainment. Have the person in charge running the stable recognize that these guys are more interesting then your run of the mill fodder and choose to A) have them fight together and B) not to make killing them some sort of priority. At this point you have your PCs locked up and doing some fights but not outright being killed. This should buy you enough time to come up with a good plot that ultimately leads to your PCs escaping.

In theory even undead can be knocked magically unconscious. In reality of course I can make monsters immune to sleep or unconscious whenever I want to but both of these answers are not really the best ones. Undead X's that the DM has made immune to sleep is OK for one or two encounters but using X is never the solution to a problem like this because it amounts to essentially - OK so for the entire rest of the campaign Monsters of type X are the only ones the PCs can ever encounter. Sure I can - with reasonable ease design an encounter where their cool powers don't work and they will be more challenging but I can't make that every single encounter for the rest of the campaign.

Power Level or Monster Group?
Well my players have run through a number of encounters in my Bubble in the Sea of Time Adventure and I sort of feel as if they have really jumped up in power level…or maybe it is more the kind of encounters they have been facing all of a sudden.

After facing some rough fights during the sea voyage everything they have come face to face with on the island itself has seemed rather underwhelming. Their first encounter was with the Kawabuses natives. I had built an encounter with 75 native minions as well as a fairly powerful shaman and their war chief. Now 75 minions is a whole heck of a lot of minions but the two controllers in the party pretty much just had a field day. I went into this feeling pretty concerned that I might have made an encounter that was too powerful and came out recognizing that my PCs had not really even broke a sweat in wiping the encounter out. OK maybe it was just the Minions. Next encounter was with a slew of standard Dinosaur types. Pretty good ones with the ability to bludgeon the PCs with their club like tails and also spit poison. Once again I was surprised at just how quickly my players seemed to overcome the encounter. My players keep holding onto significant amounts of their dailies and action points always convinced that these weak encounters can’t be the only one they will face.

Finally My PCs have engaged a pack of elite Horned Dinosaurs with some really brutal attacks…once again though my PCs seem to quickly take over. The Dinosaurs have phenomenal attacks but don’t really get to use them as my players lay down control effects on most of them before they can really engage and the party can handle a couple of these guys getting in a few hits before going down.

This could be a result of increasing player power – 16th level is a big jump in power though they handles the natives at 15th and its not THAT big a jump in power – it’s the addition of 1 really good new power for each PC. There is also a multiplying player effect that I think is always potent. Basically an old player rejoined the group recently and that puts the number of players in the party up to 7. Seven is a lot of PCs and I’ve noticed this element before in all versions of D&D really. If there are more PCs then there is this multiplying effect in terms of what the party can handle. Sure more monsters have been added but the party still seems to be that more capable of handling the monsters even with their increased numbers. The two controllers lay out their powers on the increased numbers of monster, the extra strikers bring any given down monster faster etc.

On the other hand maybe it really is more of a monster ‘type’ issue. Sure its been minions then standard and then elite monsters but none of them have had much in the way of defences against what the PCs can do – they tend to have more hps but that often does not seem that big a deal. Especially with the PCs controllers both unloading with a Slumber of the Winter Court power that puts creatures that fail saves to sleep for literally hours. With Dinosaurs my players don’t bother killing them – not needed – in hours they will be long gone and the Dinosaurs can go back to whatever it is that Dinosaurs do on their island. This is the most extreme example of a situation where the Dino’s big hps but little in terms of other defences don’t help them. In other encounters things like resistances to domination or traits that give the monsters extra ways to get out of conditions or avoid being hit help the monsters out but Dino’s pretty much don’t have anything like that and simply being big with lots of hps does not really compensate.

Of course none of this really tells me if the issue is the rising power level of the PCs or the nature of the kind of opposition my PCs have been facing. Might get a better feel with some of the later encounters – especially as some of them are not with Dinosaur type monsters. There are some Dragons, Demons, Beholder and the like in the adventure which come with more potent magical defences so that might give me a better idea if the issue is more one of increased party power or if its more a case of monster design issues. All that said I also think I need to go through another round of boosting monster powers. I’ve faced that issue repeatedly – my players tend to go up in their power a little faster then my monsters as I tend to not boost monster potency until my players prove to me that they can really dish it out and receive it. I tend to see the monster powers and think that they are over the top only to realize after a few encounters that this is not actually the case.

Though thinking about it some more and with another couple of encounters under my belt after the ones mentioned above (swarms of snakes, a plethora of invisible standards with a reasonable bite attack) I'm also of the opinion that a big part of the issue is simply the power Slumber of the Winter Court. Why this power was never nerfed I'll never know. It really should have been. My large group with two wizards that both lay it down is particularly brutal.

That was kind of my thought.

To some extent the stories I've heard of very early Gygax style play seem to fit the sandbox paradigm. OTOH, none of the earliest published adventures do. It certainly wasn't part of my early experiences. Once past the middle-school Monty Haul stage, we moved pretty much straight into the "Hickman story" version, though predating that, IIRC. Nor nearly so constrained. But other than through Dragon and those who went to conventions, there wasn't as much contact between groups as there is now, so it's quite possible everyone else was deep in sandbox mode.

I don't think I came across the concept until some discussions on Usenet back in the late 90s. And didn't know the term, at least in that contect until much later.

I think to some significant degree its simply a matter of demographics. As you point out the published adventures don't really support the idea and while the system does its not really spelled out or even supported in the rules. That does not mean that mature and intelligent groups did not discover this style of gaming and get into it. I'm sure they did...but to have been part of such a group you really had to have been at least...I don't know, say, 17 years old in 1980 to have really been part of this style of gaming for any length of time. Which means if your not at least 52 years old its doubtful you could actually have been part of such a fad for any length of time. Look around the boards - how many people here are 52 years or older and where playing D&D back in 1980? That number is exceedingly small.

So yeah no doubt such games existed but very few people played in them during the actual era. Most of even the old timers around here where doing as you say Monte Haul type gaming not in depth campaign worlds done in a sandbox style during this period. Certianly I was as I was 13 years old in 1985. I was just about at the point where I'd figured out what Monte Haul style gaming was and was about to start turning my noise up at it like I was some how too mature to play in 'that style'.

There is a reason why everyone can talk about those old Adventure Modules and say what happened when they went through them - that was what was going on for the majority of gamers. One way or another your DM was leading you to the adventure and then you where going through it.

Certainly you don't see Gygax or anyone like that talking about this style of gaming and he was not running it. I just did a conversion of Isle of the Ape which was published in 1985. That adventure starts with the PCs being summoned by, I think Tenser, and he tells the PCs to go to the Isle of the Ape and get the Crook of Rao. What if the PCs have other plans? Well Gygax tells the DM that if the players balk in any way then he should stop the game and inform the players that they are role playing their characters wrong. Seriously - read the module it is in there.

I think this is in fact one of the reasons Hickman D&D was so successful - for the vast majority of groups the alternative to story driven D&D was not sandbox D&D but simply storyless D&D. Though Ravneloft and Dragonlance did a pretty phenomenal sales job as well...especially if you where more like early teens when those adventures came out.

It sounds like perhaps you would benefit from a simplification of your campaign style.

I am reminded of advice I read in a column written by the late Erick Wujcik. I wish I could link it, but I've only seen it in print, so I will try to paraphrase what I remember. In it, he described how his dungeons would be intricate, byzantine, and contain all kinds of fun things to discover if the players worked hard enough. It became an exercise in frustration as so much was passed up, and the players grew bored with the sprawling hallways and secret rooms. His solution was to simplify. There was no reason to place the fun secrets behind such obstacles, so he put the fun stuff where it could be found, and truncated his dungeons.

Now, I know that we are talking about a campaign here, and not a dungeon, but I think that the same approach can apply. Instead of putting a whole campaign between your players and the plot, you could cut things much thinner and let them discover the deeper seeds to the plot.

I think this may even be exacerbated by 4th edition being so encounter driven, in that it might be harder to expose the story without dozens of encounters needing to take place. I don't know this for sure,as I have little experience with the system, but I've seen evidence of this.

I think the argument could also be made that experience could stand to be abstracted so that your players level up when you think that it is appropriate, but again that is conjecture. Still though, I remember having campaigns that ran too long in the past, and while it was painful, I learned much from the experience.

Yeah I'm a couple of posts ahead and in one of the ones coming up I go into more depth on what I think I learned in running this and explore how I might avoid having this problem again in the future.

houstonderek wrote:

I doubt he knows. It's pretty obvious to me he doesn't have any idea what "sandbox" means to a bunch of people who grew up in the sandbox era.

There was a sandbox era? When was this?

Well the term does come from somewhere. I mean I kind of get your point in that I rather doubt there ever was a time when Sandbox style games where anything but a minority. On the other hand it is kind of reasonable to postulate that there was once a time where Sandboxes where more prevalent then they are today. The modern system with its wealth by level rules etc. are in some sense almost anti-sandbox. On the other hand 1st and 2nd edition, lacking such rules, better supported a Sandbox style of play.

In essence I kind of suspect that the 'Sandbox Era' if it can be called that would have been somewhere around the point when 1st was switching over to 2nd. Maybe a little before 2nd to some point after 2nd came out.

That said even if this is the height of Sandbox style play as an 'era' I don't think it holds a candle to the rise of Hickman D&D roughly during the same period with a clear emphasis away from anything that might resemble sandbox style play and a move toward heavy story based play. Dungeon Magazine was not full of adventures meant to support sand box gaming but it was chalk full of adventures hinging on interesting story lines during this period.

Reconsidering Endings (how I need to change the current adventure now that it will be the last)
With Isle in the Sea of Time about to unexpectedly take the role as the last adventure in my campaign I’ve got to come up with a way of making this feel like it is a conclusion when it was never originally designed to be that. In pursuit of that goal this adventure has some elements that are useful and some elements that are not. Starting with the problem part is the fact that the adventure really does not wrap up the major theme in the campaign itself which would be the major war with Goblinoids invading the Empire and the role the PCs have been spending in digging up the causes of that war slowly closing in on the force behind it. There is simply no way to wrap that element in this adventure so I can’t have this adventure resolve the main theme of the campaign itself.

This actually puts me in exactly the same position I was in at the end of my last campaign which was on the exact same theme. In effect this whole campaign was meant to resolve this epic war because it was never resolved in the last campaign due to my players getting to too high a level for 3.5 to be a fun system prior to my players uncovering the main themes of the campaign. Here I was much more focused in making sure that the PCs could not go off track in this campaign but was not prepared for the campaign to run out of steam when it was half over.

Thus I’m stuck with wrapping this campaign up much the way I wrapped the last one up. In effect I have to try and get the PCs to buy into the idea that their characters made a significant contribution in the ongoing war while leaving the actual resolution to the war itself for my next campaign.

With this in mind I do think that this adventure does at least offer a reasonable story element in terms of having my PCs make significant contributions. The PCs are on this island to finally put an end to the Minotaur menace that has been a significant danger to the Empire. Having the PCs end that menace is something that can leave the PCs thinking that their PCs managed to get somewhere in this campaign. This element really does not require much in the way of changing the adventure but at this stage I’m wracking my brain to try and add to it to make this all feel more significant. This is the part where I’m thinking of trying to find a way to add to the adventure. I’ve established that the gate off this island will lead the PCs to the lands of the gnomes and that there are friendly tribes on this island. That might actually kind of work out. The gnomish lands in my campaign world are kind of semi-isolated from the heart of the campaign and yet if they joined the Empire against the goblinoids and such that would be significant. This could kind of work maybe – I could have the PCs not just find the gate home but maybe the friendly tribes on the lost island are much bigger then I originally planned and one of them is Gnomish and maybe they have been cut off – trapped on this jungle island and the PCs can rescue them and lead them back to the Haddath Island and into the arms of their brother gnomes. This would provide the Empire with a force that is indebted to the PCs and one which the PCs could lead into the war against the Empires enemies Furthermore the fact that the Gnomish lands are far from the heartland of the Empire actually turns out to be a bit of a boon. It can serve to explain why the PCs don’t return to the main plotline – they are just too far away. Thus I can start the next campaign with characters of a little higher level and finish off the main plotline by having this new group take over when the current PCs failed to return from their sea journey (at least failed to return to the capital of the Empire).

It also dawns on me that I should shove in some big iconic monsters into the adventure. I still have to design the Minotaur Base. I had not really thought to much about exactly what was in the base except that it had to have the Minotaur Commander and presumably their where Minotaur foot soldiers in some significant numbers. If this was not the final adventure that we are likely to play I’d probably try and focus the remaining encounters on something Minotaur themed. It makes the most sense all things considered and there is enough in the Minotaur lore to make 5 encounters. Now however I think I’ll look to build something that includes a Beholder and maybe some other big time D&D monster if possible just because I look forward to having my PCs get into it with these types of monsters and I don’t really expect the opportunity to come up again any time soon.

In the end I think I can make this adventure work as an ending for the campaign – which is to say I can wrap this up and put a bow on it and call it a reasonable chapter in what is turning out to be a campaign trilogy. Honestly that is something of a relief – past this point in the campaign and the players would be on final approach to the climax and it would be hard to put a halt to the campaign so in some sense I got lucky in that regard.

The downside here is that this is pretty much a sub plot and, worse yet, it ends with the Gnomes. My PCs never interacted with the Gnomes prior to this adventure and experience with campaign endings tells me that if the ending is focused on a group the PCs did not interact with then this hurts the story as far as my players are concerned. Nonetheless there is no help for it here but I might try and add some final roleplay type stuff to this adventure in the homeland of the Gnomes after the PCs rescue the 'Lost Tribes' to give this more of a 'closed out' feel. Normally this would have been part of the opener for the next adventure but since there is never going to be a next adventure I should try and work this element into the end of this adventure.

I like the 5e of D&D. I like the simplicity, though it does have abuse issues and oversights just like any system.

Here's what I expect to see happen:
5e comes out, people start playing it, finding synergies and conflicts in the mechanics/rules.
WotC releases a new supplement, adding new classes, races, feats, etc., some of which address the above issues.
Errata are issued to address the really blatant abuses and conflicts.
WotC comes out with yet another supplement with new options.
Eventually, D&D 5e becomes as complex and rules-bloated as Pathfinder, and someone develops a "new" rpg system that is "simpler".

It's how 3.xx developed, and therefore Pathfinder and 4.0, and is a natural evolutionary process.

In the meantime, I'm enjoying 5e as a break from rules-heavy Pathfinder.

Possibly that said I'm not sure if that is actually a certainty. For one there does not seem to be much sign of the deluge of splat books that one kind of expects with the release of an edition. Beyond that systems can have core principles and if it is a core principle of 5E that combats are simple to adjudicate and run very fast then its possible for the game to adhere to that.

In particular though I could see it being the case that WotC just keeps new releases to a minimum and only keeps on a fairly small stable of paid employees in their D&D department. In effect the game remains simple mainly because the rate of book release is low and WotC expects high returns on every book (because so few are released everyone buys all of them) while they save money because they don't pay for many employees. The idea here high return on investment for fairly low outlay of investment and of course the rest of the excess money gets funneled to the much more profitable Magic the Gathering Department.

Sort of like early 1st edition where every group tended to have just about every product released and multiple copies of some of them.

My take is that a lot of the 'old school feel' in 5E comes from what is in essence an emphasis on fast not particularly complex combats. However crazy complex 2nd edition was much of the time in actual combat it pretty much came down to roll a d20 and if you hit then you did damage and it was the next guys turn. 5E seems to be making a concerted effort to return to that. I'll concede that when I was playing 2nd edition combats often actually got a lot more complex then that but if you stripped 1st or 2nd edition down to its core it pretty much worked like that and this seems to be what 5E is going for - roll your d20 and then its the next guys turn.

4E's balance does not come from the fact that all characters use powers. In fact it is possible to design any RPG in the power system. I could create just about every Pathfinder characters abilities using the power system with triggers and special text to handle any of the vagaries.

4Es balance comes from two elements - a laser like focus on balance as a core principle of the edition AND massive amounts of errata. The reality was, especially early on, WotC was re-balancing powers practically weekly and seemed to be paying a fair bit of attention to the Character Op Boards when doing so.

In reality 4E characters play at the table very differently for the most part. A Defender is not a Controller - they don't feel the same at all and even two Defenders, say a Paladin and a Sword Mage both execute their Defender role quite differently. Paladins tend to divine strike those that defy the Defenders mark - literally bolting them from the blue. A Sword Mage will usually use some form of an interrupt and do something to screw up the attacker if they ignore the Sword Mages mark - my groups Sword Mage usually teleports the monster beside one of its friends and then has the attack proceed - but now Monster A is hitting Monster B with whatever the attack was.

I am truly sorry to hear about your campaign. Campaign fatigue has affected me more than once, and it never feels good, especially if you are still excited about finishing, but no one else is. I would love to know if you happen to have any opinions on 4e and it's ability to handle long dungeons, or if it is better suited for parsed dungeons (I believe there was some sort of thread recently about how a smaller dungeon could be something like 3 encounters then a boss monster). Somehow, I feel that 4e has somewhat of a short attention span for prolonged forays (such as large dungeons), but I can't speak with any authority as I have yet to run a significant number of 4e encounters.

I have been very eager to hear about your experiences with 4th edition as I was considering having my children start on a 4th edition campaign (for reasons not clear, they gravitated towards that edition). I am also hoping to hear what your impressions of 5th edition may be, especially given the contrast.

I wish you luck.

I've commented before on this thread I'm pretty sure that I tend to feel that long dungeons are generally not the best option. That said I think that this is more a case of lack of character development and such in the long or large dungeon and a tendency for them to start to feel like they are dragging. I remember putting my players through the Maure Castle adventure in 3.5 which I really thought was a fantastic dungeon and finding that even though it was a really well done dungeon the fact that it just went on and on meant that it seemed to drag for them. I've had players have fun with some bigger dungeons at low level - maybe its the faster pace or something or maybe kobolds lend themselves to larger dungeons or some such but as a rule I think they should probably be avoided. I'm not really sure that 4E per se addresses this issue, I don't particularly see anything specific to 4E that would make it better or worse for larger dungeons - I suppose the longer combats at high levels might be a factor but I think its as bad or as good as most other editions which mostly means as bad.

That said I don't think you have to streamline things down to 4 encounters total...6 encounters is probably a fine number as well its just 10+ that should probably be avoided.

Not broken but how does your group feel about the conditional +1 type powers. For example I note that your Aasimar get a +1 to AC if they are not bloodied. These kinds of powers really irritate my table as one is always having to remember how many minor modifiers one currently has going. It also often leads to a lot of double checking to make sure you have counted all the possible modifiers whenever rolls are close and that burns game time. If your group is fine with this sort of thing then no problem but I know that if I where doing house ruley type things with 4E I'd be doing everything in my power to remove as many of these minor conditional modifiers as possible.

Heading for Dissolution
Sigh. It is looking like my campaign will, in the not to distant future, be coming to a close. Not a really uncommon occurrence – few campaigns are completed and that would seem to be the situation that is going to take place with this one as well. I’m not really shocked by this turn of events. Looking at when this campaign began it was a little over three years ago and my experience is that eventually people just burn out on any campaign. I’ve been noticing a certain amount of this ennui for at least the last six months. The players are increasingly disconnected with their characters while simultaneously experimenting with ever more extreme builds. When half the party pretty much had their characters die and/or retire during the course of the last adventure I think this was a sign of things to come though I had noticed for about a year or so that my players had gone from being highly drawn to the campaign and the story line to ever less hooked in by what was going on.

In fact I had, at one point around nine months ago, suggested to my players that maybe it would be a good idea to put the campaign on hiatus for a bit and let some one else run something for a while. At the time the players nixed the idea but the disconnect with the campaign itself seemed to remain and just got stronger. I made some effort to draw them back into the campaign by trying to regain some of the feeling of attachment that I had had with the PCs at earlier stages in the campaign in terms of the world and their PCs place in it. There had been a time when my players had been completely hooked on the game and everything seemed powerful and exciting but somewhere along the line that seemed to dissipate.

Thinking back on it I can, pretty much, put my finger on when things began to shift from complete player buy in to a period when the players became ever less connected. Pretty much I totally had my players before the adventure Re-Creation and I did not really have them after that adventure completed.

That said I’m not sure if I can blame the adventure exactly. I mean it did have issues – it was a long adventure in a dungeon. My players took something like 3 long rests during the course of it and it was designed so that they had long rests but only a limited number before they would loose the adventure and they knew that. In other words it was a dungeon that expected them to take 3 long rests which tends to tell one that it was a very big adventure and it took many months to resolve. Prior to this the players where attached to their characters but by the time it was completed they where exploring alternate builds. I’ve noticed this issue before with large adventures – especially dungeons before. There is very little character development that takes place in a dungeon. The result seems to be that my players just became less attached to their characters and therefore began looking at new builds to rekindle excitement.

I did notice this effect and worked really, really, hard to try and counter it in subsequent adventures and I think I did make some progress in the next few adventures. These are actually some of my favorite adventures of the campaign and I think exemplify some of my best work – the results where mixed but indicative of the problem. I think I, more often then previously, managed to get my players interested in the adventures but I never seemed to really get them interested in their characters and their characters place in the campaign again.

Unfortunately this really puts the pressure on the DM in my experience. Essentially if the players are attached to their characters that alone is going to cover up a lot of DM sins…they are excited to be at the table for that reason alone but if the DM is trying to keep them interested in the adventure when they are not really attached to their character the DM has to really work extra hard to put on a show and tends to loose the players every time the adventure flags for any reason.

All that said I think the length the campaign had been running was the significant factor in my difficulties. Up until the large dungeon crawl I seemed to be able to get the players hooked back into their characters while after this dungeon crawl I simply was never able to get them really interested into their PCs again. This seemed to extend to the players co-operation in terms of their backgrounds and such. Up to this point the players would do write ups of their backgrounds and I would then hook the background into the campaign. After this point the players spent much less time on their backgrounds and tended to not really respond to my emails making suggestions that hooked their backgrounds into the campaign.

While I kind of suspect that the length in real life of the campaign was maybe the biggest factor I am forced to admit that I think 4E and 5E played a role in how this campaign got to the point where it is now in the process of being wrapped up. Basically the issue with 4E was partly just the fact that it more or less works into higher levels. If one plays a Pathfinder Campaign it is meant to wrap up between 13th and 15th level. 4E is not completely broken even into much higher levels. The problem is that the length of time to run Pathfinder to 15th level and the length of time to run 4E to 15th level is about the same (Assuming that Pathfinder moves about the same speed as 3.5 which is the set of rules I’m more familiar with). In the case of my groups games that is roughly 3 years of real life play of about 3 to 4 hours a week, 4 weeks in 5 (I’m guesstimating that roughly every 5th week the group plays something not D&D for various reasons). In essence I don’t think I could, or ever should, have tried to design a campaign meant to take more then 3 real world years. The fact that it felt like 4E could handle higher level play made it so that I designed a real 30 level campaign even though, in retrospect, I’d never manage to keep my players attention for this length of time.

I was also drawn to the idea because 4E seemed uniquely capable of handling higher-level play from a balance perspective. I was honestly excited to be able to finally use the most powerful Dragons as well as Beholders and all of the super powerful iconic D&D monsters – though if I am honest with myself that element excited me but in reality I think it just seems easier to design a campaign that has a whole slew of adventures compared to one that effectively wraps up with less adventures. I mean my outline of the campaign actually felt hard to write up – just to fit it into 30 levels I felt like I had to cut adventures…getting the campaign to fit into 15 levels would have felt that much more difficult. I think this is actually worth considering in a whole post on its own but suffice to say I had trouble in this regard.

These are the issues I had with design but I also found that 4E’s increasing length of combats where becoming an ever-increasing issue. This was an element that seemed to be compounded by other issues with the campaign. In effect 4E started to take longer for the players to do their turns with their increasingly complex characters. However this element was not just the complexity of the characters or how long 4E combats can take. Part of the problem here is that the players started to switch characters more often and it really became significant after the last adventure when ½ the party switched characters. In effect there is certainly some truth that 4E combats can get long and be complex in general, but this is exacerbated when ½ the party simply does not know their character because its new. It takes players some time to assimilate their characters in general and it is more of an issue with higher level characters. Furthermore my players seemed to try and fight the ennui that was developing by designing ever more complex characters – at this point in the campaign I have a party that is a Leader a Defender, a Striker and 3 Controllers. All those Controllers are pretty complex and, while the power level of the group is probably about the same as if it had instead had 3 Strikers how long combats run is likely longer – my group does various forms of action denial and a little hp damage to win their fights while a group with 3 strikers would win the fight 3 rounds earlier by doing much less action denial and just dishing out loads of hp damage.

This means that I have players not familiar with their new characters and running complex characters in combats that take extra long to run result in long rounds. Where previously rounds went around the table in 20-30 minutes now we are up to around an hour and even that tends to be more like 1 ½ hours for the first two rounds and then things start to speed up so that rounds 7+ are now only 30 minutes long. Of course the problem is if it is not going to be your turn again for an hour your focus on the game drops off dramatically. I kind of think if my players stuck with their PCs and got used to each others characters combat would speed up somewhat but I don’t think that alone would keep the campaign alive.

The other issue I mentioned was 5E – this is a pretty simple issue. Pretty much about half my group is very interested in 5E with the rest of them are on the fence. I’m pretty much the only hold out with a true love for 4E and one player, even the DM, cannot defy the will of a long running group. My players want to play 5E and they have become bored with this campaign so that is what is going to happen. When it does I’ll be giving up the DMs chair and making a 5E character.

In truth I’m unhappy to see my campaign coming to a premature close but I was beginning to suffer burn out myself. 3 years is a long time to run any campaign, it was and is hard work to be the DM at least to DM in the kind of campaign I like to run doing the kind of prep I like to do. There is a certain sense of relief in giving up the DMs chair and the responsibilities that go along with it for a while. Furthermore – and this bit is maybe pure egotism – I’m a very good DM who puts in a heck of a lot of work in running the campaign and after 3 years my players have forgotten that. I have every faith that they will have another chance to recognize and appreciate this when I’m not in the DMs chair for a while. Finally 5E does have one significant benefit for me in terms of playing a campaign – It runs fast. And I can expect that the next campaign will not be one that takes three years to run. I expect that I’ll have my chance at the DMs chair again in the future – hopefully right about the time I’m chomping at the bit for another shot at being DM.

Note that this won't be my last post on this thread. The 4E campaign won't wrap up until the current, very large, adventure is wrapped up so I'll keep putting up posts for some time. Some of the posts will be on stuff that gets raised in the current adventure and I expect to do a number of posts on wrapping up the campaign.