so, i was reading the campaign article recently on how to run marathon games and i got to thinking about the old days when we used to do this all the time. ahh... the good old days when we didn't have jobs, families, chores, errands, etc. When we could stay up all night on a saturday and play our favorite game.
my question is, has anyone run marathon games recently? i'v been thinking about doing this with my current group, as we are all getting together in september for a weekend. One of my gaming buddies is goig to be getting married to another gaming buddy, and there will be 8 of us there who haven't gamed together for about 8 years. What adventures in the magazine do you think would be good for a 12 hour session, with average level characters around 8th-10th level. I'm letting them make these characters on the fly there, as it is only going to be a one shot type of adventure, just for old times sake. any ideas?
Maure Castle?
You might do better to ask them what they want to play and then pre-generate the characters before hand. Not only does that cut out the hour of character generation to give more time for gaming, but it also allows you to tailor the characters to the adventure, to ensure that no-one accidentally creates a useless character.
Oh, and create some back-ups to replace the fallen.
I think you'd find Maure Castle to be too long even for a marathon game - my group found that each of the Shackled City adventures was about 3 sessions (of 7 hours each). Once you take out the time we lost in getting together, dividing treasure and XP, and the like, it starts to sound like that's the sort of length you should be going for.
If you're not going to run Age of Worms for this group, may I suggest "The Champions Belt"? It seems to have a good variety of combat and roleplaying opportunities, covers a fairly small geographic area, and would seem to work well as a one-off.
well, i thought about Maure castle, but it seems too long and this group doesn't like long involved dungeon crawls. Since i have until september, i might just look through all of my adventures and see. i have decided to make a bunch of pregenerated PCs that way if they die, oh well, no big loss. I think i am looking for a good mix of styles, maybe a couple of small dungeons, really quick, and a mix of outdoor with some role playing. since the game is going to be 12 hours or so, i am going to porbably have about 12 or 13 major encounters, because these guys don't want a lot of combat but they mostly know 2.0 and not 3.5. i figure the first few combats are going to be the PCs getting the hang of everything and then we can go hog wild. anyway, any ideas for this would be great. thanks
Throne of Iuz from Dungeon issue #118! That adventure is awesome and I think with some minor development time and then with battles could fill a better part of a marathon session.
terrainmonkey,
I have done several one shot games in the last couple of years using a variety of systems. In all of them, my group and I have inevitably run over such that our 7-hour game finishes up in 9 to 10 hours. Anymore, we come to plan that we are going to run over, but I still try and develop or chose my scenarios to fit our normal 7-hour time frame. So my advice would be to look at any perspective scenario as a 9 to 10 hour run and hopefully you will finish in the 12 hours you have planned.
My second piece of advice would be to select a more modest level for the player’s characters. After all, especially with 3.5, the more options characters have access to, the longer it takes to resolve combat encounters equal to the group’s capability. Therefore my advice would be to look at having the PCs be from 4 to 6 level. That way they have decent capability for a wide variety of encounters while not creating the overhead that you as a GM will have to contend with. Especially since there will be 8 of you playing.
I also think that Delericho’s advice concerning asking the players what kind of characters they would be interested in playing and taking the time to have pregens already created is good. That way you will know what capabilities the characters are going to have, what magical resources will be at their disposal, etc. As for having extras, you could, or if you wanted to save time spent working up pregens, you could provide a magical item that could be useful in bringing a character back from the beyond if that unfortunate accident should occur. Regardless, I would definitely load the characters heavy with healing items consummate with whatever level you do decide to play at.
My last bit of advice would be to look at using Action Points as detailed in the Unearthed Arcana. Basically these are points that allow players more control against the occasional bad roll or offer neat abilities such as feat simulation for a round or spell recall. You could also change the Action Point to simply allow a straight re-roll of a bad die roll instead of having to explain what all Action Points can and can’t do.
Finally, on the idea of possible Dungeon scenarios that could be neat for a one shot (set closer to your original level request and could possibly be run in 10 to 12 hours) I would recommend:
The Forsaken Arch, Dungeon 120, Character Level 7
The Fiend’s Embrace, Dungeon 121, Character Level 4
The Styes, Dungeon 121, Character Level 9
The Clockwork Fortress, Dungeon 126, Character Level 8
The Hive, Dungeon 127, Character Level 5
Ill Made Graves, Dungeon 133, Character Level 7
I hope you find the above useful and I hope you and your group have great fun when you do get together to play. Good luck with everything.
Mark
thanks for all the suggestions guys. i am generating 10 PCs for my group, with a mix of abilities and levels. here's some ideas
Human fighter 7
half orc barbarian 7
grey elf wizard (evoker) 7
human Cleric 7 (with a staff of life for those unfortunate incidents)
tiefling Monk 7
Paladin 4/cleric 3
assimar Sorcerer 8
halfling rogue 7
human swashbuckler 7
elf ranger 7 (i'll let the player decide favored enemies, combat style, etc.)
All of these folks will have a +2 weapon, +2 armor, and a few other magical mundane things, along with 2 postions of cure serious each. i'm thinking of running them through the old 1st ed module "tomb of the lizard king" as it is a good stand alone module, and i can convert it to 3rd in that time. Also, i've looked at a few of the ideas from modules of this level from dungeon, and the temple of iuz is cool. i may up the levels of the players somewhat, but chose the basics because i figured that the players would be more familiar with core than other splat book prestige class things.
anyway, thanks again for the ideas, and if you ahve any comments, please post.