Am I the only one that didnt like the Ocean's Eleven beginning to this AP?
Btw. yoinking Dance of Ruins ideas for the miniscule chance I ever run this AP.
For the record, my vote is CotCT over SD as well.
Vendor - Fantasiapelit Tampere
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Rosgakori and Treppa:
** spoiler omitted **
Bear in mind that I've only run the first volume of the AP so far, so all that's subject to further tinkering. Maybe I'll get around to posting short session logs one of these days.
Very nice!
And I put something else there, like, assasinations and violent fights INSIDE the crimelords freedomfighters. Not yet sure about the DiM, but something featuring the temple of abraxas in the sea, or something.
And I put something else there, like, assasinations and violent fights INSIDE the crimelords freedomfighters.
I ran 1-5 of this, with the PCs as agents of the Winter Council. We abandoned it after 5 for a variety of reasons, but principally two: I hate running high-level, and the player couldn't stomach the PCs having to do #6 by themselves (why save Elves who apparently don't want to be saved?) but didn't want to play out the mostly-NPC approach that would be natural.
But it was a struggle all the way to make the AP work for us, and I don't think that's just because we chose to do it "backwards"--in fact, I don't think I could have run it straight at all. The PCs' motivations were a huge problem for us in #3-5.
In #3, the elven attack on Celwynvian is such an obviously stupid tactic that my player was intensely frustrated with it; and the whole Celwynvian (past and present) setting felt completely wasted, with no resonance, no connection to the rest of the AP, nothing to contribute emotionally. My player said afterwards that he should have met the ancestors of the drow Houses in past-Celwynvian and had to do something political with them. Then, seeing how those Houses had been changed by becoming drow would have been meaningful and powerful. But we didn't think of it in time, and you'd have to scrap the whole adventure and write from scratch to do this.
In #4, my player did not want to infiltrate Vonnarc, he wanted to investigate Azrinae, and I had to write everything from scratch. This module actually ran the best of all for us, but it was a heck of a lot of work--basically all I had was "Zirnakaynin sourcebook" and some maps and a few NPCs, but no usable adventure.
#5 just has nothing to offer. We had PC relationships with Hyalin and Perelir already, which helped hugely, but it is still a profoundly unsatisfying adventure. The PCs accomplish nothing in the adventure as written--they are shoved one clue for no particular reason, but none of their negotiations have any potential for success.
I enjoyed Zirnakaynin a lot, but I was basically running a non-AP game set there. It's quite a good setting. But I would never run SD again as written, or even vaguely as written. I'd just set an adventure in either Riddleport or Zirnakaynin and *stay* there.
Mary
I'd suggest that the storyline itself is excellent, it's well written and I'm enjoying the political intrigue immensely. But alas, it also requres a lot of work to 'make it fit' with any specific party.
It does seem strange to me that the party starts off in Riddleport (ending up with the Gold Goblin) and then are expected to wander off to save the elves, thus abandoning their new property. That's a HUGE jump.
I am struggling big time with #5. The PC's get attacked by elves while they're asleep and are then expected to be relocated somewhere else (a prison they soon learn). They were rightfully suspicious and nearly said 'NO' outright. At this point they pretty much hate the elves, and I don't blame them. I only hope they take that hate out on the Winter Council and not on the Queen later on.
But I suspect I'm only repeating other peoples complaints here.
Neil - I found the "problem" you mentioned to be among the best parts, for role-playing. Can the PCs get past their anger, or will they have it used against them? They may indeed fail - not every challenge is one of combat.
Mary: I think perhaps SD is not a good AP to run 1-on-1. The interactions of the players has been particularly important in my game - mixed shock at actions, different perspectives on what the heck is going on. With all the mixed messages being sent in the AP, I think it takes a group to read into all of them and fully explore things. Or maybe we just got lucky, I don't know.
I do know it has been a blast, and with 1-2 sessions left, it will be an amazing finish (whatever happens).
Neil - I found the "problem" you mentioned to be among the best parts, for role-playing. Can the PCs get past their anger, or will they have it used against them? They may indeed fail - not every challenge is one of combat.
For me in the past this has felt like a lose/lose situation. If you swallow your anger despite a strong feeling your character wouldn't, you spoil your characterization, and in my group's gaming esthetic this is about the worst possible sin. If you don't, the game ends early without ever getting to see the cool stuff. Sure, it would be nice if the characters struggled with themselves and then actually decided to do the game-continuing thing, but SD seemed to me to stack the deck against that, particularly in #5.
Mary: I think perhaps SD is not a good AP to run 1-on-1. The interactions of the players has been particularly important in my game - mixed shock at actions, different perspectives on what the heck is going on. With all the mixed messages being sent in the AP, I think it takes a group to read into all of them and fully explore things. Or maybe we just got lucky, I don't know.I do know it has been a blast, and with 1-2 sessions left, it will be an amazing finish (whatever happens).
I'm glad it's working so well for you; it's a tribute to your skills and your group's play.
My player's immediate response to "Would more players have helped?" was "That would have made it worse. Getting more people to focus in on the narrow, unlikely path that the game allows would have been even harder." But it may depend on your group dynamics.
We have a little parallel data in that there are two APs, Runelords and Shackled City, that we have seen as both solo games and 4-player games. Runelords worked out fairly well, with revision work, for both groups. Shackled City fell apart horrendously for both groups at roughly the same point and for roughly the same reasons.
I didn't feel as though our SD was lacking in mixed perspectives--he's very good with the multiple PCs, and as one of them was a drow and two were not, they had very different slants on things. We also got a lot of NPC perspectives--Kallindra, Perelir, Samaritha. The Zirnakaynin sections really sparkled in this regard--I would be happy to try running a game actually set in Zirnakaynin if I could overcome the difficulty, for me, of running at medium to high levels. (It seems less appealing for very low levels.)
But over and over, both the player and I reacted to the modules' intended plot developments with "Are you crazy? No way!" and that was very hard to deal with. #3, #4, #5 and to a lesser extent #6 wanted player plans that just didn't make any sense. And the overall arc, for me, founders on the need to say to the players "If you don't save the world, no one else cares enough or has their act together enough to do it" which can lead to an emotional response of "Maybe this world isn't worth saving." Certainly by the end *I* didn't feel the elves were worth saving. I liked the drow a lot better.
(We actually played with this in the Zirnakaynin arc. It is easy to spin the game so that drow are passionate, artistic, vibrant, and involved, and elves are passive, apathetic, unimaginative and spiritually dead--the source material tends in that direction already--and after a point I just ran with that rather than trying to fight it. At the end the PCs were more concerned that Allevrah would destroy Zirnakaynin than that she would destroy Kyonin.)
Mary
I don't want to disparage your player's skills, Mary. However, I feel that some of the problems you describe might derive from the fact that there weren't more players. In my experience, having multiple players actually makes running any kind of story easier, because everyone agrees that in order to make the game fun for everyone, they don't have to play out their character 101%, but instead be more lenient and let him/her do things that (based on their character and background) they normally wouldn't. This doesn't mean that one has to ignore glaring errors and leaps in logic, but it helps that everyone is thinking 'group and story first, my character second'.
I haven't started running SD yet, but some of the concerns here and on other very useful threads have got me reworking some aspects of the AP. But I think that SD is getting a worse rap than it deserves. It's not a Riddleport/Gangland adventure, it's a serious "Through the Looking Glass" experience and should be presented as such. There are too many gems in this AP to toss it!
So, before we even start, I've already talked with my players about the overall AP without giving away major plot points. They know that Riddleport is not the only setting, and that they'll be dealing with elves on the elves' home turf, presenting it as a real high fantasy adventure dealing with what is truly an alien mindset for our mostly human party. They are all copasetic and in fact are now anticipating the departure from the ordinary.
I'm also spending a lot of time reading the NPC's backgrounds. I think Paizo took a lot of time and trouble to point out that what we might see as illogical actions are actually decisions made by beings with a very long temporal view. This looks like it will need some serious RP to get across to the PC's, and I'm trying to prepare for that well in advance.
I am hoping that deep prep and managing player expectations will avoid some of the player issues that others have seen. It might be something that could work for others, too.