I need some advice. A player in my campaign invited me to a Descent 2.0 game day. In the course of investigating I took a look at their map w/dozens of quest sites, trails leading one to the next and I suggested over email that a map like that would make it easy on a PF GM.
His response was an emphatic "That's actually how I'd LIKE to play"
Here's my dilemma. I'm an old style RPG'er; I mean like late 70's early 80's gamer with a lot of roleplaying in my style as both a GM and a player. My PC's however are hardcore board gamer/MMO guys. So far we've found a middle ground but this...
After a couple more emails we pieced together a sort-of compromise. Starting at first level the party comes to town and there's an area map: the town, a nearby priory, and a vast woodland that covers most of the remaining area. After they wander the faire that's happening they have the potential to pursue 3 different side quests and a single main plot, depending on who they choose to talk to, if anyone.
As plot points are revealed I'd put markers of some kind on the map, then create dotted "trails" to these markers to represent either a major road, dirt track, or a series of submerged stones, fallen logs and random dry patches through a forest bog or something. Each trail then has a number or question mark showing the difficulty of said trail, if known (the difficulty would relate to how many potential hazards/encounters/etc the trail might hold).
I need some advice from some old grognards as well as anyone who's played either Descent campaign style or something similar. What do you think of this style? Am I selling out, caving in, or providing the game the players wanted all along without compromise for a change? I'm a few weeks from kicking off this campaign from level 1 and right now I've got one map and LOTS of roleplaying in my outline; my gamers want these RP scenes reduced to a soundbite and a map full of markers and tiles. HELP!
Ok, without exaggerating, I've already blown my entire gaming budget for 2012. I've downloaded a couple free AP players guides for flavor (most of my current homebrew is based on Ustlav) but I seriously don't have a literal dime to my name right now or for the foreseeable future.
Does anyone have any comments that don't involve an AP. I promise to look at them again, as well as some one off adventures from Paizo and and a couple D20 creators down the road, but for now I can barely afford to pay attention.
BBT: PM sent
Ok, so barring AP's... has anyone out there played a game or run a game like this?
Anyone else on this? I'm really in a quandry here.
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Actually Yes. This is a very popular roleplaying format named West Marches. Read the blog there's lots of great advice.
Here's some salient points:
1) Buy a big ol' sheet of hex paper, and start populating it with interesting locations.
2) Monsters don't scale - the further you get from "town" the harder the monsters and dungeons get.
Here's an example:
Calvin's Rest is a relatively safe town, there is a fort and guards and shops to buy and sell weapons and magic items.
The hexes surrounding Calvin's Rest are relatively peaceful farmland. Although the farmers at Fangberry Farm are reporting thefts from their hen-houses. (Actually caused by Goblins. Encounters should be CR 1/3 - CR2).
A little further out are the wild hills, where goblins and wolves are known to roam, and make war with hyena headed gnolls. (Encounters should be CR 1-3).
Beyond that is the Fangwood, a dangerous forest, said to be inhabited by spiders and spider monsters. (CR 2-4).
As you can see if the players head out in a straight line from Calvin's Rest they might quickly end up over their head, but if they stay too close to the town then the encounters won't remain very interesting.
3)Encounter Tables are your friend.
4) Treasure tells a story: Old maps, rare metals found in mountains on the horizon, coins from lost civilizations. All of these things should tell your story when no overarching narrative takes hold.
Anyone else on this? I'm really in a quandry here.
What Dudemeister said.
Loose the paths and enter the hexes. Draw the map as the players explore hex by hex.
Also make andom encounter tables to be rolled on when exploring a hex (travelling through an explored hex should be save or have a reduced chance for an encounter).
Then think of some interesting sites and place them on the hex for the PCs to discover (farther away = higher CR). Some of the sites could be hidden, only to be found after discovering a clue about them (mysterious old woman in a hut by the woods said that south of here are burial mounds looking like ordinary hills).
Connect a few sites with an overarching story and, voila, you are done.
If you feel like it you can have the PCs being in charge for protecting and expanding the little hamlet that they start from by decree of the distant king. This way you can enter economic value to the sites (old gold mine, crystal clear lake with many fish, valuable trees in the heart of the forest...).
I'm a few weeks from kicking off this campaign from level 1 and right now I've got one map and LOTS of roleplaying in my outline; my gamers want these RP scenes reduced to a soundbite and a map full of markers and tiles. HELP!
Ouch! Artistic vision meets unappreciative audience. Been there, done that. I feel your pain.
I don't have any easy solutions for you, but I have been playing RPGs since the late eighties, with several different groups of different sizes, and I have thought a lot about this kind of problem. I have drifted into a "least common denominator" approach to it.
Some perhaps-relevant observations:
Firstly, my best roleplaying experiences have been in small groups.
Face it: Roleplaying, as in taking on a different persona and acting it out, is not just challenging from a technical/acting point of view, it also requires a good helping of courage. You might make a complete fool of yourself. Even professional actors suffer from stage fright. And to risk making a fool of yourself in front of your friends? Break from the social conventions of the group? That's beyond scary, that's tempting social suicide.
The fewer of your ordinary circle of friends that's watching, the easier it is to loosen up.
Boardgames don't have this problem at all -- but then, they don't offer the rewards that roleplaying do.
So if I had the opportunity, I would try to train the players to like roleplaying by either inviting them one by one into an existing, preferrably small group of your peers. If that is not an option, I would try to keep the number of players low. I prefer two players myself. Just one player easily gets awkwardly intimate, and with three players group effects start appearing: the least socially secure player mums up, the two players not currently enjoying GM attention start chatting about out-of-game or meta-game stuff, thus breaking the immersion, etc.
Secondly, style and expectations.
One of the members in my long-standing gaming group is an avid reader of 'pulp' fantasy, and likes his Dnd/PF to contain the same tropes. (He's also a long-time DnD player). I once considered running a (3.x) stone-age campaign, focussing on survival and self-sufficiency with very few found magic items; when I asked for his opinion his reply was something like "What, no magical plate armor? Where's the fun in that?" He was not joking. I never did run that stone-age campaign.
However, the same player had great fun playing a self-sufficiency-focussed character (Gangrel) in Vampire: Dark Ages, which has virtually no magical items (by DnD/PF standards).
I think what happened was that he didn't perceive V:DA as a fantasy game, it being different enough from his usual intellectual/playing habits that he automatically approached it as something new, that is, with an open mind.
Something along those lines may be happening to your players. They might be seeing the tactical aspects of Pathfinder and automatically, habitually, immediately enter board-game mode. To prevent that, I would try a different game entirely. Throw them off the deep end! (Maybe not any of the White Wolf games though, from a mechanical game balance perspective they are terrible, and if you're not prepared to houserule with a heavy hand, a bunch of experienced board gamers WILL break them. Something like Call of Cthulhu or Kult perhaps).
The point is not to denigrate my or your players' style but to emphasize that habits are HARD to break; and that your intellectual habits actually DETERMINE your perceptions, thus making it functionally IMPOSSIBLE to approach something (you percieve as) familiar with an open mind.
Thirdly, everybody should have fun.
I often read statements on this board that "the GM should not ruin the players' fun", which isn't bad advice in itself, but sadly it often seems to be taken to mean that it's OK for players to ruin the GMs fun.
It's not.
It is EVERYBODYs responsibility not just not to ruin anybody else's fun, but to add to it. You are not there just to entertain the players. A campaign where the GM doesn't have fun is a campaign doomed to die young, or worse, end in GM burnout. (Make sure you explain to your players that a PF GM is not not not the same as a Descent Overlord, that is, it's not them-versus-you, rather it's all of you cooperating in telling an epic story. That involves you throwing epic challenges at the player characters, but nothing personal, right?).
If you ever find yourself in a group where, when everybody else seems to have fun, you don't, and when you have fun, the others get annoyed: LEAVE. That's not the group for you, quite simply. It doesn't matter whether you are the GM or a player. It doesn't matter whether you put a lot of effort into developing your campaign or character. Cut your losses.
That being said, it is usually possible to find some common ground that everyone enjoys (somewhat) and nobody hates. This often involves avoiding alignment extremes (some players find Paladins offensive, some find Evil characters offensive; if both kinds of players are in the group, both kinds of PCs should be avoided), toning down roleplaying (a charismatic player can ruin others' fun by hogging the attention, plus a lot of people just can't bring themselves to do it), etc.
This is what I mean by a "least common denominator" approach. You could also call it "the path of least resistance", or "junk food roleplaying" (i.e. bland, but filling).
Yes it is giving in, in a way. But in another way it's the art of the possible. You do what you can do, and learn to live with the fact that what you can do is far less than what your artistic vision makes you desire to do.
So the question you need to ask yourself is, I think, "Am I going to have fun doing it this way? Enough fun that it's worth the time and effort I'm going to put into it?"
(The time and effort already spent is "sunk cost" and shouldn't affect the decision).
However I know I couldn't answer that to myself in just a few weeks. Forming an entirely new vision of a campaign, completely new expectations for it, takes me much longer than that. I put a lot of work into my campaigns, a lot of emotional capital is tied up in them. If you are like me, you'll need to get some distance to it to answer well.
So if I was you I think i would postpone the campaign start. Don't try to make an emotionally difficult decision on short notice, that's a very good way to ruin your own (and ultimately everyone's) fun.
In the meantime, you can play Descent instead...
I appreciate the clarifications and advice. I've seen some traction on RP rewards I've put in pace - hero points, story based extras and such. Its just that I've never used the "West Marches" approach before. Ironically I've used it for years though in the planning phase of my games.
For example this current campaign's homebrew area of Karnoss began when I sat down with some small-hex notebook paper and put in the port city of Dunspar. I knew I wanted the city on a hilly hex (rolling hills descending near sea level) and a northeastern US type sea-shore in the hex east of it. Then I got out the old 1e DMG and started rolling.
The hexes immediately around were more hills and scrub, so I made it all hills; some gentle to the north and east and then rising steeply to the south into stark highland cliffs and moors. Then the horseshoe one hex out I came up with almost ALL forest just by happenstance.
So Dunspar was carved from sparsely wooded hills on the edge of a dense, northeastern forest. The rolling hills just north of the city hugging the coast are arable and used for farms and pasturelands. To the south the highlands follow the coast for lonely miles and are sparsely inhabited.
To determine what monsters to base my first adventure around I rolled randomly again, this time on some homemade encounter charts I've had for a while. I came up with mites on the 1-3 level chart and then a greenhag on the 4-6 for the BBEG. So I envisioned the hag like an old witch and thought "ancient dark wood + mischevious evil fey + wicked witch = dark fairy tale". I'd recently re-read a couple stories in a Grimm's book I had collecting dust, so it kind of fit pretty well. Then the outline of the campaign kind of flowed from there.
But I usually use that like I said, behind the scenes. My players have always told me they prefer a linear game, w/out a lot of exploration, so I've always defined it well in advance so that it's all pretty squared away before they get to the table.
When the guy I was talking to about the board game map started making his comments I realized they may be looking to change it up but maybe I wasn't ready for it.
So in this style of game I see per MicMan's comments story can be retro-fitted to the sites; I've done that before to connect dots in sandbox style games so that's not so scary. But does this Western March style reduce the roleplaying even more? I'm just starting to get these guys to get into doing more than swinging swords and don't want to make a campaign that reduces EVERYTHING to a die roll.