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I started a big multi-party sandbox mega-campaign on here last year. It was based on the West Marches concept from OSR gaming but played with pathfinder, set in the Lost Lands setting of Frog God Games. The idea was to build up to Rappan Athuk or Slumbering Tsar eventually.
Two out of three of the adventuring groups I had running around in the sandbox lost momentum and folded, and I burned out myself, partly due to IRL circumstances but also due to the challenges of getting the kind of game I want to work on PbP.
I've recently come back after a 3 month hiatus and I'm just running the one adventure group now, the first one that formed when I started the project. They are running through some low level adventures set on the same map as Rappan Athuk.
This is a very preliminary interest check just to see who would be out there if I decide to resurrect the multi-party nature of the campaign and really set my sights on something big like Rappan Athuk or Slumbering Tsar.
It's a big undertaking to get sandboxes and dungeon crawls to work on PbP, and another big undertaking to get an old-school vibe out of pathfinder rules.
I still have a lot of tinkering to do to get it right so don't start sending me build submissions. I just want to get this thread floating to see who's out there.
I'd be up for entering the meat grinder
Add me to the mix as well please.
I want to recommend friend Grimmy to anyone who might be interested.
There is a small correction, only 1/3 games caved. Barakus is still here.
If anyone is interested in bringing in a druid, cleric or any character they really want to try, give the campaigns in Grimmy & I's profiles a look: Wizard's Amulet, Stoneheart Valley, Lost City of Barakus. You can learn more there.
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Barakus was #4 Trux!
Mouth of Doom and Valley of the Shrines caved.
Barakus was a new baby still.
Here's the wiki I made for the campaign Obsidian Portal
I am a sucker for both Rappan Athuk and Slumbering Tsar, never having even gotten close to playing 1/10th of either of them, so heck yeah I am in.
However, and with no disrespect for Master Grimmy, I am in IF it doesn't clash with trux's ideas for our game. He's been doing an amazing job thus far, so I'm sticking with him wherever he takes us! And if Rappan Athuk or Tsar may be on our path, I'm threading it with the man ;)
Trux is the co-gm.
We co-ordinate.
Good to see some old faces and some new faces.
I love sandbox games, but have never seen one done on pbp.
But I am absolutely down.
Depending on your restrictions I would most likely want to be a Wizard if the party is Neutral / Good.
Maybe an evil cleric if evil was on the table.
Agh, I lost count of how many games you were trying to run by yourself, you loco.
I am in another Grimmy game and love it.
This character made it through the kiddy pool area of a RA campaign before it folded. He dipped one level of trapfinder ranger and went zen archer.
I didn't go down the well.
Mark Thomas 66 wrote: I'd be up for entering the meat grinder If you don't mind scaling her back to level 1 you might be able to get Mikka back in sooner than later by entering her into Trux's game. He is currently recruiting for a cleric.
She's a Druid though, Druid being the healer sort of cripples the Druid by wasting all their spells on healing.
Oh sorry I misremembered. Moon druid I remember now.
Though if she doesn't work for Trux's game I can re-level her for this one.
Well this thread we're in now isn't anything concrete yet...
I'm just seeing who is out there that would like to see this done.
I only want to do it if I can do it right. Learning from the mistakes I made before.
So I know the two marks and I have studied AK's game and got GM tips from him. What about the rest of you? Medford Shale, Karmic Knight, Seth86? Taylor Riddle?
Do you have high posting availabilities?
I would be interested, particularly if there is a chance to a in a game with AK again, as it has been a while.
What do you consider as high posting availability? Daily is not a problem and more frequently is certainly an option depending on the time of day other players may be posting.
That being said, if the intention is to go more toward Slumbering Tsar, I will bow out as I am already in AK's Slumbering Tsar game.
Yeah I am leaning more towards Rappan Athuk for a couple reasons.
One, AK expressed interest and I know he has already run/running Tsar.
Two, I have better supporting material for RA in the form of hero lab and d20pro files.
My idea of high posting availability is someone who isn't absent much more than 48 hours without explanation/warning but also knows how to really make there posts count. Most people commit to posting every day but if a post raises a question immediately and the poster isn't back for at least 24 hours to resolve it things can still stall out a bit that way.
The best posters in my games have been the ones who either visit the thread before and after work on weekdays, or have that type of job that let's them pop in to the thread a couple of times while at the office or whatever.
I don't like to make my game feel like a job either so I never bat an eye if someone misses a day , it's more of a level of active participation and conscientiousness over the course of the game that I am looking for.
Do you guys know what I mean? Some posters just know how to make a post stick with well thought out well formatted posts. Others I'm afraid seem like they are just phoning in a post and that is not enough even if they post every day.
Okay, that sounds completely reasonable.
If this were to happen, any thoughts on allowable classes, races, etc.?
Right, I haven't touched on material yet because I don't know if this is going to happen for sure yet and even when I do get to the recruiting stage I like to meet people as gamers first before I meet them as a sea of build submissions.
But to give you an idea of how we've been doing things so far, we've stuck with mostly CRB classes to keep that AD&D feel, but I've opened up all the hardcover feats and archetypes for the sake of customizing and differentiating PC's (APG, UM, UC).
DM Grimmy wrote: So I know the two marks and I have studied AK's game and got GM tips from him. What about the rest of you? Medford Shale, Karmic Knight, Seth86? Taylor Riddle?
Do you have high posting availabilities?
Grim,
I could commit to posting at least once per day and in truth maybe even more. Typically my posts would be after lunch or after work (EDT). In terms of the depth of my post I can only hope that anything I do post will aid the campaign in moving it along.
I'm more of a old school player so I'm quite fine with sticking to the CRB if that is the way you decide to go.
I would be interested in this, and would presently have a high posting availability.
Yeah there is one group already running around my map run by me and a second one run by Trux, so if I add one more, the idea is to balance against them in feel and power level.
If you look at the characters in group 1, you can see they mostly look like a party that could happen in any addition of old-school DnD. That's the feel I was going for.
As you can see I was allowing Drow from the start, as well as Tiefling and Aasimar (not represented in this group). One character here is a sylph, and I would allow elemental plane touched races again, I find they are easy enough to reimagine in a slightly toned down version that wouldn't seem out of place walking around in a lowish magic world.
If you look at their cleric closely you will see he is actually playing a 3pp class called Priest from a supplement called Tome of Secrets. In hindsight I don't think that supplement is so great on balance but we allowed it because paizo's cloistered cleric archetype really didn't seem to give him enough for what it was taking away.
I have also allowed an inquisitor with no regrets and a witch and an alchemist with some regrets.
I also allowed a Svirfneblin which raised a big controversy with some other applicants but over the course of some 2,000+ posts I never saw any problem in actual gameplay. He was an arcane trickster playing the svirfneblin for flavor reasons. I really think people just got excited about "zomg so many RP!!". Things like modest SR I do not find to be terrible game breakers.
So you see I do make exceptions when I can feel that the choice is driven by story more than optimization. And that is not to make optimization out as a dirty word. I think the build game aspect of 3.x is a good sub-game, and I wish it was present a little more in 5e which is what I have been playing at home lately.
With something like Rappan Athuk it is natural for people to want to try out their best builds. However I have found that the way this mega-dungeon is written, it pays off to throw out your assumptions about pathfinder and remember that some challenges can't be overcome by anything on the character sheet.
So, I want to keep enough options on the table so people can tweak and customize, but at the end of the day I am really interested in the interplay of those classic party roles that have been at the heart of the game all this time.
For example, I have accepted things like archaeologist bard in place of the classic thief/rogue without any regrets, but I also would like to keep things just bounded enough so that someone who does want to play a straight rogue doesn't feel like dead weight.
My little house-rule fix for that was to give rogues access to two traits (I do not normally use traits so this was a small leg up for the rogue class).
In a similar fashion I decided to give fighters 4+ int skill ranks per level.
Nothing too radical, just a little bump for two classes people seem to widely agree have been left behind just a little.
So custom race isnt a complete no?
Here is the other group currently running around in the same sandbox. This one is GM'd by Trux now.
You can see the same kind of dynamic going on. There is only one departure from CRB classes, a magus. I picked him because it was a cool flavorful magus build you don't see every day. A staff magus that uses cold spells.
A straight dwarf fighter provides the backbone and the two wizards are actually not straight wizards. One is a monk and the other is going for some combination of arcane archer and eldritch knight I think. I really like this because it delays those high level spells enough to stretch out the sweetspot of gameplay before it becomes tough to keep things from devolving into rocket tag.
That level six slayer should not be in there, he must have repurposed that alias for another game. I have no idea what a slayer is. Also there used to be a cleric and a paladin, they had to leave. Trux is recruiting some divine help now in his recruitment.
But I hope you kind of see what I mean. These parties use options from APG, Ultimate Magic, and Ultimate Combat but they still kind of feel like they could have jumped right out of an AD&D game. That was my general idea anyway.
Seth86 wrote: So custom race isnt a complete no? I hadn't thought about it but it feels pretty close to a complete no. I don't have anywhere close to the design chops to determine if something like that was balanced.
Okay. No worries :) was just asking. Good to know rather than wonder =^^=
Taylor Riddle wrote: I love sandbox games, but have never seen one done on pbp.
But I am absolutely down.
Depending on your restrictions I would most likely want to be a Wizard if the party is Neutral / Good.
Maybe an evil cleric if evil was on the table.
Well this campaign is mostly set up very good vs evil... the main antagonist is the cult of Orcus.
Anything is possible with good role-play though.
In particular I have seen Lawful Evil work well here story wise.
At home I allow absolutely any alignment because I know my guys. In PbP with strangers Evil and CN seem to somehow be a red flag for "disruptive player" which is unfair and unfortunate.
Like I say I guess I just gotta get to know folks.
A note though, necromancer type PC's will have an uphill battle and probably get frustrated. Orcus cultists have authority over undead baked right into the mechanics.
Seth86 wrote: Okay. No worries :) was just asking. Good to know rather than wonder =^^= Yeah kind of like above, my instinct is that it would be a potential nightmare to try in PbP.
You wouldn't believe the fallout I had just by allowing Drow, got so many concerned PM's from other players and applicants.
I have a drow character. If u want to have a look at how i played her. :)
Ok Seth86 I am checking out Zartana. Looks like you keep your character sheet pretty tidy and format your posts nicely so they are easy to read what is going on.
I like Zartana. I allowed a drow character in one of my games to use that Improved Drow Nobility from ARG. I was worried it was broken but I allowed it. A couple times he shut the lights off on everyone and made the party mad, but it seemed like it wouldn't have been too much if his teamwork was a little better, or the party talked more.
I see you use Wayfinder, how are you liking it? I tried it once and it only worked for one game not multiple games, but I heard they have fixed it since then?
They have fixed it. It works great. :) can even edit posts now.
Zartana is going for the arcane archer class. So the magic helps a lot.
Yup. She is a fun character
I will check out that app. I have an android phone but not activated, wifi only :)
I love arcane archer. I have started some but never made it high enough to take the PrC.
And same thing as DM. I have had players start it but never make it high enough to take the PrC. So I have never seen one in action. We have so many campaigns end because of schedule problems, or people decide they want to play something else.
I am 2 or 3 levels away from prc. 1 more fighter. 1 lvl sorcerer, then AA
Cool. How long in RL time does it usually take you guys to gain a level in game?
If I do this, I want to have some real continuous progress.
You know the more I look at Rappan Athuk, the more I'm thinking it will work well for PbP.
Now the low-level "kiddy pool" dungeon they added, "The Mouth of Doom", was a challenge to run in PbP when I tried. Lots of small rooms to clear.
But the main levels are not so much a maze of small rooms. There are many levels, but most levels are not vast.
Vast mazes of small rooms are tough in PbP as every one waits for the rogue to check a million doors for traps. And if you automate those procedures the DM feels like he is playing by himself which is NOT COOL.
Mid-levels though RA has a lot of big set-piece fights with interesting environmental challenges.
With the support of the d20pro files I feel like it can make a good PbP.
Well. We leveled once a month first level or two. Then it increased. I think we are now at a level every 3 or 4 months. But i think it can be faster. But we are a big group :P
That sounds pretty good.
I think I enjoy levels 6-10 the most, so I would want to speed through low levels and slow down a bit there to enjoy the sweet spot.
A suggestion: dont work with xp. Just let players know when they level up. So level progression is up to gm. Not xp
A lot of GM's tell me that but I hate that system. I would never play that way as a player so I won't do it as a GM either.
Not sure why I hate it so much.
On pbp its a good option. Face 2 face. Around a table. Xp is a better option in my eyes too. But its just a suggestion =^^=
ok but what if the PC's want to grind and come back to a tough area when they level up?
don't they lose control of their own destiny if I am leveling them only when I feel like it?
Through the discussion thread you can see their tactics and needs and you can adjust. So if they want to grind, you give them something to do. And when they are done, you give them the level they were looking for.
fair enough. I still like xp.
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