My previous group sadly disbanded at the end of book one (people physically moved too far for it to continue), but I have another group looking to play the same adventure path. Unlike the other group, this one would actually be able to play an evening every week, so rather than streamlining the adventure for speed as before I'll keep most of the encounters and possibly even add a few more.
One thing bothers me a little: the character of the group is leaning more towards meta-gaming and number-crunching, and is fairly light on the roleplay. Players don't care about their character's origins or motivations, and not often do you hear somebody at the table say "but my character wouldn't do that". While a GM does have to cater to what their players will enjoy, I'd also like to nudge them towards an enjoyable aspect of the game I think they're missing out on.
One suggestion I'm exploring is the idea of starting the players off as villagers or other people with a local connection. The hope is that this would give their characters more character, since they'll have a job or position in the village rather than just being a random passing mercenary. This also helps to answer the question of "why do we give a damn about saving this village?" They'd have the choice of taking one of the existing named villagers for instant back-story, or making a new one and writing their own.
Other threads describe the players starting out at a summer festival; details of a travelling festival could be borrowed from eg the Murder's Mark module. Depending how much I want to expand it, I may even run the whole of Murder's Mark, while adding in some hints about the encroaching winter.
Mechanically, I'm thinking that the players would start off with 1 or 2 levels of an NPC class: Commoner, Expert, Adept, Aristocrat or Warrior. Most of them would be Experts, since that covers a lot of the jobs a villager might do (blacksmith, farrier, barber, cobbler etc). Commoner would cover a farmer or other ordinary villager. Anybody wanting to play an Aristocrat, Adept or Warrior would need to come up with a story justification for why they'd be living in or passing through the village, and why they'd be willing to join the quest. PCs would only start getting their first real class levels once they've overcome their first story encounter (the wreckage of the two carriages, to which I'll add some yummy extra zombies so it feels more like they've achieved something).
The question though is how to treat these NPC levels once the players take real class levels. Do they stick around, offsetting the level numbers all the way through the game and making things messy? Do I shift the levels at which feats and stat increases happen? Or do they evaporate somehow and leave people with just their nice fresh PC levels to calculate?
Has anybody else done something like this, with Reign of Winter or another AP? Did it work out?
Most of my PCs were adventuring class characters that came from the village. Only one PC hadn't grown up there.
I think Book 1 is going to kill the hell out of them if they're just NPC classes. Those early encounters (especially Rhokar's Raiders) can be rough.
starting the game as NPC classes is an idea I see bantered around quite a bit - but never successfully.
It's either limiting your player's character choices (because they are forced to pick an idea which makes sense with a character class: suddenly being the old retired wizard or the village bard is off the cards) OR they just make their own fluff regardless and your NPC class time is spent as a boring waiting period before they actually get to play their concept.
As for NPC -> real class: get rid of the NPC levels entirely once they gain PC levels.
Why not just start off with several non-Winter adventures that you design yourself? Have them start to consider Helgren home. And then right when they reach level 2, the winter weather starts. That is when they start down the path.
That way they can have done things for some of the farmers, helped out various people... gotten to know people really.
That said, RoW does not need an RP-heavy group. While it can help and be fun... if they like meta-gaming and just rolling dice and killing things? Or using die-rolls for Diplomacy and the like? let them.
When I get my second... third chance at RoW, I'm moving Heldren to the island of Battlewall in the Ironbound Archipelago in the Linnorm Kingdoms, somewhere between Halgrim and Frembrudd (tho closer to Halgrim)
I'll give them summer solstice to whoop it up and play their Viking games... then that night as a cold wind starts blowing.... Bam! The snow starts full force and the Trolls, Fey and winter witches attack, abducting children and other assorted winter witch cliches :-)
Also this will make Rohkar's class choice more appropriate, gives the feeling of "holy s&#$! We aren't even close to Irrisen!" Feel, and allows me to turn the High Sentinel Lodge into a little miniature Graul homestead :-)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
... and allows me to turn the High Sentinel Lodge into a little miniature Graul homestead :-)
I like the cut of your jib, sailor. <grin>
starting the game as NPC classes is an idea I see bantered around quite a bit - but never successfully
I think this is probably the real point. Pathfinder simply isn't set up to allow a transition from NPC classes to PC classes. Whether that's a conscious decision or an assumption, it's reinforced throughout the system. So I shall abandon the idea, at least, of mechanically starting as NPC classes.
I still want to work in the flavour of the past being villagers or locals as much as possible, rather than passing mercenaries who have no good reason to go on this quest or care about the outcome - at least until they get the exposition that the whole world is on the line. Even then I can see them trying something awkward like referring it to property authorities rather than stepping through the portal themselves.
How about doling out background traits and skills as bonuses for the campaign? The campaign traits in the RoW Players' Guide is a good starting point to build off of.
You mean above the standard rate of one story-relevant trait and one general trait?
I usually use 2 regular traits and a campaign/story-relevant trait. IF the players come up with some cool stuff, a bonus background-y trait can be awarded. I also award traits in-game for whatever off the wall/consistent in-character things that they do.
If the goal is to encourage local-ness without either an amped up point buy or "taxing" their characters in some similar fashion, then it seems the requirement is using background skills from Unchained or something similar.
As-written, the bad guys don't make things personal out of the gate, and there isn't a whole lot to work from other than the baddies in the lodge...
I had quite a large group of players (7 of them, but they don't all play at the same time) so I was actually worried about saying they were all from Heldren - feels like a lot of people to wander off (and end up developing into classes). So I made sure they all gave me a brief backstory and explained why they had travelled to Taldor. From there I gave them the real reasons why they were making their way to Heldren, plus why the whole potential quest would mean something to them. That has all helped them to get involved with the story, their characters and the NPCs within it.
Do you know what classes they're planning to play as yet? We might be able to suggest some ways to approach it - fresh eyes might help...
Mine was perhaps a bit different. I'd been running the game for a year before I got into Reign of Winter; the campaign started with two players, and was a hybrid of AD&D and D&D 3.0. When I recruited a third player, who'd not played D&D before, I couldn't find any 3.X rulebooks, and a store owner suggested Pathfinder.
I fell in love with the rules, changed the characters over to Pathfinder rules, and continued the campaign... and after a few months I recruited a fourth player who joins us over Skype. He'd been after me for a while to run a game for him and his friend over Skype... and after finding Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, I picked that up so I'd not have to do work for that game.
I quickly fell in love with the quality of Paizo's APs. RoW part 1 had been out nearly a month, so I subscribed to the AP (just missing the subscription for the first part in fact) and took my group of 3rd and 4th level characters and threw the campaign in a sharp turn down a bumpy and frost-covered road... and had no regrets.
Considering I was converting Night Below into Pathfinder, and one player had been in that campaign series in the past, it wasn't a big loss. Sadly, we meet maybe eight times a year if I'm lucky, so we're only now finishing up on the 2nd book - and that's after I cropped several encounters.
So... no one had any ties to Helgren, except for one of the NPCs (who was supposed to end up kidnapped as an incentive for Night Below). It didn't hurt things too badly though, and the group never asked "why should we do this?"
Do you know what classes they're planning to play as yet? We might be able to suggest some ways to approach it - fresh eyes might help...
Not yet. The start is still months away (after two books of Kingmaker and one of Carrion Crown). One player already has his character planned out (and it's a pretty cool idea), but the rest haven't said anything yet. I'd really like to have a solid plan for what background recommendations to make before asking people to pick classes.
Even though I've GMd before - this adventure path even, for another group - this group is a really though one to keep on track, and playing every week rather than once in a blue moon will make it even harder. So I really don't want to be winging it if I don't have to.
As a GM I like to be very prepared. I already have a box full of multicoloured index cards: yellow for treasure, blue for the stats of monsters not in the book, red for negative conditions etc; as well as printouts of maps and pictures of NPCs (so much more convenient than holding up the book with your thumb over the sensitive bits).
Consider making them relatives to people in Heldren. I made 2 of my PCs related to Dryden Kepp and that worked very well, especially when he went missing.
The Ultimate campain book has rules for retraining a class level.
"If you are retraining a level in an NPC class (adept, aristocrat, commoner, or expert) to a level in any other class, the training takes only 3 days. This allows an NPC soldier to begin her career as a warrior and eventually become an officer who is a single-classed fighter, and for a younger character to start out with one commoner or expert level and become a 1st-level adventurer with a PC class when he reaches adulthood."
There is more to it than that, but that is the basics.
I have not tried this, but I may on the next campain I run.
Start them off as members of whatever town, as an NPC class, throw a little bitty custom encounter at them (maybe there are a couple wolves killing sheep or investigating a robbery or something... just big enough to introduce their characters but nothing so big as to destroy them/level them) Then give them some downtime with the option to retrain class.