Two weeks ago we completed the "Omelas" quest. Ending was a little mushy but it hit the players in
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| Why yes we ARE 1st Level. Why do you ask? |
Next up was a two location adventure. The henchlings party has been tasked with liberating a remote keep and then holding it for seven days until a relief column can arrive. The A team will be leading the column. This fulfills several goals. The new kids get to learn to function as a team and earn some XP in a balanced setting. The A team gets to earn some points for exploring, the players get to keep them involved, and they'll earn a few things to boost their inventory.
Sadly our post-Christmas session was cancelled. As always the GOOD news is that I'm already prepped for NEXT week. So here's what I'm doing: I've put together a short (four page) Player's Handbook for my game setting out the (player facing) home brews we use. Also made a spreadsheet workbook for tracking some stuff that I just am not happy with on almost every character sheet I've ever seen. Our magic and encumbrance system are the main two. We'll see how it works at the table soon enough. Still wanna change up my music usage but I just can't get there. Next step is to do a DM's Guide for a lot of my mechanics so rather than scurrying around for half a dozen different things as I need them at the table I can have them in one spot.
Now, let's talk about the title of this post. Last session we introduced three new PC's: a half-orc wizard, a human Circle of Spores Druid and a halfling Twilight Cleric. First level characters. Had trouble climbing trees and jumping. And then combat was joined. The TC started slinging Toll the Dead from range, killing one opponent every round. The wizards did the same with Fire Bolt. Druid used healing word but was otherwise a staff swinging whirlwind. Roughly 1/3 of the bandits holding the keep were slaughtered almost silently at night. Once they figured out what was going on they stopped charging to their deaths so prying the remainder out of the shell will be tougher. But the ability of two first level non-martial characters to dispatch over half a dozen bandits with relative ease? They're all super heroes now.
Recently blogger Taskerland, in the midst of an exploration of the use of random tables and philosophy did a nice little historical backtrack. "...D&D had abandoned many of the practices that had emerged in the early years of the hobby and replaced them with a tendency towards writing that was horrible proscriptive in an effort to be a) idiot-proof and b) more epic in scope."
To make matters worse, support for the game aimed at players encouraged the creation of ever-more powerful PCs with ever-more elaborate powers. Meanwhile, support for the game aimed at GMs described these densely-layered and intensely rule-bound social worlds where the PCs spent their entire time being ordered about and manipulated.
Character creation became a major part of the game. When I was trying to put my table together I had several people tell me they'd played D&D and it consisted of two hour sitting around a table creating a character. Not fun. A Distant Chime touched on this recently as well.
Partly as an edition thing (with the increased focus on character-building as an aspect of gameplay), partly as a community thing (with the rise of character-optimization communities, especially on online forums), partly as a business thing (make sure everyone is playing with the published rules, in the published settings, using published adventures, so that they buy our books) the experience of the game for many players has shifted away from the experience of playing at a given table, characterized by a particular DM and players with their own faults and foibles and opinions and houserules, and towards the partly-imagined experience of playing a sort of platonic ideal D&D, where the rules always work as intended and the setting is exactly as published and the game is a regular progression of CR-appropriate combats atop masterful battlemaps.
Our friends over at Tao of D&D have written about this as well. It saddens me. The progressions seems to be pig farmer -> mage capable of killing people with the wiggle of a finger -> Master of the Universe. The middle ground doesn't seem to have much to differentiate it. The gravy might be a bit thicker, the meat a bit better seasoned, but it's still all a fine feast. No scrambling after scraps, wondering where the next potato might be coming from or whether you might be able to snatch that rutabaga to make it to tomorrow.
Not sure where this is/was going but I felt the need to splooge it out.
