Although there is a lot of good material in the Adventure Path that is currently in use, and have been some really good set-peices in the campaign (the fight with Tongue-eater, the Kua-toan temple fight), one of the big problems is that the characters are extremely thin. So thin that the impact of Eloi's death was more, "Oh, we've not got a wizard. Oh, well. Next!" than anything else.
That's not to say there is no characterisation: Rurik and Zantar are distinctly different, despite both being dwarven barbarians with waraxes (and don't get me started on how much weapon familiarity annoys me. I've ranted about it enough in the past...). However, this difference is more due to a difference in the players involved, rather than a conscious role-playing decision.
The reasons for this problem, as I see them, are three-fold:
1) The adventures are not tailored to the PCs (and, really, how could they be in any meaningful way?), so it doesn't really matter what characters are involved. They're just vehicles for getting through the story.
2) There isn't a setting as such, which means there's nothing to hang character backgrounds on. And without backgrounds, it's difficult to develop a three-dimensional character. Or even the two-dimensional caricatures you get in RPGs.
3) Having two characters really doesn't help. There's little enough in the campaign to hang one character on, let alone two distinct ones, and especially two distinct ones that speak with the same voice.
Ah, well. There's nothing to be done about it. Rest assured, however, that I won't be relying so heavily on pre-gens for any future campaigns I run (might use one or two, of course).
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ReplyDeleteAs a suggestion for playing characters differently. Why not take the white wolf apporach, and right down 3/4 character behaviours to differentiate who is playing whom?
ReplyDeleteOne of the problems of pre-gen adventures is a lack of material to help us create unique characters for the setting. I find that Rurik is a standard "Dwarf Barbarian with a big axe" cliche and I usually need a bit of help from the setting to get a background I'm happy with.
ReplyDeleteAs for Eloi I think it was more of being annoyed with the character itself rather than "just another mage". Maybe it's because we feel we won't be using the characters again after this adventure is finished?
Oh well hopefully you'll be encouraged to run the new Vampire or even better B5. ;)
Truth is I don't really fancy running B5 at all, and nor does the thought of running the new Vampir appeal (at least with the current group - there's just too much history with the old version that I don't see the new one working at all).
ReplyDelete