Level Up

About a year ago I backed a Kickstarter for "Level Up" - a take on an 'advanced 5e' by En Publishing. I finally finished reading through the PDFs this week. Some thoughts:

This may be one of the best games I'll never run. Level Up has some really nice features that probably make it an improvement over 5e, but it's also a step more complicated when 5e is pretty much at the upper limit of what I'm interested in running now. Besides, if I were to get the chance to run anything else, I'd go for something distinctly different - Firefly, or Star Trek, maybe.

I really like this method of buying into the game: back one Kickstarter to an appropriate level, receive a package of the books, and then that's essentially all there is. That sort of one-and-done is now really appealing, especially given my increasing disdain for supplements.

I backed this at a PDF level. I suspect that is now very much the future - I have sorely limited space for (or interest in) physical books any more, while other electronic formats are utterly useless to me. But PDFs are ideal.

And I think, actually, that is that. I had planned a longer, more in-depth review, but don't think that really aids anything. This is recommended for people who like 5e but would like it to be a bit more crunchy, in depth, and detailed, and is very much not recommended for anyone who fundamentally doesn't like 5e.

A Close Call

The second session of the "Isles of Dread" saw some truly disastrous dice rolling leading to the party coming within a whisker of a Total Party Kill. Which, I must admit, would have been highly amusing given the amount of preparation that I'd done for the campaign!

As it happened, three of the PCs found themselves unconscious and bleeding out, while the fourth was given the opportunity to surrender. Fortunately, that last man standing was one of the more rational members of the party, and so they were marched back to their cells and disaster was averted.

Which leaves me with a big and tricky question: what now?

And We're Off!

The first session of the "Isles of Dread" campaign was this afternoon... and it was very nearly the last. The characters are now well advanced in their escape from the elven larder, and may have bitten off more than they can chew - certainly, a few better rolls from me and they'd have been in real trouble.

But it's going well - fun times.

One thing I do need to be wary of is that, now that the players know what they're doing, things are just running much faster than they were previously. Which means that the several months worth of material I had prepared may not last quite as long as I had thought. And it means I really need to get that final part of the adventure, and the maps, and the handouts, put together quickly!

Where is the Dragon in This Campaign?

Looking back at my recent campaigns, I've noticed something: "Isles of Dread" has exactly one dragon encounter, "Mists of Lamordia" had exactly one dragon encounter, "Lost Mine of Phandelver" and then "Storm King's Thunder" had exactly one dragon encounter (though there was another we never got to). "A Quest for Memory" had two, but that was something of an outlier.

In other words, it looks very much like my pattern is that a campaign will have one, and usually only one, dragon encounter.

Which is no bad thing - having identified the pattern there are options for dealing with it: either I can consciously mix it up by having lots of dragons in one campaign and none in another, or I could embrace the pattern and consciously build campaigns with that singular encounter - in which case, the question becomes "where is the dragon this time?"

And I find myself liking that approach, so I'm thinking I might go that way...

Stalled Again

I'm now partway through writing Part Four of the "Isles of Dread" adventure/campaign. I'm about 6500 words, and 22 encounter areas, from the end. And once again I'm stalled.

The problem this time is that I just don't have a firm vision of what this part of the adventure should look like. For Parts Two and Three, and even moreso Part One, I had a very clear image of many of the beats that I'd wanted to hit. But with Part Four, other than the need to bring things to a conclusion and wrap everything up, I just don't have that vision.

That's not surprising, I guess. Endings are just hard.

On the plus side, I do have one plan for how to force things forward - I know that there should be about 15 encounters in those 22 encounter areas, so I can sensibly proceed by mapping out what those are, and then populating the rest...

The Customisation Step

One of the many things that I don't like about the One D&D playtest is that they've moved the Ability Score Increments from race to background - removing these from race is undeniably a good move, but moving them to background just replaces one weakness with another. (They've also added feats to the backgrounds, which also sucks, but it's a comparative act of genius, so I'll leave that for now.)

The upshot of this is that players will now choose their class and then look for the background that gives them the 'best' ASIs.

Except that they won't, because another of WotC's brainfarts is that backgrounds are entirely customisable, and therefore utterly meaningless. Basically, WotC's designers had a great idea, but couldn't maintain any confidence in their concept and therefore wrecked it. Backgrounds were great for all of 300 words before they were utterly destroyed.

The thing is, allowing customisation in character creation is, in fact, a really good thing. But they've been spectacularly awful in their implementation.

The way to do it is to make race, class, and background all fixed packages of stuff - you get what you get, and that's that. Then introduce a dedicated customisation step, where you can make a small number of adjustments and substitutions anywhere on the character sheet.

So that your dwarf can indeed swap stonecunning for improved darkvision; your Fighter can indeed be proficient in arcana; your Soldier can replace proficiency with land vehicles with air vehicles... but you can't have all of these things.