Building a Better Adventure: Fight, Evade, Corrupt, Deceive...

I'm afraid this is another tirade inspired by the "Black Crusade" adventure "Hand of Corruption", but it's actually applicable to the vast majority of prepublished adventures I've read. Paizo are occasionally better in this regard... but not too often.

In "Black Crusade", the PCs are heretics, followers of the Ruinous Powers. And one of the key conceits of the setting is that Chaos and its followers are essentially a cancer on the Imperium - they corrupt everything and everyone that they touch. That being the case, when "Hand of Corruption" has the PCs interacting with a significant number of NPCs, one might be forgiven for thinking that they might well choose to corrupt those NPCs into their followers. Indeed, the book itself notes that they might well have taken that route in order to sway enemies to their side.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't actually give any great indication as to how they might do that. The NPCs are given backstories, and personalities, and quirks, and all that good stuff... but for most of them there's no indication of how they might be corrupted. Is it money? Power? Sex? Revenge? Jealousy? Exactly what hook could a clever PC unearth enabling them to get at that NPC?

This points to a wider problem in most prepublished scenarios. Very often, the book simply assumes that the PCs are going to fight the NPCs, and that's it. Rarely, if ever, will the book consider other approaches to the encounter.

And that's quite frustrating, because quite often the adventure will spend time detailing the character's past and personality. We get told loads of things about the character... just not things that might be incredibly useful in actual play.

To that end, I'm inclined to think that every significant NPC write-up should include some specific notes on how the NPC might be influenced: how does he respond to charm? To intimidation? To bribery? Are there any specific deceptions he's liable to be taken in by, or specific bribes he might be offered? Just how can he be corrupted? (And, incidentally, in a game like "Black Crusade", the answer should never be "nothing". Even the most fanatically pious of souls has a price... and if not, then 'pride' might well be their downfall!)

Likewise, I'm inclined to think that every encounter should say something about the various possible ways to deal with it: how can it be avoided (is there a possibility for stealth?), what passwords with the orc guards accept? What disguises might the PCs use?

(Oh, and critically, when I say "every", I do indeed mean every NPC and encounter - not just the ones that the designers think the PCs "should" corrupt. Because, yes, when one of the NPCs is a corrupt degenerate then of course they're liable to use that, but what about the ones who aren't obviously corrupt? After all, those are the very ones that the GM might actually need help with!)

Just a thought...

I have, on occasion, seen it said that there are actually several different iterations of the Old World setting: that while many of the names are the same, the world of "Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay" is not the same world as "Warhammer Fantasy Battle", which is not the same world as "Bloodbowl".

It seems to me that Games Workshop/Fantasy Flight Games would do well to make a similar distinction between the setting used in "Warhammer 40,000" versus that used in the various RPGs in the same 'universe' - "Dark Heresy", "Rogue Trader", "Deathwatch", "Black Crusade", and "Only War".

The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is one of hand lines - in the wargame you want single, monolithic forces with little or no intermingling. That is, you have a Necron force, a Chaos Space Marine Force, an Eldar force, but no "mixed parties". However, in the RPGs, and especially in the likes of "Black Crusade", that can be somewhat problematic - interactions between a band of BC heretics and, say, a group of Orks are almost inevitably going to be at the point of a bolter. There's no intermingling of cultures, which means there are very limited opportunities for interaction. (And it's actually worse than that - about half of BC heretics are obviously and unmistakably enemies of the Imperium. This means that any scenario where they are expected to travel undercover through said Imperium are essentially doomed before they begin. This could be fixed by having Space Marines 'retire' from active service, and so appearing occasionally in the various strata of society, but that appears not to be a feature of the setting.)

(In fact, should I run "Black Crusade", I'm inclined to do exactly that - have a somewhat variant version of the setting in which the cultures are much less monolithic, much more factionalised, and much more intermingled. Oh, and while the Imperium is both powerful, oppressive, and omni-present... I'll be vastly reducing the actual level of surveillance while also ramping up the level of paranoia.)

Black Crusade: Hand of Corruption

Since I'm feeling curmudgeonly today...

I've now read the first two chapters of "Hand of Corruption" (out of three). In particular, chapter two represents the 'meat' of the adventure, the bit that is advertised on the back of the book.

It's not very good.

Firstly, the boring stuff that needs to be said: this is a gorgeous book, with top-notch production values, decent writing, and so forth. Structurally, it's fine. But there's a problem with the content. In fact, this adventure engages in some of the worst sins of published adventures.

The problem, fundamentally, is that the designers haven't really presented an adventure here. What they've presented is a story, that a group of PCs could be slotted into as the protagonists.

I don't want to give to much away, so I'm going to have to be rather vague here. However, quite often the book provides an illusion of choice. The PCs have to get to location X, so they are given a choice of means by which this can be achieved. But the choice is an illusion: if they do this then that happens. However, if they instead do this then... that happens anyway.

In fact, it's worse than that. Because at one point the PCs are given a Big Goal to accomplish. This goal has several different components, each with its own complications. So, a bit of a tricky one. But it's cool - the adventure has a whole "Prison Break" vibe going on, with lots of scheming factions, and different ways to achieve the goal. The PCs could do this, or that, or the next thing...

Oh, no, they can't. Because the adventure flatly declares, "the PCs decide to solve the problem by..." And it then discusses other possible options, and why the GM should outright ban them.

It's actually a real shame. The book has quite a lot of good ideas in it. Indeed, I reminds me a great deal of a D&D adventure called "Expedition to the Demonweb Pits" - like that adventure, the book itself is really quite poor, but it contains the spine of a truly awesome campaign in there. It will need an awful lot of work to bring it out (chapter one needs completely re-written, chapter two needs some massive changes, and I haven't started on chapter three yet), but that's fine - a homebrewed version would probably be better anyway.

However, my main purpose in buying this adventure was really not to run it, or at least, not directly. Rather, I was interested to see what sorts of stories FFG foresee us using "Black Crusade" to tell. After all, the three introductory adventures are all rather similar, and I can see that getting very old very quickly... but I was having a hard time seeing what else there was to be done.

Unfortunately, having read this, I'm none the wiser. I can see how this story would be interesting and fun, but it seems awfully specific in its nature. But once I've run this campaign (assuming I do), what then? (It looks like my next port of call may be the WH40k novels... but that's a good way down the line.)

Wealth Per Level

With the advent of 3e, D&D introduced the controversial concept of "wealth per level". This was the notion that a character of level X could expect to have Y gold pieces of accumulated treasure. This was immediately heaped with derision and scorn, not least because it was intimately tied to the notion that characters should be able to buy and sell magic items with relative ease.

However...

To a certain extend, some sort of wealth per level calculation is inevitable. After all, the game needs to provide some sort of guidance for DMs about how to construct encounters that will challenge the PCs without being hugely lethal. In order to have any chance to do this, the game needs to assume a baseline level of competence for the PCs.

Now, when establishing this baseline, the game can either assume that the PCs will have magic items or that they will not. (There is a third option, but I'll come back to that.) Now, if the game assumes that the PCs will not have magic items, this means that as soon as the PCs gain those items they are immediately more powerful than the baseline. And that being done, the balancing guidelines start to break down. Conversely, if the game assumes that they will have magic items, if the PCs do not then they are weaker than the baseline, and the same problem applies.

Since virtually all games grant magic items to the PCs at some point, it only makes sense that the game should assume that they do have items, and then it's just a question of how many - what "wealth per level" do they have?

(These calculations are actually even more important in a "bounded accuracy" system like 5e, where every +1 bonus to hit is a much bigger deal. It is with more than a little concern, therefore, that I greet the removal of any "wealth per level" guideline in that edition.)

Now, I did mention a "third option" above, and it is this: magic items become considered just another part of the character - Elric gains huge power from Stormbringer because that's where he's spent all his "build points", but if anyone else picks up the sword they don't get those powers. Which works... to a point.

However, I've been digging into the 3e wealth per level table quite a bit of late, and come to a couple of realisations:

• There's no actual formula behind the numbers in the table. That is, there is no way to take the character's level, perform a mathematical calculation, and end up with the correct WbL. Instead, it's inevitably a matter of looking up the table.
• That said, there is a method behind those numbers. The DMG also includes extensive tables for determining treasure for each Encounter Level, with a matching table giving the average result for each EL. The XP system is also set up so that a group that faces nothing but EQ-equal encounters will take 13 such encounters to reach the next level. Taking the average treasure for each encounter, multiplying it by 13, then dividing by the 4 PCs that the game assumes, we get a set of figures that is between 5% and 10% higher than the gains from the WbL table. And this is consistent across all levels. (The 5% offset is to account for the group using disposable items, items being damaged, and similar attrition.)
• What this means is that WbL is not actually a guideline for creating new PCs at levels higher than 1st. Instead, it is merely an expression of the likely amount of treasure that the party will have gathered in their travels. And that treasure will be in all possible forms - gold, equipment, magic items, gems, jewellery, artwork, etc etc...
• The corrolary to this is that a character who is created at higher than 1st level should, by rights, either be required to roll on the treasure tables 4 times for each level or should be assumed to have sold everything that was collected and therefore should start with significantly less than the WbL table actually indicates. If we assume a split of roughly 2/3rds 'valuables' to 1/3rd 'items', and that the items (only) get liquidated to half their 'book' value, that suggests a character of higher than 1st level should actually be equipped with approximately 80% of the gold that is indicated on the WbL table. The ability to build exactly the items gained grants an optimisation that is not possible to the PC who merely gathers items organically.

However, there is a further corrolary even to that, and it is that the designers of 3e missed a trick. See, the various numbers on the random treasure tables were, essentially, plucked out of the air. There's no particular rhyme or reason to them. And then the average results follow, and then the WbL table - and so there is no formula.

However, it's relatively easy (in theory, at least), to build things the other way around. Build a WbL formula, split that into 13 treasure packages, and then build the treasure tables to suit. And, indeed, there is a very obvious formula that really should be used in this regard - the expected WbL should be some multiplier of the XP gained by the character in the level. (In fact, in the early levels, WbL actually does this - for 4 levels it is consistently 90% of the XP total, before accelerating out of sight. But the best multiplier is actually quite simple: 1. Have WbL match the XP per level table, and you get a system that is much easier to remember and actually quite easy to design for.)

Of course, making that change would mean redoing the treasure tables, and would mean redoing most of the magic item costs. Which is an awful lot of work. But then, most of the item costs actually bear almost no resemblance to power level, not least because a character benefits a huge amount more from carrying lots of 'minor' items than he does from carrying one or two 'major' items - and that's an inevitable consequence of the way those prices are assigned.

(In fact, magic items are only balanced if they are found, and found mostly-randomly, and can neither be bought nor crafted. But that's another rant entirely, and one I'll go for on another day.)

Eberron 4e, part two

Following on from my read-through of the "Eberron Player's Guide", I've been reading the "Eberron Campaign Guide". Where the former is really the player's book for the setting, this latter is the DM's guide to the setting. It covers much the same material in more detail, and also discusses 'secret' information about the setting - basically, anything the DM should know but the players should not.

And it is an excellent book, even for a non-4e DM.

In 3e, Eberron was detailed across a series of some 13 hardback books. The original campaign setting book is also an excellent work, but it suffers a little in that when it was written large elements of the world had not yet been fixed on. The later books then gradually fleshed things out, adding a lot more detail to the world. However, the effect of this was that there was a huge amount of information spread across a lot of text.

The 4e campaign guide therefore takes that information, condenses it to "what you really need to know", and then presents that. And, because very little has changed, it remains true that if you need more detail, you can always refer back to the 3e texts. Huzzah!

(The 4e books also do a really good job of fitting in the new races from the 4e PHB - the tieflings, the dragonborn, and the eladrin. In fact, so good was the job that they actually persuaded me that the eladrin actually have a place in the setting, where previously I had felt there was no place for them in the game. In fact, of the three new races, they are the one whose addition has added most to the setting. I was impressed.)

The 4e campaign book is also very rules-light. This is obviously good for a non-4e DM, but it's actually good even for a 4e DM, given that any and all stats in the book have long since been rendered obselete by the ongoing revisions to that game in DDI. The other key advantage of this is that the 4e campaign guide actually includes more information about the setting than did the 3e version - about a third of which was necessarily filled with new rules elements. That's good for us... probably not so good for WotC's sales, though.

All in all, where I was rather unimpressed with the player's guide, I am well pleased with this book.