Boxed In

We ended yesterday's session on a major cliffhanger - the PCs have brought the full force of the fire giants down upon them, and find themselves boxed in to a corner. Worse than that, the room they're in doesn't have a single entrance they can block up as a choke point - it has two such entrances just far enough apart to cause them grief.

In addition to this, they're in a position where their front-line warrior is really low on hit points and their Warlock is now out of spells.

I really don't see how they're going to get out of this one. Maybe this time it really is going to be a TPK, campaign wipe, and start over.

Of course, my experience has generally been that a TPK comes only when you least expect it, and generally when a sequence of bad rolls lead to a key PC going down unexpectedly, which provokes a cascade of deaths. If I'm expecting that outcome, that probably means it won't happen.

Either way, suddenly things got really interesting!

Rethinking the Next Campaign

I suddenly find myself in a position where I'm looking to finish up "Storm King's Thunder" as quickly as reasonably possible and much less sure that my decision to go with "Legacy of Fire" as the next campaign.

My feeling is that D&D 5e doesn't actually handle high-level play much better than any other version of the game, which means that the current campaign has started to drag. And given our current session times (1.5 hours, weekly), that drag is only exacerbated.

The other issue that I've found, actually with just about every edition and every game, is that a campaign simply has a "shelf-life" - except in very rare cases, once you get towards or over a year of continuous play, people just want to move on to something else.

All of which is probably a reason why so much campaign play, across the board, is in the low-mid levels.

Given that, and given that "Legacy of Fire" is intended as a campaign to run from level 1 to approximately level 20, which probably means 2-3 years of game play, it would seem a poor choice for the next campaign. Indeed, pretty much any of the published campaigns would make for a pretty poor choice.

Actually, the ideal adventure for the current group is "Lost Mine of Phandelver". It's just a shame that we've already used it!

What I'm now thinking we'll probably end up doing is a homebrew campaign, probably set in the Forgotten Realms, sticking to some fairly simple themes of exploration, finding treasure, and defeating evil.

The Emerald Spire Superdungeon

As mentioned in my previous post, I had one last Pathfinder PDF to read through. "The Emerald Spire Superdungeon" was something I had had my eye on for a long time, and when Paizo issued me with some store credit (for a delay I hadn't even noticed), and with my subscription benefits coming to an end, it was an ideal time to pick it up.

As the name implies, the adventure details a 16-level superdungeon. This was a product put together for one of their Kickstarters, and Paizo therefore used their contacts to arrange to have each level written by a different author, being a whos-who of some of the big names in the industry (excluding people working for WotC... can't think why...) The upshot is that each layer has a distinct feel, which may or may not be a good thing.

All in all... it's fine. It's one of those products that I suspect is of more interest as an artifact rather than as a gaming product - perhaps as a guide to how those big names would go about putting together something like this. From a quick glance, it really looked like many of the challenges, especially in the first half-dozen levels, seemed rather weak.

I did feel that there were some levels, notably in the middle of the pack, that were really great - lots of clever ideas, and it just generally seemed like fun. Given that this also matches up rather neatly to the 'sweet spot' that just about every version of D&D (and Pathfinder) has, that's not really a surprise.

I don't think I would recommend this product, those I certainly don't regret the purchase. It's just that there are better adventures out there. It's interesting, but something else would probably serve your needs better.

(And with that, the era really is ended. No more Pathfinder for me.)

End of an Era

On Friday I finished reading through my final Pathfinder Adventure Path volume. (I still have one final PDF, "The Emerald Spire Superdungeon" to read, but that's not part of the subscription and was something I bought to use up some store credit I had on Paizo's site.) That marks the end of the 24th Path they've published, and also the end of their content for 1st edition. As I've decided not to follow 2nd edition, both due to a dislike to some of what I'd seen and also because I'd be unlikely ever to play it anyway.

"Tyrant's Grasp" was probably a perfect place to end 1st edition - not only did it pit the heroes against the biggest Big Bad in their setting, and a figure they've been teasing for a decade, but it also really summed up everything that has characterised the Paths in recent years, for good and ill. Basically, I've found they've been becoming rather same-y of late, and so it was probably time to bow out regardless of the edition change... and so good to have that motivation.

Still, I do feel a bit bad about it. This marks the first time in a couple of decades that I haven't had a regular delivery of RPG-related material (first the Dragon/Dungeon magazines, and then Pathfinder). And with D&D dropping down to a trickle of new material, and my not really following any other game, that means I'm suddenly adrift.

5e Wands: Nice in Theory

One of the aspects of 5e that I really liked on my read-through was the handling of wands (and staves, and similar items), which I thought was a marked step up from their handling in 3e. In particular, I liked that wands had far fewer charges, I liked that they slowly recharged overnight, and I liked that they had a chance on crumbling away when the last charge was expended (but, crucially, that it wasn't guaranteed, thus encouraging PCs to take that risk with the last charge).

However, having played through a fairly long campaign now, I've found that I'm not so enamoured with the way wands are handled. My reasons for this are two-fold: firstly, the PCs have a bit too much certainty when it comes to tracking the number of charges; and the chance of the wand crumbling with the last charge just isn't high enough.

They're just that bit too generous and too controlled.

My inclination is the make the following four changes to all wands (and staves and similar items):

1. The user does not know how many charges they have.
   
2. Each time a wand is used, there is a 50% chance that one additional charge is expended. (Also, see below.)
   
3. If the last charge is expended, there is a 25% chance of the wand being destroyed.
   
4. The wand recharges 1d3 charges overnight.

In the event that there are not enough charges remaining to power the desired effect, whether due to the use of an extra charge or simply because there were fewer charges remaining than the user expected, nothing happens - the wand does not lose any charges, but no effect occurs. The effect of these changes should be still leave wands as a valuable treasure, and one that PCs are reasonably confident of using fairly regularly. However, they're less controlled than before, which should mean either that they will rely on other powers more often or they'll incur that chance of destruction more often. And, indeed, wands will probably become a treasure that is useful for a few levels but that then eventually drops out of the game - which is also no bad thing.

Of course, I haven't had a chance to test any of these changes in play as yet, and won't until my next campaign. So for now, consider them as random thoughts and little more than that.