Our game this afternoon had to be cancelled at short notice. We're now going to attempt to meet on Wednesday afternoon instead, with a view to shifting to Wednesdays as a regular slot for a while. We'll see if that works any better.
All of which amounts to another good reason to make the current campaign our last.
Apparently the sense of smell is the one most closely tied to memory. Events of the last weekend have served to remind me of that fact (or factoid).
Amongst her many activities of the weekend, LC repainted our downstairs bathroom. The skirting boards, doorframe, and other edging obviously needed a completely different white paint from the walls, and said paint was cleaned with white spirit, or its modern equivalent.
But the thing is that when I first started painting miniature figures, way back in the days when the models were made of lead (before they became pewter, never mind plastic!), the recommended paint was oil-based enamels. Those were, of course, cleaned using white spirit.
And so for much of the weekend I found myself fondly reminded of those days. And not so fondly reminded of having hundreds of unpainted little figures lying around waiting for my attentions.
(I still have no intention of starting again. Those days are over.)
Apparently, the upcoming Planescape boxed set will include an adventure that includes a low-mid level section and then a section at 17th level. Characters will enjoy a level jump just before that final section of the adventure.
I should note that I have absolutely no objection to the use of a level jump within an adventure, and it's good to see WotC finally publishing some high-level material. I just with they were better at it - ever since 3e they've had difficulties in both providing such support and in making that support worth having.
Speaking for myself, I've never used a level jump. I'm not particularly a fan - I'd generally prefer to start at a higher level than build in a jump, and given that the game just runs better at lower levels anyway I'm inclined not to bother.
That said, there is one time I should have used a level jump. This was a "Roman-esque" campaign from back in the day, from sufficiently long ago that I didn't name all my campaigns. The campaign had been running for some time, with the characters reaching level 8 or so, before life events led to me bringing it to a premature end. Unfortunately, the planned end basically involved a Godzilla attack (actually a Hellfire Wyrm, from back when that was a singular monster of extremely high CR, rather than just another type of monster).
The planned end of the campaign expected the PCs to have reached 20th level and acquired a number of powerful magical items. The actual end featured wildly under-powered PCs with a few good items, and thus ended in a TPK. (There was actually something thematically interesting there - sometimes the apocalypse doesn't wait for the heroes to be ready to face it. But as a game experience it wasn't great.)
In hindsight, I should have built in a level jump, set the PCs up so that they weren't quite ready to face the beast, and gone from there. But, alas, I just didn't think of it at the time.
One of the big issues with D&D has always been the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem, where Wizards get ever-bigger spells as they go up in level while Fighters just get a bit better at whatever they were doing previously. One of the fixes for that was always to give Fighters bizarre and outlandish powers to try to compensate, but that never quite sat right either.
Another fix I've mooted in the past was the notion of combos - the Fighter would have a set of 'basic' attacks that could be used at any time, but by combining them into sequences they could multiply up the effects. So if they first landed "uppercut", they could then use "haymaker", and then finish off with "thundrous smite" to get a knock-out effect.
Well, maybe. There are complexities inherent in all of that.
But that's not the point of this post, because I've said most of this before.
The point of this post is to note that I've made a crucial mistake in my thinking. Originally, I had thought that the Fighter should hit with the various 'steps' in order to qualify for the chain. But the problem with that is that they're very likely to fail at some point, and at the very least have to repeat a step (if not start over). Because combats mostly last four rounds at most, and feature multiple opponents, that makes the chains essentially useless.
My correction is that the Fighter should have to use all the various powers, without needing to hit. And for the powers beyond the first there should probably be at least some effect even on a miss. Once you get to the capstone power in the chain, that probably does require a hit... but should allow for retries if it does fail the first time.
