Dragonlance D&D Game Blog

My typical progression for a campaign may be little unusual. In the beginning, when the PCs are newly minted 1st level characters that have just been created by their players, I run adventures that don't tie too closely into any character's background. The reason for this is two fold. At lower levels, simply put, characters may not survive. I never go out of my way to kill a character, but to quote the villainous Leland from Needful Things "these things happen". Secondly, I want to leave things open in case the player decides "this character blows" and wants to play something else. Replacing characters is much easier to do when said character has no integral connection to the overall campaign. When it's established in the first session that these six noobs are destined to save the world, it's a little hard later on shoehorning in a new character--like the convoluted solution on Charmed when the "Power of Three" needed a new Third af...

It seems inevitable in my games that when the PCs finish up the meat of an adventure--when the princess has been rescued, or the one ring destroyed--they start acting like a piece of cornbread at the end of a meal, sopping up the last bits of gravy from the adventure. In almost every game, there seems to be rooms the PCs skipped, or failed Search checks that leave them thinking they've missed something useful. In these cases, when the bulk of the adventure is over, my players at least, start retracing every step, rechecking every room, and researching every scrap of paper they can find. In times like this, part of me wants to call a time out and move on to the next story point in the campaign. At the same time, I understand as a player wanting to find all the loot, defeat all the creatures, or learn all the secrets. In trying to understand why my players behave like this (and why I behave like this sometimes as a player), I think part of this stems from the reward system bui...

I know I was going to write about the first game session, but I also want to touch a bit on the campaign, in some broad strokes. First, I always like to think of D&D in terms of campaigns, there's a beginning (typically characters at 1st level), and a series of adventures. Some are directly connected to a longer plot, some are just one-and-done adventures, and others seemingly have no connection, but in the end turn out to be related to the main plot. I came up with this idea long before shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and X-Files, but I see them as great examples of what I try to do in my games. They were great at doing long arcs as well as one-shot eps that had no real connection to the over-all plot. For my games, I typically work backward. I usually know the climax adventure (which is never a 1st level adv) and then work at filling in the advs that would lead a party from 1st level to the level and location of the beginning of the finale. I'll use published mods fro...