Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Curse of the Crimson Throne

If it is not obvious by the two month hiatus from blogging, we did indeed fall victim to the 6th level curse. At least this time, I can kind of see what sent wrong. No chance of me preventing it in the future, as it just seems to be an artifact of me being too nice combining with the nature of pen and paper gaming.

So, our friend Josh started up a new group. He is back in a place where he can and will DM again, so he took the reins back and began converting the Paizo adventure path The Curse of the Crimson Throne to 4e. This is despite his well know bias against it.

Which brings me to my primary reason for the lack of blogging. We are running a published adventure path. It is one thing to share the adventures of players in a homebrew world, and quite another to narrate our progress down an adventure path. I do not think I will be writing up detailed reports on what happened any longer. I will try to stick to observations about the game, it's mechanics, and the quirks of the group. Emphasis on try. In addition to that cop out, my motivation to blog about this is pretty low, since I am not DMing at all. As stated previously, I viewed this blog as a tool to help me be a better DM.

A couple of changes for this group:
- Set leveling schedule.
- Low magic
- Shared background

We are advancing in level every 2 sessions. If we game nearly every week, that puts us getting through epic in about a year. I like this for our group. We have dinked around in low levels for far too long. As long as we can avoid the curse (no certainty of that happening) we will be getting to paragon levels around October. It will be nice for a change.

Of course, to balance that out, Josh has pretty much eliminated magic items. Our group has played 4 sessions now and not found a single magic item. This puts us behind the curve as far as ac and to-hit goes, but we haven't noticed a problem yet. I was kind of irritated at first, since I am playing a Wizard (Gnome Illusionist ftw?). I had planned to make him a strong ritualist, but I will wait and see what the future of magic in this world is like, maybe I will go a different direction with him.

The Adventure path suggests a common link for the PC's, and we have gone with that suggestion. All of us have had dealings with a common enemy, and our initial quest was tied wholly to him. Things have developed beyond that, but I'll touch on that when I start with the writeups.

Jay

2 comments:

Tom said...

The math of 4e assumes your getting the enhancement bonuses from magic items. If your DM doesn't want to use them, he may want to include something to compensate. Perhaps a +1 to hit and damage to start, and every 5 levels.

Jay said...

Been suggested through a friend. The problem is we have kind of skated through combat so far, so I am not sure he (or I) see a need for it.

One similar idea I liked is giving bonus feats to compensate, and only allowing those feats to be spent on the weapon/implement expertise type or on the feats that boost defenses (paragon/robust defenses). Still puts you behind in some spots, but it helps mitigate the problem somewhat. It also legitimizes those feats.