Quote from: smiorgan;699990Having "safe space" rewards grow linearly but the exploration/fighting rewards grow logarithmically is a neat solution (if I read you correctly), and something that can "ease newbies into the game" if you feel that's needed to attract new players (per the OP).

I wonder if that's just prolonging the inevitable, however -- the party gain a couple of levels from swanning around town doing errands, then finally feel they're ready for an adventure. They go out and the game is as lethal as ever, and some of them die.

Well, no, I've never seen PCs level up purely from roleplay XP. Even at 1st level my PCs rarely go a session without combat, and the risk of death. It's more that you might get your PC to 2nd level after four combats and doing a bunch of other stuff, rather than needing the dozens of combats it could take RAW if you don't get a lucky treasure find.
I don't award XP to PCs who do nothing significant, and I'll often have combat and the threat of combat, at least as much as in typical adventure fiction.

Quote from: S'mon;700039Well, no, I've never seen PCs level up purely from roleplay XP. Even at 1st level my PCs rarely go a session without combat, and the risk of death. It's more that you might get your PC to 2nd level after four combats and doing a bunch of other stuff, rather than needing the dozens of combats it could take RAW if you don't get a lucky treasure find.
I don't award XP to PCs who do nothing significant, and I'll often have combat and the threat of combat, at least as much as in typical adventure fiction.

Combat usually happens in most campaigns, but I don't give xp for combat.

If I am dming a 1E dnd game, it is possible to gain levels without combat.

If a character built a keep and plotted to replace the rightful king and was doing all sorts of cool roleplay things, he would get xp.

I give out group xp at intervals during a campaign.

I don't give xp for directly killing monsters or finding treasure.

Quote from: Bill;700046Combat usually happens in most campaigns, but I don't give xp for combat.

Survival is it's own reward.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;699923It should all be horribly lethal and unforgiving.

Like marriage.

Quote from: trechriron;699556These posts intrigue me. I think it’s fairly easy to discuss character mortality before a game and set expectations. It may not always go over well, but you can forewarn. However, what about long term play? How do old school games handle the potential lethality/mortality and still maintain continuity?

Through the setting.

If you approach the game not under an "it's like a movie or TV series" rationale but with the idea there is a world and the player characters just happen to be some of the people doing stuff in it, characters live and die and are replaced, whereas the setting lives on.

This means that the sense of continuity comes from the living setting. A band of adventurers who is partially wiped out in the dungeon might seek replacements at their home village, or city. Some characters (PCs or NPCs) might have heard of what happened to them after some talked at the inn, and come to see if they can scrounge a few coins of their own out of their operations. Some of the characters might have relatives claiming the lost character's will (Erac's Cousin, if that rings a bell). A party completely wiped out may just be replaced by a completely different group of adventurers who will go about its own adventures, choose its own objectives, and if it comes to tread the same roads the previous group adventured in, they might find traces of their passage, witness how the setting evolved after their passing, and the consequences of their deaths.

At higher levels it becomes all the easier, and potentially all the more meaningful, because the campaign is established by now. Everybody knows who these blue guys living by the mountains are, what Count Whatsisface is up to on his side of the plains, and coming up with replacement PCs and acting the natural consequences of the PCs' actions becomes a no-brainer, the setting representing a font of possibilities to choose from.

And that's not even talking about henchmen and hirelings which could be upgraded to PCs, nor the other characters you also play in the campaign as PCs to switch back and forth depending on adventure levels, opportunities in the setting, particular objectives and whatnot. The idea is that you have a number of characters adventuring in the world, in and around the party, forming sub-parties and so on depending on who makes it at the game table this week, and these make for alternate characters when your main higher level one is doing stuff like magic research or building a keep, or of course when this or that other of your character dies adventuring, also ensuring you can adventure at all levels of the campaign continuously using a variety of PCs.

If say a fighter Lord (name level) fails at his attempt to save his life in a magical assassination performed by demons who materialized from the shadows to kill him, Elric in Bakshaan style, then the next character may be the Wizard who summoned the monster and works for the bad guys, a noble that is named as a replacement for the deceased Lord who will be warned about his predecessor's fate and will have to find out what happened before it happens to him too, the Archbishop or Nuncio from the Church who has come to bury the corpse of the Lord and investigate the crime like Cadfael at a much higher rank of priesthood, his trusted aid (henchman) on so many adventures who witnesses his replacement by a shoddy incompetent character, a high-ranking member of the thieves' guild posing as another character wanting to find out who dared hire assassins to kill the Lord on the guilds' own turf, and so on, so forth.

The setting provides the continuity.

Quote from: Ladybird;700018And the party (ie, the characters) would let him get away with that?

That's a thing the party's team leader should have solved in-game, potentially up to kicking the character out or just cutting them down where they stand. It's not a problem that the GM should have had stick his hands into the setting to solve.

The age old problem of... "He has the car"

I am NOT going to kick out the problem player who is the only transportation for the handicapped player and two other players without cars.

I did though apply pressure where I could. Tried talking, yadda yadda.

The other players just tended to roll with it. They were used to it.

To the problem players credit. While being a nuisance on the one front, he was curbing other behavior that would have had me kick him out on the spot. Handicapped player or no. But as was. He bent some so I bent some and the other players bent some.

And about 8 years later I get a new group and end up with about the exact same situation. argh!

Quote from: Benoist;700101The setting provides the continuity.

QFT Good post.

The biggest issue now is that the role of setting in later iterations of the game has been reduced to a flimsy 2D backdrop that only exists as a blue screen against which awesome egos do kewl stuff.

In a game model where the setting is largely irrelevant you either "fix" things to ensure continuity ( i.e. cheat) or whine endlessly about how the campaign has no purpose because a few knuckleheads bite it every few months.

Bring setting back to its rightful place as the center of the game and so many "problems" fix themselves.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;700120QFT Good post.

The biggest issue now is that the role of setting in later iterations of the game has been reduced to a flimsy 2D backdrop that only exists as a blue screen against which awesome egos do kewl stuff.

In a game model where the setting is largely irrelevant you either "fix" things to ensure continuity ( i.e. cheat) or whine endlessly about how the campaign has no purpose because a few knuckleheads bite it every few months.

Bring setting back to its rightful place as the center of the game and so many "problems" fix themselves.

Yeah, I agree, although the flimsy 2D backdrop goes back to people running campaigns consisting of TSR modules in nominally-Greyhawk in the late '70s. Running GDQ has similar issues to running Rise of the Runelords.

Quote from: S'mon;700141Yeah, I agree, although the flimsy 2D backdrop goes back to people running campaigns consisting of TSR modules in nominally-Greyhawk in the late '70s. Running GDQ has similar issues to running Rise of the Runelords.

I agree. Some of the TSR modules, like GDQ, are way too easy to construe under the 2D backdrops that took over precedence in the game's design. It is assumed that the G series are part of a greater setting of course, and that the adventure sites are dynamic et al, but if you don't know what you're doing, that the DMG advice flies over your head and that you construe the modules as scripts, as opposed to settings, and there is a part of that fault that befalls to the way the modules are linked to each other in the text itself, let's be clear, then it becomes all too easy to run them as 2D hackfests where problems of "story continuity" creep in.

The A series suffers from the same issues, though I somehow feel they are worse in that context. It would take me a serious amount of retooling before feeling comfortable running these modules, personally (and I'd do it, for the record).

Quote from: Benoist;700101If you approach the game not under an "it's like a movie or TV series" rationale but with the idea there is a world and the player characters just happen to be some of the people doing stuff in it, characters live and die and are replaced, whereas the setting lives on.

This means that the sense of continuity comes from the living setting.

Ben, I started to write this same post a couple of days ago, and I decided I wanted to make it a blog post instead. Very well said, and I plan to link this with attribution when my post goes up.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;700150Ben, I started to write this same post a couple of days ago, and I decided I wanted to make it a blog post instead. Very well said, and I plan to link this with attribution when my post goes up.

Thanks! Let me know when it goes up. I'll link it on my facebook page.

Quote from: Benoist;700101If you approach the game not under an "it's like a movie or TV series" rationale but with the idea there is a world and the player characters just happen to be some of the people doing stuff in it, characters live and die and are replaced, whereas the setting lives on.

There was a Greyhawk FAQ at one time (may still exist) that summed it up nicely to me:

Quote from: Greyhawk FAQGreyhawk is bigger than any character, but any character can become as big as Greyhawk.

I like this way of looking at it.  It directly states that your characters aren't the center of the world, but by virtue of providing a world that is larger than the characters, the potential impact of the characters increases.

Quote from: Ladybird;700050Survival is it's own reward.

In fact, there are actually no rules for winning the game; the winning is in the playing and the staying alive.
-Understanding Traveller

Quote from: Omega;700116The age old problem of... "He has the car"

I am NOT going to kick out the problem player who is the only transportation for the handicapped player and two other players without cars.

I did say character, not player; make them come back with someone more appropriate, if that character can't tone it down. But if they're the type of player who would be a shit about it, that really sucks.

When joining an already-established SLA Industries ops team, the team wanted to interview for their new hire. So I had to create a couple of character concepts and actually play out interview scenes with them, and then detail out the winner. It was fun! It was appropriate.

Quote from: S'mon;700141Yeah, I agree, although the flimsy 2D backdrop goes back to people running campaigns consisting of TSR modules in nominally-Greyhawk in the late '70s. Running GDQ has similar issues to running Rise of the Runelords.

That's because "modules" were never conceived of in the original creation of the game, and neither were "convention tournaments."

The G modules are published versions of convention tournaments.  Of COURSE they have fuckall to do with D&D.