Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366038A second way is that there are player-driven organizations called Adventuring Companies. So if you want to have a thieves guild house, or a knightly order, or just a named adventuring party.. you could have that. Just declare yourselves a group, and you get a little bonus: an extra "group" action point which can be spent during the game.

The Adventuring Company concept sounds very interesting.  Could you please elaborate a little more on this extra Bennie or action point that the group is awarded to use during play?  How does it work?  What can be done with it?  Are these points a one-time deal and once spent gone forever, or do they renew somehow?

Quote from: Drohem;366042The Adventuring Company concept sounds very interesting.  Could you please elaborate a little more on this extra Bennie or action point that the group is awarded to use during play?  How does it work?  What can be done with it?  Are these points a one-time deal and once spent gone forever, or do they renew somehow?

It's just a single action point and you get it once per game.

In D&D4 terms, characters can do a move, a standard action, and a minor action in a round. An action point allows for "one more action". So usually each player starts with one action point. The AdCoAction point is for the guild.

In my experience, it is usually never used.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366022I was kind of interested in Wyrmstone when it came out- (It uses FantasyCraft right now, but originally it was going to be 3.5) because they had a maxim that "no books are brought to the table". During the 3.5 era, that attitude was unique.

So I like their approach.


Their Campaign Rules sound like a lot of fun.

I was looking at that -- it looks pretty cool.

And although they discourage rulebooks, I'd have to at least call to roll on the Table of Ouch at least once, just for kicks.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;366044It's just a single action point and you get it once per game.

In D&D4 terms, characters can do a move, a standard action, and a minor action in a round. An action point allows for "one more action". So usually each player starts with one action point. The AdCoAction point is for the guild.

In my experience, it is usually never used.

Cool, so just like a normal Action Point that a character can use.  So, if spent by a group in play, then does every character in that group gain the benefit of the extra action, or does the group have to choose to apply it to a single character in the group?

Quote from: jibbajibba;366041(I don;t liek them by the way as I don;t think the idea of an adventurer is immersive. My PCs are thieves, drunken fighters, homosexual hobbits or whatever, they have adventures but adventuring isn't a career for them)

Well, it doesn't have to be an adventurer's guild -- adventuring company is just the blanket term. You could create the Homosexual Halflings of Harforth if you wanted to.

In any case -- yep, it's more local structure than global structure. Living campaigns share the drawback of MMOs in that it's very difficult to affect the world beyond a certain size. The end of adventure feedback does matter -- if everyone who plays a certain adventure reports that they killed a certain NPC, that probably gets written into the campaign. But it's hard to see the effects of that from the player perspective.

The big convention events go the other way. I went to DDXP this year and played in the big event, the battle interactive. Something like 40 tables played at once, at all level ranges, and all the PCs were located at the same battle at the same time. The course of the fight was determined by how well the tables did as a whole, and you could send help to other tables, or ask for help, and so on. At one point there was a vote on a morally ambiguous decision, and the majority ruled. Totally new kind of experience for me, and it was a blast.

Also my character now has a fountain named after him in a certain city in the Forgotten Realms. And I mean in canon. I have a piece of paper from WotC that says so. Obviously it's not going to make it into the 5e Forgotten Realms sourcebook, and I'm sure if they do another 100 year skip it'll be torn down, but by god, right now it's there.

Quote from: Thanlis;366048Also my character now has a fountain named after him in a certain city in the Forgotten Realms. And I mean in canon. I have a piece of paper from WotC that says so. Obviously it's not going to make it into the 5e Forgotten Realms sourcebook, and I'm sure if they do another 100 year skip it'll be torn down, but by god, right now it's there.

My minotaur Ionos has a small monument to "Ionos, for the glory of battle" located near the south wall in Elturgard. It's a bronze statue of a minotaur with several dozen arrows sticking out of it.

Quote from: Drohem;366047Cool, so just like a normal Action Point that a character can use.  So, if spent by a group in play, then does every character in that group gain the benefit of the extra action, or does the group have to choose to apply it to a single character in the group?

I was really curious about this.  Does anyone know involved with the LFR the answer?

Quote from: Drohem;366154I was really curious about this.  Does anyone know involved with the LFR the answer?

Just one character. This makes it less exciting, obviously.

The other big adventuring company flaw -- one PC per player per company. You can't join a given company with multiple PCs, which makes it really tricky to ensure that you're adventuring with other AdCo members. I think it's a good idea which could have been implemented better.

Quote from: Thanlis;366160Just one character. This makes it less exciting, obviously.

Meh, yeah that's kind of weak.  Thanks for the answer.

Quote from: Drohem;366161Meh, yeah that's kind of weak.  Thanks for the answer.

It has its moments. I used the AdCo point once as a fighter to grant someone a second wind, move, and then grant someone else a second wind. Kind of clutch. But that may be the coolest thing I ever do with it.

Quote from: Thanlis;366165It has its moments. I used the AdCo point once as a fighter to grant someone a second wind, move, and then grant someone else a second wind. Kind of clutch. But that may be the coolest thing I ever do with it.

Sure, I didn't mean that it's totally useless.  It's always cool for any one character to have an extra Action Point in any one encounter.  As in your example, it could really be a clutch play that saves the day.  I guess I would be more impressed if it affected more than just a single character- and, yes, one could argue that a single character's action(s) could affect the whole group, but that's not how I mean it.  Damn, I hope that makes sense.

Taking this Living Campaign idea outside of the realm of Living Greyhawk, Pathfinder Society, etc, one could in theory run a much more interactive, multi-game group Living Campaign...

Now THAT is something I could get behind... A living campaign where "killing the Goblin King" actually makes him quite dead, but may have heavy repercussions in other games being played.

This would probably require that the GMs be given a lot of leeway with what is happening in their campaign, while a storytelling team is handling potential consequences of the actions taken by other groups...

I'm sure some GMs have run games set within the same game world for two or more different groups. This living campaign I imagine would not be so different, except that in scale it would be much larger, of course...

Does anything like this exist somewhere?
Should it?

I could see how hard this must be to manage if there were more than two or three dozen games being run at any one time but it just seems fun to me.

Quote from: Nihilistic Mind;367120Taking this Living Campaign idea outside of the realm of Living Greyhawk, Pathfinder Society, etc, one could in theory run a much more interactive, multi-game group Living Campaign...

Now THAT is something I could get behind... A living campaign where "killing the Goblin King" actually makes him quite dead, but may have heavy repercussions in other games being played.

This would probably require that the GMs be given a lot of leeway with what is happening in their campaign, while a storytelling team is handling potential consequences of the actions taken by other groups...

I'm sure some GMs have run games set within the same game world for two or more different groups. This living campaign I imagine would not be so different, except that in scale it would be much larger, of course...

Does anything like this exist somewhere?
Should it?

I could see how hard this must be to manage if there were more than two or three dozen games being run at any one time but it just seems fun to me.

As I hinted up there somewhere you could only do this if you didn't run the adventures simultaneously and if you have 10,000 members in 2500 groups of 4 that would mean you needed to create 2500 diffferent scenarios to enable every group to play, so its not going to work. I can see it working for a user population of up to 100 but beyond that its just not practial.
You also have the additional problem of quality control. Even in a well structured rules driven game where gm fiat is reduced as much as possible there will be crappy DMs that allow their PCs too much leeway and that can have repurcussions across the whole environment.

It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh

Quote from: jibbajibba;367132It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh

No, no. What's ironic is that WotC has been running living campaigns since 2nd edition using the same "instanced" techniques, and yet people still think it has something to do with 4e.

Quote from: jibbajibba;367132As I hinted up there somewhere you could only do this if you didn't run the adventures simultaneously and if you have 10,000 members in 2500 groups of 4 that would mean you needed to create 2500 diffferent scenarios to enable every group to play, so its not going to work. I can see it working for a user population of up to 100 but beyond that its just not practial.
You also have the additional problem of quality control. Even in a well structured rules driven game where gm fiat is reduced as much as possible there will be crappy DMs that allow their PCs too much leeway and that can have repurcussions across the whole environment.

It is quite ironic that for the all the 4e 'its not a MMO' handwringing the flagship campaign has to run instances like an MMO. I mean you gotta laugh

Lol, yeah, definitely not something I would see happening on a scale of 2500 groups...

As for quality control, you're right, it might be the largest concern... The Master Storytelling team would have to rely on each GM to handle a region according to their guidelines, but then again, it's the problem everywhere, isn't it?
No matter how interactive a Living Campaign can become through the proper development, it comes down to a group of individual GMs to pick up the slack and run a good game for his players...