This Tunnels & Trolls adventure that I ran for my brother concluded recently. The Type V Demon guarding a treasure chamber triggered its Wave of Terror attack, causing the party's dwarf and fairy to flee. This turned a tenuously balanced combat to the demon's advantage. The remaining party members made a rushed retreat out of the crumbling tomb, snatching a few handfuls of treasure on their way out. They promptly arrived at a city and partied all night. The leprechaun woke up with a tattoo. Read it all at the wiki.
The purpose of this post is to revisit the premise of this experimental campaign and take notes on what did and didn't work well with the system, scenario, and house rules.
The eight character party was--perhaps predictably--overkill. Part of the reason was because I scaled the adventure difficulty to match the party as I converted it from D&D stats to T&T stats on the fly. So the large party just slowed things down unnecessarily. A 4-6 character party would suffice. Larger parties are better suited for mega-dungeon type campaigns, which The Book of Treasure Maps is not.
"The Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom" house rule is just too clunky for PbP. This dungeon was just the right size for completing in a month of consistent play, but things will usually crop up that slow down play for stretches of time. A simpler reward for consistent, brisk participation would be extra experience points or Confidence/Fate/Action Points for completing the adventure within a certain time frame.
My need for a quirky random event table to wrap up each adventure will instead be filled by the Carousing Mishaps table from issue #4 of Fight On! For example: "Did you really make out with an emu or was that just the drugs?"
T&T's abstract combat, punctuated with Saving Roll stunts, worked well for PbP. A battle between the 8 character party and 10 skeletons was resolved quickly with the help of an online dice roller.
T&T's Saving Roll (SR) system did its duty. It encouraged the player to declare creative, colorful, and detailed actions by awarding xp on both success and failure. A friend made an astute observation, describing the SR system as "Obama-esque".
I ramped up the SR difficulty as the adventure went along, generally using Level 1 SRs at the beginning, but then using more Level 3 SRs towards the end. In the future, I'll lean towards harder SRs from the beginning, to make things interesting and earn the characters more xp. One thing that could be fun is negotiation between the player and DM for setting the difficulty of each SR, but that may slow down a PbP game too much at times.
I have many more treasure map adventures and plan to keep this campaign open indefinitely, with rotating players. Let me know if you ever what to play it.
The purpose of this post is to revisit the premise of this experimental campaign and take notes on what did and didn't work well with the system, scenario, and house rules.
The eight character party was--perhaps predictably--overkill. Part of the reason was because I scaled the adventure difficulty to match the party as I converted it from D&D stats to T&T stats on the fly. So the large party just slowed things down unnecessarily. A 4-6 character party would suffice. Larger parties are better suited for mega-dungeon type campaigns, which The Book of Treasure Maps is not.
"The Triple Secret Random Dungeon Fate Chart of Very Probable Doom" house rule is just too clunky for PbP. This dungeon was just the right size for completing in a month of consistent play, but things will usually crop up that slow down play for stretches of time. A simpler reward for consistent, brisk participation would be extra experience points or Confidence/Fate/Action Points for completing the adventure within a certain time frame.
My need for a quirky random event table to wrap up each adventure will instead be filled by the Carousing Mishaps table from issue #4 of Fight On! For example: "Did you really make out with an emu or was that just the drugs?"
T&T's abstract combat, punctuated with Saving Roll stunts, worked well for PbP. A battle between the 8 character party and 10 skeletons was resolved quickly with the help of an online dice roller.
T&T's Saving Roll (SR) system did its duty. It encouraged the player to declare creative, colorful, and detailed actions by awarding xp on both success and failure. A friend made an astute observation, describing the SR system as "Obama-esque".
I ramped up the SR difficulty as the adventure went along, generally using Level 1 SRs at the beginning, but then using more Level 3 SRs towards the end. In the future, I'll lean towards harder SRs from the beginning, to make things interesting and earn the characters more xp. One thing that could be fun is negotiation between the player and DM for setting the difficulty of each SR, but that may slow down a PbP game too much at times.
I have many more treasure map adventures and plan to keep this campaign open indefinitely, with rotating players. Let me know if you ever what to play it.
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