So I finally managed to get past the whole overland travel section of this chapter. Having ended the last chapter by successfully defending Triboar, my PCs traveled east along the Evermoor Way in order to complete the quests given by Triboar's NPCs in the most efficient way possible. In the last two sessions I had taken a granular approach to play by recording time traveled, distance traveled, travel costs, and other associated bookkeeping, but this time around I only focused on the quests themselves and my character's decisions. As a consequence I also was no longer rolling for random encounters either, since the system was tied to time-of-day, distance and travel pace, so you could say I wasn't so much playing the game as much as just reading flavor text, but I found the random die rolls to be more immersion breaking and momentum halting than as fun as they were supposed to be. Also, random encounters lend themselves more to theater of the mind combat than they do to gridded play, unless I wanted to spend time setting up the encounter myself, which means I would basically be creating it whole from the ground up myself, so what would be the point.
None of the quests had any really interesting encounters attached, but at least there was a good amount of treasure rewarded upon completion. The only really involved one was the final quest I played, encountered on reaching the final destination of my travels, Urgala Meltimer's quest at Zymoran Hall. This quest required us to go back to Yartar, find a thief, chase him down, find his stolen goods, bargain, bribe, and negotiate with several NPCs before gaining the quest reward. There should have been more quests like this and had I been playing this at a table with a live group I'm sure it could have taken an entire session on its own. However unexpectedly, it provided a satisfying capstone to the otherwise tedious traveling of this section and right at the end I had my PCs meet Harshnag and gain the knowledge to advance to the next chapter of the book.
Also after all this travel and questing I'm primed for combat. I would run a few random encounters just for fun, but Chapter 4 is a dungeon crawl and I'd be more interested to play that instead. Dungeon crawls also lend themselves better to solo play, a concept that goes back to 1e AD&D. The modern Dungeon Master's Guide harkens back to the 1e DMG in granting tables and suggested rules for solo dungeon crawls as well.
Overall I give Chapter 4 a 3.5/5. The beginning and ending of the Chapter were great, with a lot of backstory and a satisfying conclusion, but the central travel of the chapter felt like a slog. I was going to end my solo gaming experiment here, but I think it might be worth it to play at least one more session in Chapter 5, to see if the dungeon crawl might be enough to carry me through the game.
Also I had been reading through the 4e "Scales of War" adventure path. I'm disappointed I didn't know of its existence sooner, since I had been unknowingly running a 4e campaign for a while and I'm much more familiar with the playstyle of that edition, and with the focus on encounters and skill challenges and lighter roleplay elements might make that easier to play alone. Also I feel that as an adventure path it is much more epic than the adventure modules released for the current edition. Storm King's Thunder and previous modules such as Tyranny of Dragons feel a lot more limited in scope, you're restricted to the Sword Coast, just one part of one continent of one world in one plane and your enemies aren't varied much either, while "Scales of War" has you journeying into the Shadowfell, the FeyWild, Elemental Planes, and finally the Nine Hells itself in order to fight Tiamat, encountering along the way the many wild denizens of all these places and a number of epic-tier monsters, gods and deities. Bahamut doesn't even show up in Rise of Tiamat, like WTF.
And lastly, another idea for a future time, is that I might run a solo campaign with a completely restricted scope, by going back down to 1st edition AD&D and playing through the Village of Hommlet adventure. I've never played 1e, I don't think I even understand all the rules, but I'd love to teach myself it and see if it really is wildly different from later editions, and if it really is as harsh and dungeon focused as I think it is, and if it really does live up to the hype.
Or I could, you know, try to find a group online and keep to a regular schedule.
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