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Ultimate Death

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Ultimate Death

Unread postby icycalm » 17 Sep 2021 06:27

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https://www.patreon.com/posts/56228838

icycalm wrote:When you take all the above into account, maybe you can begin to see why I chose my Ultimate Edition as 2020 Game of the Year...
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icycalm
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Re: Ultimate Death

Unread postby icycalm » 17 Sep 2021 13:14

I’ve thought of another death scenario and how to deal with it.

Say two characters die. They roll new 1st-level characters, and the other two characters in the group are say 4th level. The party’s PL is now 10, but there are no adventures nearby of that PL. There are however two adventures of PL 4. So the party can be split into two groups, each comprised of a 1st- and 4th-level character for a PL of 5 (the party and adventure PLs don’t have to exactly match; I will determine a maximum tolerance via trial and error; 10-20% sounds like a good starting range).

These probably won’t be easy challenges because of the diminished action economy in the split groups. They have two characters instead of the four the adventure expects, but those two have an extra level, plus one of them is way overleveled and probably has access to spells and skills the adventure isn’t prepared for. So these would be interesting challenges, and we could probably even play them in midweek since they would only require two players and me. We can run them privately so that the groups will be anxious to see what happened to each other. How long would they wait if the other group fails to show up? What if one group is delayed not because they died but because the adventure ended up sending them across the world or to the planes?

Tons of cool situations will arise by utilizing this sort of rules.
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Re: Ultimate Death

Unread postby jeffrobot494 » 20 Sep 2021 23:32

I'm surprised you didn't mention hiring NPC mercenaries to shore up party strength, or having leveled henchmen or descendants as alternatives to a new 1st-level character. Those are all possibilities, no?
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Re: Ultimate Death

Unread postby icycalm » 21 Sep 2021 00:43

NPCs as allies, whether hirelings or otherwise, is a thorny issue. If you have treasure and you can hire as many as you want, adventures can be trivialized. So even though no one ever mentions this in printed materials, the DM isn't supposed to allow it—unless of course he allows it but strengthens up the enemies in the adventure accordingly, which I won't be doing for Battlegrounds. In Battlegrounds, the players will always be facing exactly what's written in the adventures. And also, since we have the entire strategy dimension (city-building + 4X), it means I HAVE to allow the players to hire however many mercenaries they want and can afford to. Which means that some adventures CAN be trivialized in Battlegrounds if the players want to spend the loot to do so, and that's okay. It's their loot, so if they want to spend it to ensure adventure completion, they're welcome to do so. They could just as well be spending it to buy themselves magical items for example, which have an analogous impact on party strength.

Generally speaking, the adventure loot is balanced so that spending it doesn't trivialize the adventure (on the contrary, judicious spending is REQUIRED to beat the adventure). In general, the PCs WON'T be able to afford an army of hirelings to beat all their enemies for them. But that's not counting the procreation and bloodline and strategy mechanics that I am introducing. Wouldn't a king's son be able to bring an entire army to bear in every adventure? That's when we'll need the rule that a king's son must prove himself first by going on individual adventures without royal help, before he can ascend to the throne. And this will be a GAME rule, not a role-playing rule. I.e. in the world there's nothing preventing a king's son from calling daddy to send an army down to the dungeon, but, in order to preserve adventure integrity for the enjoyment of all, the player will have to role-play the son as independent and desiring to make a name for himself and not depend on his father's shadow. HOWEVER, if half his party gets killed, and he gets "stuck" with the adventure because his friends had to roll 1st-level characters, and now they can't continue the adventure because their party is underpowered, I will ALLOW the player to call daddy and get some troops sent down to help while the new characters level. In short, the groups will try to defeat adventures WITHOUT using non-traditional D&D means, but character death and TPKs change everything, and at that point everything goes on the table: every means available for the players to make a comeback and continue the adventure, which includes pretty much all the stuff you mentioned. We might even make a table of a hierarchy of "extra help" in order of least to most disruptive, so that I can give players the least disruptive options at first, and as things get worse they can go down the table all the way to the most potent means in their disposal.

For example, the wives and partners the players will be able to gain through the Seduction mechanics WILL count and function as henchmen, and especially if they are adventurers (as opposed to housewives) they will be able to join the adventuring when needed (though pregnant women can miscarry if hit in battle, etc.) So I do plan to make especially the adventurer wives as a powerful tool in shoring up party strength when needed.

Your idea about descendants in the plural, on the other hand, had never occurred to me. I've always been thinking about singular descendants, i.e. your child that will grow into your future character. And of course as long as he's a child, he won't be much use in the adventuring phase. Rather I meant to use those as LIABILITIES in the sense that you have to protect your child for at least 16 years before you can actually use him as your character. You'll also need to be providing for his education to simulate all the stuff that regular D&D takes for granted; e.g. if you want your kid to be a wizard or a fighter you have to pay for him to become so, and I plan to give benefits for paying for a better school, etc., so that much of the players' loot can be put to good effect in this process.

But what if a player's character has five kids instead of one?

That possibility never occurred to me before you mentioned it. Only thing I know is that I won't allow direct control of more than one character at a time, and that character has to die or become terminally incapacitated before I give you control of another. It's just better for role-playing this way. So all your other kids will be NPCs. And I guess you're right, they could be used to shore up party strength when needed. But then I will make having extra kids expensive and difficult, otherwise every player can just churn out a giant family and form an army for nothing. We'll have constitution checks for the mother to not die in childbirth, and for the child to not be stillborn etc.

To summarize, all the options you mentioned are possibilities, but I will have to balance them carefully to avoid trivializing the adventures. Up to a point, that is acceptable, and even desirable, as I despise the idea of every single encounter in every single adventure being "perfectly balanced" from a tactical perspective. The game is about far more than tactics, and I want a player who becomes strong in a community for example to be able to leverage that community to clear at least SOME adventures as if they were nothing. In that case, his steamrolling of the adventure is his REWARD for the good role-playing or strategic thinking that led to his becoming influential in the community he leveraged. Certainly a king in Kingmaker should be able to even HIRE other player groups to clear adventures for him from his domain, and that's one of the features I want the game to have in the 4X phase. I'll even make it integral by requiring that a region be clear of published adventures before large-scale building etc. can be allowed.

The ultimate goals of the project are fairly easy to grasp: to approach as close as possible full realism (or what passes for realism in a fantasy world at any rate), while still retaining and using all the published material which is written with certain limitations and restrictions in mind. If we were only dealing with ONE group and ONE adventure or campaign at a time, and regular D&D rules, then we wouldn't be able to use stuff like henchmen to full effect, but since we have many groups and many adventures running simultaneously, that means the challenges are never-ending and even multiplying if one group starts failing really badly, which means that the means afforded the players should be correspondingly greater to face these multiple and multiplying threats. Of course all this sounds very vague and who knows how applicable it will be to good effect in particular situations in the game, so we need to wait until such situations arise in order to figure out exactly how to apply all these new rules and possibilities.

So far, we've had one player death, and it was a 1st-level character on his very first combat encounter. This means that he can just roll a brand-new character, have him join the party, and continue as normal. Nothing will have been lost other than a handful of XP. And since his teammates survived and defeated the enemies, the XP that one character lost are still in the team, because the other characters got it. So we haven't had a need for more complex party-strengthening rules beyond standard D&D character-rolling yet. I am eagerly awaiting tougher situations so I can showcase all the brand-new solutions I have for them.
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Re: Ultimate Death

Unread postby icycalm » 21 Sep 2021 01:09

By the way, to continue from my comments on CRPGs in the Death chapter, note that one of the most amusing episodes in the Crimson Throne campaign so far has been ysignal's death from the spiders. That whole encounter is fantastic (and far from over, btw), but ysignal's death has been one of its HIGHLIGHTS so far.

And in a CRPG it is impossible because death is impossible in a game with saving and loading. If it had been a CRPG the party would have just loaded an earlier save and kept going, and not only would they have missed on the excitement and humor of ysignal's death, but also the extra tension and difficulty and drama of the remaining three characters taking on the entire compound on their own—and winning.

It's truly tragic how CRPGs butcher the game they are supposed to be adapting, and it's all due to the stupidity and lack of dramatic sense of programmers.
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