The Valley Part 6 - Waiting for Players

The time for the Valley is coming up soon enough.

Summer activities are messing with our sessions as much as usual.

Dale’s schedule will be back to its erratic phase, starting in August and ending in December. So he will obviously have to stop running his game for a good deal of time.

He wants to resume the game some time (possibly after the Valley), but from experience, I give that less than a 50/50 chance. Things change too much to make solid plans, but I’m certainly not against returning to the Order of the Mithril Dolphin.

So that means we’ll be playing the Valley in early-mid July.

Next on today’s menu – Why am I playing 4E if I dislike it so much?

First and foremost, I don’t hate D&D 4E.
I’m just not happy with a good chunk of the crap they’ve served us this time around; overlong combats, increasingly more complex powers, every class is so balanced that they are all equally bland and boring, nerfing monsters to boredom so they don’t hurt so much (rust monster), not rolling for hit points, and so on.

I see a lot in the game that has potential, but there was a lot of potential in the suck-fest known as 2E.
In 2E we had house-ruled so many things that the actual rules in the book were all but ignored.

A year ago my liking of 4E was high. Now it is just a hair above 2E.

“So why don’t you play one of the other versions of D&D, or a different game entirely?”

- Because I am not the only person in the group.
I’d like to play Basic D&D, Dale would probably like to go back to 1E AD&D, Mike is happy with 4E, and so on.

- Because when we lose players, very few potentially new players will be interested in playing an old version.
D&D is the most known RPG and therefore has a better chance to pull in new players than any others. By not playing the latest version, you lose more than you gain.

- Because no one wants to drop $40 on a book without knowing they’ll get their $40 out of it.
I’ve literally bought books for a new RPG, only to play one game of it. Bye-bye money.

I’d rather use my experience and others to determine ways to fix or work around 4E.

Others have worked up ways to improve social skill challenges. I’ll just use role-playing and then have the players make the appropriate checks at certain points.

There are plenty of ways to speed up the combat.

And you can bet your ass the morons who nerfed the rust monster can kiss my hairy ass. When I use that monster it will not be some pathetic creature that has to hit the defender several times before it hurts. It will be the same exact creature it was before 4E – a force that makes the fighter jump behind the wizard, just like in the drawing in the 1E AD&D DMG.

“What about the all the equipment that gets ruined by the rust monster? It kills the game.”
Shut up.
You’re not dealing with some amateur DM that does crap to his players out of some immature control freak need to be malicious to the players and let them know who’s the boss.
I’ve played under those DM’s and they suck at it. I consider them to be worst than Monty Haul DM’s by far.
If I throw a rust monster at the party, you can bet money on there being a fair compensatory reward afterwards in addition to standard rewards.

Now you’re saying “Ok, I’m still waiting for information about the Valley.”

Well so am I.

I tasked the players to make three character back-stories so I can prepare a game based around the characters. Then I give them parameters to give the 3 characters stats.

“Why three?”
A lot of reasons really.
The last time I had players send me back-stories we ended up with no healers. This helps prevent that from happening.
It allows the player to have a back-up PC, just in case.
It spreads the work around. I’m keeping one of the PC’s for myself to be used for my own needs as a DM.

What if the player doesn’t make three PC’s?
Then he obviously is not vested in making the game entertaining, so I won’t be putting any effort into making his PC’s part of the story.
No quests, no special stories, no special consideration from the DM to help him out in the form of treasure.
If a player is just showing up to the game to be entertained and thinks I’m going to be a conduit to throw monsters at him so he can kill them and take their stuff, then that player is doomed to disappointment.
This isn’t high school D&D.
I’ve had actual Valley sessions where there was only a single die roll the whole night.
The campaign will not be a simple formula of 1 – snag plot hook, 2 – fight #1, 3 – fight #2, 3 – boss fight, 4 – return with plot hook item, 5 – reward, then next week repeat.

So far I’ve received a few histories, and some partial histories. At least a two of them did not even bother to read my “campaign packet” or even the blog entries so far.

Now once everyone has sent me their histories and we’ve hammered out any issues with the histories, I’ll be giving them special parameters that they can use to make their PC’s. Those parameters will be special abilities, penalties, equipment, and so on.

Then I added three starting quests to each PC suited to their stories. These quests can be as simple as killing ten goblin minions to as complex and open ended as “find out more about the dreams”.

Then everyone should make 3 PC’s while I populate the NPC’s I’ll need to get the game going.