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Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Follow Up to Last Night's Congested Conjecturing - Should Adventures Have a "Power Slider?"

So, last night I pondered Commercial Adventures - Should They Be Level-less? Tonight, based on some excellent and insightful comments, I'm going to refine the question.

Should adventures have a "power slider?"

What I mean by "power slider" is should the adventure should be written with a certain level spread primarily in mind but include suggestions and options to decrease or increase the challenges presented within?

Basically, ways to beef up or tone down the traps, adversaries and even rewards depending on the DM's actual campaign and the party of PCs it will be used with. If nothing else, these would be examples for the end user to refer to as they make their own tweaks.

And yes, still have congestion from hell...

4 comments:

  1. I like the power slide model for modules. My style of game mastering is to adapt existing scenarios to match the story being told. Having an existing encounter with advice on how to modify it to match differing power levels has proven to be incredibly helpful in that regard. Especially since I used to be the one drafted to run new systems on a regular basis... modules that modeled varying power levels made my life sooo much easier.

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  2. Even more extreme option: should adventures, or at least dungeon adventures, be written so that they can be placed at any physical depth, with the assumption that it will be run in the old school manner of scaling danger to depth?

    I think either way, you'd want a minimum level based on the dominant creature. Monsters like orcs or human bandits can be used for practically any target level by scaling up the numbers and adding higher-level leaders. But others, like vampires, are hard to scale down below a certain point.

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  3. Fantasy Craft was designed with a very slick "any level" Power Slider baked in. It technically worked, but my experience was it was more trouble for on-the-fly conversions than it was worth, although it was probably something I could have adjusted to if I tried.

    That said....a few notes on adjusting the module up or down a bit seems to be fine to me.

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  4. It seems like it would greatly complicate writing an adventure, unless you made it really bland and generic. I think the individual DM, who knows his group personally, is best qualified to make these adjustments as needed.

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