3.5 Years of 3.5

Yesterday was the final session of my Ptolus campaign, which started about four years ago. We played on a bi-weekly schedule, but due to a number of cancelled sessions, the campaign ran about 3.5 years. I started with 8 players and finished with 6, though only 4 of the final 6 players were there since the start of the campaign. By the close of the campaign, half the party was 20th level, with the rest 19th or 18th.

The final session was great. First, the party mopped up the last normal encounter, a group of demons with some decent gear. Then they found a major stash of magic items and loot, including an extremely powerful, sentient, evil magic staff. Along with various other abilities, the staff could cast Disintegrate every round, at will. After protracted debate, the party used a powerful spell to banish the staff into the sun.

Then they underwent a magical challenge to enter the demiplane where the Big Bad was waiting. Three passed the trial and immediately started fighting a gargantuan and completely corrupted solar angel, in a pocket dimension consisting of darkness, writhing black tentacles, and zero gravity. The solar was protecting an evil artifact. The other three characters, including the cleric and two wizards, were still back in the dungeon. Within a few rounds, the spellcasters had successfully used magic to track down the rest of the party and then travel there. However, because they entered the demiplane without properly passing the magic challenge, they were all instantly turned evil.

In the ensuing chaos, the minotaur fighter was killed first. Then one of the evil wizards killed another one. The druid and the rogue/sorcerer battled on bravely. The evil cleric tried to steal the evil artifact, but planeshifted away empty-handed. The evil wizard damaged the evil angel with a big area of effect spell aimed at the druid and the rogue/sorcerer, as they both struggled to resist corruption. As the angel battered on the wizard and druid, the rogue/sorcerer got ahold of the dead wizard's staff, and deliberately broke it to trigger a retributive strike.

The blast killed the druid and rogue/sorcerer, and banished the evil angel and artifact back to Hell. The evil wizard barely managed to survive because she was also a tough dwarf with lots of hit points. Then she was summoned to meet with the pantheon of Gods, who personally thanked her for saving the world before sending her back home. In summary, 2/3 of the party died and the survivors were both turned evil. But they still managed to save the world. That was a good stopping point for the game.

I have a lot of past DM experience, but this was my only experience at running a D&D 3.5 game. Here is what I learned:

1. First level characters are fragile.
2. Making the players buy stats with the default point buy system made it difficult for multi-class characters.
3. Nobody want to play the cleric, but every party needs a cleric.
4. Nobody wants to play a bard, even though a group can really benefit from having one.
5. People get excited about rolling critical hits, but they are boring in 3.5.
6. Certain spells can just really drag out a fight, especially area of effect hindrances like solid fog.
7. I banned Evard's Black Tentacles because I could tell that it was going to ruin a lot of fight scenes if I allowed it.
8. The sweet spot for 3.5 seems to be roughly 3rd level through 8th level. After that, the complexity of the game gets in the way of the fun.
9. Attacks of opportunity are a necessary evil in 3.5. They add to the complexity, but eliminate a fair amount of otherwise silly activity.
10. Birds are better. Our first druid experimented with shapechanging into a variety of forms, but our second druid spent more time in ordinary bird form than in human form, because it was often very practical to be a small, inoffensive-looking creature that could fly.
11. Discussions about loot often slowed the game down, even though I encouraged players to handle that via email between sessions.
12. Inexperienced players are much more likely to hold actions.
13. Traps seem like the most potential fun for a game master, but they ultimately slow down the game a lot, as wary players become obsessive about looking for traps.
14. At first, spell resistant monsters are a huge hassle for spellcasters, but at higher levels, the casters tend to easily make those rolls.
15. Summoning is bad for the game. We got to the point where three spellcasters were summoning huge monsters every round, leaving everybody squeezed in every fight. Turns take a long time when a character is managing several summoned creatures.
16. Druids need too much access to the Monster Manual, posing an ongoing threat of metagaming.
17. High level characters often have a five-minute work day, or less. They throw a few high-level spells around and then want to retreat and recover their spells.
18. High level combat are very slow to play out. One session, it took us six hours to play out a 2-minute combat.
19. High level encounters can be brain-burners for the DM, keeping track of ongoing spell effects, monster abilities, spell resistance, damage resistance, immunities, etc.
20. Towards the end of the campaign, death lost its sting. A character or two might die, and then the party would just spend a big chunk of money to bring them back without level loss. Only the threat of characters turning completely evil kept the final session exciting.

Though I was mostly running pre-made adventures from the Ptolus book, I did an insane amount of prep work. I printed off literal reams of paper worth of pre-made tactical maps and scissored off the white borders to save table space. Instead of using miniatures, I created roughly 1,200 tokens. I swiped online artwork, re-sized it for the token size, and then craft-glued the pictures to wooden nickels or cardboard sheets. I did a second set of 1,200 tokens on just cardboard sheets for use in tracking initiative. I also made my own custom ref screen, for the rules that I could never remember offhand. I also printed off dozens of pictures for use as visual aids during key scenes, along with a couple dozen Call of Cthulhu style handouts. For one large and complex fight scene, I actually created a 3' tall scale model of the location, with scaled down tokens of characters and opponents.

If I ever feel like running 3.5 again, I will run this same campaign again for a new set of players, so I can re-use all that prep work.

Nice. Wish I had that kind of group going.

So will you move up to D+D v5 if you run another campaign? I was listening to someone running a 5.0 and I really liked what I was hearing mechanicswise.

Gary Sax wrote: Nice. Wish I had that kind of group going.

So will you move up to D+D v5 if you run another campaign? I was listening to someone running a 5.0 and I really liked what I was hearing mechanicswise.

I would like to try D&D 5 before I buy it at some point. In the short term, I will stick to playing board games, and after that just running less-complex games like Call of Cthulhu.

Shadowrun.

And as an aside, you should sell this campaign to the Diablo guys and help make Diablo 4.

Funny you should mention Shadowrun. One of my regular players (the minotaur) works in IT, but he is too lazy to deal with complex rules in games, so he outsourced his leveling up tasks to another player (the rogue/sorcerer). Minotaur recently decided that he wants to run a Shadowrun campaign for his kids, and asked the Rogue player to make characters for his kids. Rogue found the Shadowrun character generation rules to be tedious, but he made a character which was immediately rejected by Minotaur as not fun. So Rogue brought the Shadowrun rulebook to our final D&D session for mockery before giving it back to Minotaur.

I'm a Cyberpunk purist. IMO, the magic and monsters of Shadowrun are a crutch for players who can't deal with playing a straight-up sci-fi setting.

Have you looked at Trail of Cthulhu? It takes the standard Lovecraftian investigation focused game-play and simplifies it but replacing a lot of the skill checks with a resource management system. I ran a short campaign and the rules really vanish into the storytelling. It's really easy to keep things moving at a solid clip as well. The only down side is that it doesn't seem to scale well past four or more players.

Nicely done. And totally agree about Shadowrun. Play fantasy, or play sci fi. Make a choice; we're at war.

For myself, I am completely and totally done with any iteration of DnD other than B/X and its various clones and descendants. LOTFP is good, DCC is good, B/X itself is great, but all the rest ... Ugh. Too much private system wankery and kewl builds to be bothered.

Nah, Shadowrun (at least 2nd and 3rd) is a lot more interesting to game than Cyberpunk 2020.

fortressat.com/forum/15-games-catchall/1...ames?start=30#208464

What about Mutant Crawl Classics? Last day to get in on the KS.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/1409961192/...classics-rpg-mcc-rpg

I was SO CLOSE to backing it, but honestly, WreckAge is substantially more fun and interesting from a setting perspective than DCC/MCC from what I've read (all 17 pages). It's also easier and has a better battle system. That said, I love the eroding party from DCC...that's fucking rad.

Not that I need celebrities to endorse my lifestyle, but this was nice to read:

www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/behin...losed-doors-a-912169