A rainy day off means more blogging. I’m looking at recent fediverse posts of mine and turning them into blog posts if I think they’re worth keeping around.
I like to write short single-post summaries of our game sessions in addition to the regular session summaries on our campaign wikis. Recently I mentioned the makeup of our party:
Running Arden Vul for a group with a level 1 fighter. a level 3 cleric, another level 4 (?) fighter and a level 8 wizard with level 1 henchman. They get to pick the difficulty level they like. Today, the mage saved them: three fell into a pit each, the first level dude fell to -5 immediately, the cleric was lightly wounded, the level 4 fighter fell into a chute and sled two levels down. Wow! But invisibility, polymorph self and potions of extra healing saved the day. 😅
@andy asked me about playing with mixed level parties. I’d say that compared to my days as a D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder 1 referee running Adventure Paths I feel that old school games like B/X and AD&D running sandboxes like mega-dungeons and hex-crawls are more carefree for me.
Players determine the difficulty level by deciding where to go. This is made possible because mega-dungeons and hex-crawls are sandboxes in the sense that there are multiple ways to traverse them with no clear progression in difficulty or plot requirements. All this requires is for the players to be able to make an informed decision. Rumours about monsters provide warnings, and the implied treasure provides enticement. Dungeon level depth provides both.
Characters catch up with each other. Since XP requirements double for every level, by the time the highest level party member gains a new level, everybody else is at most one level below them, more or less.
Example: Assume an experience point progression like 0, 2000, 4000, 8000, 16 000, 32 000. If everybody is first level with 0 experience points and one is fourth level with 8000 experience points, and everybody gains 8000 experience points, then everybody is fourth level with 8000 experience points and one is fifth level with 16 000 experience points. If everybody gains another 8000 experience points, then everybody is fifth level with most characters having 16 000 and one character having 24 000 experience points. They’ve all caught up!
The power discrepancy from new spell levels is limited in scope because spells are limited per day. So whatever the thread, either the magic users did not use their spell, so nothing changed, or they did use their spell and can’t use it again for the rest of the day. This is why hex-crawls with small encounters favour magic-users: there are few encounters per day and magic-users start with full spells. I’m usually OK with that. My hex-crawls aren’t all about fighting the monsters, anyway. It’s about finding new lairs and either talking – or fighting in those lairs, i.e. it turns into a small dungeon.
In addition to that, powerful magic-users have very few hit points (a d4 per level) and no armour. They need bodyguards even if the level discrepancy is high.
All these small effects make mixed level parties possible. Just make sure you have the right non-linear setting.
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For reference, we put session summaries up on our campaign wikis. Most of them are in German.
#RPG