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scon40 12-25-06, 07:58 PM

Ok folks. I'm taking a break from spending most of my Christmas and New Year's holidays working on the LG High Level Crawl for DDXP so I can address some of the concerns I'm seeing on various LG lists. I'm going to give you a detailed inside look at what has happened to this point and what the future will bring. Hopefully, a more detailed explanation will allay some of the fears and bring the blame squarely where it belongs, which sadly is in my hands. Ok, here we go… When the Circle decided to move to the current retirement age for LG characters, it was done for a couple of reasons. It is really hard to manage a campaign with a range of levels from 1st through 20th. Doing so on a worldwide basis is next to impossible. And using our RPGA provided allotment of adventures to provide adventures for that range of levels is a really problematic situation; you can’t really scale any adventure up to the highest levels of play. So you wind up having to limit the play range of adventures in a way that does not provide enough play for all levels of PCs. The D&D game is also a balancing act, and it becomes a more challenging one the higher in level the PCs are. At high levels, it takes a dedicated DM to really balance challenges for the party. We can’t provide that amount of dedication to the large number of high level players. And even if we could, it would not work effectively … you need an individual DM who can completely tailor the adventure to the specific PCs. That way you can provide an adventure which challenges the PCs properly and offers rewards that fit the PCs as well. High level PCs in the Greyhawk campaign world are an abnormality of sorts. Most NPCs in GH are not above 16th level. PCs at levels above 16th are going to be major movers and shakers on Oerth, and we needed to find a way to make their actions seem appropriately large to those PCs, but not have them overwhelm the play in the basic LG campaign. So we pulled the high level play out of the basic LG campaign and left it to be decided later as to how we would resolve the issues involving high level PCs. With the Circle extremely busy (and us not having Creighton taking over all of the Core adventures for us), we simply left it for later to work on. Once Creighton took over supervision of the Core adventures, we started to have a bit more time to discuss the less crucial issues of the campaign. It may bother some of you, but, in all honesty, the high level campaign was definitely not a top issue for us to resolve. By the end of the last year, we finally got around to working on the high level campaign. We quickly decided on the perfect first story arc for the high level campaign … the most famous of all high level games, the Tomb of Horrors. As we began work on plotting out how we would go about running the high level campaign, we ran into the same issues we had before. How would we balance the challenge? How would we get adventures allocated to high level play? And so on… At this point in time, the RPGA was finding a great deal of success in their DM’s Marks concept in their other campaigns: adventures written by the general populace of gamers, usually specifically for home games. When we approached the RPGA about the high level campaign for LG, they made us a deal. They were willing to give us 4 additional adventures over the quota we are allocated for LG that could be used for the high level campaign, but three of them had to be in the style of the DM’s Marks and the fourth would be a pre-written adventure for DDXP (then still known as Winter Fantasy). The Circle was very torn about taking this approach, but, in the end, we realized that using these “DM’s Challenges” would allow us to have the individual DMs tailor challenge and rewards to their specific players. So we agreed to the plan, and the Living Greyhawk DMs Challenges High-Level Option was born. HQ set a very specific schedule for the campaign. We had to produce 4 adventures a year: 3 DMs Challenge packets for play in the Spring, Summer, and Fall, and a pre-written dungeon crawl for the Winter (DDXP). I volunteered to handle the high-level campaign … all of the rest of the Circle had significantly large projects they were working on at the time, and I did not. Unfortunately, my time commitments outside of LG took a turn for the worse in 2006. I was unemployed unexpectedly in August of 2005 and did not find a new job until May 2006. I was spending a huge amount of time applying and interviewing for positions all along the Eastern Seaboard, and, once I found work, I found myself with less free-time outside of work than I had experienced with my previous job. And I made the awful mistake of not seeking additional help from my Circle mates and the other volunteers who offered their time. Thus we missed deadline after deadline in 2006. Finally, in November, I got my act together and got to serious work on the high-level campaign. But I ran into a problem. We were supposed to have three DMs Challenges out by this point in time: #1 out in May 06 and retiring in July 06, #2 out in August 06 and retiring in October 06, and #3 out in November 06 and retiring in January 06 … all out before the finale at DDXP in February. That was no longer possible. So we had two choices … cancel the DMs Challenges entirely for this story arc or make some sort of compromise with HQ. The RPGA actually was very generous, IMO; they let me move one of the DMs Challenges to after the DDXP adventure and release the first two at the same time now and let them be played up until DDXP. In the end, I think it is better to offer everyone a chance to play three additional adventures than simply pull them off the schedule. I know there is little time to play them, but it is better than nothing at all. If you don’t play them before DDXP, you don’t lose out on anything … the adventure at DDXP is playable without the first two DMs Challenges. And if you do play them, you get two extra play opportunities. After DDXP, the dungeon crawl premiered there will be released for play. Then we will release the third DMs Challenge and let it be available for three months of play (as was originally intended). We are already working on the next story arc, and that series of DMs Challenges will be available on time and for play for three months at a time. I’ll discuss with the RPGA about having us let the adventures be available for more than three months, but the likelihood is that they will not make a change to this. And I think three months is plenty of time to write and play a high-level adventure with your home campaign. So that’s how we got to where we are. It’s completely my fault we’re behind schedule, so any anger or complaints should be directed at me, not at HQ and not at the rest of the Circle. We’ll be on schedule from this point forward, so you won’t be dealing with this sort of compacted schedule in the future. The prequel in the main LG campaign is not really a “prequel” per se; it is an adventure set outside the Tomb of Horrors and a good companion adventure for players, not a prequel for PCs. So you don’t need to play it before the high level campaign. It just fills in some gaps in the storyline so players are aware of what is happening both outside and inside the Tomb. If you don’t get to play the two DMs Challenges before DDXP, you will not lose out on anything crucial … you’ll be able to understand what is happening and why just as if you had played them. Consider them two extra play opportunities before we get the campaign properly on schedule in 2007. And if you are having a hard time writing them, feel free to drop me an email at scon40 at aol.com, and I’ll try to help you out with some ideas on how to get it written in time. That’s all I’ve got time for at the moment … I’ll respond to additional questions and such the next time I check in on the list. Happy holidays all!