However, it is also nonsensical.
*Warning: minor spoilers for both modules follow*
Both these adventures have a clear need for story rewards. The adventure background for IMPI1-4 makes it obvious that the events of the module are part of a much larger story. Even if there are no current plans for these events to be followed up immediately it would seem to make sense that appropriate story rewards be handed out. If there are current plans to follow up this adventure at a later date, the lack of rewards becomes truly puzzling.
CORM1-4 ends with the PCs gaining an official honorific title. That would seem to me to be the definition of a story reward. Instead, it is tucked into one of the small Treasure paragraphs after the final encounter.
I could understand a lack of story rewards for a module that was designed to be stand-alone. There is nothing wrong with a quick game that has no long term impact and no villain who escapes at the end with a twirl of the moustache. For such adventures a lack of story rewards makes a certain level of sense. If there is nothing to follow up on and no change to the status of the PCs what would be the point?
However, these two adventures are about as far in the opposite direction as you can get. The decision not to include story rewards is truly baffling.
Anyone have a comment on why this might have been done? Anyone official care to explain the thought process here?
Of course, that's not happening too often either.
On the other hand, what would you really use it for? You know you played the mod, your adventure tracker says so, and so you can just say you are now the "High Honorable Muckity Muck of Muckgersen".
And on the gripping hand, perhaps they've (they == TPTB) been listening to us whiners about how the story awards aren't worth anything and decided to do away with them. (I keeeeeed because I luuuuuuuuuv)
I feel that each adventure should have (at least) one story award, but only if there is a reason to have one. "Enmity of the Fire Knives"...YES! "Had Lunch With A Dwarf"...NO!
With some adventures giving rewards for mundane/seeminly random events and these two recent adventures missing rewards all together, I worry that the idea of story awards has lost focus. Please DO NOT GET RID OF STORY AWARDS....and while no one had said such a thing, evidence does give reason to be concerned about the system as a whole.
I actually have 0 slips from any of my 4 characters in LFR.
Second, I agree that too many story rewards have diluted their meaning, and they serve little purpose. Perhaps we are seeing the results of that now. I mean, you played the adventure you dont need a cert that says you explored some ruins. If you played the adventure = ruins explored. But if something significant happened in the ruins that needs tracking then maybe a cert is in order.
Perhaps the existing rewards are seeds that will now have effects in the higher band adventures which will in turn have fewer need for new rewards.
Maybe.
Gaining real favor or disfavor of factions would make it easy to put into a module something when interacting with a particular group.
So if you have 12+ reputation with say the Harpers or whoever, you have some kind of bonus, where as if you have negative reputation they actually try to hinder you. That'd be exciting and interesting.
Better then a lot of this junk. Light coins and trash.
Anyone attached to the campaign have any comments?
If you don't acquire/keep any of the story awards, how do you show you are engaged in a Major Quest? Going on a particular adventure does not necessarily equal accepting or engaged in the Quest. Usually to get the Major Quest xp reward (and if other reward), the DM should verify if the PCs meet the requirements.
Some story awards are probably questionable utility, but some may provide bonuses or opportunities (favors) in later adventures. Any game mechanic benefit will be specified in the later adventures and is situational.
Keith
Some story awards will see mention in other adventures. If a story award make sense, you will likely see it mentioned somehwere.
Others are descriptive enough that a DM can rule that it makes a difference, even if it is only flavor. Ofocurse,, a player also needs to think of it (I know my PC is going to roam some festhalls next time she is in Waterdeep).
I should note though that, having skipped the spoilers, I can't say how needful the story awards in this case are. In some cases, having *played* the adventure is similar to 'success' (unless you end up with a TPK). In others, you can finish an adventure and still have failed (or have been given different choices that mean different awards).
And for a major quest, you always need a story award.
Gomez
-SYB
I had a story award allow my character to borrow some treasure at the beginning of the adventure, rather than receive it at the end of the adventure.
This is a great point -- and something that probably would not occur to many DMs unless the player is very proactive about saying "hey, I have this story award, and this situation seems like it might give me a benefit -- so how about it?"
I wonder if there would be any interest in making a list of ideas of "neat things you can do with story awards" for DMs to consider. I'm thinking of a generic, non-spoilery list of suggestions, like the one above, that might be fun to try when running adventures to see if there is a way to improvise a minor (i.e. not game-breaking) use of a story award to make the player feel like there was some benefit above and beyond whatever the writer might have "hard-coded" into the adventure.
Of course, not all story awards will be suitable for this kind of thing, and not all adventures will be suitable for this kind of thing either. You also wouldn't want to go overboard (trying to link 6 different story awards into the same adventure) but with a little creativity, I think this could lead to a variation on DM empowerment that would add a lot to the immersiveness of the campaign's play experience from time to time, without really needing to change anything significant about any specific adventure.
I wonder if there would be any interest in making a list of ideas of "neat things you can do with story awards" for DMs to consider. I'm thinking of a generic, non-spoilery list of suggestions, like the one above, that might be fun to try when running adventures to see if there is a way to improvise a minor (i.e. not game-breaking) use of a story award to make the player feel like there was some benefit above and beyond whatever the writer might have "hard-coded" into the adventure.
I think a fun one would be having a minor interaction with the NPC of the previous story award. Along the lines of "Hey, I heard you(the PCs) were in town and decided to stop by and say hi. Don't have time today, but we should do lunch soon."
Or right after they finish a skill challenge successfully, the NPC sends them a letter of introduction to the NPC that they're trying to persuade/get in contact with/etc...
Has no real game benefit(other than making it look like the NPC gave them a minor boost to succeed, and maybe not even that if the PCs are obviously blowing through the skill challenge), but...
Red
I wonder if there would be any interest in making a list of ideas of "neat things you can do with story awards" for DMs to consider. I'm thinking of a generic, non-spoilery list of suggestions, like the one above, that might be fun to try when running adventures to see if there is a way to improvise a minor (i.e. not game-breaking) use of a story award to make the player feel like there was some benefit above and beyond whatever the writer might have "hard-coded" into the adventure.
Maybe in the Writer's Guide, but we already have a pretty wide variety of story awards and consequences that would have to be covered in a generally accessible document. It could get clumsy.
OTOH, the list of applicable awards within each region is narrower, so the current practice of accounting for story awards in the subsequent modules should continue to work. Perhaps just try to include some more general provisions. For example, a favor/enmity of law enforcement would have different consequences in Cormyr vs. Impultur, so you would add different provisions to those modules. And, maybe it wouldn't make sense at all on the Dragon Coast (not sure, but the example should serve).
It is easy to see that the award part is almost entirely lacking from most and at best difficult to implement. In some cases, story awards (which cannot per the admin rules provide a mechanical benefit, I believe) carry the strong suggestion that GMs consider some benefit. The GM then has to understand the mod/award so they can adjudicate properly, has to weigh the impact on the current mod (which should theoretically be balanced already) and has to consider fairness to the rest of the table and the other story awards likely in play. Abstracted, any PC playing a 7-10 mod has handfulls of story awards suggesting heroic deeds were accomplished - should any provide benefits? Why, how...?
Authors can consider past awards in their mods, but this can be hard to do. It is not uncommon for part x of a major quest arc to be written before the previous part has received much play (or even premiered), and there may be some minor difficulty in gauging how to incorporate the story awards from the arc. It is much harder for an author to consider all other awards from the region and cores (let alone other regions near that region) and incorporate them.
The other part is story. It is possible to create an award that has lasting presence and continues to be evocative of what took place, but it is darn hard without a reason for the player to recall the award. If you look at LG, few players that had the favor of Varn Armandis have trouble recalling what they did to earn it (return his bones, getting a future modification of their AC or a boost to a save). The award had major teeth and went hand in hand with the noble nature of the story behind their reward. Put simply, players loved Varn Armandis and the reward he gave, and in turn remembered the deed.
In an RPGA game, where Snap Out of It is an auto-occurrence when we are dazed, I don't see why we can't have some story awards with mechanical benefits. At the very least, rewards for the conclusion of a major quest would work well. This would be solid reasons for players/PCs to want to complete quests (vs. the current maximization of a PC being better off not succeeding at major quests). The current game does not allow for much in the way of award or story, which is a shame.
If you don't acquire/keep any of the story awards, how do you show you are engaged in a Major Quest? Going on a particular adventure does not necessarily equal accepting or engaged in the Quest. Usually to get the Major Quest xp reward (and if other reward), the DM should verify if the PCs meet the requirements.
Personally, I write the names and numbers of any story awards I receive on my log sheet. Tracking is all one big honour system anyway, so fear of cheating is of zero concern - and any time it might come up in an adventure, the rewards to look for are indicated by adventure name, reward number, and reward name. I have just as good of a record as anyone else of which rewards I have, and I don't have to come up with a way to store the odd-sized sheets of paper.
Personally, I write the names and numbers of any story awards I receive on my log sheet. Tracking is all one big honour system anyway, so fear of cheating is of zero concern - and any time it might come up in an adventure, the rewards to look for are indicated by adventure name, reward number, and reward name. I have just as good of a record as anyone else of which rewards I have, and I don't have to come up with a way to store the odd-sized sheets of paper.
I took screenshots of all the awards I've gotten from the pdf award files and assembled them in a page layout program - 12 per page. It prints reasonably well and they're small, but I can read them easily enough when I have to do that.
I took screenshots of all the awards I've gotten from the pdf award files and assembled them in a page layout program - 12 per page. It prints reasonably well and they're small, but I can read them easily enough when I have to do that.
You can copy and paste the text from the story award certs into a Word doc (or a text file for that matter, if you don't care about formatting), which yields a reasonably compact record.
If it would matter, any sequel would just ask the DM to talk with the players and see if they had a different ending. Just make sure your notes are in order, and if not, the DM is just going to assume success.
From what I've noticed, players usually don't take any notes after each scenario. Story Awards are therefore a convenient way to recall if you were successful or not. Story Awards have also proven useful to recall the significant events from a previous scenario. Certainly from personal experience I know it's hard to recall what occurred in previous scenarios and what scenario result I got.
Mind you, I'm referring to scenarios where the end result is not predetermined with near 100% accuracy. Scenarios in which there is a real choice for the players to make, or one in which the players might not actually succeed (without it being a TPK). But we should always be striving for scenarios like these anyways.
Though not related to IMPI1-4, Story Awards that mention titles or other honors *are* sought out by players. From LC and LG, I can say these are a great boon to the campaign. It's one of the few ways to create some sort of lasting effect for PCs in a massively shared campaign. A reputation system, or some sort of membership system, is also something that players love. A couple of LFR scenarios have included these, to good effect.
EDIT: Forgot to mention. FWIW, I ran IMPI1-4 recently, and my players did ask about the Story Awards, and they were a little upset that there were none. To your average LFR player, it's apparently another form of "reward" in their eyes. Players like getting rewards for completing a scenario, successfully
In an RPGA game, where Snap Out of It is an auto-occurrence when we are dazed, I don't see why we can't have some story awards with mechanical benefits. At the very least, rewards for the conclusion of a major quest would work well. This would be solid reasons for players/PCs to want to complete quests (vs. the current maximization of a PC being better off not succeeding at major quests). The current game does not allow for much in the way of award or story, which is a shame.
I believe the reason you're not seeing mechanical benefits behind story awards is that WOTC wants to review all new mechanical elements. So there's strict limits on new monsters and traps for example - basically you can't create anything new. I believe they followed this line of thought to story awards. WOTC doesn't want to spend the development teams time making sure the mechanical benefits of a story award are balance. They could leave this up to the writing director and metaregional director as they did in LG. However if they did that you'd see the occasional overpowered (or underpowered) story award cropping up, just like you did in LG. Most awards would be fine, but you'd see the rare awarad that was not properly balanced.
As a writer for LFR, I'd love to include mechanical benefits in Story Awards. I don't see this happening, though.
In an RPGA game, where Snap Out of It is an auto-occurrence when we are dazed, I don't see why we can't have some story awards with mechanical benefits. At the very least, rewards for the conclusion of a major quest would work well. This would be solid reasons for players/PCs to want to complete quests (vs. the current maximization of a PC being better off not succeeding at major quests). The current game does not allow for much in the way of award or story, which is a shame.
And some of us really want to see game cards like Snap Out of It banned. They are capable of breaking entire encounter designs and making it even harder to provide the experience or the challenge that the author intended.
I already have plenty of reason to finish/play a mod. XP, Gold and Lewt. I'm frankly happy if they can find more useful story awards but mechanical benefits are not something I'm really looking for.
A group I judged recently "rescued some children for a brainwashing cult of Shar." I had them give me a list of the Story Rewards they wanted me to consider at the start of the adventure. We had some great role-playing scenes, a few with some members of the cult who knew some of the PCs looked familiar - perhaps they had taken a class together?
They had quite a time of it when they walked into the library, to notice "Shar's Top 10 Most Wanted" portraits hanging over the entrance! ;)
Three PCs were thrilled that they made the Top 10, while the others vowed to do more to thwart Shar's plans.
While really for flavor only, the sum of those "anti-Shar" story rewards - - and ranking in the cult of top-enemies - - was really enjoyed by my players. (Certainly made them feel that they had made a name for themselves at the end of Heroic tier!)
(Also explained why the cultists thought they looked familiar . . . . ) Ultimately, I believe the value of the Story Rewards belongs to the table judge. When players hear from NPCs that they have heard of their character from NPC A, or of heroic deeds B and C, or react to glowing eyes, facial tatoos, scars on the palms, or invisible marks on the forhead, this gives players the feeling that their character has some status in the world - - which is part of what being heroic is all about!
How great would it be for, say, at the end of SPEC1-3 (or QUEST1-1) there was a story reward like "A Name for Yourself" - - if you have completed at least three major quests, you get . . . benefit X. (Perhaps the opportunity for a high-level treasure bundle, one-use-only bonus action point, etc.)
Some of the best story rewards in Xen'Drik were mechanical benefit one-use-only rewards.