(no subject)

[ralphmelton]

Man, it's hard to achieve everything I want to achieve as a GM. I wonder if the Wachowski brothers consider Matrix Revolutions and have the same reaction of "That was so much cooler in my head."

Some particular issues I'm dealing with:

- The PCs have just found out about an ancient vampire, obviously an enemy they're going to have to fight. I hadn't expected them to take on the vampire immediately--but I now realize it's not very easy for them to assess the vampire's capabilities. (In D&D 3e, vampires can be of almost any Challenge Rating, just as NPCs can.) So how should the PCs know when they're able to take on the vampire? From their point of view, maybe it is the right strategy to teleport in and tackle the vampire directly.

- I've managed to create a sense of urgency for the game--I think my players do acknowledge that things are getting worse all the time. But that leads them into doing less exploration than they might otherwise, and it has them feeling that it's futile to try to fix the symptoms that they encounter, since the underlying problems are still getting worse. (Monica alluded to all that here.)

Comments

[skington.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me like you've just got yourself a free session here, as your players are going to have to work out whether they can take this vampire or not. This means having to find out as much as possible about him - stuff that, presumably, you already know - and, possibly, sending tentative raids against him to gauge his effectiveness.

Of course, these raids are likely to fail, which should lead to nice juicy moral dilemmas for the PCs: is the enemy so bad that it's worth sending brave loyal men (and women? don't know your campaign background) to their deaths?

OTOH, if they decide that they have to Do Something Now, well, you have three possibilities.

1) They Win. Dead Vampire. They were smart, or the vampire could have been plausibly taken down by them no matter what they did.

2) Vampire wins. Total party kill. Either they're stupid, or they were outclassed from the word go. They blithely assumed that they could take anything you threw at them, and they were wrong. (This is pretty shitty from a player's perspective.)

3) They skirmish, the vampire survives, they teleport back out, who won? Who knows? Have they dealt him a lasting blow with some sort of weird magical weapon, have they sufficiently compromised his security (they know the lay of his keep / they've killed or swayed valuable henchmen)? Or did one of his blows infect one or more of the PCs with a slow-acting, but ineluctible mind-controlling poison?

The other issue, of course, is whether your players are assuming that they're playing rail-road D&D, and their immediate response to any enemy NPC is "kill him", thinking that if the NPC has turned up, he's killable. ("If it has stats" etc.)

I haven't been reading your blog at enough detail to remember what the exact background is, but hopefully this should be of some use.