As it happens, Crafty Games has a npc generator linked to on their website, which will spit out the fully-figured statblock of an NPC you stat out.
This should make planning my upcoming FantasyCraft campaign much, much eaiser.
I also swear I’ll finish my series about the system before summer is over. Seriously.
Reading through FantasyCraft in preparation for my first series of articles got me thinking. Well, actually, thinking about WoW turned me on to this idea, but I later realized that FantasyCraft had already implemented it to a certain extent. Which is cool, and gives me a bit of a baseline to build from.
You see, in WoW (World of Warcraft, if you’ve been living under a rock in a cave 20,000 leagues under the earth’s crust for the past five years), the last few tiers of raids have had the feature of hard modes. You can turn the hard mode on, and in exchange for a much harder fight you get much better rewards. So, why not do something like that for D&D?
Okay, wait, we’re not quite at my idea yet. Be patient.
FantasyCraft implemented this hard mode idea somewhat. Your party can toss the DM an action die (long story), and then the DM will up the encounter difficulty. More difficult encounters, you see, give better loot and experience, much the same as in WoW.
This is a very cool idea. It gives the players some measure of control over how difficult the game is, and anything that makes the players feel more engaged – the “we’re bad hombres, we can totally take four more gnolls! Bring ‘em on!” effect – only adds to everyone’s enjoyment of the game.
But what if you want to make the encounter easier? What if the players are standing outside the dragon’s lair, saying weeeeell, we’re not so sure we can take this guy. You have a couple options. You can scrap that line of encounters, and move on to something else. By the way, that’s a horrible idea. That’s like reading a book and thinking this next part sounds scary, I don’t want to read anymore, except worse, because now you’re wasting the time of your entire gaming group instead of just your own. You can take the video game option, and have the party go kill gnolls for a level or two. Again, bad idea, because the fact that you aren’t doing this already means that nobody finds it fun. Not to mention that experience gained from completing goals should be far more than killing random mooks (which is something, I should say, that WoW does extremely well – while you can get from 1 to 80 by killing random monsters, it happens much faster if you kill random mooks that somebody else wants you to kill).
So, we are at an impasse. The players, for whatever reason, don’t feel that they can handle continuing forward. What do you, you awesome DM you, do? Give them the easy mode option!
At its most basic, the easy mode consists of doing an additional encounter that, in some way, turns down the difficulty of the hard one. Don’t want the vampire to kill everyone? Ask an alchemist to make a vampire-slaying grenade, and go collect the rare ingredients needed for it. Negotiations with a dragon got you worried? Find out what his favorite food is – and collect it from the depths of the chuul-infested jungle it can be found in.
Notice that the unlocking encounters aren’t trivial. We’re not talking a simple DC 20 Diplomacy check, here. The players should get the same amount of XP, or maybe even more – in a way, it can be a subtle reminder that strategy can work better than sheer brute force. Ravenloft did this sort of thing a lot. All the really nasty monsters were way more powerful than the party could easily defeat, unless the party knew the monster’s weakness. Which, really, is like the classic monster movies and Gothic tales that spawned Ravenloft in the first place! After all, Dr. van Helsing sure as hell couldn’t take Dracula in a fair fight.
Another positive benefit of these easy mode encounters is that they can serve to underscore a climactic encounter. The dracolich we fought last night was soooo tough, we had to dig up the sword that killed it the first time! Doesn’t that sound better? It takes a single encounter and splits it up into its own story arc. The party knows they have to perform X task, and ask themselves, what can we do to make this easier? A couple attempts at research later, they know what they have to do. Action rises as they get closer and closer to their goal, and the encounter happens right at the climax.
Really, this whole concept is just creative thinking put into a moderately structured form. Think about the low end of this scale; for example, caving in part of a cavern to thin out the kobold tribe, and make them easier to defeat. On one level, that’s the players thinking outside the box to make an upcoming encounter easier on them. On the other, it’s the players activating an easy mode of the kobold encounter. Make sense?
Not that I’m saying that you should set up an encounter and allow the players to say this is too hard, tell us how to unlock the easy mode. That’s making things far too structured. The players should have to work for it. Just…keep it in the back of your head, and if there’s a natural progression, let it happen.
If you really must have some sort of level system, here’s a light one to keep in mind.
Low-scale encounters: creative thinking, plus a couple skill checks. Improbable rope devices, maybe convincing the society’s omega male that life is better without his tormenters around. At this level, the encounter is so easy that the players probably don’t need the easy mode, but if it makes them feel better, go ahead. It’s not like the encounter is anything more than filler anyway.
Mid-scale encounters: skill challenges. Here, there’s a balance between pre-encounter and encounter, and both should take up relatively equal story time. Set an ambush before the patrol of fire giants arrives, alchemy up some lye to piss off the aboleth.
High-scale encounters: part of the plot arc. Go back to the above examples to see what I mean here. This can give the DM considerable freedom in considering the encounters that wrap up this current arc. CR becomes far more fluid, as the PCs get an ace in the hole, so go ahead and throw that huge dragon or ancient demon at them! Consider this even a bit further – because each of these encounters is individualized, the PCs don’t need to keep the enabler after the adventure is done. The grenade is used up, they give back the powered armor, the magic weapon is old magic that doesn’t translate into a stat bonus (old magic is the coolest magic, anyhow).
Long story short, the easy mode concept doesn’t cheapen encounters. It makes encounters more meaningful, by expanding their place in the story, either by giving them more dramatic weight than they otherwise would have, or putting greater emphasis on the encounter. By having to prepare for it, the players receive a sense of the encounter’s scope without the encounter having to be busy and overdone.
Not that I’m saying you have to let the players plan for every encounter. A bit of surprise is good for them. Keeps them on their toes.
When Wizards released the fourth edition (4E) of Dungeons and Dragons in 2007, many people were upset. What about the years of third edition (3.5E) material? Well, those of us who prefer 3.5E can rejoice, for our pleas have been heard.
The primary heir to the 3.5E throne is Pathfinder. Basically, it is a houseruled version of 3.5E.
Is it good? Yes, absolutely.
Is it interesting? Not really. If you knew 3.5E backwards and forwards, you won’t find much new in Pathfinder. Skills are easier to wrangle, and polymorph effects have been fixed. But, same basic idea. You have your Fighters and Bards and Sorcerers, and pick feats like Dodge, Cleave, and Spell Penetration.
What if you’re ready for a change, though? You like the skeleton, but want something different from the same game you’ve been playing for seven years?
Enter FantasyCraft. Designed by the same group that did SpyCraft, FC takes the core ideas behind D&D3.5 and re-imagines them. If you could play a character in 3.5E, you can probably play them in FC.
It’s a daunting book, however. Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual, all rolled in to a single tome. Lots and lots of information.
Which is where I come in.
What I am hoping to do here is thoroughly catalog the differences between Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 and FantasyCraft. What changes, and what stays the same. I originally planned to write this as a single article, but I have a hunch that it will be easier and more rewarding to make each section an article in and of itself, rather than cram everything into one.
To begin, I want to describe some aspects of the game which, I feel, represent it rather well, to give you a sense of how it performs.
The Soldier class gets an ability called Portable Cover, which gives the character an aura in which allies receive cover, to represent the Soldier knocking over chairs, terrain features, and generally making a mess of things.
Monsters don’t have explicit stats. Each stat is given a value from I to X, which will then correspond to one of a set of numbers, depending on what CR the monster is set at. By default, monsters scale with the party, so a kobold will provide the same amount of challenge at level 15 as it does at level 1 (which still won’t be very much). Some commentators are up in arms about this feature, but we know it’s really just a function and we can plug in any number we want.
Both DMs and players get pools of action dice, which (among other things) allow them to make changes to the way the game runs without getting in to arguments by adding Campaign Qualities. These give quick, easy rules to emulate a variety of fantasy tropes or general conditions, such as Beefy Heroes (where characters get DR equal to their Strength modifier) or Tense (which doubles Stress damage and doesn’t allow taking 10 on skill checks).
Did I already mention that there’s rules for how much money the PCs piss away on ale and whores between adventures? Because there totally are.
You may be getting the sense that FantasyCraft has a lot of crunchy rules to keep track of. Straight out of the box, FantasyCraft is indeed a very rules-heavy game, with lots of numbers and effects to keep track of. It is made very clear, however, that the rules are meant to serve the people playing the game, and that if nobody likes something, it can be chucked. On the plus side, nearly every rule is something interesting that adds a positive benefit to the game, as opposed to pedantic carrying capacity or spell component rules.
So, that’s where we’re starting. Sound interesting? It had better, because the book has seven chapters, and several of those are getting split up into multiple entries. It’s my blog, I can do what I want, ha-ha!
I wanted to start blogging again. But I couldn’t find my old blog. Not much on there, but it’s the principle of the thing. So, here I am instead.
Hello there. Nice to meet you. I enjoy reading, and (in theory) writing. I play roleplaying games and paint expensive model soldiers. I am a volunteer at a local historical garden, and during the school year I am a writing tutor. Hopefully, I will be writing about all of these things.
See you soon.
