{"id":1631,"date":"2008-05-01T08:00:15","date_gmt":"2008-05-01T13:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1631"},"modified":"2008-05-04T12:39:20","modified_gmt":"2008-05-04T17:39:20","slug":"halberts-mordan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1631","title":{"rendered":"Halbert’s Mordan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anyone who read my Mordan D&D Campaign<\/a> here should find this interesting: Mr. Halbert ran the same campaign for his players<\/a>, based on my notes. It’s a long read, but well worth it if you’re familiar with the original tale. <\/p>\n

He made a few classic blunders (too much uber loot, by his own reckoning) and his players were a little more hack-n-slash than mine, but in the end our two versions of the story are still strikingly similar. I crafted the story with my players in mind. Having played with them through two previous campaigns, I had a pretty good idea of how they would react to circumstances. Halbert didn’t have that benefit, and the campaign wasn’t crafted for his players, but they still managed to very closely follow the thread of of our version. I don’t know if this was due to chance or if the campaign is more deterministic than it seemed. <\/p>\n

This might sound odd, but he stuck to the source material more than I would have. <\/p>\n

Some comments, having read the whole thing: <\/p>\n

At one point one of his players says, “I go to the Corellon temple.” This is one of my pet peeves about the standard D&D settings, which often leaks into other settings because (in my opinion) too much of the D&D pantheon is built into the core rulebooks and character system. I never wanted to drag that ungainly thing along with me into my own settings, but there is often an assumption among players that there is always a temple to god X in any given town. It always seemed to me that temples of varying types should be more regional and cultural, not stacked next to each other in towns like competing fast food franchises. The expectation seems to be that no matter who you follow, you should be able to roll into a village of mud huts and find a temple dedicated to, and filled with followers of, your particular god. <\/p>\n

Later Halbert needed to take one of the players into custody. This is one of the most difficult things to do in a roleplaying game. So difficult that videogames handle it via fiat in a cutscene. Players do not want their character to sit in a prison cell. It splits the party (unless they all<\/em> go to prison) deprives them of freedom, and puts them at the mercy of NPCs. In real life, resisting arrest is a big deal, a move which escalates danger and has little chance of success. In a tabletop game, even supposedly “good” characters will resort to bloodshed rather than allow themselves to be taken in for questioning, even if they have done nothing wrong. Part of this is meta-game thinking: They know they’re players in a story, and so they don’t expect that a trip to the guard house is going to be just, easy, fair, or short. They suspect railroading and injustice, false accusations, losing their hard-won gear, and annoying sidequests to clear one’s name. You can talk a player into robbing a dragon’s hoard, but they won’t sit still for a trip to the keep. I’m really impressed Halbert pulled it off. <\/p>\n

Halbert’s players stood around after freeing the Lich. I was afraid my players might do this as well: I didn’t want them to hang around and keep looting after taking the orb. I had the earth shake and the chains fall from the coffins, which was more than enough to get my players running. They knew<\/i> it was a trap of some sort, and their plan was to grab the loot and run out like Indiana Jones. This made it all the more satisfying once they realized the loot was<\/em> the trap.<\/p>\n

Halbert’s players went to Sar Diga, a place my players skipped. Halbert came up with some really interesting stuff there, and in fact it was the most entertaining part of the account. It’s certainly better than what I had planned for the town: The town had huge stone a dam built by dwarves. (The dam is what forms the nearby lake you see on the map<\/a>.) I had planned to – and I admit this is stupid – have a dungeon inside<\/em> the dam. Like, the place was filled with tunnels? For some reason? I never developed the idea, obviously. Which is for the best, I think.<\/p>\n

It was a great read. Thanks to Halbert for typing it up. I’m glad he was able to use our story and make it his own. I hope they had fun with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anyone who read my Mordan D&D Campaign here should find this interesting: Mr. Halbert ran the same campaign for his players, based on my notes. It’s a long read, but well worth it if you’re familiar with the original tale. He made a few classic blunders (too much uber loot, by his own reckoning) and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tabletop-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}