An adventure I wrote, designed, and ran for 6 level 5 players.
Here are the tables (each on a new sheet) for this session: link
Level Designer @ Question Games. These opinions and projects are mine unless noted.
Category: RPG
An adventure I wrote, designed, and ran for 6 level 5 players.
Here are the tables (each on a new sheet) for this session: link
A quest I designed, wrote, and ran for 6 level 4 players.
A D&D 5e quest I designed, wrote, and ran for 4 level 1 players.
A Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition quest I wrote, designed, and ran for 6 players of level 4.
A quest I wrote, designed, and ran for 6 players.
I ran this quest with a group of 5 beginner players. The goal was to set up a mystery in a compelling way.
A summary reference sheet for a quest I designed for my D&D 5e players. The goal was to design an adventure that could completed by fairly new players in one sitting. I also wanted to include a puzzle and some adventure game elements (item combination.) I ran this twice with a party of 3 and a different party of 4 and adjusted the number of enemies/their HP accordingly.
These are two level layouts designed for a hypothetical fantasy RPG that are designed around setting up a sense of discovery and uncovering at a player controlled pace. One layout is good and one is bad at this.
Good Example:
Bad Example:
Conversations
Combat Complexity
Levelling
Experience Points Honor System:
Abilities: Death Whisper
Puzzles:
In the last session, my players completed a story arc. They earned a new spaceship, a bunch of strange alien loot, and were given three major directions to take the next story arc: follow a set of coordinates to a planetary system around a blackhole the previous villain had targeted as a location to summon the Emberons (a race of extra-universe beings of unknown motive one of which they had just defeated), report to the Agnate (the Federation of this universe) of their deeds and what had happened, or seek out a criminal (simply noted as Blackwater) the previous villain had made contact with. The player chose to look for the criminal, for several different character reasons. I think they chose this option because it had the least info.
In Blackwater, which ended up being an ancient planet converted into a black ocean of rotting corpse ooze (harvested by the Agnate as fuel), I had set up another puzzle for the players. This puzzle came in two phases: they had to seek out translucent ‘keys’ to form an image indicating the location of a crime lord’s HQ, and then use the colors and shapes from those keys to unlock a door by pressing the correct buttons.
Puzzle Insights – NPC Motivations as Puzzle Mechanics, Single Player Tasks in Multiplayer Environments, UI
The goal of the first phase of the puzzle was to get the players to explore the NPCs of Blackwater more in depth. Mechanically, I also wanted to add party members as we were down about half our players that week. So, each major NPC had one of these keys – all of which were needed to progress. My players had formed different relationships with NPCs in the previous arc, but none of those NPCs could join the party. For this, I wanted them to have to pick the party members they chose (the NPCs had different motivations) or negotiate between them. For example, Ssonass the shady butcher will only give you his key if you promise him he will protected from the local crime lords. He insists he must join your party, which makes getting the key from Phobos and Demos, agents of that crime lord, rather difficult. This structure required that each NPC have a foil with slightly asymmetric goals:
The players interacted with each NPC, though only added Ssonass, Zeera, and Galahad to the party, killing Phobos and Demos for their key. They agreed to protect Ssonass, successfully lied to Zeera about wanting to kill the crime lord, and convinced Galahad that killing Phobos and Demos would help in his quest for the grail (side bar this was also a tie in for our wizard PC’s personal quest.) I consider this puzzle a success because the players later applied their learned ability to problem solve around NPC goals later when they met the crime lord and convinced Zeera to begrudgingly accept him as a party member, and managed to convince the crime lord to accept Ssonass, who had killed and was selling the meat of the crime lord’s beloved pet.
This puzzle was less successful in nearly all other areas. While the party was discussing how to procede which their collection of volatile NPCs, the one player who happened to have all the keys in his hand solved the image puzzle alone. This was not what I intended, as I was hoping for another group solve moment like in the third session puzzle only this time with a fun and new material. This may indicate that the scope of the puzzle was too small a challenge for a group to comfortably solve, or that the social dynamics of the puzzle were more fun than matching the images. This portion of the puzzle was also weak for its non-inherent answer. While yes, it did have a correct answer that was somewhat recognizable when achieved (the solving player announced he had finished when he got the complete picture, though he didn’t say what it was), the solution was random to the players. The scarab image presented a new question that did not build out of the natural conclusion of the puzzle, like the translation puzzle earlier. The players had not seen that image before, and one of the NPCs had to explain to them what the image meant. This could be solved with a better integration of the symbol into earlier play, perhaps with a minor riddle with the NPCs or worked into the visual motifs.
The second part of the puzzle was unplayable due to a printing error. The colors on the printed material were too dark to distinguish, and I had to scrap the puzzle mid play upon realizing. Always pretest your materials.
Combat Insights – Structuring Luck with Monster Damage
After gathering these NPC party members, the party had a final battle. This was also our last session before I left for NYU, so I wanted to make this battle special. Talk had been floating around the players about monsters they had heard of (like gelatinous cubes) that they’d like to fight. One of these was a skeleton army. So I delivered.
While attempting to cross a field of rotting corpse tar to an elevator to the crimelord’s temple, the party was confronted by ~100 skeletons, a gelatinous cube by another name, and a faceless horror. The cube and horror were statted to be predictable but medium/hard monsters for the party’s level (60 HP versus the players’ average 30 HP, two attacks, AI to target the nearest player). They were included in the initiative order as individuals. The skeletons attacked together, twice in the initiative at equal spacing. I used a d60 to determine how many skeletons would attack with 1 point of damage that ignored armor, and a d10 to see how many party members (there were 10) based on initiative order would receive damage. If the skeletons criticalled on their check roll, each did 3 damage. This happened twice, and nearly TPK’ed both times. The first time it was interesting, with the conscious players scrambling to heal each other. They found it satisfying to successfully help their friends. The second time was frustrating for the players. I should have lied and not rolled with this. My goal is never to kill my players, just present the possibility of death. Overall, I would remove the critical 3 points from the skeleton stats. Statistically, the d60 rolls high enough to cause thrilling damage even if each skeleton only does one damage. I should have also chosen another way to distribute the damage. Statistically, the players higher in initiative have a higher chance of taking more damage each skeleton turn. They are always the ones getting hit, and only by random chance (players in Xenoterra do not have abilities to affect initiative order). I should have chosen a more agent way of distributing damage, such as a choice earlier in the game. (Example: If a player ate Ssonass’ strange meat early in the session, then the mate of the creature the meat belonged too would later attack that player after smelling the residue.) Overall the skeleton war took an hour and a half, but was generally well received by the players.
Session Materials