Post by Slavemaster on Jun 13, 2008 23:56:24 GMT
This is a thread for discussing matters about technicalities, rules and setting. We all have our own preferences of gaming, and it might be a good idea to know as many of them as possible before the actual game begins. So, this is the place to discuss in general the weak and strong points of the game system as it is applied to Play-by-Post, as well as questions regarding the setting and our respective interpretation of it. Matters about what is going on in the game will be taken to the OOC-thread when that opens at the same time as the IC-thread. Matters about characters and other general things concerning the campaign can still be kept to the “Preliminaries” thread.
A few things I wanted to bring up, as information or for discussion:
Mechanics
Dicerolling: For some players, dice are holy and they insist on rolling everything themselves – we’ve probably all had a “lucky die” sometime, kept in a velvet bag, and consider it a killing offense if other players even touch them (see this webcomic strip for a good example of this type of character: www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0049.html Others don’t care much about it and are perfectly happy with letting the DM roll if it speed things up. As for myself, I tend to the latter option, especially when it comes to Skill Checks where the player shouldn’t know if he succeeded or not, like Spot, Listen and Knowledge Checks. So, if you have a strong preference for doing your own rolling, this is the time to say so.
When it comes to rolling, I suggest we use the online roller on www.invisiblecastle.com. I’ve used that before on Play-by-Post sites that didn’t have their own diceroller, it is easy to use and the results can be shown as a link in your post.
Battles: Well, sooner or later you will get into a fight, and you might even be eager for it. That’s why you spent all that shiny gold on Superior weapons and armour. However, this is where the main disadvantage of Play-by-Post shows; a battle with several combatants using the entire rules system can easily take weeks, especially if there is some dispute about the rules. LWRPG has it a bit easier because it is simplified – the lack of Attacks of Opportunity alone have probably cut the time it takes to run a battle in half – but it is still not ideal for this medium. I will certainly keep this in mind and not throw in too many fights. And if you know some tricks from other games to speed things up, feel free to share them. Stating very carefully what you plan to do, and rolling all the relevant die rolls in advance, will likely save us a few unnecessary posts. Trusting the DM to do all or most of the simple fights against low-level guards and NPC:s is another way. Otherwise, I think we just have to make things up as we go and see if we can find a system that fits all of us. And when it comes to important “boss fights”, we must of course let it take it’s time. But anyway, advice from more experienced Play-by-Post players on this matter is of course much appreciated.
Setting issues
Well, we all have our own view of Magnamund; we all see different things before us when we encounter things in the books that are not illustrated. And as for the things the books don’t cover, we all have different views about what the DM can make up in order to fill in the blanks without making it deviate too much from the general feel of the setting. For this reason, I want to take up a few setting-specific things which you may or may not agree with.
Currency: Instead of using the generic ”gold pieces” of generic fantasy, Joe Dever went to the trouble of actually making up different currencies for different cultures and nations, and it would be a shame not to use them. However, it obviously has to be expanded a bit; this is not a gamebook where everything from a mug of beer up to a warhorse can be squeezed into a range of 1-50 gold crowns. So Mongoose has wisely put in Silver Plates and Copper Pawns in addition to the familiar Gold Crowns.
The official currency of Palmyrion, where this campaign starts, is the Lune, stated in the books to be made of silver and worth one-fourth of a Gold Crown. In order to fit this into the campaign, I have decided that the Lune is a large silver coin, weighing 2,5 times an ordinary Silver Plate (thus making four Lune equivalent to one Gold Crown, as in the books). They also have Copper Pawns, worth the same as the ordinary ones, and lastly they have a small gold coin, the “Gold Lune”, worth one half of a Gold Crown (thus maintaining the Gold Crown as the “Hard Currency” of Magnamund). In short: 1 Gold Lune=2 Silver Lune, 1 Silver Lune=25 Copper Pawns.
This might seem like too much hassle for some, but I have always felt that different coins is an important way to convey different cultures in a game – especially when dealing with the sort of players who don’t much care about the cultures, but do care intensely about their money;) Also, I’ve had a lot of fun with it in some campaigns, like one set in Victorian England, where I drove the players mad with all those quids, bobs and thruppeny bits…
Population: This is something I pointed out in a thread on the old TotS. I remember I backed it up with a lot of references to historical population levels and the number of people required to support an army and so on, but basically it boils down to that the population numbers stated in the Magnamund Companion (and transferred to the Gazetteer, slightly modified in some cases) are simply waaaay to low to support the kind of cities and armies we see in the gamebooks. For example, it would be highly unrealistic for a country like Eru – stated in MC to have 13 000 citizens – to field about 2000 men (depending on where you draw the line between the Lencian and Eruan forces on the map) in the battle of Cetza. Especially if you take into account all the non-combatants that a medieval and early-modern army needed for support – smiths, grooms, carters, engineers, carpenters, various artisans, not to mention the families of the officers and general hangers-on, including prostitutes - and which could easily count as many people as the actual soldiers. In a medieval economy and logistics system, that is simply not possible.
So, I have decided to treat the population numbers given in the Gazetteer as the city population; it works quite well for them, and would mean that cities like Vanamor, Varetta and Rhem are roughly the same size as medieval London, which is a bit more reasonable. The actual national population will be about ten times as large, which I see as a minimum to support all those grand cities, but which will still put the population significantly lower relative to medieval Europe (but this, at least, is reasonable, as it would leave room for all those other races that share the world, and a lot of wilderness where all the monsters could dwell).
Creatures: As the adventures of LW progressed book by book, the number of creatures, critters, monsters, animals, darkspawn and humanoids unique to the setting that have amassed is very impressive, to say the least; the bestiary in LWRPG is nowhere near complete. A list I made some time ago by going through all the books yielded some 140+ creatures (including, of course, various small game like the rabbit-like Vassagonian Flumi, domesticated beasts of burden like the Zull, Gorkha and Dougga, and various other miscalleanous you don’t actually fight), and then I didn’t even have all the books. So, whenever I need to throw something nasty at you, I have more than enough to choose from.
However… The problem is that all of you have played the books too. You, too, have fought with, against or alongside all of the said lifeforms when you first experienced the great world that is Magnamund. This means that only using those 140+ critters will risk making the game predictable or, in the worst case, even some sort of re-enactment of the LW adventures: “Oh, a sewer, get ready for Kwarazes, boys! Aha, there is a log fallen over that chasm? I keep a lookout for Anaphegs before we cross.” Hope you see what I’m getting at here. I don’t want you to simply read through the book or books set in whatever area you happen to be in and from this know exactly what you might potentially face.
Therefore, it is highly likely that I at some point will take the liberty to throw in a few non-canon critters, either homebrews or ripped from other sourcebooks. Don’t worry, you won’t run into the old run-of-the-mill elves and orcs, and certainly not setting-specific monsters like beholders, illithids or the Tarrasque. But non-controversial generic stuff like most Constructs, Plants, Oozes and some magical Beasts are fair game as I see it, especially with some slight modifications. Zipp’s Cat Creatures might also turn up, who knows;). On the whole, I will stick to the canon monsters, but I just want to give you a heads-up well in advance in case you turn into something or someone you can’t remember from the books. And even then, I’ll will probably give the thing some Magnamund related twist or modification. For example, Green Slime might be what happens when something goes horribly wrong with the Giak spawning vats;)
Well, I think that’s it for now, at least.
A few things I wanted to bring up, as information or for discussion:
Mechanics
Dicerolling: For some players, dice are holy and they insist on rolling everything themselves – we’ve probably all had a “lucky die” sometime, kept in a velvet bag, and consider it a killing offense if other players even touch them (see this webcomic strip for a good example of this type of character: www.darthsanddroids.net/episodes/0049.html Others don’t care much about it and are perfectly happy with letting the DM roll if it speed things up. As for myself, I tend to the latter option, especially when it comes to Skill Checks where the player shouldn’t know if he succeeded or not, like Spot, Listen and Knowledge Checks. So, if you have a strong preference for doing your own rolling, this is the time to say so.
When it comes to rolling, I suggest we use the online roller on www.invisiblecastle.com. I’ve used that before on Play-by-Post sites that didn’t have their own diceroller, it is easy to use and the results can be shown as a link in your post.
Battles: Well, sooner or later you will get into a fight, and you might even be eager for it. That’s why you spent all that shiny gold on Superior weapons and armour. However, this is where the main disadvantage of Play-by-Post shows; a battle with several combatants using the entire rules system can easily take weeks, especially if there is some dispute about the rules. LWRPG has it a bit easier because it is simplified – the lack of Attacks of Opportunity alone have probably cut the time it takes to run a battle in half – but it is still not ideal for this medium. I will certainly keep this in mind and not throw in too many fights. And if you know some tricks from other games to speed things up, feel free to share them. Stating very carefully what you plan to do, and rolling all the relevant die rolls in advance, will likely save us a few unnecessary posts. Trusting the DM to do all or most of the simple fights against low-level guards and NPC:s is another way. Otherwise, I think we just have to make things up as we go and see if we can find a system that fits all of us. And when it comes to important “boss fights”, we must of course let it take it’s time. But anyway, advice from more experienced Play-by-Post players on this matter is of course much appreciated.
Setting issues
Well, we all have our own view of Magnamund; we all see different things before us when we encounter things in the books that are not illustrated. And as for the things the books don’t cover, we all have different views about what the DM can make up in order to fill in the blanks without making it deviate too much from the general feel of the setting. For this reason, I want to take up a few setting-specific things which you may or may not agree with.
Currency: Instead of using the generic ”gold pieces” of generic fantasy, Joe Dever went to the trouble of actually making up different currencies for different cultures and nations, and it would be a shame not to use them. However, it obviously has to be expanded a bit; this is not a gamebook where everything from a mug of beer up to a warhorse can be squeezed into a range of 1-50 gold crowns. So Mongoose has wisely put in Silver Plates and Copper Pawns in addition to the familiar Gold Crowns.
The official currency of Palmyrion, where this campaign starts, is the Lune, stated in the books to be made of silver and worth one-fourth of a Gold Crown. In order to fit this into the campaign, I have decided that the Lune is a large silver coin, weighing 2,5 times an ordinary Silver Plate (thus making four Lune equivalent to one Gold Crown, as in the books). They also have Copper Pawns, worth the same as the ordinary ones, and lastly they have a small gold coin, the “Gold Lune”, worth one half of a Gold Crown (thus maintaining the Gold Crown as the “Hard Currency” of Magnamund). In short: 1 Gold Lune=2 Silver Lune, 1 Silver Lune=25 Copper Pawns.
This might seem like too much hassle for some, but I have always felt that different coins is an important way to convey different cultures in a game – especially when dealing with the sort of players who don’t much care about the cultures, but do care intensely about their money;) Also, I’ve had a lot of fun with it in some campaigns, like one set in Victorian England, where I drove the players mad with all those quids, bobs and thruppeny bits…
Population: This is something I pointed out in a thread on the old TotS. I remember I backed it up with a lot of references to historical population levels and the number of people required to support an army and so on, but basically it boils down to that the population numbers stated in the Magnamund Companion (and transferred to the Gazetteer, slightly modified in some cases) are simply waaaay to low to support the kind of cities and armies we see in the gamebooks. For example, it would be highly unrealistic for a country like Eru – stated in MC to have 13 000 citizens – to field about 2000 men (depending on where you draw the line between the Lencian and Eruan forces on the map) in the battle of Cetza. Especially if you take into account all the non-combatants that a medieval and early-modern army needed for support – smiths, grooms, carters, engineers, carpenters, various artisans, not to mention the families of the officers and general hangers-on, including prostitutes - and which could easily count as many people as the actual soldiers. In a medieval economy and logistics system, that is simply not possible.
So, I have decided to treat the population numbers given in the Gazetteer as the city population; it works quite well for them, and would mean that cities like Vanamor, Varetta and Rhem are roughly the same size as medieval London, which is a bit more reasonable. The actual national population will be about ten times as large, which I see as a minimum to support all those grand cities, but which will still put the population significantly lower relative to medieval Europe (but this, at least, is reasonable, as it would leave room for all those other races that share the world, and a lot of wilderness where all the monsters could dwell).
Creatures: As the adventures of LW progressed book by book, the number of creatures, critters, monsters, animals, darkspawn and humanoids unique to the setting that have amassed is very impressive, to say the least; the bestiary in LWRPG is nowhere near complete. A list I made some time ago by going through all the books yielded some 140+ creatures (including, of course, various small game like the rabbit-like Vassagonian Flumi, domesticated beasts of burden like the Zull, Gorkha and Dougga, and various other miscalleanous you don’t actually fight), and then I didn’t even have all the books. So, whenever I need to throw something nasty at you, I have more than enough to choose from.
However… The problem is that all of you have played the books too. You, too, have fought with, against or alongside all of the said lifeforms when you first experienced the great world that is Magnamund. This means that only using those 140+ critters will risk making the game predictable or, in the worst case, even some sort of re-enactment of the LW adventures: “Oh, a sewer, get ready for Kwarazes, boys! Aha, there is a log fallen over that chasm? I keep a lookout for Anaphegs before we cross.” Hope you see what I’m getting at here. I don’t want you to simply read through the book or books set in whatever area you happen to be in and from this know exactly what you might potentially face.
Therefore, it is highly likely that I at some point will take the liberty to throw in a few non-canon critters, either homebrews or ripped from other sourcebooks. Don’t worry, you won’t run into the old run-of-the-mill elves and orcs, and certainly not setting-specific monsters like beholders, illithids or the Tarrasque. But non-controversial generic stuff like most Constructs, Plants, Oozes and some magical Beasts are fair game as I see it, especially with some slight modifications. Zipp’s Cat Creatures might also turn up, who knows;). On the whole, I will stick to the canon monsters, but I just want to give you a heads-up well in advance in case you turn into something or someone you can’t remember from the books. And even then, I’ll will probably give the thing some Magnamund related twist or modification. For example, Green Slime might be what happens when something goes horribly wrong with the Giak spawning vats;)
Well, I think that’s it for now, at least.
Yes, London was probably the most important city in north-western Europe, but if we are to include Italy in the Western World, which I think is fair, then Milan had about 200 000 citizens at the end of the 13th century, while other Italian city-states like Venice, Genoa and Florence each exceeded 100 000. London (and Cologne, by far the largest city in Germany at the time) had about 40 000, Paris somewhere around 80 000, and Ghent in the Low Countries about 50 000, although of course figures vary wildly depending on who you read.
It's official then. I think that will speed things up nicely.
