Campaign News April 9

My apologies for the long gap between the last news and this. A lot has happened over the past 5 weeks!

PLAYERS & CHARACTERS

A look at the Leader Board will show significant character progression, but there is even more progress than is visible: two of the 2nd level characters are about to make 3rd level and one of the 1st levels is on the verge of 2nd level.

Where & When:

 

SCHEDULE

There is more than a month between the future-most and furthest-past characters and they are in the same physical location. This is likely to necessitate a reckoning with some combination of "time jail" and "fast-forwarding" to avoid time paradoxes. The Tuesday players will drive how this is reconciled prior to the next session, April 14. Anyone with slack should be prepared to lose that game world time, and issuing downtime orders to use it productively before it's lost is highly recommended!

TIPS & TRICKS

All characters training for 3rd level, and many training for a level or two above that are very likely to find themselves in the position of having enough XP to train for the next level, but not enough gold to pay for the training. This is because characters typically earn 1 XP for each 1 gold of treasure recovered, but the amount of gold required to train is equal or greater than the number of XP required for that training eligibility. The chart below highlights the levels, by class, where the training gold is equal to or greater than the incremental XP requirements for the next level.

 

This situation is aggravated by the fact that once a character has acquired sufficient XP to train for the next he cannot earn any more XP until he has trained to that next level. Besides the typical activities which gain a character treasure and XP, there are two options for paying for training: performing a service for the tutor or taking out a loan. The rules provided for both of these possibilities are quite thin.

 

"The tutor might possibly accept some combination of gold and service" is all we get from the rules. Rules which rely on the referee's judgement as heavily as this are useless for a playable game. They reduce game play to unstructured make-believe. I don't have a solution to this, but I'm inclined toward "service" taking the form of months of service in exchange for a predetermined reduction in training costs, like 1 month per 500 gold reduction per level of the trainee, which would put the character in "time jail" for the period without the possibility of fast-forwarding the character's clock. A minimum of 500 gold per level might be additionally required. In any case, this is something for us to decide as a group, not just one referee's ruling. Let's discuss it in Discord!

 

Loan rules are only slightly more developed than the "service" rules, however the like-minded players and referees at Demon Idol have interpreted and extended the book's scanty rule in a way that I suggest we adopt wholesale.

 

This game is as much yours as mine, however, and I'd like to debate these ideas with you and discuss any other suggestions and thoughts you have.