Paradigm Concepts

[Njal Val'Assante]

When it comes to Crawl mods, how much is too much? Would 6 combat encounters be too many? 8? Should there be a lot of RP opportunity written into Crawls to offset the combat, or would you rather a straight hack/slash/eep! Trap! perspective?

Regarding details, again, how much is too much? Especially in as immersive a world as Arcanis, is there a point of too much detail with regards to little things that the majority of the people playing will never discover?

Opinions? Thoughts?

[hustonj]

It depends on whether people are supposed to expect to finish or not.

It depends on what the author does to "ramp up" the difficulty.

If each fight is supposed to take 30~45 minutes of real-world time to play through, and people are expected to FINISH the module in a 4 hour block, well, there ya go. I think you can do that math. 4 fights would mean there's not much time left to initiate or conclude the module, let alone include any skill challenges or puzzles.

Two fights where the story specifically does not provide the players time to rest and recuperate between the fights, meaning they start the second one still down any Stamina they used during the first one will make the second fight much harder than the opponents themselves will. If you put three in a row that way, you should expect a great many tables will simply fail to win their way through all three fights.

A traditional "dungeon crawl" saves some time for a skill challenge or puzzle, whether it is the trapped and locked doors you have to get through in order to enter the secret escape passage into the enemy castle, or the ability to evade an encounter which would otherwise create a no-rest double combat.

If you provide more dice chucking opportunities (the thing that most typifies a crawl adventure) than the majority can fit into the expected run time, then ANY details you try to cram into the module will simply be missed by people who are racing the clock.

Everything comes down to what can people reasonably expect to accomplish in the time frame you expect the module to take to complete, or do you expect people not to ever complete it?
_________________
Valeriano Innocenzo Camillo de Larissa la Galletti
San Antonio, Tx-based Harvester
Jeff Huston
huston.harvester@cox.net