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Showing posts from January, 2017

Abyssal Winds: A New Style of Campaign

I've GMed over 100 sessions of Dungeons and Dragons 5E now, with over 40 different players across multiple campaigns. I think I have finally learned enough to make a meaningful commentary on the system. I really love it, except for one thing: my bad guys, NPCs, and monsters are always getting ran over by the PCs as they sprint through encounters. They don't even think about it anymore. Bing, bang, bam -- they run in and kill the baddies. I had a level 15 take out a level 21 lich in a round and a half without breaking a sweat. My new campaign has been years in the making and I really wanted to get a different feel from combat and NPC interaction. The party is a group of monster hunters in Kara-Tur, the Asian-inspired part of Forgotten Realms.  To slow down the action, I really have emphasized two major changes: making NPC interactions trickier and making monster interaction trickier. For NPCs, the PCs now have to navigate the subtleties of honor and tradition. Each PC has 7