81 réponses à ce sujet

[Haplose]

Okay, thank you Lugaid and Fred. That's reassuring. Guess I'll play it sometime soon then.

[The Fred]

The community project is planned to go from 1 to 20, more or less. I think you might end up needing to kill a few wandering monsters along the way, though (I have a sheet with the XP range filled in and there are some gaps at odd-numbered high levels and a few around L4-7, for example).

[mungbean]

A level 5 dungeon crawl is ad hoc from the character's point of view, generally motivation is by necessity, undead local raiders came from the crypts or whathaveyou.

A level 25 dungeon crawl turns out to have been a carefully orchestrated lure some master villain organised for you to be there, so he could wipe out the city you came from whilst you were otherwise occupied in a dungeon crawl.

Note the difference? No immersion if you don't accommodate the full scope of what so many millions of experience points slaughtering baddies in the name of waterdeep or your lord or church or whatever really means to the baddies, the real serious ones like evil deities that don't care about the rules on directly interfering in mortal affairs.

[rjshae]

M. Rieder wrote...

I think that there are certain quests and story types that could lend themselves well to scaling. Dungeon exploration and area clearing come to mind. The settings would have to be generic and the story lines would have to be incredibly generic if you wanted to scale to a wide range of levels.

I am not sure how one would go about making a whole module this way. I suspect things would become repetitive quickly and I doubt many people would like it. In my opinion, story is king. It doesn't matter if you are story driven, or sandbox, you still have to have compelling plots and dialogue or the module becomes one dull hack and slash. Making a story that is plausible for a 1st, 10th, or 20th level character is not possible.

My thought is that scaling works better if you throw a player into an environment where they don't know what to expect. Like a parallel plane of the faerie sidhe where magic doesn't work like you'd expect, even the humblest creatures can be powerful nature spirits, and motiviations are full of layers and deceptions. Having a few encounters that even the most powerful characters can't handle eliminates the certainty of being a higher level character.

The Dragon Age game did a pretty good job of scaling encounters and making the player less certain of success.

Modifié par rjshae, 08 septembre 2011 - 09:42 .

[Haplose]

rjshae wrote...

The Dragon Age game did a pretty good job of scaling encounters and making the player less certain of success.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Facing seemingly same opponents, just progressively stronger, as the player gets stronger is never a good idea. Like the basic darkspawn types.. or worse yet, bandits and mercenaries. Kills the spirit of progression. Level scaling of module, depending on character starter level - seems like a good idea, within reason (no epic rats and kobolds, please). But scaling encounters with similar monster types accross the adventure, basing on character level is very bad.

[Arkalezth]

Dragon Age was pretty weird in that regard. The easiest enemies of the game were actually found at the end, many of them died in one hit (and not a powerful hit, just any, like if they had 1 HP). I know it was done that way to make the player feel powerful, but it was a bit ridiculous.

Also, Dragon Age has the most boring fight I remember in a game (that spinning column in the Deep Roads).

[rjshae]

Haplose wrote...

rjshae wrote...

The Dragon Age game did a pretty good job of scaling encounters and making the player less certain of success.

Sorry, but I have to disagree. Facing seemingly same opponents, just progressively stronger, as the player gets stronger is never a good idea. Like the basic darkspawn types.. or worse yet, bandits and mercenaries. Kills the spirit of progression. Level scaling of module, depending on character starter level - seems like a good idea, within reason (no epic rats and kobolds, please). But scaling encounters with similar monster types accross the adventure, basing on character level is very bad.

I suppose it's a style preference really. For example, Fallout 3 seemed to use scaling throughout and just changed the names of the opponents. (Although a few of the opponents became trivial foes toward the end game.)

To satisfy your criteria, you would probably have to limit the experience range that you would allow for application of the scaling.

Modifié par rjshae, 09 septembre 2011 - 04:22 .