Getting Classy with Equipment

So I find myself in a weird place in this hobby. For years I played a regular weekly campaign, over a decade, going from 3.5 to pathfinder to 5e, until life and work got in the way a few years ago. Since then it feels like life keeps opening the possibility for rpgs to re-enter as a major part of my life as new people discover the hobby and new ways to play become viable, but then there’s the other obstacles that have popped up in the last year or so too…

But where I am now is playing 5e occasionally with adventure league players (fun times, but we all know how restricting that is) and introducing people to the game with Knave. This blogs’ main author has brought up the game before, and has even gone so far to introduce his beefed up hack, Brave. Knave has given me a great opportunity, it’s nearly removed the barrier of entry to play. It’s dnd where you can sit down without any understanding of the rules and keep up with everyone else. While other games are similarly simple, knave also has the benefit of feeling more like regular classic dnd than most. People I never thought would be interested in the game finally understand just what us nerds are doing, it’s great.

This leaves me with an interesting situation: I have people who want to play more, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to teach them “real” dnd, but I’m noticing the limits of the game. It’s not really built for the campaign. As a Referee it’s the perfect system, but nearly all of my players wanted more toys to play with, they all wanted class features and spells. For a player to really get invested in a long term adventure they’ll want to see their characters grow and improve, they will want to see their stories unfold—and I find that having mechanics to reflect that helps drive a story home helps out new players especially, it’s easier to be reactive than active.  

Running On Empty

Adventuring is tiring work, when you think about it. Traveling across wilderness after wasteland, slay beast foul and fantastic, saving the helpless and carting their lazy buts back to civilization, not to mention the loot. How can one forget the loot?! And it's not like it doesn't show up in the fiction either, I mean, dealing with being tired from walking is most of the page count of lord of the rings after all. 

But DnD and its ilk rarely have a good mechanic for this, or rather, not very usable ones. 3e had a pile of conditions, including fatigue and exhaustion that I'd always forget, and 5e has a downward spiral of exhaustion that I'd rather not remember, one that is so punishing that I can't hit the players with it too often or they'll not want to adventure at all. Besides, I usually play Knave, or my co-writers variant Brave, most of the time these days. 

Here There Be Dragons

A common misstep I see dungeon masters make, myself especially, is to put off their good ideas. They, or rather I take their craziest, most heroic adventures, monsters, dungeons what have you and plan to run them sometime down the road. For myself at least, there are several reasons for this, working together to make my campaigns somewhat less than they ought to be.

The first is the idea of a campaign progression, the idea that I start with small, mundane challenges before diving into the realm of the fantastic. This makes sense, on both a storytelling and gameplay level- you need to set up the world before the characters see its extremes, and you need appropriate challenges for low level adventurers. The problem is that I often overdue it, I’ve never run a liche, or a rakshasa, never ran an adventure in the lower planes, even though I’ve run more than one campaign that has lasted over a year. I don’t want to throw out my best stuff right away, and often never get to it. Especially since most of my campaigns don’t last more than a year.