Feedback

[Telas]

Feel free to reply to this or email me privately with any feedback you have for the campaign, setting, rules, or anything else over the last few dozen Thursdays.

KOS, The Once and Future GM

Got plot?  Try Eureka, 501 adventure plots to inspire game masters.

[Alex Johnson]

You did great, Kurt.  Thanks again.  I might have preferred SavageHawk the way you originally planned.  The benefit of D&D settings is big built up lists of monsters and treasures.  You had some interesting ones, but where the most variety and focus should have been it seemed a little drab (undead and infernals).  I definitely enjoyed the lower level play more than the high level play.  An advancement may only be two skills or an edge, but it feels a lot more significant than d20 where you get lots of skills, maybe a feat, some class abilities, more spells, and possibly an ability score point to boot.  By high levels I was feeling like we could take on demon lords...and we did.  Savage Worlds is definitely fast, furious fun and I'll welcome any other scifi or fantasy games using the system.  Oh, I'm talking more about the system than your game.  Back on topic!  The idea of each PC having a magic item that improves over time was a great one but the execution kind of fell short.  We were getting extra magic items not associated with Rank, we got almost whatever we wanted as we gained Ranks ("I need better armor", "I need a tower shield", "I want a bonus to stealth"....  I think I prefer the mystery of either finding items as in D&D or discovering new powers of an artifact over time.  You did a good job building the story and not bad at wrapping it up given that it had to be cut short.

Alex

[Telas]

Yup.  With hindsight, it's obvious that my expectation of prep time was off.  There wasn't as much time later in the campaign as in the beginning.  You can see that in the brief bursts of 'matured' critters, items, and plots that would show up from time to time, when I had spare time to crank them out.  

I was also surprised at how well I could improv.  There were sessions when it was obvious, but there were far more where I had little or nothing planned, but y'all were scrambling through the adventure as if it were polished.  Funny how that works.  Now that most of the campaign concept is worked out, I can add to it, and mature it some more, hopefully ending up at a solid campaign world.

The advanced ranks do slow things down a bit with SWEX, but it's not as bad as d20 or even 4E.  Next campaign, I may slow things down a bit in the middle, and try to maintain the sweet spot for longer.

Kurt

Got plot?  Try Eureka, 501 adventure plots to inspire game masters.

[Alex Johnson]

One other suggestion.  Decide what skills you will have in your world and what they mean.  There was some unclear skills which didn't fit in well, some skills you said weren't used but later you mentioned they'd be one way to do something, some skills you nixed as inappropriate for fantasy but they seemed reasonable to me, and there were some skills that got disproportionately very heavy use while other skills came up 0-1 times.  I worship your improv skills.  Plan the campaign setting in a bit more detail and try to distribute those calls for skill rolls so we can't just pick 3 and be good for the entire campaign.  Your crutch skills are Notice, Knowledge (Rituals, Planes, Infernals, Arcana), and a little bit Intimidation.  I took Streetwise and Swimming, two skills that came up exactly once each in the entire campaign.  Taunt was one that might have been useful, but I never used it.

Some suggestions:  vary combats by having enemies attempt tricks (Agility or Smarts) on us, set up encounter locations where terrain affects tactics (you're already good at this but I really like it when you do, so I'm just asking for more), set up encounters that are meant to teach us when it's time to walk away and when it's time to run, look for ways to make other skills relevant (ie, a lake or sea voyage so that piloting and swimming get used, times of commanding underlings that aren't 100% loyal so persuasion, intimidate, and taunt are used in other ways, guessing and chance games as tricks/traps so that gambling is used, some information we need to uncover so investigation, tracking, and streetwise get used), maybe guts should be used to get out of shaken which would differentiate the points spent by fighter-types and priest-types instead of all being straight Spirit rolls.  Finally, I don't like the way healing works in SW.  Not anything to do with you, but it's super easy in the first hour (so much so we only ended a session with wounds once or twice in 18 months of play) and super hard after that.  Just having a couple characters with d6 Healing helping each other can heal the whole party in the Golden Hour, usually.  I feel that needs some tweaking.

Please don't take all this input as negatives.  I'm looking for something to say other than just praise.  Praise is good, you earned praise, you've got praise, but now is there anything I can think of that would make the next campaign even better for me?

Alex

[Bryan X]

 Sorry I couldn't make the last game after 2 years of play. *shakes fist*  Oh well, I had fun. I thought it was a fresh and well thought out campaign, of course with a few bugs in it but that's normal.  Then again I'm use to on the fly, "improv" style campaigns and I've never played savagehawk, greyhawk, whateverhawk-skull-make-it-sound-grim type campaign so I don't have the obligation of being a snob about it otherwise. :P   But I digress , my verdict is that it was fun and I hope to play in your next campaign when it comes around.

B-Dub

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Date: Fri, 6 May 2011 22:44:15 -0500
Subject: [After the Darkness] Feedback
From: tel...@gmail.com
To: after-the...@googlegroups.com