Well, our longtime DM, Willliam, and his wife are moving to San Antonio. We’ll be able to continue our D&D 5e campaign online via Roll20, but I think it’s important that the group that is left still get together in-person. Since I’ll be moving the Traveller game back online, I’ve decided to start a D&D 5e campaign. My wife has been playing in William’s campaign and enjoys it, and really only in the last few months I think she’s really caught on to how to play RPGs, and 5e in particular.
However, we’ll only have three players, so I really can’t run a typical combat-centric game. They will all die.
So I’m going to run a 3-player campaign with a bit more Swords & Sorcery tone. I’m keeping the available players races to the original ones from AD&D 1e, but without half-orcs. We’ll start it as more of an urban campaign, based in a massive city inspired by Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar, and we’ll be generally shooting for the spirit of the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser novels, minus the sexism, racism, and other cringy stuff. I love those books, but parts of them haven’t aged well, even if the spirit of them has.
So without having tons of combat, and not giving experience points for treasure obtained, how to do this? Well, I’m going to award XP for good roleplaying, problem solving, clever use of abilities and skills, etc. I may actually use the rules in AD&D 2e for awarding XP for use of class abilities during play. For example, in that edition thieves got points for actually using their thief skills in-game. I really liked that.
So this campaign, I hope, will center on exploration, investigation, problem-solving, etc., and I’ll award points accordingly.
I’m using my Legend Keeper account to create a wiki for the campaign from the ground up, and I set up this blogger blog too.