A couple days ago some folks asked me to clarify what went so wrong with my Eberron outing that I'm prepared to nix it after just a couple sessions. It wasn't any one big sweeping problem, just a number of minor things that led to this clear feeling that the game just wasn't clicking. Let me explain. No, let me sum up.
I Thought We Were All Pirates On This Bus - Was I expecting horrible Long John Silver or Captain Jack Sparrow accents? Goblins forced to walk the plank? Betraying the Ms. Johnson in the stupid intro adventure? Interparty fisticuffs? I'm not sure, but I know that the piratey-ness was just laying there dead.
Airships? Huh! What are they good for? - I did quite a bit of searching and tinkering trying to find some way of making airshipery work to our advantage, but it never it panned out. In the end I came to the conlusion that putting any focus on the ship rather than the people was probably a bad idea from the get-go.
Crunchy Eberron vs. Fluffy Eberron - Half of the Eberron Campaign Setting is golden. New races, new classes, new feats, new items, new templates. All the crunchy stuff that my players and I love. But the fluff doesn't really do that much for me. My favorite part of the setting is Xendrik, simply because it's a big unknown. If the book had been half as big and relied on a new implied setting rather than an explicit one it would work much better for me. As it stands I feel like I'm playing in someone else's sandbox. I stopped running Greyhawk because I didn't like that sensation and with Eberron the feeling was even more intense.
So there you have it. What wasn't working in Sky Pirates of Eberron? The sky part. Also the pirates. Oh, and the Eberron part. Everything else was aces.
Stay tuned for details on my next big crazy idea. Here's a hint: it will involve both swords and orcs.
PoP!
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I have drawn three pieces today, and this -- with no hint of irony or
self-deprecation -- is the best of them all.
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Some thoughts:
ReplyDeleteI Thought We Were All Pirates On This Bus
I think that this would have been more satisfying with a bit of communication around character creation. The whole 'junior officers' thing didn't really give me any grounding - several of us were confused as to how long we'd been on the ship. If we'd had discussed the sorts of pirate conventions we were interested in and the sorts of character archetypes that would fit with that, I suspect it would have gone a bit better.
Airships? Huh! What are they good for?
I think that a ship would have worked as a setting, rather than a tool. Unfortunately, I think that the ship we had was perhaps too small to work as a setting.
Crunchy Eberron vs. Fluffy Eberron
I suspect that a lot of that has to do with familiarity. Some of the fluff I found that I really liked - I mean, the bits about Zilargo on the Wizard's website sold me on playing a gnome. A gnome!
That said, until a detailed setting hits a certain level of familiarity, I often have a similar issue. Usually I simply abandon all pretenses of setting fidelity and (after giving the players warning that I've changed a lot of things) riff off of the ideas that I like.
I'm still Eberron-ignorant so I can't offer much in the way of specific advice or even specific sympathies (as you know, I'm not a d20 gamer).
ReplyDeleteI can, however, offer a note of solidarity on generally favoring implicit settings over explicit ones. That's my usual preference as well, as you could probably guess. :)
I'm still tempted by your reference to robots, though. Every fantasy setting I've ever enjoyed has had robots in one form or another ...
Yeah, I'm totally using the Warforged in my next game, with slight modifications. They're going to be made of bronze and steam-powered. They're built by Ancient Greek war-philosophers.
ReplyDelete