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Grog Logs
2018-08-04, 06:47 PM
CEPHALON CAMPAIGN STAY OUT

I need help figuring out how to resolve a situation of having too many NPCs in a Settlement. My PCs are currently in a medium-sized Town (~4k citizens) that is composed of 12 interconnected small Villages (~330 citizens). Each village is located on its own hex on the map, with each hex being 25 miles across (a full day of traveling). We're playing Gritty Realism variant, but that's probably irrelevant to my problem.

About 6 years ago, the Villages were cursed with Paranoia, which led to them breaking contact with one another and the rest of the continent. To break the curse, the PCs must complete a quest for each leader of each Village. Quests consist of rescues, battles, deliveries, and sharing novel ideas (e.g. compose a song; share a recipe from far away).

My fear is that the Party will get sick of the collection of Villages (especially given the extreme paranoia) before completing enough of the quests to break the curse. Over the course of 3 sessions, they have completed 2 of the 12 quests (both of which were find & rescue a captive NPC) and received the third quest (investigate rumors of devils stealing a treasure chest). In comparison, it only took them 4 sessions to resolve the crisis in the first region of the continent and 6 sessions to resolve the crisis in the second region of the continent. There are still 6 regions on the continent that the Party has not yet visited, so there is a lot of campaign to go.

If I was designing this custom campaign from scratch, I would have only made 6 village peaks to decrease the number of sessions in this region. Or, I would have 12 districts within a single Town, so that the PCs could have more easily reconnected with the leaders that they have previously helped. Whereas currently, they'd have to travel a full day to re-talk to an NPC even briefly, which is odd from a narrative point of view. I can't redesign the structure of the Village collection because the PCs already know all of the above (except what the other 9 quests consist of).

So, my primary question is, what should I do? Do I trust that the variety of the next quest will break the repetitiveness? Do I ask the Players if they want to do a montage of resolving some of the village leader interactions and quests? Do I simply remind the Players that they can always come back to this region later to finish resolving it if it gets too repetitive? Would a certain type of quest make the prolonged stay in the region interesting enough? Is there a greater variety of paranoia that I could inject into the different Villages to create more diversity? What other solutions am I overlooking?

Thank you in advance.

ChamHasNoRoom
2018-08-05, 05:45 AM
It doesn't really matter if the hook for every quest is fundamentally the same so long as the quest itself is different. All the different village mayors probably will blur together, but provided the rest of the quest is different, it doesn't matter. Make one quest a dungeon crawl, and another about trekking across wilderness to fetch a thing and bring it back, and a third about finding out who's responsible for murdering the mayor's brother, and so on, and your players probably won't care that each quest started from basically the same place. You could structure an entire campaign around players being part of an adventurer's guild who get every single quest hook from a gruff veteran guild master who tells them they're a loose canon and threaten to take away their badges.

If the problem is less variety and more that the constant paranoia has players fatigued on people being suspicious jackasses all the time, you can have a quest from village A be relevant to village B somehow. Even if it's just as simple as village A having no idea where the dungeon containing their lost relic is located but village B happens to know. This means that players go from paranoid and suspicious village A to the friends they made in village B and it breaks up the monotony of every allegedly friendly character talking like Haley's Mistrust.

Lunali
2018-08-05, 07:32 AM
Doing all 12 does seem like a bit much, you may want to have some quests that open up multiple villages. Alternatively, you could have the villages that have already been resolved take care of some of the other villages.

Hooligan
2018-08-05, 09:04 AM
12 is way too many.

If you have too many NPCs, have some of them fight or get murdered by the party. Such things seem to account for ~95% of all NPC mortality in D&D

Temotei
2018-08-05, 09:12 AM
If the towns are cursed with paranoia, who's to say that some of the quest givers would have already been murdered or otherwise indisposed (caught stealing weapons from the blacksmith who is so obviously trying to produce weapons for an uprising, for example)?

Honest Tiefling
2018-08-05, 01:46 PM
If the towns are cursed with paranoia, who's to say that some of the quest givers would have already been murdered or otherwise indisposed (caught stealing weapons from the blacksmith who is so obviously trying to produce weapons for an uprising, for example)?

I was going to suggest this. Nothing says a curse of paranoia quite like overly elaborate murder that somehow still kills someone.

Do you have any clerics, paladins, druids or other holy types in this game? Perhaps they can contact their order to mop up the mess after the worst cases have been dealt with. The players focus on the most problematic and violent of the NPCs until help arrives that can spend time untangling this mess.

Or perhaps one of the NPCs WAS a cleric, and healing them means they get their powers back, allowing them to hold down the fort as it were.

Also, a giant fire can sweep across the town. Doesn't even have to be from the paranoid NPCs, but that might not make matters better.

And someone made the curse, and probably want it to keep going. Have them enter the story, so the group can choose to save the village, or get rid of the origin of the curse who might make matters worse. They might target the PCs, so staying in the town might not be the best of choices due to collateral damage.

Blymurkla
2018-08-05, 04:24 PM
An idea: have the players do a montage. Player one (who's the one who is most ready) sets up a village with a quest, then hand over narration to player 2 two who's PC will be instrumental to resolving the quest. The other players chips in and cheers on. Thus, you go around the table. You can do it twice, if necessary.

And man, 25 mile hexes is not (https://www.deviantart.com/blymurkla/art/The-30-mile-hex-750319786) the right size for this stuff ... but I gather you've understood that by now.

Grog Logs
2018-08-05, 06:15 PM
Doing all 12 does seem like a bit much, you may want to have some quests that open up multiple villages. Alternatively, you could have the villages that have already been resolved take care of some of the other villages.

Yes, 12 is too many. A great way to learn about what not to do in a campaign is to create a campaign. 😉 Actually, a lot of the campaign is going well, but I have so many ideas about how to make my next campaign more manageable.

Having a quest encompass multiple villages is a workable solution. Having them already been resolved does not given other details of the campaign.


If the towns are cursed with paranoia, who's to say that some of the quest givers would have already been murdered or otherwise indisposed (caught stealing weapons from the blacksmith who is so obviously trying to produce weapons for an uprising, for example)?

"One thing's sure: Inspector Clay is dead — murdered — and somebody's responsible!" Lt. Harper in Plan 9 from Outer Space

Actually, this could work. I have to give it more thought within the context of the overall tone and story of campaign. But, I had not considered this option, which is a good thing.


(snip)Do you have any clerics, paladins, druids or other holy types in this game? Perhaps they can contact their order to mop up the mess after the worst cases have been dealt with. The players focus on the most problematic and violent of the NPCs until help arrives that can spend time untangling this mess.

This does not work for my story, but a good suggestion with a different setting.


An idea: have the players do a montage. Player one (who's the one who is most ready) sets up a village with a quest, then hand over narration to player 2 two who's PC will be instrumental to resolving the quest. The other players chips in and cheers on. Thus, you go around the table. You can do it twice, if necessary.

This could be a good way to speed things up if the Players start to feel the drag.


And man, 25 mile hexes is not (https://www.deviantart.com/blymurkla/art/The-30-mile-hex-750319786) the right size for this stuff ... but I gather you've understood that by now.

Huh, I wonder why 30 miles is the standard instead of 25? Probably because 30 is dividable by 5 and 6 (as well as 2, 3, 10, 15). I went with 25 because a PC can travel 24 miles in a full day’s travel at normal pace. I wanted the math for travel time to be easy. That is, the PCs can travel one hex in a day. I added the additional mile to make it divisible by 100 as that is more manageable in my brain, as I haven’t been inundated with TTRPGs over the years.

Honest Tiefling
2018-08-05, 07:03 PM
This does not work for my story, but a good suggestion with a different setting.

Hrm. That's a pity. Regardless, is there any sort of institution that can or would want to try to handle this situation that the PCs can find or contact? If not...Then what is your setting? Might as well get some more information in that case.

TheStranger
2018-08-05, 07:17 PM
Huh, I wonder why 30 miles is the standard instead of 25? Probably because 30 is dividable by 5 and 6 (as well as 2, 3, 10, 15). I went with 25 because a PC can travel 24 miles in a full day’s travel at normal pace. I wanted the math for travel time to be easy. That is, the PCs can travel one hex in a day. I added the additional mile to make it divisible by 100 as that is more manageable in my brain, as I haven’t been inundated with TTRPGs over the years.

I think the point was that 25 miles apart is way, way, too far. If my math is right, you have an area roughly (very roughly) the size of Connecticut (or half the size of Belgium, if you prefer), with a population of around 4,000 people. Your villages should be more like 2-3 miles apart, I think.

Anyway, what's done is done there. I'll second doubling up on as many of the quests as possible - 12 is a lot. Or make some of them pretty trivial. "Hey, as long as you're headed to Eastville anyway, could you return this casserole dish to my sister-in-law? She left it here last Yuletide." Okay, maybe not that trivial, but they don't all have to be session-long or longer.

I think the key to keeping this interesting is making the quests feel like they're intertwined, and part of a larger story. Otherwise the PCs are just running through a checklist, and that will get old after a while.

Blymurkla
2018-08-06, 11:56 AM
Huh, I wonder why 30 miles is the standard instead of 25? Probably because 30 is dividable by 5 and 6 (as well as 2, 3, 10, 15). I went with 25 because a PC can travel 24 miles in a full day’s travel at normal pace. I wanted the math for travel time to be easy. That is, the PCs can travel one hex in a day. I added the additional mile to make it divisible by 100 as that is more manageable in my brain, as I haven’t been inundated with TTRPGs over the years. I haven't done any proper investigations into whether 30 mile hexes have historically been the most common size, but there have at least been a several maps with 30 miles per hex. My intent was to showcase how much damn stuff, in this case mainly villages and a few towns, fit in a hex. Whether that hex is 40, 30 or 20 miles across doesn't really matter - point is that unless your hexes are really small, lots of things should believably fit inside them. Which sort of ruins the point of hexes. As TheStranger points out, 12 25-mile hexes is a very large area - 6495 sq miles or 16 822 km². Even with low density figures, that's enough space for over a 100 000 inhabitants and multiple towns with thousands of citizens. No more than 12 villages in that area is so low a density that it's, well, remarkable. It's certainly possible, but it's most-rural-part-of-Siberia low. That's gonna have ramifications on what sort of societies springs up. If you care about that sort of stuff. Which you don't have to. And how you call the twelve most remote villages ever a 'town' or 'villages within villages' is beyond me. But what's done is done, and after I've ranted a bit more, I'll try and be constructive too.

As for traveling distance, I don't know, but perhaps whatever game used 30 miles per hex also used 30 miles per day of travel as their rule?

I, by the way, feel that both 30 and 25 miles per day is an absolutely ridiculous high pace for overland travel. If it was in kilometers, I'd accept it. But 25 miles a day!? Yeah, sure, guys with green berets probably do the double as part of some famous test or something. But when counting hexes, the 25 miles is as the crow flies, the real distance traveled on foot in any sort of non-flat, non-road terrain is probably between 1.5 or 2 times longer. Some terrain is even rougher. The rules I've encountered also assume that these high paces is something that can be kept up forever, 'pushing it', incurring fatigue and stuff, comes when you exceed 25 or 30 or whatever. Sure a well trained guy can walk 25 miles in a day, but after just a few of those, he'll need to rest for quite a while. And then we have the party halfling! It's like the guys designing these rules have never hiked their entire life, but only driven along ruler-straight roads and then read about special forces ... // Rant over


____


I do think that having players narrating montages can be a pretty neat idea in your situation. It's surely a way to break the pace and try some story-telling gaming within the confines of your familiar campaign. I'll elaborate (and change) a bit on what I wrote, in haste and without a proper keyboard, yesterday.

Set aside some time, an hour perhaps, for the montage. I'd to it at the beginning or end of a session. You as the GM start by, in rather broad strokes, describing a village, the mayor figure and the quest at hand. Be rather specific about the obstacles in way of the quest - in normal adventure mode, player get to discover the obstacles as they come, but here they need to be fairly known beforehand. Customize the quest and obstacles for a particular player's character. The player should be the one you'll think will be most confident continuing the story, so you get off with a great start. And the obstacles should be tailored to suit the PC in question, a chance to show bravery in combat for a Fighter, a piece of ancient poetry to deliver for the Bard etc.

Then you'll hand over the narration reins to the player. Ask »How do your PC accomplish this quest?«. Ask the player to narrate something cool, to weave in the other PCs in supporting roles and to keep to the tone of the campaign (you'll already established a pattern of what a quest can constitute, so hopefully you won't have anything to wacky on your hands). The other players are free to cheer on, chip in with what their characters do in the quest and come with suggestions, but you might need remind them on who the spotlight is on.

When finished, and this shouldn't take to long to narrate a successful quest, it's time for another player to shine. So someone, either a new player or the one who just finished (the former is preferable if the story got a bit long), describes a new village, mayor and quest. And then you go round, till every player has narrated their hero through a quest (one player won't get the chance to narrate a village, but there's not much to do about that.).


Another idea,is to weave together several villages into what's effectively one quest. Say a bad guy, a dragon, vampire or just a evil sorcerer, has used the amnesia thing make himself ruler of 3-4 villages. The villagers don't remember that they weren't willing underlings of a tyranny before! Dealing with the bad guy solves several of the 12 quests at once. You'll need to establish, though only briefly, all or most of the villages involved before the boss fight is finished - it won't be a blast to set out to save one village from the bad guy, and then discovering that actually, you saved 3. But that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

PairO'Dice Lost
2018-08-06, 12:39 PM
I, by the way, feel that both 30 and 25 miles per day is an absolutely ridiculous high pace for overland travel. If it was in kilometers, I'd accept it. But 25 miles a day!? Yeah, sure, guys with green berets probably do the double as part of some famous test or something. But when counting hexes, the 25 miles is as the crow flies, the real distance traveled on foot in any sort of non-flat, non-road terrain is probably between 1.5 or 2 times longer. Some terrain is even rougher.

Funny you mention that, since the 3e rules (which I assume Grog Logs is using given the 24 miles/day pace) does specify that that's the base travel rate and then is modified by terrain (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#terrain), with most multipliers being between x3/4 and x1/2 distance (or ~1.3x to 2x), just as you describe.


The rules I've encountered also assume that these high paces is something that can be kept up forever, 'pushing it', incurring fatigue and stuff, comes when you exceed 25 or 30 or whatever. Sure a well trained guy can walk 25 miles in a day, but after just a few of those, he'll need to rest for quite a while. And then we have the party halfling! It's like the guys designing these rules have never hiked their entire life, but only driven along ruler-straight roads and then read about special forces ... // Rant over

The fact that forced marches don't take multiple days into account is certainly a weakness of those rules. That pace can be sustained for quite a while, though; Roman and Medieval armies could march at those paces for multiple weeks, being limited more by their baggage train speed and overall logistics than the soldiers' endurance.

There are some attempts out there to make more nuanced and/or verisimilar overland travel and endurance rules, like these (https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Revised_Overland_Movement_and_Fatigue_Rules_(3.5e_ Variant_Rule)), if you're interested.

TheStranger
2018-08-06, 12:57 PM
Funny you mention that, since the 3e rules (which I assume Grog Logs is using given the 24 miles/day pace) does specify that that's the base travel rate and then is modified by terrain (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm#terrain), with most multipliers being between x3/4 and x1/2 distance (or ~1.3x to 2x), just as you describe.



The fact that forced marches don't take multiple days into account is certainly a weakness of those rules. That pace can be sustained for quite a while, though; Roman and Medieval armies could march at those paces for multiple weeks, being limited more by their baggage train speed and overall logistics than the soldiers' endurance.

There are some attempts out there to make more nuanced and/or verisimilar overland travel and endurance rules, like these (https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Revised_Overland_Movement_and_Fatigue_Rules_(3.5e_ Variant_Rule)), if you're interested.

As an experienced long-distance backpacker, I can say from experience that fit individuals not carrying too much weight can maintain a 20-30 mile/day pace on footpaths through mountainous terrain for extended periods without undue difficulty. On roads through flatter terrain, 30-40 miles or even more is feasible (and some people do that on the trails, too). In extremely rough terrain, with no trails, something more on the order of 10-15 miles is about right. Actually, I'm kind of amazed at how realistic the 3.5 rules for overland travel are.

sktarq
2018-08-06, 01:30 PM
yeah-best bet is to knock off multiple villages per quest

villages X,Y,& Z for example
prominent citizen in X is murdered and evidence points to prominent citizen in Y (name Alpha). Town X is starting to get mob-y and baying for revenge. Town Y thinks the whole thing is X looking for an excuse to behave badly and attack them. Headman of X asks the party to kidnap Alpha, so that he/she may face justice and not expose to risks and dirty tricks of Y. The party investigation shows that Alpha didn't do it. Turns out it was someone from Z (an agressive type) who wanted to have X and Y fight and use that to overthrow the headman of Z (an isolationist and spy type).

X gets their justice
Y gets their name cleared
Z get their attempted overthrow thwarted

Frozen_Feet
2018-08-06, 04:13 PM
The number of NPCs is not a real problem, because based on the setup, the players obly need to deal with one or two villages' worth of characters. The scope of the quest might be disproportionate to the size and population of the settlements, but this isn't a problem if the villages and quests themselves are interesting.

Worst case scenario, the players get bored and move on. Solution? Let them. You can just allow them to fail this quest and work the consequences into your campaign at a later date. If the consequences are interesting, the players will resume the earlier quest on their own volition.