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View Full Version : Pathfinder Gloomhaven-inspired Warcraft campaign



ladubois
2017-06-17, 09:15 PM
I've been working on a Pathfinder Warcraft campaign for years (I've already got documents full of homebrewed mechanics and crunch for races and stuff - and yes, I've been using the 3e Warcraft RPG for reference and inspiration, as well as other homebrew efforts around the web - that's not what this is about). Anyway, one of the big hurdles I've been trying to figure out is how to set up the adventures. Because going from the Valley of Trials/Northshire all the way to the Broken Isles as a single, continuous group of characters is a bit insane, especially considering that I envision this as being a E6/E8 campaign setting (I just don't see C'Thun and Yogg-Saron being as far apart in power as a continuous level progression would imply - the difference might be in mythic ranks, but I'm having difficulty getting that idea to behave properly in this context). Anyway, I quickly hit upon the idea of players being able to periodically (usually between expansions) having the option to retire their characters, and pick up a new one but how, exactly, that could be handled in a way that rewards players for retiring their characters, but doesn't lead to everyone wanting to retire their characters all at the same time has eluded me. Until I was introduced to Gloomhaven.

Gloomhaven is a bit difficult to adequately describe, because there's a lot going on in it. In short, it's a tabletop boardgame that plays reminiscently to a D&D game, but where the rulebooks are able to completely take the place of the DM. There are a number of characters you can play as, each of which comes with a deck of cards that represent their abilities, and you build a large hand/small deck out of these cards to take with you on each of your adventures. As you level up, you gain access to more cards, but the number of cards you can bring with you remains the same. Swap out dice for a "modifier deck" (a stack of cards with a distribution of -2, -1, +0, +1, +2 cards, and a couple of others that adjust your attacks' damage), and it's actually rather reminiscent of 4e, on reflection. But great. Still, that's not the important part. What makes Gloomhaven noteworthy is that it's a "legacy" game - a board game which each time you play can end up affecting how it plays next time. Completing adventures unlocks new areas, or "world achievements" that can affect how the world unfolds. But that's just the start. Back to the characters.

When you make a character in Gloomhaven, you acquire a personal objective that represents what that character is trying to accomplish by adventuring. For example, trying to make a powerful poison capable of killing anything which requires harvesting ingredients from a certain number of specific monsters. As soon as your character completes this objective, they must retire. And since every character's objective is different, you'll never end up having every character in a party (and rarely even as many as two characters) retiring at the same time, allowing for a strong sense of continuity in the group, even once no character that was in the group at the beginning is still around. Additionally, completing a personal objective provides the group with some sort of reward - new items, a new character class, etc. And when the retiring player's new character gets a free "perk" (pretty much analogous to a feat in d20 systems) for each previous character that player has retired. Combined with the Prosperity system that allows new characters to be created at a higher level, and retiring won't often set you back all that far (and at one point I was even able to make a new character at the exact same level my old character had retired at - though a fair amount of XP behind).

Now, this system can't quite be transferred straight over to Pathfinder, but this is where this thread comes into play. Things like the rate to award XP and Prosperity will probably just require experimentation. But other things like what would be good rewards for personal quests (since the standard reward in Gloomhaven, new character classes, doesn't work so well for tabletop RPGs) - what would make good personal quests, for that matter - can easily be brainstormed without needing heavy number-crunching. I've already decided that it would be a good idea to n number of personal objectives (probably 4) should need to be completed in order to unlock an expansion's end-game raid progression, and that completing those raids is what unlocks access to the next expansion (beginning with a launch event, like in WoW, to allow for a little bit of downtime, and build up for the next leg).

Anyway, so that's what I've thought about so far. Feedback?