Thursday, March 22, 2012

RPG: Combat vs Story


My first real experiences with D&D were playing in Wizards of the Coasts' Encounters program. This is a weekly event run by local gaming stores. They feature 'seasons' of adventures that take characters from levels 1 to 3 over approximately 13 weeks.

I wasn't able to regularly play until the 3rd season, The Keep on the Borderlands. If you asked me what the story was for the adventure I would not know what to tell you. I remember there was a betrayal, and a couple dragons and I'm guessing a keep.

The point being that when I started roleplaying, I was much more interested in the combat aspect of the game. 

Most RPGs have a mix of combat and story telling. They're two sides of the same coin. Without story, you may as well just play Risk over and over and without combat and conflict, the story can get boring and stagnant. It just so happened that I held one side in higher regard than the other. I've recently noticed, however, that my tastes have changed.

Last Friday my D&D group wrapped up the Cairn of the Winter King, the 4th level adventure included in the Monster Vault boxed set. It was a nice little dungeon crawl with a nice variety of combat encounters and skill challenges. Story-wise though, it fell a little flat.

The basic (slightly spoilery) premise is that while venturing through the town of Fallcrest, the adventurers find a winter storm in the middle of summer. Snow covers the land and the town is in danger of running out of supplies. While in the middle of investigating this strange occurring, a flying ship lands and unloads a swarm of undead soldiers. After the soldiers are dealt with, the talking masthead of the ship reveals that someone has stolen the scepter of the Winter King and he wants it back. The thief is soon found and the heroes take the ship to return the scepter. 

When the ship arrives in the frozen lands of the north, they find the lair of the Winter King has been entombed in ice for unknown ages. However, the hallways are slowly beginning to thaw and all sorts of monsters and creatures are waking up. Fighting through the ice palace soon leads the party to the frozen body of the Winter King. When the scepter is returned, he wakes up, and obviously tries to kill everybody. 

I will admit that its a very cool premise, but the story just feels so one directional and there's so many questions with no answers. There's no real backstory of who this King is. No idea of why and how long he's been trapped in ice. There's so much potential of unlocking secrets that the adventure doesn't provide.

I'm sure that the right DM and the right group could add so much to this to really make a memorable adventure, but out of the box, its much for combat focused than story. 

The previous adventure, The Reavers of Harkenwold (provided in the DM's Kit) was a much beefier adventure. Granted, it had two levels worth of story as compared to Winter King's one. But it felt so much more open-ended. The players found themselves in the large area of Harkenwold. The region has been overrun by a  mercenary group known as the Iron Circle and needed help freeing themselves from their grip. From that introduction, the group had free reign to go where they wanted and slowly build up a resistance group. It definitely had a more epic feeling of a larger world that what the players could immediately see, as opposed to the narrow view that was presented in Winter King.

Again, I'm not saying that Cairn of the Winter King was a bad module, just that it was more combat focused. If that's something your group wants, then I highly recommend it. For those that are looking for a deeper story, you might want to look elsewhere.

Have any of you noticed a shift in your gaming tastes? Do you love an epic and engaging story? Or do you just want to stab everything that moves.

2 comments:

  1. I agree, story becomes increasingly important as a campaign progresses (and players get past the learning curve of the rules). Its especially tough to blend a story from a one-shot like Cairn into an ongoing campaign without extensive work and time. The best published modules I've read or played have all been ones part of a series, adventure path, or tide to a campaign world which gives them the extra room to add the extra hooks for PC's to discover and DMs to flesh out.

    You may want to check out one of the adventure paths for Pathfinder, they usually blend a great backstory and campagin together pretty well. PC's are encouraged to choose a campaign specific perk to help their backstories and all major NPC's have details on their history/motivation.

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  2. Thanks for the advice. I'll have to check that out. We have one more published adventure (Orcs of Stonefang Pass) planned but after that I may try to convince everyone to start over and try to get a more cohesive story going.

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