Dissolution Future

So, with the defeat of the lich Aggah-Shan and the stopping of the Malady, the Dissolution campaign has reached a crossroads: do we continue on its present course, continue on while translating to a different game system, or bring it to an end and play something else? This page suggests some options.

Continuing Dissolution in Pathfinder

We could keep playing Pathfinder in the current campaign.

Pros: We know the characters. We sort of know the setting. We have a number of open plot lines that we could go down (some of which you might not be completely aware of), feeding naturally from the story we already have. With the recent windfall (lich pimp booty), the characters are really fighting above their weight class, and should be scarily, setting-alteringly effective now.

Cons: When starting a 3.5 campaign, and later switching to Pathfinder, part of the point was to gain an understanding of how the system worked and what it can do. At this point, I'd have to say mission accomplished on this score, and not much more to uncover. Another problem is that Pathfinder is an additive system. That is, as your character's advance, you gain more and more options, without ever loosing any. This tends to make the game bog down at the higher levels, with all sorts of interlocking effects and more and more details to manage. Common wisdom holds that the "sweet spot" for the game is around levels 7 to 12. So, if you think there is a lot of detail now, it will only get worse. The multiple characters per player makes this much worse, yet Pathfinder and similar games tend to need a certain number of "roles" to be filled to make a party effective. Lastly, this campaign takes a higher amount of effort to manage than I expected (though, to be fair, much of this is self-inflicted).

Continuing Dissolution in 13th Age

We could, yet again, translate the characters into a different gaming system and keep the campaign going that way. One candidate for a target system is 13th Age, one of the most modern evolutions of the d20 system, mixing concepts from D&D 3.5, D&D 4th Edition and some modern story games together, by the designers who built a lot of those systems in the first place. We could also mix in elements from Primetime Adventures.

Pros: Allows us to keep the characters, setting and the story line. There is a lot to like about 13th Age. In particular it is built to avoid the "additive complexity" problem, with characters who become more able as they advance, but yet the number of options the player needs to deal with at once remains about constant. Much of the complexity of Pathfinder is distilled down, particularly during combat, with the vast array of modifiers being distilled down to a couple of more abstract ideas, and magic items vastly reduced in relevance to a character's potency. It adds some really interesting methods of connecting the characters to the setting mechanically, using what it calls "icon relationships" that help and hurt the characters. (I've taken a go at figuring out what the icons might look like in a Ptolus campaign.) Nearly everything in the system is built to be more evocative than just "+1 to hit".

Cons: Characters will not map exactly into the 13th Age system (in fact, until about two days ago when the 13 True Ways book was released, about half couldn't have been translated at all). The system is still pretty crunchy and will take some getting used to. Also, the system is built to sort of teach you how to play as your character develops, which we would be avoiding by translating characters into the mid levels immediately.

Continuing Dissolution in Dungeon World

The Dungeon World rule set would work very well in the Ptolus setting, but it seemed the characters would be hard to map into the "playbooks" the system uses. That all changed in November 2014 with the release of Class Warfare, a book that deconstructs the playbooks into parts that can be mixed and matched together. Armed with it, and some newly gained experience making custom moves for an Earthdawn hack, I think this could be the best way forward (some notes on how).

Pros: Allows us to keep the characters, setting and the story line. In Dungeon World, combat is just one of many approaches players can take, which would really bring out the political/social nature of the Ptolus setting (now that the group counts themselves among the movers and shakers of the city), in a way the Pathfinder or 13th Age just can't handle. It would also mesh well with the the group has been gaming lately (using planning and strategy to avoid drawn out slug fests), as the game's non-combat "moves" are just as important and useful. Characters are also significantly simpler, with many fewer moving parts to track. Gear and magic items are dramatically simplified into a handful of tags and, in some cases, "moves" that the players can make. (As an example, the big bag of goodies from Cassiodora, instead of being tracked item by item, likely just turns into a single "Cassidora's Goody Bag" move that does something narrative.) The system is also built to be improvisational, where you "play to see what happens". Players have more agency in driving the story, and the GM never rolls dice, instead making ritualized "moves" in response to what the players do. One of the best bits of the system is that every move has "success", "partial success" and "not success" results, and the latter two tend to be the most interesting.

Cons: With custom moves, we can get close to the existing characters in feel, but there will be some difference (mostly for the better, though). As Dungeon World works better with smaller groups, and running "GM characters" is much more difficult in Dungeon World, Lostwhite and Sikarsis will likely get transmuted into (extremely competant) "hirelings", using rules that Dungeon World has for such things. This may take some getting used to. The system can also be a little jarring at first.

Continuing Dissolution in Anima Prime

Another system we could transition into is Anima Prime or, more specifically, the Exaltation Prime hack that I built to move our Exalted campaign into.

Pros: Allows us to keep the characters, setting and the story line. Allows us to test out the Exaltation Prime hack. While the system isn't the best fit for the lower levels of a Pathfinder campaign, once characters reach the level you are at now, they are basically superheroes, and Exaltation Prime can handle that just fine. Using this system with characters we already know should allow us to learn it more quickly. It should also be possible to more flexibly embrace and implement the original concept of the characters better.

Cons: Characters will not map perfectly into Exaltation Prime, as the "silos" of party roles (e.g. healer, tank, etc.) don't really exist in Exaltation Prime, at least not nearly as strongly, and the game has a totally different mechanical focus. In fact, it would probably be desirable to "retire" two to three of the characters in order to speed play (while Pathfinder works better with four to six characters, Exaltation Prime works better with two to four).

Continuing Dissolution with D&D Next

Stinging from the failure of D&D 4th Edition to catch on, Wizards of the Coast has spent the last view years totally revising Dungeons & Dragons. While they are not quite done yet, they will soon make the basic rules of the system freely available to everyone. I'm not sure I like what I've seen so far to think this is a good idea, but time will tell.

Continuing Dissolution with Fate Accelerated

Someone has gone through the trouble of translating Pathfinder into Pathfinder Fate Accelerated, a lighter, more narrative system. The Fate system has become very popular, and the Accelerated version offers an even more rapid playing system.

Pros: Allows us to keep the characters, setting and the story line. Allows us to test out Fate Accelerated. The much looser character system may fit the PCs better, as several of the characters bend the Pathfinder system heavily.

Cons: Not sure.

End Dissolution and try a series of short games

As endings go, this one is as good as any. We could start some experiments with testing out some games that run for one or a few sessions. Some that I am dying to try out, in no particular order:

Danger Patrol: A rules-light, high action, Flash Gordon-y, serial-style sci-fi roleplaying game. This could probably go for two or three sessions, with a new "episode" each session.
Gamma World: A ridiculously gonzo, post-apocalyptic game, where radiation gives you mutant powers. This version is supposedly the best incarnation of the D&D 4th Edition rules. Characters can be created in about five minutes, which is good, because characters die horribly and often. If you want to play an erudite polar bear that shoots fricken lazer beams out of his eyes, this is your game.
Lady Blackbird: A steampunk game that comes with specific characters and a specific setup, but rarely plays the same way twice. Really neat mechanical ways of connecting the characters and incentivizing particular actions. There are some hacks of this that take the basic concept into other genres (e.g. Operation: Blackbird turns it into a superspy/caper sort of game).
Fiasco: A purely narrative game of powerful ambition and poor impulse control. Different "playsets" make the genre and setting of the story different each time. No gamemaster.
Doctor Chaos: "What if the world’s greatest supervillain were not actually a moron?" An interesting take on a superhero game, where the players collectively play a supervillian and only incidentally create some heroes along the way.
In a Wicked Age…: A dark fantasy story game where the story is driven by a random "oracle" at the start of each session. Long term play is structured by following a chain of characters through a world, one leading to the next, instead of playing the same character the whole time.
Wield: Story game where you play epic magic items and the "heroes" that wield you are sort of disposable pawns.
Evil Intent: a board game about taking over the world.
Sentinels of the Multiverse: a cooperative card game pitting a team of superheroes against a villain.
Smash-Up!: a competitive card game, where you mix two "faction" decks together (e.g. "ninjas" and "gorillas") and fight others.
Escape: The Curse of the Temple: You all have ten minutes to escape a temple. Played in a real ten minutes.

End Dissolution and try another long term game

We could also leap into a different game, where "long term" might mean a few weeks to a few years. Some possibilities:

Numenera: Written by Monte Cook (the guy who wrote the Ptolus setting and most of D&D 3.5), this is his approach to "post-D&D gaming". Taking place so far in the future that science seems like magic, it functions like a fantasy setting filled with ancient, powerful secrets (i.e. ultra-technology). Instead of race and class and such, each character is an "<adjective> <noun> who <verbs>", gaining different abilities from each of the choices. Plus, the setting is gorgeous.
Exaltation Prime: Try out these rules (or maybe the gamemaster-less mini version, Pocket Anima Prime) in some other setting with new characters. Could maybe use Channel A to generate the basic premise for a game.
Apocalypse World: Built for short campaigns (maybe six to twelve sessions), this story-based post-apocalypse game has turned out to provide an engine for play that has kind of taken the gaming world by storm. The game revolves around "moves" that all work on a success/partial success/failure model. The game is known particularly for encoding exactly what the GM does, using its own set of GM moves. The design is also built around a notion fiction informing the moves, and the results feeding back into the fiction, at all times, and also about emergent story (rather than pre-planned by the GM).
Dungeon World: Takes the Apocalypse World world engine, and builds a love-letter to dungeon crawling adventure games like early D&D. Essentially old-school dungeon crawling with new-school design and sensibilities.
Monsterhearts: Takes the Apocalypse World world engine, and builds a love-letter to teen monster romance stories (e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, et. al.).
Low Life: In the far-far future, lower life forms (cockroaches, worms, even poop, boogers and Twinkies) have achieved sentience and now dominate the ruined remnants of the Oith. This Savage Worlds setting showcases the system as well as any. You really need to see the art to "get" the idea.
Bulldogs!: Freebooters in space, taking risky jobs, rubbing elbows with other alien races, trying to make a name for themselves. This is a FATE game, written by a guy I gamed with a little when I lived in Jersey.
Monsters & Magic: Peripherally part of the Old School Renaissance (a loose clique that builds games based on very early editions of D&D), this game captures a lot of the feel of early D&D with some more modern system flavoring. Old School games tend to feature exploration (particularly dungeons) and tend to be pretty lethal.
Tech Noir: How modern designers build a near-future, cyberpunk game like Shadowrun. Very interesting design, also with an emergent story.
Mecha: How modern designers build a story-based mecha fighting game. Avoids the technical minutia of BattleTech for a more abstract system, driven by character.