So I finally put a bullet in the dome of my Pentex campaign.
It was a hell of a ride for all that I barely planned it past a couple of the initial scenes.
The theme of my Pentex game was "Take everything you want, and pay for it." All I did was hand the players a pile of juicy powers, ridiculous magic items, limitless resources and endless parades of cheap drugs and sex. It was, perhaps, a quintessentially American campaign.
Once you beef up a bunch of characters to an absurd high level, it becomes hard to challenge them. Frankly I ran out of challenging enemies about six months ago; I was mostly just siccing the players on each other and dropping deus ex machinas on them when we managed to stay sober enough to game at all. No point in putting a lot of thought into a dangerous foe that is going to be eviscerated by 500 claw attacks in the first combat turn. With a lot of high level characters in the party, coming up with combat challenges was just not working out-and I can't get this group to do any of that high level intrigue stuff, they don't have the patience or experience.
It was a grand, glorious orgy of carnage that I am quite happy not to repeat. Let me tell you, fomori are not characters that can really drive a campaign for very long-once the shock of acid blood and brain eating wear off, the whole business becomes a rather numb affair of whirling claws, improbable drug cocktails and ichor stained sodomy.
Anyway, the next WoD campaign is probably going to be a hard sci-fi Hunter: The Reckoning. I think that might just be the thing to revitalize our fictional lives. I'm also probably going to fire up Pathfinder; I've been enjoying the Pathfinder rulebook a lot and some of my players have never done the classic "Dungeon Crawl." With some of their main gaming exposure being World of Darkness, I'm going to enjoy the chance to show them some of the D&D tropes instead.
Heh. Poor suckers won't even see it coming.
Good for you!
ReplyDeleteIn my far too many years enjoying RPGs I have consistently found those games spent hungry and running were often the most enjoyable.
That's not to say rewards and wins were few and far between, but more often that not I enjoyed the super reward not working quite as planned, or balancing out the super mcguffin with some super mcguffin armed enemies as well.
I still find it interesting how many of us quickly get bored with overpowered heroes in fiction and film but only want to play such in RPGs, and then wonder why we have so much fun when playing as less well endowed folk.
Do post updates how the new game goes. I've never played a WoD campaign entirely from that perspective. With all the preponderance of "go-go-go supernatural" media around us some good old fashioned monster stomping does seem overdue.