MShipley88 wrote:
The standard operating procedure in my own campaigns has been to start over with new characters whenever the game began to break down due to PC power levels.

In 1st Edition AD&D, this was around 9th-11th levels.  After Unearthed Arcana, the breakdown began shortly after 7th level, when double weapon specialization made the fighter characters too strong for almost any monster in the book.

The same was true of 2nd Edition, which was essentially a neutered version of 1st.

In 3.5, the breakdown level is higher because the monsters can also be over the top mean.  I consider 9th-12th to be medium levels, with the game beginning to break down after the cleric reaches 12th level and cuts loose from reality.  The game can be played to higer level, but changes to a high level space opera at that point.

After starting new characters, the old characters became either NPC's, under my control, or were held in reserve for special high level adventures.  Sometimes, after a group of characters reached sufficient level, the campaign was declared to be "open" and any past character could be brought to the table.

The old PC's from the high school games became the legendary heroes and mages of my adult campaigns.  One, as mentioned above, even became a god that was worshipped by player characters...at their peril.

Interesting concept.  I have detailed notes of the main campaigns I have run over the years. We tended to do exactly as you say, starting over when characters reached a certain level (mainly when they started building stronholds, attracting followers, etc).  It's more fun to run a mage with 4 hp, a dagger and a Sleep spell than a Mage with an army and castle to my groups way of thinking....
  The first campaign I ran started with B1 and then C1 and C2, after which we wanted to run the GDQ so I bumped them a few levels (I think they were 5th) and they went through the GDQ series which ended up lasting several years as one member was in the Navy and we could only play while he was on leave.  This party still gets hauled out ocassionally for one shots (recently they started the 25th anniversary Against the Giants and have played about halfway through it, it's been several months now but we'll dig them out again eventually).  So this group is still going after 26 years...
  The other group was two members from that original group, plus a few others who wanted to game with us but we wouldn't let them join the Giant series in progress.  We started with B1 (naturally), then T1, then a ran a few of my own adventures waiting for T2-4 to come out (whoops, never did), finally they ended up going through classic letter stuff like B3, I1-5, N1, S2-S4, UK2-3, U1-3, A1-4, WG4, X2, just basically whatever module was coming out I bought it and ran the party through it after adapting it to the level of the party.  Also ran through some Companions stuff and Judges guild...I was going to college during this time and I don't think I even wrote one original adventure during the entire campaign!!! I remember the final adventures of that party had them settling in the Saltmarshes in Greyhawk and building their strongholds, first they cleared out the U3 sahaughin stronghold and WG5 (I moved Maure castle to a nearby location). This group is permanently retired as we haven't used the characters since about 1987 or so.
    When second edition/Forgotten Realms came out, had an entire new group except for both my brothers. I set the campaign in the Moonshae Islands since I wanted a celtic type theme and setting (plus it had just been released and I knew my players didn't have it yet to read!!!) Started in N4 ((Treasure Hunt), C3 (Isle of Castannimir), then L1 & L2.  Ran the entire campaign out of a group of islands with the main cities being Barnacus (from Dragon magazine) and L1's Restenford (they were the largest cities in the archepelgo I used as a backdrop, one on each side of the largest island in the chain).  Oddly enough I mixed in many of the Dragonlance modules, completely reworked them and made the badguys the Cult of the Dragon and actually the group had a LOT of fun with these.  Take out all Dragonlance references, use the maps and bump the dragons to 2nd ed and they aren't bad crawls.   About this time Dungeon magazine had come out and used a few adventures from these....off the top of my head, Tortles of the Purple sage, Caermor, Assault on Eddistone Point, House of the Brothers, Nightshade (who became a huge recurring character in the campaign), Crypt of Istaris (all from the first 9 issues of Dungeon Magazine). Also ran I6 Ravenloft for the first time for this party, and the sequel I think it was I10?  Worked in X5 Temple of Death as the main headquarters of a major baddy on an isolated island.  A lot of old modules work well as isolated islands....I know we did L7 Baltron's Beacon this way. Also remember distinctly running UK7 Dark Clouds Gather and the players had an absolute blast, it was the first time I ran the adventure ever, they got really good mileage out of the Skyfish in that module and used it for the entire campaign to zip around the islands! We had a gigantic final ship battle against pirates and Cult ofthe Dragon, I remember the players taking out a fleet of about 100 ships or so, we had a great time with that, we retired them after that....haven't played them since about 1991 or so...

Ugh, this BITD remembrance is taking way too much time and space, don't have time to go into any major campaigns past 1992 or so.  But the gist is that it was never a bad time to work in a letter adventure.  The impact these adventures had on my subsequent campaigns and gaming are obvious, I loved those things.

Mike B.

We ran Greyhawk campaigns (was the only one around). I used modules extensively. My homebrew adventures were written just like the modules including player descriptions for each encounter. My goal was always to make my adventures seem as professional as the TSR stuff and I went out of my way to not let the players know if it was a module or homebrew adventure in many cases. It is funny to go back and read my homebrew stuff...

bbarsh wrote:We ran Greyhawk campaigns (was the only one around). I used modules extensively. My homebrew adventures were written just like the modules including player descriptions for each encounter. My goal was always to make my adventures seem as professional as the TSR stuff and I went out of my way to not let the players know if it was a module or homebrew adventure in many cases. It is funny to go back and read my homebrew stuff...

BBarsh you still have some of the homebrew in printible shape you should let us know....there are a lot of us in this forum that enjoy reading each other's original or adapted stuff.

Mike B.

On the subject of burn out at higher levels. We seldom had that problem. I can think of at least a few campaigns that died out via Tomb of Horrors, Vault of the Drow among others.

Hell, it took us many, many months to achieve those levels (sometimes years).

But there were plenty of campaigns that ended prematurely due to complete party destruction (Forest of Doom from Dragon magazine was one).

I think we started at least six campaigns (I was not the DM in any) one year and not a single character got past 3rd level before everyone died. Now, those were the good old days...  

bbarsh wrote:Yep, I got it. I did most of my writing on the computer (macs) back in the day. If you are interested, I can send out some stuff.

I'd love to some stuff from some of the guys, too.

hey BB

i am gonna run a game in a few weeks, but havent got time to write some stuff atm, so a little material might be really cool that i could use? somewhere around 4th level would be nice. dont really wanna use a released module atm.

anyone who can help me out, gimme a shout!

Al

MShipley88 wrote:
As far as I have been able to tell from Ebay, Dungeon #6 is one of the harder issues to find.

My own copy is packed away somewhere in our storage space.

I was just delighted that someone played it and liked it.

Mark  

Mark I didn't just run it once but TWICE! Once as a part of my second big campaign, the players were settling down and building their strongholds, I made the cave of the brothers one of the areas they had to clear out before they built the castle.  Another time I ran it as part of one of my many re-runs of the G-series, it was an interlude adventure between Frost and Fire giants I believe. Still have my photocopied House of the Brothers with my handwritten notes  on it around here somewhere...
Just out of curiousity, do you still ever run that particular scenario (jumped up to 3.5 edition) or did you have any further submissions not make the cut?  One of my friends back in the day, Mark Bicking, had three adventures accepted but many more returned from the Dungeon editiors...

Mike B.

Mike B.

I have run House of the Brothers twice in my campaigns...once as a play test and once more than a decade later, just as a side adventure.

One member of my gaming group still remembered the adventure...amazingly, almost word for word...I mean, he told me what was in each room with total accuracy...stuff even I could not remember.  

I submitted other ideas, but Dungeon was either not interested or they had just published a similar idea.  I should have tried harder.

The published scenario was dialed down in threat level a bit from my version.  Apparently, the Dungeon editors were worried about parties getting wiped out.  One guy still wrote in to complain about the deadly traps.  I wrote back that my own wary players survived the battle with the main badguys and then cleared the complex with almost no damage taken from other tricks, traps or encounters...at slightly lower level than the levels recommended in the magazine version.  

As I recall, the published version also had much higher values posted for the most exotic pieces of captured equipment than I assigned to them.  I mean, by about 10 times higher, as I recall.

A mental gear shifting between versions wouldn't be hard for me.  They aren't really that different.  The hardest part might be deciding which 1st edition to use.  (Not being flippant, actually.)  Does one use pre or post Unearthed Arcana AD&D?  How about pre or post Dungeoneers and Wilderness Survival Guides?  The basics of game balance change the deeper one gets.

Mark  

I always wondered why TSR (later WotC) stopped doing Greyhawk-oriented modules, etc.; same with what seemed to be a successful campaign, Dragonlance.  Are there third-party makers of games that are still doing Greyhawk- or Dragonlance-campaign oriented modules around, regardless of which version of D&D is played (much like Dave Arneson is doing with Blackmoor and . . . nuts, I forget the company's name!)?  Is it just because of the money ("the series are not doing as well as before, therefore let's drop the campaign") or what?

sleepyCO wrote:I always wondered why TSR (later WotC) stopped doing Greyhawk-oriented modules, etc.; same with what seemed to be a successful campaign, Dragonlance.  Are there third-party makers of games that are still doing Greyhawk- or Dragonlance-campaign oriented modules around, regardless of which version of D&D is played (much like Dave Arneson is doing with Blackmoor and . . . nuts, I forget the company's name!)?  Is it just because of the money ("the series are not doing as well as before, therefore let's drop the campaign") or what?

Blackmoor is being done by Zeitgeist Games.

ShaneG.