So the other day one of my players told me there were two types of games.
- Adventuring to gear up.
- Gearing up to adventure.
So this got my brain churning and of course, I asked him what he meant. Well, it was pretty simple. We had just completed session 0 and a quick one-shot of the Conan 2d20 system by Modiphious.
His character was a rather brawny barbarian that quickly dispatched any of the minor enemies I had thrown at them along the way. Another character in the party while not so tanky and damaging was almost impossible to hit because of some clever assignment of points to defensive skills.
I mentioned that next time I was going to have to throw some more challenging encounters their way, but that they were the outliers of the party. The other two characters wouldn’t be able to accomplish these twos damage output or tanking capabilities.
Then he told me that he enjoyed beginning with stats almost as strong as he would ever be, it freed him from worrying about how he would advance later on and maybe make a mistake he couldn’t undo if it turned out wrong.
The topic returned to various other systems and how they handle things. Most systems handle things as:
Starting characters are very weak and progressively get stronger as the game goes along. Eventually, the system breaks down and the game progression stops.
This will not do!
Luckily Conan was a roaring success with my Friday night group and there is more of it to come in the future. It will allow me as the Game Master to focus on the personal stories of these wandering adventurers in such a fantastic backdrop.
Unfortunately, we have to figure out when to throw it into the mix of games we currently play (mostly Fallout 2d20 at the moment).