Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018132What was his reaction to the death?

Some tears, but he took it manfully, especially for a nine year old. :cool: Since his PC was almost an Archmage I accepted his request for a 'force ghost' scene where Sultan William appeared to his widow & mother of his 4 children, Princess-Sultana Adriana the daughter of King Stefan Karameikos, back in Karameikos where it had all begun 25 game years & 4 real years before. He bid her a very touching farewell & departed to the higher worlds.

QuoteIf people come and go based on whatever quest their PC is interested in, what happens if your one PC is interested in something nobody else is? Does that mean you have to rely on coincidence to be able to join whatever session is happening? Like, I could imagine 20 different PCs, with like 12 different goals spread between them, making a fairly fractured group that may never actually get together in any real combination.

Well if the player is playing online or if I see them regularly offline (eg my son Bill) then I can do them solo sessions. Eg Bill has a plan for Shieldbiter his Barbarian-17 Dragonborn to solo the ancient black dragon Matriarx of Dread Isle, we'll do that at a suitable time. If the player can only make my regularly scheduled Sunday tabletop sessions then I would need to resolve any solo plans abstractly. If they don't want to take part in a particular quest the others want then they could sit that out, make a new PC for that quest etc.

Normally players & PCs are happy to team up for adventure, whoever's idea it is, as there are rewards in fun, gold, XP etc. But I do see stuff vetoed, eg the PC Hakeem refused Shieldbiter's request to help him go up against the ancient red dragons beneath Fortress Badabaskor, rumoured to possess the sacred Dragon Armour and Dragon Shield of ancient Arkhosia.

Edit: Rely on coincidence - yes just like in the comics (Savage Sword of Conan, notably) and pulps, heroes are always running into each other in unlikely circumstances. But I also have a home base, Selatine port village, that serves as the heart of the campaign, the starting point for (most) new PCs & PC groups, etc. With lots of PCs based there they naturally interact and form adventurer parties.

Oh, also re the tabletop element, I would be willing to run up to two separate groups on alternate weeks if necessary, if the PCs split up. And I have a co-GM who helps out, running the Bratanis region, a low level campaign area west of Selatine. PCs can go back and forth from there, being GM'd by him one week then me the next.

Quote from: Ravenswing;1018140partly due to what I call the Tasha Yar Rule, which boils down to that I'm not going to kill a PC for no better reason than a grunt orc made a good roll.

Mileage... I *love* it when some mook NPC gets lucky and takes down a high level PC or BBEG! Not something I see often in 5e, but the Blight Belcher disintegrator cannon that took out legendary wizard Duke-Sultan William Karameikos was crewed by zero level nobodies... Who were then swiftly dispatched by the furious Sir Bravery, William's elder son, in a rage worthy of Achilles.

Bill also lost his level 8 Dragonborn Fighter Drakonok to a horde of mook orcs a few weeks ago - turns out that in 5e challenging an entire orc tribe to battle is not such a great idea. Mind you when Drakonok's companions (who had fled the orc horde summoned by Drakonok's roared challenge) came back across the scene an hour or so later, the breath-frozen, stabbed, and arrow-pierced orc bodies were piled high in the corridors of Stonehell.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018132If people come and go based on whatever quest their PC is interested in, what happens if your one PC is interested in something nobody else is? Does that mean you have to rely on coincidence to be able to join whatever session is happening? Like, I could imagine 20 different PCs, with like 12 different goals spread between them, making a fairly fractured group that may never actually get together in any real combination.

Any campaign needs to have an underlying goal that all adventurers can work with (say, seeking treasure or glory or whatever) that makes them compatible enough to adventure together. If you have players constantly making up characters that can't work with the characters of other players (to at least set aside their underlying goal simply to gain treasure, magic items and experience) then it sounds like they're trying to undermine the campaign.

With very high level characters, they can form parties implicitly to some extent - if everyone else is playing their high level character then you play your high level character, and so you end up with the same party as the last high level adventure, unless everyone has multiple high level characters. (On the other hand, DMs back when would run for a single player with henchmen/followers/etc, so it's not inevitable, and less so if there's a very large group of players.) I've adventured with many of the same characters in higher level organized play, because many players only have one character of higher level, and organized play requires a minimum number of players - same players at the table means same high level characters. The permanent loss of one of those characters would just mean that that player doesn't play at the higher level table until another character reaches a high enough level.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018132If people come and go based on whatever quest their PC is interested in, what happens if your one PC is interested in something nobody else is? Does that mean you have to rely on coincidence to be able to join whatever session is happening? Like, I could imagine 20 different PCs, with like 12 different goals spread between them, making a fairly fractured group that may never actually get together in any real combination.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Solo sessions are marvellous fun, and very highly prized.

And with all those people wandering around interacting with the various NPCs, the world will continue chugging along beautifully with the referee just figuring out NPC reactions to all these different players' antics.

Quote from: rawma;1018157With very high level characters, they can form parties implicitly to some extent

IME very high level PCs in sandbox open game tend to get played less often; they tend to be focused on political shenanigans rather than adventuring, and the player will start to spend more time with their lower level PCs adventuring in lower level parties. Eg in my Wilderlands currently one player has PCs of levels 5, 9 & 20, another has 4, 5 and 17, a third has 5 & 13. A 4th or 5th level PC can adventure with third or eighth level PCs, an 8th level can adventure with 5th or 13th, but very high level characters tend to dominate too much, aren't challenged by most adventures, & often have better things to do.

Quote from: rawma;1018157The permanent loss of one of those characters would just mean that that player doesn't play at the higher level table until another character reaches a high enough level.

One thing I learned running an open sandbox campaign was to limit PC starting level; I settled on 8th as the maximum starting level, being the high end of what feels like mid-level in 5e.  It doesn't work letting everyone roll up new 20th level PCs just because one guy got a character to 20th. Characters need to feel organically part of the world, and keeping them to 8th initially ensures that.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1018136In those kinds of games, do the PCs ever bond with each other and have any roleplaying?

I find the more PCs are independent entities, not just part of The Party gestalt, the more roleplaying I see, and the more interesting interpersonal relationships form among the PCs.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1018158This is a feature, not a bug.

Solo sessions are marvellous fun, and very highly prized.

Agreed! A one on one solo adventure is an awesome way to play.  Doesn't happen often though.

Back in the AD&D days, there were 5-10 Players in the pool, all of which had 2-10 Characters each.  There were three main groups, with some crossover and multiple smaller groups, with two active GMs.  The shared campaign was what held everything together.  There were half a dozen major events/quests/undertakings happening at any one time, with lots of smaller things going on.

With high-level magic, a lot of deaths were temporary, but the higher level you go, the rarer death becomes, but it also tends to become more permanent due to the nature of the opposition.  Generally, the players had a "no man left behind" attitude and would sometimes risk TPKs of multiple parties to bring back a compatriot.

Of course, there was also a lot of cross-purposes, betrayals, PvP, wars, and all the stuff you can expect from so many different PCs.

It's hardly fool proof, but by the time the average player gets a character up high enough, they are at least a little smarter than they were when they started.  If nothing else, from all those experiences of losing low-level characters.  It's the primary reason that I don't pull punches at low-levels.  Whatever else happens, you don't usually want a new player to experience their first character death after running the same character for years.  Well, unless they were already smarter than your average bear when they started, and maybe a little luckier.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1018138No it would not.

We were wargamers.  You will lose forces.  It happens.

Also, the old epics always end with the hero's death.

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Quote from: Steven Mitchell;1018172Whatever else happens, you don't usually want a new player to experience their first character death after running the same character for years.  Well, unless they were already smarter than your average bear when they started, and maybe a little luckier.

That's actually the exact situation that made me ask this OP.

The two highest leveled players are the guys who have had their same original PC from Day 1, two years ago. The rest have gone through multiple PCs. But these two are still on their very first.

Quote from: S'mon;1018160IME very high level PCs in sandbox open game tend to get played less often; they tend to be focused on political shenanigans rather than adventuring, and the player will start to spend more time with their lower level PCs adventuring in lower level parties. Eg in my Wilderlands currently one player has PCs of levels 5, 9 & 20, another has 4, 5 and 17, a third has 5 & 13. A 4th or 5th level PC can adventure with third or eighth level PCs, an 8th level can adventure with 5th or 13th, but very high level characters tend to dominate too much, aren't challenged by most adventures, & often have better things to do.

I'm mostly talking about organized play, where you don't get to play in the third tier module unless you have a character who is 11th to 16th level - the characters are forced to be of similar level. And you tend to see the same characters at the third tier tables if you play there with the same other players, because mostly players don't have multiple third tier characters, but you can always have another 1st level (1st tier) character and it's not hard to bring a starting character to 5th level (2nd tier). A year ago it was hard to get any 4th tier tables, because not enough players had 4th tier characters; two years ago I don't know how many organized play modules for 4th tier existed.

Way back, high level characters did tend to retire, but would adventure again if something significant in the game world came up, and that would often draw out other players' high level characters. So a similar effect happened then; nobody expected a much lower level character to survive, let alone contribute, if there was a real challenge to the high level characters, so the PCs were all of similar levels.

Quote from: S'mon;1018161One thing I learned running an open sandbox campaign was to limit PC starting level; I settled on 8th as the maximum starting level, being the high end of what feels like mid-level in 5e.  It doesn't work letting everyone roll up new 20th level PCs just because one guy got a character to 20th. Characters need to feel organically part of the world, and keeping them to 8th initially ensures that.

Again, in organized play you have to bring the character up from 1st level. (Adventurers League has a couple of oddities; you can use downtime to advance a 4th level character to 5th, and a 10th level character to 11th - for the former it is certainly the case that 4th level is a slog to get to 5th level without it, since the first tier adventures don't award much experience. The other oddity is GM XP, which was criticized in the other thread about 5e.)

I have rarely played in a campaign where characters started at higher level; and in those where they did, they usually were much weaker because they lacked the magic items or NPC contacts or knowledge of the world that the PCs who didn't start at higher level had acquired. But I've also rarely played in campaigns that didn't support multiple DMs, so you could find a level appropriate table to join.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1018165Agreed! A one on one solo adventure is an awesome way to play.  Doesn't happen often though.

I like doing online solo high level political stuff, and some PCs like Hakeem the Conanesque barbarian PC are great to GM solo. Mostly though for tabletop I greatly prefer GMing a group, ideally 3+ players; these days I tend to feel a bit awkward running solo games, and there is the lack of player-player interaction sparking new stuff.