What sorts of obstacles do your 1st level characters face, /tg/? How do they deal with them?
>>47930249
Depends on the system.
>>47930249
Peer pressure towards conformity. Poorly.
>>47930430
What a terrible fucking non-answer that is.
Since it's asking 'your,' why don't you actually answer by citing your own experience in your preferred system instead of contributing literally nothing?
Anyway, OP, the general answer is to start with small-scale and work your way up. Generally something related to petty crime or problems that will become worse the longer they're ignored is a good choice, something that the general populace isn't capable of doing until they've gotten cash together to get someone with skills and expertise to take care of it.
I'm planning a WFRP2 oneshot right after Storm of Chaos which will be about passing by a large town that had its inhabitants mostly wiped out and the remains divided between a few factions and a few orcs holed up in a building that holds something each faction holds dear, but is too weak by itself to claim it; the only way through the city (everything else is fucked up with debris) is through the sewers.
The core of the adventure will be using lots of different skills to play; sneaking by the powerful opponents, including the orcs themselves and some maddened mutants that went feral; persuading others to help you; resistance checking for diseases when someone is not careful; the house itself having a lot of stealthy ways to go through and, with proper knowledge checks, some alternative ways to wipe out the orcs without risking frontal battle.
And the players can also go on a standard dungeon crawl if they decide to fuck all the factions and just bypass the town on their own.
Chen
>>47930249
Social encounters, simple traps, combat, maybe a simple puzzle or two, maybe something more complex. Most of my players have been playing for years so it usually goes well.
>>47930249
Having like, 4 spells per day and the very real chance of dying to a Kobold fart.
>>47930249
Rats, in the bartender's basement. Not dire rats, normal ones.
This usually results in TPK.
>>47930249
Insurmountable odds
They die
>>47930249
I pretty much always use James Raggi's The Grinding Gear as the starting adventure in every D&D campaign I do now regardless of system.
The characters usually deal with this obstacle by burning it down and walking away.
>>47932127
>TPK
Toilet-paper-kinesis?
>>47930249
>>47932263
No, but I will keep that one in mind for future application.
>>47932263
lurk more if serious
>>47932241
Raggi seems to be often mentioned when adventure design is discussed, with Death Frost Doom commonly cited. DFD is enough to make me think twice about using another one of his dungeons, because while I have no qualms about its quality, it has the kind of tone that could make players never want to play again if it's their first adventure.
>>47933815
DFD is a nega-dungeon. It's the kind of thing you use with veteran players when they've settled into a certain kind of dungeon-crawl routine and you want to change things up.
The Grinding Gear is very much a deconstruction, but it's also beatable if played straight and there are substantial rewards at the end.
>>47933909
Sounds promising, especially since a quick google search has it getting fairly high reviews.
Doing dirty work killing bandits, finding things, retreiving items, negotiating with people(Usually for more money), and other odd jobs.
>>47934123
There's just one major hurdle I've had to deal with when running this adventure though:
What do you do when the party just decides to walk away?
I've had two different groups immediately walk past the adventure location right from the beginning. One of them doubled back as soon as they realized that was the adventure (they know me well enough to read my facial expressions.) They thanked me for not railroading them though. The other group did expect me to railroad them through the adventure and even demanded it.
I recommend using The Grinding Gear as a hex-crawl location in a sandbox campaign along with the other LotFP adventures. You may even stick it into Better Than Any Man or A Red & Pleasant Land.
