The1True
My my my, we just loooove to hear ourselves don't we?
I finally worked my way through this monster and it just kind of fed my increasing despair for 3e stat bloat.
It started out great! Lots of interesting lore and ideas. Cool sidequests meticulously tracked and interwoven throughout the megadungeon. Lots of neat ideas.
But bit by bit, level by level, the stat blocks grow; and with them, the tactical instructions. There was a noticeable decline in description quality to go along with that. Like they had space concerns and all the fun stuff had to give way for pages and pages of feats and special abilities.
And I love this stuff. I love building up a super powered character and pitting him against well-thought-out monster encounters. I'm just thinking there's a happy middle ground. Not every encounter needs to be a life or death combat simulation. Maybe just the Boss, the mini-bosses and maybe one weird'n wild one/level (the old bridge over the chasm etc.) Otherwise, just give me a heavily truncated stat block. The PC's will make mincemeat of the oversimplified monsters, but everyone will have a lot more fun. I'm prepping 3e stuff here and my stats are printed on a different pile of papers to my notes. It may be as simple as that...
Anyway, it was a fun read. The authors made a genuine effort to knit it all together. There's lots of good stuff, but the maps are poorly connected which makes me wonder if the dungeon levels were designed independent of each other and hooked up with stairs/ramps/elevators etc. as an afterthought. And, god damn but those stat blocks make it impossible to read by the end :\
It started out great! Lots of interesting lore and ideas. Cool sidequests meticulously tracked and interwoven throughout the megadungeon. Lots of neat ideas.
But bit by bit, level by level, the stat blocks grow; and with them, the tactical instructions. There was a noticeable decline in description quality to go along with that. Like they had space concerns and all the fun stuff had to give way for pages and pages of feats and special abilities.
And I love this stuff. I love building up a super powered character and pitting him against well-thought-out monster encounters. I'm just thinking there's a happy middle ground. Not every encounter needs to be a life or death combat simulation. Maybe just the Boss, the mini-bosses and maybe one weird'n wild one/level (the old bridge over the chasm etc.) Otherwise, just give me a heavily truncated stat block. The PC's will make mincemeat of the oversimplified monsters, but everyone will have a lot more fun. I'm prepping 3e stuff here and my stats are printed on a different pile of papers to my notes. It may be as simple as that...
Anyway, it was a fun read. The authors made a genuine effort to knit it all together. There's lots of good stuff, but the maps are poorly connected which makes me wonder if the dungeon levels were designed independent of each other and hooked up with stairs/ramps/elevators etc. as an afterthought. And, god damn but those stat blocks make it impossible to read by the end :\