Snowflake Challenge #8
Jan. 15th, 2024 07:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cinefarious
Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)
I'm currently participating in
candyheartsex. It's past nominations and assignments, but if anyone is looking to write treats for their favorite fandoms, it's still early enough to jump in and have a good time.Other than that, the only proper project I'm working on is my dnd campaign. We've spent the last five sessions in one desert city and it's surrounding magical wilderness, but I've got three major cities to work on from here, and I'm looking forward to filling them with intriguing characters and side stories. Especially given one has a big crime boss to deal with. It promises to be a high stakes and fun part of their journey.
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Date: 2024-02-01 01:22 am (UTC)As far as their travel in the area, I definitely enforce exhaustion risks in the desert, and it'll probably go double in that area thanks to the gaseous air. They have heat/fire resistant items and plenty of other resistance potions though so they'd be fine. I'm er, definitely a little too magic item heavy >.> I like to hand out shiny things.
When it comes to creating npcs I would say both! The few npcs that the party has adopted, I've definitely fleshed them out more than their original backstory for sure. There are just so many npcs that I couldn't imagine putting that level of thought into every one of them x_x But I have favorites that tend to get more love than others XP
What about you? I take it that you do both, but I'm curious how many npcs you tend to have how fleshed out they are! And your method of fleshing them out.
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Date: 2024-02-18 01:43 pm (UTC)Oh I hear you on the "here's another magical item, team!"-issue 😆 I've had to escalate the threats in more than one of my campaigns because I've realized I've given the party too many powerful toys 😅 But balancing that with environmental hazards is an excellent way to keep the game fun and challenging!
Yeah, it's impossible to flesh out all necessary NPCs. You'd never get anything else done if every darn urchin or mill worker the party ran across had a whole prepared life-story! Has your party ever glomped on to an NPC you didn't expect them to enjoy that much, or do they tended to go for the NPCs you've prepped an extra bit? My parties tend to surprise me at times with who they get emotionally invested in 😆💖
When I start out plotting a campaign, I tend to make a few key NPCs and then focus on having different 'fractions' aka groups that have goals within the campaign that will affect the plot and the party's journey somehow. That way, even the most central NPCs tend to start out more as functions rather then fleshed out people, but I do flesh them out as the campaign goes on. If I know the party is about to run into a character who will have an important role to play, I put time aside to focus on fleshing that person out in detail, if I haven't established their personality beyond being "part of faction X".
And sometimes the party surprises me by deciding to seek out a magic shop in a town that shouldn't, reasonably, have one - which leads to me on the fly creating one and justifying to myself why it would be there and who owns it, because that's more fun that saying "No magic shops here" and OF COURSE those are the NPCs the party decide to dedicate their lives too 😆 One of my parties once took a break from stopping the end of the world to make sure two magic shop owners didn't get divorced because of a domino effect they accidentally caused. Oh, and one time they started a campaign by adopting a random kid they'd saved in a side-mission. So yeah, some NPCs are planned and some a thrust upon me by my players, 'cause they think they're shiny~