I said that I intended the Great Tower of Oldechi as a three-act campaign, and that was true even with the Gaiden adding an extra thirteen or so sessions into the middle of it. My original intent was to have the acts transition midway through Haelyn and again midway through the fifth tower guardian. But with the Gaiden lengthening Jay’s section of the tower I could make floors 15 through 18 be Act 2. Now the party knew that the tower was in trouble, they knew what was at stake if the maybe-enemies-maybe-allies group continued unabated, and they were ready to do something about it.
So while I originally had an idea for the fifth tower guardian, pushing forward the act transition let me turn the character up to eleven because I didn’t need them to execute a shift, just be emblematic of it. I was already planning on a guardian who allowed as much player agency as Jay but did it differently, and somebody who was a lot less glib about it along the way. The campaign was serious and difficult, so the story needed a guardian whose floors were serious and difficult.
Diana was the opposite of Jay in a numbers of ways. She found humor and lies frivolous, and she didn’t believe in advancing via awesomeness because it was too subjective. Her floors had singular, objective measures for success. The method by which that success would be obtained, however, varied significantly within the boundaries of rules that the party discovered along the way. Combat as a solution was almost universally unacceptable, and her floors probably had the fewest combats, including a couple of sessions (in D&D 4E!) with no fights or threat of fights at all.
This is because Diana’s floors were all puzzle floors. The environment only existed in so far as it set up the mental challenge that the players, not the characters, had to solve. Basically Diana’s theory was “If you solve all your problems by violence, you don’t deserve to go to epic tier play.”
The main problem with this is that D&D, especially 4E, is a violence-based system. The fifth section of the tower worked mostly by being things that weren’t D&D. One floor had the players interviewing people, putting together a schedule of events, and trying to find a killer, so it was more Phoenix Wright. Another floor was set inside a body dying from a sickness, so it was more Trauma Center. A third floor was explicitly and unabashedly based on one of my favorite flash games, Archipelago, but with less swimming and inventory management and more looming specters of world-devouring leviathans.
I suspect the players really liked Diana’s floors. I suspect this mostly because near the end of the campaign I asked them which floor they liked the most and every player chose one of Diana’s floors. In fact, among the five players all four of her floors were represented, so it seemed they were pretty universally beloved.
But speaking of the players, we lost three and gained four between the beginning of Jay’s floors and the beginning of Diana’s floors. By the time floor 19 got rolling the party was:
- Tela, goliath warden, as before.
- Lao!ze, thri-kreen ranger, a creature born in the tower but to a retired climber, so he retained the ability to advance in floors. His was a fairly interesting mystery because he had no pre-tower life to discover, and the question of what would happen to him was an occasional recurring issue. (For those of you playing at home, Lao, Laotzu, and Lao!ze are all from the same player. See if you can figure out his naming scheme.)
- Cid Viscous, slime man reskinned from a shardmind druid. His story is interesting enough to save for a podcast, but suffice it to say that this is one of the characters I reference whenever I talk about how powerful reskinning is.
- Rousseau, dragonborn fighter/cleric. A devotee of the god of tyranny, Rousseau did everything in his power to be nothing like the philosopher who was his namesake. But he did flex his way out of an obdurium cage, so that’s pretty serious.
- Miesha, succubus stripper reskinned from a dragonborn sorcerer/warlord. This is the kind of reskin where I would normally choke out a player for trying it, but Miesha’s player was not only female but also, like, three feet taller than I am and trained in hand-to-hand combat.
- Plague, changeling warlock pretending to be a tiefling. He had a tendency to debuff the party accidentally and damage the party on purpose. Normally this would not endear him to other players but on the first floor with Plague he sacrificed himself in a nuclear explosion to destroy thousands of monsters simultaneously. He got better, but that kind of gave him a pass on “I deal 1d10 damage to you sometimes”.
With one exception this party made it to the end of the campaign, and they worked startlingly well with each other considering their disparate backgrounds and playstyles. By this point the campaign design was much more freeform, with heavy reskinning of monsters and powers, weird environments, unclear and mutable goals, and playing fast-and-loose with the conventions of 4E in general. This party was really good at saying “I do X” and trusting that we would come up with some sort of rule or check to adjudicate it, and they spent as much time subverting the tower as it tried to spend subverting them. The Act 3 party was nothing like the Act 1 party, but it was perfectly suited to the situation and the opponent.
It’s worth noting that the payers seemed to be much happier near then end of the campaign than they were at the beginning. We can chalk this up to the players who rotated until we found an amazing group, but this is a blog and post series about DMing, so I think we need to focus on the change to this more freeform style of design and play. It’s as though players like a campaign best when they get to decide their own way. Imagine.
In fact, at no point did the players seem to resent or disagree with the “there’s only one solution” approach Diana used because the method by which they could approach that solution was variable. They could use any tactics they wanted to treat the disease eating away at the body, navigate the library maze, or interview suspects during the murder mystery (yes, even violence, though the players determined that beating up one member of a close-knit family was not going to aid them in interviewing the rest). They could also gather information however they wanted—at one point a player tapped directly into the body’s nervous system to try to communicate with the brain. The campaign had transitioned from “this is awesome, so you level” to “this is awesome and makes sense, so you make progress toward your goal” even if that goal was set in stone. The players could make their own decisions, the DM got to design around known quantities, the world could move at its own pace, and the action-success-reward pacing of D&D remained intact. For Diana’s floors, at least, everybody was happy.
The biggest takeaway I got from this section of the tower and perhaps the campaign as a whole, besides that players like puzzles, is that I tend to best put together things players like when I have a specific end goal but provide some variance in getting there. We reinforced this with Wrath of the Cosmic Accountant, where I had no specific end goal and the campaign was terrible, and the Eight Arms and the Empire of Sin, where I followed Diana’s formula and the campaign was great even if I did kill nearly everybody. A good campaign is lot like a puzzle in that you start by explaining the rules and restrictions then pace feedback and rewards based on experimentation and success. Perhaps it was just a confluence of play style, players, characters, system, tides, blood sugar, and any number of other things, but I’ve been trying to duplicate that magic ever since.
Diana did end up serving as a transition, but to a much harder style of puzzle in the next section, the type that doesn’t explain the rules at all while still letting you get the game into an unwinnable state. That was when some cracks in the party started to show. But that’s another post.