In Legends of Kralis, there is no true concept of "balance." While we have included ranks within the bestiary to make it easy for you as a GM to figure out what not to use to avoid killing the entire party. We have also included a discussion on how to determine difficulty levels so you have an idea of what would be a challenge or not be a challenge for characters at a specific rank.
We have attempted to balance the game, but in the end, there is no actual balance within the game, simply because there exists the random factor of dice rolls. The system will allow for a low-ranking character the chance to take out a much higher ranking character, and while shocking to some who might see this as a bad thing, it adds a layer of danger, while remote, still implies that even the lowliest of creatures are still a threat. No formula that indicates that N number of Rank X creatures is a good match for Rank Y characters. Every monster and task should be challenging for players through out their entire "life". Try not to focus on game balance, which is inherently a fuzzy concept and term, rather focus on everyone having fun. But be aware of challenges both as too easy or too difficult. All of this, however, does depend on the situation at hand. If the PCs are worn down from previous encounters or have the right combination of abilities, all balance can go right out the window. Which is why there is no exact system for balancing encounters. Character death is unlikely, but there is always the risk that a character could die if they are worn out, alone or do not have the right abilities or equipment.
0 Comments
As with all things for the GM, creating and running a campaign is the most lengthy process that you will work on and in some cases the most difficult. While the rule book is meant to be played within the World of Kralis, it can be used to in any world that you create.
How you begin, a campaign depends on how you decide to run the game. Typically, campaigns is a series of adventures linked either by the characters moving from one story to another or by over-arcing plots. The heart of the campaign is the adventures, and the spirit of an adventure are the encounters that characters overcome. Even though you will be basing your adventures in the World of Kralis, it is still your campaign. You should alter things and stress specific parts of the world that are important to your current campaign. The critical component in running a successful Legends of Kralis campaign is consistency. This requires you to make sure that the NPCs they met in the Town of Coldiron before they ventured into the Halls of the Mountain King are still around (for the most part) when the party returns to Baleos' Supplies to resupply. Or that when they return to Khagon Asteroid base, Phuldan's Outriggers is still supplying much needed Void gear. This will allow the players to feel that they are adventuring in a living world. Creating Adventures Adventures are the stories that make up a campaign. You can think of them as chapters in a book or a whole book in a multiple volume series. They can be stand alone events with no interconnection, or they can be a part of several adventures over many game sessions that are part of a plot. Creating an adventure can be as simple as you wish or as in depth as you want. In either case, an adventure is made up of a number of encounters that help you define the challenge of the adventure, which then lends itself to creating the overall plot or plots and then end with the finale. This structure, beginning, middle, and ending should be woven together in a neat package that allows you and your players to craft a fantastic story or series of stories. Your story can be either location based or event based. Location-Based Adventures Location based adventures are often set in a specific location: ancient dungeon, remote starbase, the interior of a void ship, or in a remote Wildlands location. These are often the basis for some of the most incredible adventures in the RPG world. These adventures can be devised from a couple of steps and concepts that inspire you. You should decide what is going to be the goal of the party and the location. Is the party searching for a long lost dungeon, investigate a remote star base that has gone dark, escaping captivity on a ship, or rescuing a captive being held by a band of oku. Perhaps they are requested to escort an NPC, find an object lost in the Void, investigate an unnatural disaster. Once you have identified the goal for the party, you should also identify the essential NPCs that will be met or interacted with either at the location, before the location or along the way to the location. These are your villains and your PC allies. Your villains can range from a monstrosity guarding the ancient dungeon to a powerful undead beings agenda to cultists bent on sacrificing their captives to the fiend in the center of the starbase. Next, you should take some time to flesh out the location, draw a map, add important location descriptions, and know who and what are in and around the location. Next and perhaps most importantly, you need to determine the ideal hook and introduction to the adventure. These hooks can set the tenor and tempo of the adventure. Some sample hooks can look like: • A town or village needs some volunteers to go to the location. • A wealthy merchant needs an escort from one location to another location. • One of the PC's inherits a map from their recently deceased relatives that leads them to the location. • While flying through the Void, the PCs come across an abandoned derelict void ship lost in the vastness. • The PC's are ordered to go to the location by their superiors. These are just some of the many, many hooks that you can use to grab the attention of the PC's to head to the location. Finally, the climactic ending is something that you should at least consider. How it all ends is really up to how the PC's handle the adventure location. So how should the ending and climax go? It could end with a bloody confrontation with the main villain. The PC's actions result in a cataclysmic event that they must now escape. Or a trusted ally betrays them at the crucial moment of victory or achievement of their goal. Event-Based Adventures Event based adventures focus on the interactions and events between characters and villains. Event based adventures are more about the how and why instead of the where or when. These adventures require a great deal of work, and like with location based adventures they can be done with a few carefully considered steps. The most important aspect of these adventures is the major acting NPC, whether the villain or an ally of the party. Be sure to spend a great amount of care into creating this prominent actor. They will play a pivotal role in advancing the adventure. Once you have fleshed out the main NPC, you should spend some time thinking about their motivations and the actions she will take to accomplish her goals. Does she seek revenge? Does she seek the down fall of a particular group or individual? Does she want to locate a lost artifact? Does she want to prevent or be responsible for the advancement of a specific event? Will the NPC plan her activities to occur during a singular event or will she commit actions that will grow bolder over time or will they commit actions in a series? Or is she pursuing her goals through specific actions in a sequence? Finally, you must determine what the goals of the players should be? Are they to bring the NPC to justice? Help the NPC make good on her goal? The party's goal could change based on the events that they interact with or hear that have occurred. What is an Encounter? While the adventure is the heart of the campaign, and as interesting as they are, the soul of the adventure, is the encounter. Encounters are best described as individual scenes which are linked to building your adventure. Like the adventure, the encounter should have fun, drama and excitement for the players and be easy for you to run and place. Encounters tend to have a straightforward objective and should have connections to a degree to the larger story of your campaign. All encounters are meant to be overcome by players in some fashion, both to further the story and plot and further the characters' growth. There are, by definition, a multitude of encounters, however, the most common are: Combat, Environmental (puzzle, trap, or environment) and Social. Encounters will have three outcomes for the party: Success, Partial Success or Failure. Each outcome must have consequences, both good and bad depending on the encounter, so that the players feel that their successes and failures matter. Combat Encounters The most common type of encounter is the Combat Encounter. They are often difficult to design, but they are the most important. This represents the most dangerous time for players as their character's lives are on the line. Combat encounters are the obstacle that the players must overcome to reach the next encounter, and there is no right or wrong way for the players to overcome this. There is the possibility to sneak past foes, convince them to surrender, or let the players pass. Combat encounters will predominately have the players fighting opponents, whether they are monsters or villainous NPCs. Combats within Legends of Kralis should more often than not be about something. There must be something at stake for the character's. "Avoiding death," while interesting and often the point, it should not be the only one. Combat should be fun and exciting, and while there will be many dice rolls to determine specific outcomes of attacks and defenses, finding a creative way to end combat or beat the big bad boss quickly should be encouraged. Designing a combat encounter for play within Legends of Kralis is based on the approximate rank value of players vs. the opponents. This can be averaged, ran equally, or increased, depending on what difficulty you determine the encounter should be. As a general rule, most monsters are built approximately in the same fashion as players (with abilities, skills and attribute scores). Putting characters up against equally ranked monsters or villains is perfectly acceptable. When designing these types of encounters, you may want to drop in ten oku. While that is a pretty straightforward encounter, you can make it memorable and epic by flavoring it with a "mini-ecosystem" whereby the oku encounter now has three guard dogs on leashes. The air is filled with buzzing, stinging insects that get into the players' eyes, nose and ears that annoy them and might have combat effects. Now you have an encounter that is not just a whole bunch of one thing, but a mix of elements that take the combat encounter from straight forward to now we have to think and move in such a way as to get better tactically to defeat the encounter. Social Encounters Social Encounters are often challenging to design and can be tricky for you as a GM if you have difficulty with making things up on the fly. But with time you will get better with doing things on the fly. Unlike combat encounter design or environmental encounter design, designing a social encounter in the Legends of Kralis is built upon interaction with NPCs. Social encounters should be roleplayed out with the players, if you feel that there is a significant challenge involved. If the goal is merely to meet an important NPC or find out a particular piece of information while hanging out at a bar, than a little bit of role-playing may be all that’s required. However, if the goal is more complex and if there are consequences for failing, then a skill checks are going to be the best way to adjudicate the encounter. Having NPCs skill checks in the use of Convince, Skepticism, Gaming, Leadership, Etiquette, Haggle or Interrogate set the Target Success challenge for your player's characters and vise versa if the goal is more complex and if there are going to be consequences for failing. The amount of work you need to put into building a social encounter will depend upon your group's style of playing. For those that prefer to bash monsters or even explore dungeons, caves, voidstations or new worlds, then social encounter will likely just be filler for them. However, if your group enjoys the deeper role-playing side of things, a social encounter presents your players with ways to challenge their characters, develop them and use social skills more heavily. When you are creating social encounters, draw on your own real-life experience. After all, this is one of the few areas of gaming where you can apply things from your life to the situations that PCs might be facing. The key to any successful encounter is preparation. If you are prepared then the encounter runs smoothly, and everyone has a good time. To help with you designing social encounters here are a couple of tips: • NPC Agendas - Always give your NPCs an agenda, from the lowly street urchin to the Emperor. Just like the PCs knowing what your NPCs want or desire will help determine how they react. Avoid having grand agendas. Though villains may have a grand scheme in play, most agendas have simpler steps. • Focus the conversations - Never allow yourself to let your NPCs have conversations with each other without directly engaging the PCs. If this has to happen, it is better for you to narrate this conversation than actually go through it. Such as the guards arguing with captain about why the arrested the PCs, or chancellor arguing with the ambassador over the protection of the nation. Describe that interaction, avoid narrating this NPC-to-NPC discussion without integrating the PCS. • What do you need to tell the Players - Social encounters are not always life or death situations, like combat or environmental encounters. Social encounters are often designed to deliver information to the players in an engaging way. When done this way, be sure to have an idea about the information you want to pass on or even have it written out in notes. You also need to have a clear understanding of whether it is okay if the players miss out on this information. If it is not, you may want to consider having that information available to the PCs through numerous sources in one form or another. Environmental Encounters Environmental Encounters can easily be overlooked and even underused as an encounter type, and can easily swing wildly from too simple to too complex. Yet, these encounters can be the easiest to implement and included in the previous two encounter types. In most cases, environmental encounters are based on the difficulty of the encounter you want the PCs to come across. Similar in fashion to combat encounter difficulties that are set by the monster's rank, in this case you can create an encounter based on either how difficult you wish to make it in terms of Target successes or create the encounter and set the TS based on it. In creating and setting these environmental encounters here are some tips for designing these encounter types. • Puzzles - Are one of the greatest and funnest environmental encounters you can create, but they can also become impossible, impassable roadblocks that choke the player's creativity and drive up frustration if the player's are unable to figure out the encounter. As the creator of these puzzles you know the answer, see the outs, but the players, unless master detectives themselves, may not see the answers. When you create puzzles, give them multiple correct solutions or even answers, place hints to the answer around, or even answer before the puzzle. You could even allow the PCs to bypass the puzzle in some other way. • Don't Oversimplify - When you present the players with a non-puzzle environmental encounter, it is essential to ensure that it offers a complex challenge. Any challenge that can be overcome with a single skill check or attribute check is far too simple. Layering checks to by-pass the encounter can raise the average encounter to one that stands out in the players minds and can make for some great stories beyond the campaign. • Reactive Environment - In a universe where magic and technology go hand in hand, it is not beyond the idea that the land itself could be active or even sentient. But not ever place the players travel is sentient, but it can all be active and work against the players. But this type of encounter takes planning and will require you to think about the environment in a very specific way: an old forest has trees that could collapse suddenly, a valley could suddenly be filled with a flash flood, the plains suddenly are engulfed with a wildfire, the voidship is hit with micro-meteors ripping holes through the shielding, or a voidflare sweeps through the region. As first discussed previously in The Story of the Campaign, crafting the story will be your biggest job as the GM. Many times these stories can arise out of gameplay, but the majority of them begin with you. You are responsible for providing the story seed and present the events of the game as they unfold as a reaction to both the actions of the PC and the NPCs.
Crafting a good story is not easy. But it can be made easier by encouraging the players to describe the action their characters take, not the mechanics involved. The description of the action is more important than what mechanic is being used (though knowing what mechanic is used makes for a faster resolution to the action.) There are a number of ideas that you can use at your table to help craft better stories that involve everyone but must start with you as the GM. • Learn what motivates your players. Are they explorers? Combatants? Do they love good puzzles? Interaction with the NPCs? • Learn what motivates the player's characters. What do the players want for their characters? What do they seek in the world? • Empower your players. Give them the power to make meaningful choices. Player characters do not need to be all powerful, but their decisions need to be important. Let the players fall in love with the story more than you. • Entice your players. Create the stories to involve the PCs as directly as possible. Give the players a reason to strive to be involved. Let the world affect them as much as it affects everyone else. • Avoid the untouchables. Avoid putting the PCs up against odds that they can do nothing about. Sure, you can drop in a high ranking monster or even put up such high Target Success that makes the players actions irrelevant. Challenge your players, but ensure that the challenge gives the players hope that they can overcome it. • Remember your co-authors. Remember to include the player's desires, their characters, and allow them to help you write the sub-context of the story. • Vary the encounters and stories. Vary your stories and the encounters. After a heavy combat encounter, drop in an intriguing mystery encounter. Break up the story or encounter, even in the middle of combat there is the opportunity for a mystery or even a moment of exploration for some players. • Don't over explain. This is Legends of Kralis, a science-fantasy where things are not always going to makes sense to the players or their character's. It's a weird world and the Omniverse is full of secrets. • The world matters. The players need to feel the effects of the world and that the world acknowledges the players. This can be found in many forms: news, bardic songs, tales, locals offering them things. Where it is possible to let the world spread the legend of the characters. Pacing and Flow Perhaps the most crucial aspect of creating story's is pacing and flow. Pacing is not how quickly actions get resolved. It is the rhythm of the story, the event, the encounter, the adventure and to a greater extent the overall campaign. The story's pace is the rate at which the story problems establish and relieve tension and how exciting and fun that is for the players. Pacing is not as simple as the faster the better, or else throwing non-stop life or death situations at the players would be the only way to conduct a great story. It is easy to describe pacing, but it is not easy to understand or implement. Pacing really has two streams in it: fast and slow. A fast paced scene draws you in, makes you lean into the scene, makes your heart beat faster. When there is a lot happening in a very short period of time, players get excited, anxious and our heart races. A fast paced scene is about excitement, tension, and strong emotion. Details matter less in this situation. A slow paced scene, does not necessarily mean it is any less exciting. Players get engaged in differently. They become more attentive, their brains engage more with the scene, there is a sense of tension, but it is not a fast paced one, more emotional. Slow paced scenes can do a lot of things. They are great for imparting information, raising emotional content, drilling into character information. Because players are paying more attention slow scenes are where they can get important, complicated stuff. However, this does not mean that slow scenes have to be loaded with emotion or information. They can have a single thing occurring, working on the emphasis of the event. They can build anticipation, anxiousness, and its own type of tension. As the GM your job is to guide the story and generate situations for players to overcome to build tension. To build tension you need to keep things moving, do not let the action get bogged down by the indecisiveness of players, rules arguments, or irrelevant topics. Do not let encounters drag on, if the PCs have fought a dozen of oku and only a handful are left, its perfectly okay to let those few left to run away, surrender or let the PCs easily dispatch them. One of the hardest and trickiest aspects of pacing is deciding what is important and what is not. You could decide to describe a scene with elaborate detail, but a simple, straightforward description is best unless there is a reason to have such detail. If there is no compelling reason for detail, advance through it quickly. The problem with pacing in an RPG is that its flow can get thrown out of whack. Between the pace of action and the players exists the layer of rules and mechanics that need to be dealt with. The game rules are important as they represent how the players interface with the world around them. While there is a battle going on, or chase scene occurring, or a sneaking attempt happening, and the tension and excitement are turned up, there is a layer of game mechanics that add to this excitement, uncertainty, and tension that empower the players to make decisions and feel like they have some control over the results. Flow is concerned about keeping the game moving forward, no matter what. Bad flow is an obstacle. Anything that breaks the flow gets in the way of good pacing. Unfortunately, flow is always broken in role playing. The flow stops we get bogged down in looking up rules, or rolling a die. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it allows for the players to have a say in the flow through the rules interface, they can change the tide of the flow or change the pacing of the story because they have engaged the rules. Your job as the GM is to minimize the breaking of the flow, which unfortunately occurs more often when players are not engaged. Flow ultimately is about running games. It is about keeping players engaged and keeping the action moving. It is about minimizing distractions while speeding up resolutions within an encounter or event. The main speed control you have over pacing and flow within the game is your narration. When you slow down your talking, and become wordy your narration slows the scene and you are signaling to the players to pay more attention to the details. When you are quick in your words you begin driving your players to get their guts engaged, getting them excited about the outcome and not worrying about the details. Painting with Description Similar to location, location, location, for locating a great place to live description, description, description is at the core of great roleplaying sessions. When you paint the scene with precise and concise descriptions, you create a depth of, where the players can be caught up in the action of their imagination. Describing the scene creates immersion, and for immersion to work well, you must give great descriptions. Through description, you paint the world around the players. Instead of simply saying "a large room" consider saying "a cavernous room, its edges disappear into the darkness beyond your light source." But while you are descriptive, you must also be concise too long of a description and minds will wander. Encourage the players to describe what their characters are doing, be creative in what they do and how they do it whether this involves describing how they attack, or how they will slip into the shadows to give themselves the best chance to make a sneak attack. Or how they kill an opponent. While the description is important, do not get caught in the trap of too long or too many descriptions, some times the best way to serve pacing and flow is to state what occurred and keep things moving. In combat this might be to just state how many successes your attack obtained and how much damage you deal and move on. Describing the World of Kralis The world of Kralis and the Omniverse in which it sits is a weird place where technology and magic blend together. Where void ships rift-jump through the wilds of the Void, where characters can jump on their levitation bikes or horses to out run the mecha or dragon that has just came over the hill. Where-ever possible, your description of the world around the characters, stress the unique, weird and bizarre. But do not be precise and exhaustive in your descriptive detail. Even if that is needed to describe the creature, the character, the device, the locale, or the phenomenon. Leave the players guessing with an impression rather than a detailed description. Give them a partially developed picture. Let it be weird and evocative. Be aware of how you describe things in a shorthand way as well. If you describe something the PCs see coming at them with the words "sort of" they will fill in the blanks with what they want to see. But instead, if you are descriptive in gray shades of specifics, you can put more of an evocative and weird image in their heads. It is better to be vague. When attempting to describe how a Void vehicle works try not to use jarring terms, be wary of the cliches of both science fiction and fantasy. To keep the weirdness factor up use more obscure words to describe something: • Say clockwork instead of robot or android • Say machine intelligence instead of artificial intelligence or computer intelligence. • Say energy pistol instead of blaster or laser gun • Use beam or ray instead of laser. • Avoid using radar or spaceship • Say world not planet • Say realm, dimension or universe instead of plane • Say slugthower, pistol or rifle not gun or revolver As a GM, you have many responsibilities, from refereeing to adjudicating rules to describing the world as the campaign, and the players move along. While they are all important, describing the world and the player's interactions is what drives the campaign and story in each session.
While at first, it seems evident that pulling in player’s characters through interaction and description is what is meant by “roleplaying” it may fall by the wayside as you focus on the adjudicating of rules. What then, exactly, does roleplaying entail? Of most importance is the description of the immediate situation in which the players are interacting. Telling the players what the situation their characters are in, with concrete terms, is how you get a session started, get things back on track from breaks, etc. Like all good stories, your use of details and senses can draw characters in. It’s not “the dragon attacks,” it’s “the dragon rears its head back, its massive wings unfurling to cast a dark shadow on you, as it unleashes a hellish storm of fire at you." It is also the lack of information to create sense of tension, “A soft scraping, like bone on stone, echoes around you.” The situations occurring around the players is rarely smooth or uneventful. They exist in a world where magic and burgeoning technology exist, where the undead rise from their graves and horrific monsters exist just outside their torchlight. They need to have something to react to, and often. When describing a scene or situation always end with an open-ended question: “What do you do?”; “How are you acting?”; “Where are you going?”; “Who is doing what?” Invoke situations that demand the players act and respond. Everything that occurs in the world around the players occurs because of you as the GM and Storyteller. Your NPC's actions and scenario descriptions should aim to do the following: Portray a world of adventure, fill the character’s lives with that adventure, and play out what happens. Legends of Kralis is about facing down the hordes of monsters, surviving the darkness and braving the chaos that whirls around the players. It’s meant for player characters who have decided to step outside the safety of cities and towns in hopes of earning fame and glorious reward. One of your jobs as the GM is to bring to life a world where the players can find adventure. To portray a world of the fantastic and horrific. To show the players the wonders of the world that they live in and push them to live in it, to interact with it and to react to all that is occurring around them. This is done by working with the players and their characters to create a world that engages them, one that is dynamic and one that catches them in some threatening danger and fosters a game of action and tension. The story never presumes to know player's actions and Legends of Kralis is a tool meant to portray a grand setting that is in perpetual motion. With situations filled with conflict where the players will clash with the world and its inhabitants, it is up to you to portray the repercussions of that action in the world around them. You need to bring the players fully into the sense of the story. By addressing the characters instead of the players you create a world that flows and keeps the players engaged in the fantasy-fiction you are developing. This helps you as the GM stay focused on the story first instead of the gameplay mechanics. It also allows you to focus on the details of the story and what moves the characters and their interaction with the situation and the world at large. While the world and the game have stats to determine the mechanical resolution of affects and effects, it is your job to bring these stats to life. The world that the characters move in is filled with fantastic creatures with own motives, desires and traits. It is your job to give the characters descriptive details of each creature, bringing it to life through smells, sights and sounds. You are every other person in the world from the lowliest peasant to the greatest of kings and gods. You are the non-player character personified and anyone that interacts with the characters has their backstory, you may not have it fully developed for every interaction, but they all have a name. The rest will fall into place as the players will indicate to you who they feel is important to them. Part of being a great GM is playing the parts of the world in order to find out what happens to the characters after you have setup the scenario. Whenever you have made an action as an NPC in the world; or created a situation that requires action by the characters - it is always best to ask “What do you do?” |
Archives
March 2024
Categories |