@AeriaNyx said in Will it PrP? A place to propose PrP ideas and get feedback:
I have a ton of random ideas, some of which are just that, nebulous little content nuggets that I haven't fully worked out in my head.
I still have an entire Evernote folder full of those, from before my time on staff. (Sometimes I mime it for ideas still.) So I feel you on that!
@AeriaNyx said in Will it PrP? A place to propose PrP ideas and get feedback:
Hey, potential PrP runners, have you got something you want to get feedback on? Have tips or tricks for running combat you'd like to share?
Find a dice mechanic that works for you, where you can run it easily and fairly quickly, which will get through the combat in a timely manner, but still allow for the PCs to get moments in the spotlight. It may take a while; I think it wasn't until the fifth PRP I ran with it that I had the right numbers so my system balanced out properly.
For me, what I ended up doing was giving each enemy a 'successes needed' value; each time someone attacked that creature, their successes were subtracted from that. When the value hit 0 or lower, that opponent was downed.
Then I had three difficulty levels; I think they were 20, 30, and 50, when I settled on my final balance numbers. A normal attack was at 20, and the successes you got were just subtracted from the pool normally; 10 successes, 10 points from the target's successes needed pool. If you wanted to do something a little more difficult/dramatic, that was at 30, but the successes would be multiplied by 1.25. If you wanted to do something downright cinematic—the sort of thing that would be shown in slow-motion during a fight scene in a movie—that was at 50, but if you succeeded, the resulting successes were multiplied by 2.
Similar rules for damaging the players existed; the monsters had a 'challenge rating', and I would just do the gmcheck dice rolls to represent the monster's attacks in return, and then use harm on the player for the monster's successes multiplied by 1 + (<cr> * 0.1), so a monster with challenge rating zero would have its successes multiplied by 1, CR 1 would be 1.1, CR 10 would by 2.0, etc.
It was simpler to run than it probably sounds. Still, I meant to make a spreadsheet to automate it, but I had planned to do that after NaNoWriMo back in 2017, and... when I finished NaNo that year, I joined staff and didn't need a PRP spreadsheet any longer.
@AeriaNyx said in Will it PrP? A place to propose PrP ideas and get feedback:
Personally, I have this idea brewing to place a chest someone in public and have a journal inside it that gives clues to the next location and so on, like a crazy weird treasure hunt all over the grid. I have no idea to what end this would be. Like, maybe it leads to a camp of bandits? Maybe it leads to a shardhaven/dungeon?
Puzzles can be a lot of fun. One of my absolute favorites of the PRPs I ran took place in a literal ghost town; a town called Frosthaven which was utterly empty, save for skeletons scattered about. But when night came, the players could see the spirits of everyone in the town, standing atop the walls as though keeping guard. (Those sensitive to the dead had heard them before, but at night everyone could see them.)
In order to figure out what had happened—and therefore, what they had to do to fix it—the players searched for clues. I had three journal objects prepared, each written in a different language by a different individual involved in the events, which I dropped when they searched somewhere that seemed feasible for that journal to be. If they translated all three journals, took the entries, and put them in a single list by date, they could see what had happened, and then figure out where they had to go to make it right.
For yours? Honestly, I'd think about a theme for the end-point. Is it a demon taunting someone? Is it some prankster laying a path? Is it some helpful individual, bound by Writ against offering direct aid, who's leaving these breadcrumbs in hopes that they'll be able to eventually lead the players to something useful against something in a later PRP?
Answering that will give you an idea of what tone the puzzles should take. Taunting, helpful but vague, etc. Where they're going to lead might not be terribly important right away, if you lay the clues out in such a way they can only be found during GM'd events; you could pace things and see what players' interpretations are, because sometimes they'll have an even more cool idea than the GM had.
(RE: something for a later PRP, I had intended to run several PRPs around the individual responsible for the situation at Frosthaven. Over the course of multiple individual PRPs, this character's full past and motivations would have become clear. I think story arcs like that, where people involved with different PRPs can come together and figure out the bigger picture by sharing information? Those can be really fun.)
