After my Sunday game group finishes The Wild Beyond the Witchlight (we're confronting Endelyn, so I think we basically only have the Palace of Heart's Desire left) I'm planning on running an updated version of the adventure that my original campaign was just starting when the group kind of fell apart. While two of those players are still part of the group, and I'm hoping to get another one who was in it previously, at least a couple of players are going to be new additions.
After the 2024 core rulebooks came out, I rebuilt the entire adventure from the ground up.
The intent was to be an open sandbox of an adventure - the high point of that previous campaign had been a trip to the Shadowfell (though think more like the Dark World from Link to the Past than Ravenloft) in which I kind of set the party loose in a big zone. The intent here is to then kind of repeat this structure, but with significantly more DMing experience to guide it.
The party is hunting a powerful, ancient vampire who surreptitiously set a group of monster hunters to assassinate their group patron - who is, himself, a vampire, but one whose innate kindness and faithfulness has allowed him to be a benevolent force in the world (he and his wife and adopted daughter, both vampire spawn, simply get barrels of animal blood from the village butcher's to sate their nutritional needs). I will, admittedly, have to fast-track through the introductory story here, but the key is that they're going into a land dominated by the vampire.
The structure is intended at least to be a kind of open-world sandbox that then leads into a trilogy of dungeons - first a dungeon where the vampire is hinted to be, but is actually a decoy that inadvertently holds an important key to allow them to pursue him in earnest, then a quick "dungeon" that is a supernatural train (inspired in large part by the Phantom Train from Final Fantasy VI) and then to a ruined castle that hides beneath it a profoundly ancient temple/citadel to an evil celestial who created the world's vampires in the first place, where our villain seeks to achieve apotheosis by siphoning off the holy energy of a vampire-turned-saint he has trapped.
Tonally, we're meant to start in classic gothic horror territory, but gradually weave in a bit of psychedelic horror (I don't know if that's a recognized genre, but I've long been inspired by the trailer for the movie Beyond the Black Rainbow, despite never getting around to seeing the movie.
Anyway, while my current Ravnica game uses milestone leveling, a system that I think most people seem to prefer using for D&D, this original game used XP. And I want to keep to that.
Partially, that's because I've found that in my high-level Ravnica game, I sometimes feel like it takes forever for my players to level up, because there's just so much to do in order to hit the milestones that count (one flaw is that I let them hit level 10 way, way earlier than they should have - most of this campaign has taken place in tiers 3 and 4).
But also, I think there's something fun, as a DM, about not really having control over how powerful the party is. You build out a world and just let them hit whatever part of it they feel ready for.
What I'm curious about is how a party's size will affect the difficulty.
There are two counterbalances: a party with more players earns less XP per player in each encounter. But a party with more players will also count an encounter as easier.
Assuming a party of four players, I believe that if they do most of the stuff in my open world, they'll be level 11 by the end of the adventure after starting at level 8.
To get from level 8 to 9, a player needs 14,000 xp (going from 34,000 to 48,000 - but I'm going to just talk about the difference). To get from 9 to 10, one needs 16,000. To go from 10 to 11, one needs 21,000. So a single player to go from 8 to 11 is going to need 51,000 xp.
In other words, across all the combat encounters and quest experience that the players are expected to go through, the assumption I've built the adventure upon is that they'll earn enough to hit level 11 by the time they've completed the adventure. We might fudge this and say that they'll hit this right before they have their confrontation with the big boss.
If we assume four players (the current group of players for my Sunday game, though obviously my switching chairs with our current DM) then that means the party as a whole should be expected to earn 204,000 xp.
However, if we can, I'm hoping that we can get my best friend's wife (who is also my friend, of course) and our original Sunday group DM (who also was in that original campaign of ours) to join us, that would mean six players.
That does mean that the XP is going to be split between more people.
If we divide that 204,000 by 6, rather than 4, each player will get 34,000 xp. That will get them just 4000 xp past hitting level 10, so they'd all be just level 10 by the time they hit that final boss.
The final boss is a Vampire Umbral Lord, who is aided by four Cultist Fanatics. The vampire also gets the benefits of being in a lair, so it's worth 15,000 xp while the fanatics are 450 apiece, or a total of 1800. Thus, the total encounter budget is 16,800.
If we divide this value by our assumed four players at level 11, or 4,200 xp apiece, that puts it just above the "high" difficulty for level l1 (arguably overtuned, but given how it's just barely above that, I think we're ok for a big climactic boss battle). If we divide that, instead, by 6, it's only 2,800 per player, which is comfortably in the high-difficulty budget range for 10th level players.
It's not a perfect ratio, of course - it does seem like more players will mean an easier time (especially because not all the XP will be divided between players: quest XP might just be the same per-player amount regardless of the party size). And, of course, the encounter-building guidance and XP budgets for these monsters are all abstractions of a much more complex system.
As it stands, my current expectations are that we're going to have a Rogue, as well as a College of Swords Bard (one player wants to re-roll). I'm hoping I can get our old DM to play her Warforged Monk again, and my best friend to bring in his original Wizard (though rebuilt - he now understands that it was a bad idea to have a Wizard with +0 to Con - at level 9, he had only like 30-something HP - oh, and I am grandfathering in characters who were higher level). My best friend's wife had a short-lived Cleric who was part of that party, and I'd like to encourage as many people as possible to play their old characters so that there can be some continuity with the old campaign. (The Rogue player, and another who I haven't yet been able to talk with about his future character, I didn't know at the time this campaign stuttered to a halt, so they'll be originals). I'm hoping to have a diverse array of characters so that I can hand out all manner of fun magic items. While the Swords Bard and Rogue give us a bit of martial stuff, I'm hoping to get someone who can make use of the martial weapons that will be available. (Also, I hope that my friend with the Wizard does actually play that character, as I wrote some elements related to his backstory into the adventure, and also have a number of spellbooks for him to find).
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