Forever Alow

Low levels. I love 'em. My players love 'em. They actually start to get somewhat disconnected from their characters around levels 5-6, as the powers mount and the challenges grow less about utilizing your brains to prevent your feeble body from being flayed alive by uncountable horrible foes and more about calculating your strength, mustering it, and throwing it where it is needed to topple dangerous enemies that would have, at one time, seemed like certain death.

It's this white-knuckled grip on the dice that interests my players most. The additional resources of high levels actually seem to be a burden. I've had them remark on several occasions that they LOVE playing the low levels. They've done it enough; TPKs, loss of players, and other such nicities have caused party resets a-plenty. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it hasn't all been due to one primary secret driving urge—my players like playing low-level schmucks. Sure, there's the essential draw of taking a paper-thin douchebag and turning him into a god... but do my players get bored of their douchebags long before they reach divine status? It would seem, by all evidence, so.

This is one of the reasons I've always wanted to run WFRP2e, why I love the current (but incomplete) rules for Medieval Hack (now Feudal Anarchy), and why I have sought out Hârnworld over and over again only to be repulsed by its not-quite-early-medieval setting (with its guilds and high medieval nonsense and strange words that look like Baatorian break-teeth languages). We just love the thrill of low-level play, and it seems like we always will. I've only run a handful of games with characters beyond 6th level in my life, and it doesn't look as though that number is going to increase anytime soon.

Kazoo Day 1

Things I learned today:

The romans served a form of dish commonly (to amuse the viewer) that was a statue of Priapus with a lap formed of apples and pears which, when touched, would shoot purple saffron. Yesssss!

I might be designing a humoral system for the optional character creation charts in the boxed set. Maybe just for humans? Probably just for them. I'm not sure. Starsigns will also probably be a thing, but that's a Warhammer Fantasy response, not a Kazoo response.

Dave Crane gave me some great ideas about ruins when discussing the Roman landscape in Anglo-Saxon England and how they avoided inhabiting Roman structures—partly from the inability to build in stone, partly from a cultural resistance to building in stone.

I learned about the possibility that the Great Heathen Army was forging coins when they wintered in Torksney which is awesome.

There were a bunch of papers on foods that we saw which were awesome—two sessions worth. I learned that El Gallo Blanco has the best chorizo I've ever had bar none, even in Mexico, and that Dutch Girl Donuts (which we actually got yesterday and carried with us) are fucking amazing.

I learned that a self-professed genius (Alexis of The Tao of D&D) doesn't understand literature and thinks he can easily boil down all books into "things about the real world" (which therefore can be good) and "things about everything else" (which therefore, by definition, cannot be) as well as his love of ugly Strunk and White language. His quotidian approach to literature leads me to believe that he is, in fact, not a genius but simply autistic.