LP rewards (treasure, adventure example)

[Mataxes]

Here you go, the blog post that came out of this thread.

http://www.fasagames.com/blog/?post_id= ... -earthdawn

[Sangius]

Much appreciated, Mataxes. One very quick question just to clarify: session = one gaming evening of average length, correct? Also, should there be a hyperlink in the last sentence of your posting? If so, it isn't working for me.

[Razan_GM]

Link works fine for me.

[Mataxes]

Yes, generally speaking, a "session" would be a typical evening of playing the game; which I consider to be 2-4 hours.

[dweer]

Blog post was Awesome. Well done.

[Baravakar]

Thanks for the fantastic response. This was very helpful.

There is one thing that has always concerned me about Creature Loot. There is very little in the guides to explain this concept. Personally, I always liked the idea, but it does not seem well defined (IMO).

In your example, Crakbills have Neck Cords worth Legend Points.
Lets assume the party has never encountered these creatures before. How do they know to take the neck cords?
Should this be some kind of knowledge check? (Creature Lore/Legends and Heroes)
When designing an adventure, we make an allowance for discovering these treasures and award legend points. If the party does not know to take the bit of the monster that is normally awarded legend points, they do not receive them?
It seems unfair to me to not receive legend points because you failed to make a knowledge check.

Another thing that always bothered me was, what do they do with the bit taken?
I'm sure tales are given of the heroes deeds and they are enhanced by the the item taken.
(These neck cords where recovered by the adventuring group [insert name here]. Wow that's cool. They were attempting to rescue a lost expedition)
Many of these creature loots just have a name with a silver value and the phrase (worth Legend Points). How is the item used after it is taken and sold. Why are they worth buying?

[Sangius]

After Mataxes took the time to provide some extensive insight on his way of handling LP, I figured I’d finally contribute some of my time to provide the community with some intel as well. Being one of those guys who’s fascinated by numbers, Mataxes’ remark that the Legend Awards table is based on some number crunching experiment to figure out the right pacing of character advancement made me want to run the numbers myself. Maybe somebody around here is interested to see the result. First my assumptions (which no real character would meet):
No Skill / Attribute advancement
No Skills converted to Talents
Advancing only one talent from each new circle, plus the 5 the character starts out with

I rounded to the first digit after the comma by the way. I crunched the exact numbers too, but most of them didn’t look too appealing, so here it goes …
Starting Point:
2 Talents on 1, 3 on 2 (what way you distribute your 8 points within those 5 talents doesn’t really matter in the long run since you’ll have to spend more LP going from circle one to two if you start out with 2 rank 3 talents and 1 rank 2, whereas you will save some LP going from circle two to three in that scenario)

Advancement to circle 2: raise two rank 1 talents to rank 2: 2*200 = 400LP
Advancement to circle 3: raise one talent from 0 to 3, 5 from 2 to 3: (100+200+300) + 5*300=2.100LP
Advancement to circle 4: raise one talent from 0 to 4, 6 from 3 to 4: (600+500) + 6*500=4.100LP
Advancement to circle 5: raise one talent from 0 to 5, 7 from 4 to 5: (1100+800) + 7*800=7.500LP
Advancement to circle 6: raise one journeyman talent from 0 to 6, 8 novice talents from 5 to 6: (200+300+500+800+1300+2100) + 8*1300 = 15.600LP
Advancement to circle 7: raise one journeyman talent from 0 to 7, one journeyman talent from 6 to 7, 8 novice talents from 6 to 7: (5200+3400) + 3400 + 8*2100 = 28.800LP
Advancement to circle 8: raise one journeyman talent from 0 to 8, two journeyman talents from 7 to 8, 8 novice talents from 7 to 8: (8600+5500) + 2*5500 + 8*3400 = 52.300LP

Now let’s run the numbers with the average LP-gain per session (p. 98, Gamemaster’s Guide 3rd edition):
Circle 1: 200, to advance to circle 2, you’ll need 400LP = 2 game sessions (assuming an average session time of 2-4 hours, roughly 6 hours gametime).
Circle 2 average gain: 800; to advance to circle 3, you’ll need 2.100LP = 2,6 game sessions (roughly 7,8 hours gametime).
Circle 3 average gain: 1400; to advance to circle 4, you’ll need 4.100LP = 2,9 game sessions (roughly 8,7 hours gametime).
Circle 4 average gain: 1900; to advance to circle 5, you’ll need 7.500LP = 3,9 game sessions (roughly 11,7 hours gametime).
Circle 5 average gain: 4000; to advance to circle 6, you’ll need 15.600LP = 3,9 game sessions (roughly 11,7 hours gametime).
Circle 6 average gain: 7200; to advance to circle 7, you’ll need 28.800LP = 4 game sessions roughly 12 hours gametime).
Circle 7 average gain: 13100; to advance to circle 8, you’ll need 52.300LP = 4 game sessions (roughly 12 hours gametime).

Total game time from character creation to circle 8: ~70 hours (assuming the above mentioned assumptions), which equals roughly 23 gaming sessions. If you play once a week, and play around 2-4 hours, you should reach circle 8 after roughly half a year of gaming (plus a couple of sessions in LP for skills, attributes and additional talents). Does that sound about right, Mataxes?

[Panda]

I understand where you are coming from when looking at creature body parts and going, "huh?" Some are straight forward, others are elucidated in the text, while a crackbill neck cord is an oddity. And by no means the only one. My default assumption if the bit falls into the "???" category is it is useful for some magical thing, be it alchemy, common magic item creation, or for thread items. As such, if players want they can simply use it at the value in whatever they are making so long as they can explain how it is working.

The other thing I do is have players create trophies with them. Here are two posts which talk about it a little: and .

Hopefully this is helpful in some way.

[Mataxes]

[Roth]

This appears to be designed around a more linear playstyle.
How would this change for a more open playstyle.
Or to be a bit more plain in speak, this looks like more theme park(i.e. some may call railroads) than sandbox.

If there are no session goal/adventure goal, how would you incorporate the legend points for these aspects?

Does this mean all creatures will have treasure?

What about sessions that last 4-6 hours or even 6-8 hours?