Monty Halls and Previous Playtest

[kevin_video]

Thought I'd put this here now just in case things go sour.

The Monty Hall was first developed in 2001. It was developed by a friend of mine who saw a challenge on the WotC site back then to make a variant Tomb of Horrors one shot. People had tried to revise the old AD&D campaign, but a lot of people couldn't do it. It would be during 3.5's time that WotC would do it themselves.

The only problem was, how would you do it?  How would you make such a one-shot? He spent about half a year devising what the rules should be, and what books would be allowed. In the end, it was the books that he had. The main three core books of 3.0. And so began, the Monty Hall.

The first one gave you 76 stat points to put wherever you wanted, +5 for 20 HD levels. You were allowed to take any race that was made available to you in the core books. The game had 30 players enter the grounds of an evil wizard, who was not only looking to take over the world, but destroy the entire prime material to show just how powerful he was. If every plane of existence knew how powerful he was, they'd obviously bow down before him without a fight. Or so he though. The prime material people weren't about to let this happen to them without a fight. He wasn't stupid enough to leave his grounds unguarded and think that no one would retaliate though.

You had various rangers, clerics, fighers, barbarians, monks, etc all fighting to get to this guy, and they were in for the fight of their lives. You'd never seen so many save or die spells or attacks going off. It was ridiculous. The saves were in the 30's, and most of them were Will saves. All the rogues, fighters, rangers, and barbarians were toast within just getting to the castle gates. Then there were the reflex saves for the clerics to content with.

You had devils, demons, golems, undead of every kind, and then some coming your way. All controlled by an evil necromancer. They're usually the ones that do this kind of thing. Of course with so many beings being immune to crits, the rogues were useless, and will saves were not what a fighter was best at. A couple friends of mine were in it. One was a fighter, and his wife was a cleric. She used more Resurrection spells than she thought was possible. Used up all of her pearls of power too.

The worst of the worst traps was getting changed into a random class. My current DM was one of the people playing in it, and he was a 20th level paladin. He set off the trap. He got transformed into a 20th level wizard. They can't use paladin stuff. He did get to keep his pearls though, and he stole spell component pouches from fallen wizards and sorcerers so he could cast spells. His mount also turned into a familiar of his choice.

In the end, only four people made it to the final boss. The DM of the Monty Hall had this epic long speech about world domination, and how he could do whatever he pleased now, etc, etc, and how he knew they couldn't beat him. The four that made it was a cleric, a sorcerer, and two wizards. All of whom had almost no spells left. My DM asked that DM if he had to actually listen to the guy's rampage and speech. Surprised, he said "no", and it was initiative. He hadn't considered that anyone would have done that, so the evil wizard was flat-footed. After rolling, the evil wizard rolled a "1" and ended up going last. Four castings of Time Stop went off, and he unloaded every spell he could. At the time, Time Stop was a little different, and the DM of the Monty Hall wasn't familiar with the spell, so they just went at it like that.

All four characters unleashed everything they had, with another three Time Stops going off from the other wizard and sorcerer. The evil wizard didn't stand a chance against that many spells. When he died, he transformed back into his original form. A towering (three sizes bigger than colossal) black dragon. It toppled over towards the group. They had one round to get away from their soon to be crushing deaths.

They all held hands, and a greater teleport was cast. They escaped with no problem. The DM still remembers his frustration. The speech was nearly a page long, and he had gone over it to make sure it was absolutely perfect, and that it wouldn't sound like he was just reading off of the paper. He knows better now.

And that, was the first Monty Hall.

[kevin_video]

He had done the Monty Hall for six years, but he finally gave it a rest three years ago when he realized he just didn't have the time.

The last one he did is another well talked about scenario, which he admits he can't take all of the credit for.

He found a Map-of-the-Day for a castle that kind of looked like his very first one, and it felt almost nostalgic for him to use.

The scenario he went with for that one was, can a 1st level character with epic gear, take on an epic level adventure and survive? While my DM didn't participate in that one, one of the players in my group had.

There were 50 pre-made characters, and a stack of epic level gear. You were allowed one weapon (two if you had two-weapon fighting), and one magic item for every slot on your character, as per the Magic Item Record Sheet. http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/dx20070208iw_MagicItemRecordSheet.jpg The prices were all there so you could get as close to 750,000 as possible.

It was a group of 10 people this time around, and it was an actual EL 20 scenario, and at the end, you guessed it, was a wizard to take you down. What was he trying to do? Take over the world of course. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8u7px_GzWQ

Again, everyone had a lot of fun with this one, but the players felt a tad robbed of the fact that they weren't able to design their own weapons, and their own characters. Admittedly, would you really want to do that for 10 characters? Make a level one mook that you know is going to die just so you could choose your own weapons?

If characters died along the way, you knew they had better gear than you did, you were more than welcome to loot along the way.

There was only one rule. No more than 10 characters at any one time in play. It'd be kind of quick if all 50 went at once, and died during the first round of combat. So it was ruled that they were given teleporting earrings that would summon the next character you had in your pile to take up into battle.

Surprisingly enough, a good portion of the 50 lvl 1 character made it to the final boss. They even won. There were more characters to take down than he had spells. He wasn't optimized of course, or he could have just killed them all outright 20 times in a row if he wanted to.

Still though, it was fun for everyone who played.

He's done other systems too. Arcana Evolved was another one he used a lot in the Monty Halls.

[kevin_video]

Since I'm lazy, I'm going to copy and paste what happened during the previous playtest. I originally put it in the "My DM is an idiot" rant thread, so some of you may have even seen it already.

Warning, spoilers ahead, but they will be hidden for those that don't want to read them.

Needless to say, it didn't exactly go as planned, and it ended up being a rant about what happened.

As well, for those that read this, you'll notice that they didn't encounter your encounter. They didn't stick around long enough for that. Basically they went in, found the dwarf, the pixie cut off his head, smashed all of the windows, followed the intruder who'd been upstairs out of the mansion, and took off after whoever it was before the demons arrived. Had they stuck around a couple of more minutes, they would have. At any rate, they were going to meet up with them at some point, whether fresh or beaten slightly.


Last Sunday (read three days ago because it's after midnight here while I'm writing this), I did my playtest for a tournament game, and couldn't believe how much I had underestimated their character building skills. It was fun to see them be effective though, and they were enjoying themselves.

However, it was the Sunday DM I had to do a double take on. I really should have looked at his character sheet closer because I don't think it was balanced properly. Some of the stuff he did just didn't seem quite right for someone of his level. Read pixie nonspellcasting feat ranger 12/scout 4. Why? Because rangers shouldn't have spells. It bothers him to no end that they can cast. But it was his Improved Skirmish damage from his Swift Hunter that really caught my attention. He was using a short bow, but even then it seemed like a lot of d6 to be rolling. Even if his arrows were magically enhanced with shocking, frost, flaming, dessicating, implacable, etc, etc, etc, and he had Greater Manyshot.

But what's done is done.

I think what really bothered me was his definition of CG. You know, Chaotic GOOD! "Oh look. One of the guys we're supposed to save is dead. Better cut off its head and loot their body. Oh, and instead of saving anyone, let's kill them all, loot everything possible, then pay for resurrections for them all, then make them pay double what we paid to bring them back to life." Really? "Well he was dead anyways, and you need a part of them to bring back to life." You don't know that they're dead yet. "Oh, they will be by the time we get to them." Or even better "I shoot it." But it could be an ally. "I have greater invisibility, I shoot it as soon as I see it and it won't know who did it. Did I kill it?" Yes. It wasn't an ally though. Thankfully. "Shucks... I mean, good. Wouldn't want to do that now would we?" You're chaotic, yes, but you're also GOOD! "I'm a pixie. I'm very chaotic. We define chaos. Besides, I'm still good. I'm just mischievous." Nothing, and I mean NOTHING could get this guy to admit that he was being Chaotic EVIL! You can't tell me he wasn't. He sure could though. He had every excuse in the book. No matter what you said, he had a counter for it, and eventually you backed down, or the players told you to because they knew you couldn't win. And he'd be all smiley about it, with that shit eating grin of his. Hell, even when the bard had done diplomacy on the gorgon, the second he saw her shadow, he popped her full of arrows. Why? "She's CE. She could have turned on us at any time." Yeah, like you're doing to your own group. Why do I say that? He's a scout. What do scouts get? Trapfinding. What did he do? Found all the traps, but did NOT tell ANYONE. He just kept his mouth shut. Not a word was said. So I tried to call him on that. "Actually, no. I'm not telling them which means I'm not lying to them about there not being traps there." Bullshit. Your job is to find traps. "I did." And tell your group about it so they don't get hurt. "They're not my group. I have no loyalties to them whatsoever. Our being together is merely a convenient happening. If they're truly ECL 20, then they should be able to detect it themselves, or at least survive it." THAT'S BEING EVIL! "No, that's being a sprite." Or, how about when he was breaking all of the windows, which alerted the encounter inside that they were coming. Why was he breaking the windows? A) "Being a chaotic sprite. It's what I do." and B) "Should there be an enemy in there, I'm making sure that we have an escape route if it gets too hairy." C) "I wanted to see how tough the windows were." F*ck this shit!  He drove me nuts all night. It didn't help that he would occasionally say that I must not really know the rules if I don't know the definitions of the alignments. DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! DEATH! AH!

Gawain said it best when he said the guy was being a hypocrite. How? Because earlier in the campaign he was running, an elf that didn't come off as Evil (my cleric used the spell), he was trying to kill one of our party members (a fellow elf) with a wizard spell that was easily something from a 6th level spell slot or higher, and we were barely all 5th level. So I intervened, and attacked the elf. Apparently, in this DM's world, attacking elves is like shitting on a country's flag, burning it with fire, and then hanging it on their roof because after we defeated the elf (the swordsage destroyed it with a critical hit, hence why the DM nerfed him even more after that), and saved our elf party member, we all lost XP. Why? Because we were all good or neutral aligned, and we dared to take on an elf in battle when he hadn't attacked us. He attacked a party member. That counts. It didn't. Apparently when an elf challenges you, it's a one-on-one duel. You will be attacked to the point that you shouldn't die, but as per the Rocky IV catch phrase from Drago, "If he dies, he dies." His earlier character had already been killed off once, and I wasn't about to see him make a new character in such a short amount of time. We then got reminded that I didn't detect him as "evil". True, but "good" characters don't just do that on a whim when fighting other "good" characters. But apparently I was wrong. That's because he was chaotic, and true chaos does whatever the f*ck they bloody well want. And if it's an elf, and they deem you worthy to die, you must accept that because elves are the closest things to mortal gods in his campaign. When he asked for feedback about his campaign during our summer break, I was sure to tell him just what I thought about that, but nicely. No one else did though. They were hoping that their silence would speak louder. It didn't.

Anyways, back to my game. Again, I should have looked at his character sheet more closely when he sent me a pdf copy of it because he averaged hitting AC 54 almost all of the time. I think the lowest he rolled was like 38 and 49. Maybe he just rolled really well, but it was still bothering me regardless. The stacking damage didn't help either. Especially when he averaged 156 damage an arrow from the Greater Manyshot (so 156 x3 on average), and then hiding in the trees afterwards with his flyby attack. And of course his bow was a truebane transmuting weapon too so DR meant nothing to him. That's all he did though. He was always doing greater invisibility, had a potion that lasted 10 hours to give him +10 to his move silently and hide for 10 hours, and did a flyby attack with manyshot, then retreated to a tree to hide. And no matter how high my spot was, his hide was better. I needed way more monsters with true seeing, blindsight, and cone breath weapons.

I was also only allotted four hours to do it.