[D&D] Midwinter Harvest

[Jasper Flick]

Last Saturday I had my first play session with the group I talked about in the "[D&D] Who's boss?" thread http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=23122.0. We've got me as GM and Ivan, Johan, Marcel, and Tom as players.

Modifications

We decided on a few deviations from standard D&D and some other conventions, mostly fueled by my desire to not be a Super GM. As I was sick the week prior to play and am still not fully recovered, I had extra leverage to make this happen. Modifications were:

• All d20 rolls are transferred to the players (so they roll their defense and the monster has a fixed attack score, for instance);
• Tracking initiative order, monster damage, temporary modifiers etcetera are not done by the GM (Johan volunteered to keep track of all of it);
• The GM is not responsible for snacks, drinks, or dinner, but he does host the game;
• If a player succeeds at something in combat, he may narrate how it happened afterwards, but if he fails the GM narrates;
• No take 10 or 20 rule, instead boring or deterministic rolls should simply not happen;
• The GM will state the difficulty of a roll before it's made, or the modifier in case of an opposed roll;
• Skills will be used in a more free-wheeling way than described in the books;
• If the entire group needs to make a skill check only the most skilled character rolls (not things that affect individuals);
• An Eberron Action Point (each player has 8 for the entire adventure) can be used to enhance any d20 roll made by the player, not just a select few (so also the transferred d20 rolls), and you'll know the odds;
• Two AP can be used to convert character death into "out of the fight, but (barely) alive";
• No XP awards, instead completing the adventure is worth one level up, but what we'll actually do when the adventure is over will be decided afterwards;
• Favored classes are ignored, so no XP penalties for multi-classing in non-traditional ways;
• There is no need for a traditional adventuring party, if a key role is missing it will simply not be required;
• Characters should be created with some event that kicks them into action, so no passive PCs;
• Players can add content to the world both before and during play, if everyone agrees it is reasonable.

Setting

During our pre-game session we decided to play D&D in the Eberron campaign world. Only Johan wasn't familiar with the setting but that was fixed with a very short crash course. I let people browse the book a bit (two physical and one digital copies were available) and come up with a location to set the adventure. This took a while as people were blanking out at first, but eventually we settled on the Eldeen Reaches. This got us the following most notable elements for setting:

• A sparsely populated gigantic forest full of magical creatures, sandwiched between two mountain ranges;
• The Wardens of the Wood, a druidic organization protection the Eldeen Reaches;
• The Gatekeepers, a dwindling sect of mostly orcish druids, dedicated to keeping chaotic horrors out of this world and some imprisoned deep below the earth;
• Groups of minions of said chaotic horrors still threatening the lands.

Characters & Situations

Generation of characters was done mostly through e-mail and instant messaging afterwards, starting with a one-on-one with me before throwing them in the group. I'll list them in the order that they got created. Character started at level 6, got average hip point rolls, and a point-buy variant for ability scores.

Johan created Danil Underwood, halfling fighter/ranger, defender of a remote hamlet somewhere in the big forest. He had a wife and four kids, a fifth on the way. After I asked "So, what's happening?" he decided that the little village had just been attacked and his eldest son, Erekk, had been kidnapped!

Tom made To'ki, an orc barbarian, a hunter from the Gatekeeper sect based in the Shadow Marches, located south of the Eldeen Reaches. His story was that he had been expelled from his order because of a dark prophecy; he was apparently doomed to something terrible. So he's been wandering alone for years in the Eldeen Reaches, doing his job as a solitary gatekeeper. At some point he built a hut somewhere, but he heard it being destroyed by a terrible beast some day and he's been wandering and very edgy since then.
I thought he would stop after the destruction of the hut, but he went on after that, basically saying his PC was paranoid and trusted no one, and drawing a blank as to what could kick him into action, again. So I asked to make a suggestion, which was ok. I made him wake up one day feeling rather well and not so haunted anymore, and then he discovered this weird growth on his shoulder?
I triple-checked but Tom was rather fond of that idea. He was firing questions but I held most off until actual play.

Ivan wanted to play an ice-queen kind of character and came up with Elysia Coe a young human wizard not getting along too well with her secluded parents. She was from a secluded wizard community somewhere close to Danil's village. She was in love with Leon Rowley, an ex-soldier from Danil's village, who wooed her by telling romanticized war stories. Of course he has been kidnapped as well. When he didn't show at their regular meeting place, somewhere in between the two villages, she decided to investigate.

Marcel introduced Marius Quintus, a human ranger, kind of a free agent, kind of allied with the Gatekeepers, hunting aberrations in the mountains. He had a grudge against them after a town he frequented was wiped out by those monsters. He was tough to get something out of, but once he stopped evading he decided his mountain house had been attacked by aberrations and now he was following them to get his revenge.

I had defined the village as the centre of play, and dubbed it Little Green Hill and made it about 40% halfling due to Johan's additions. Marcel asked whether it could be winter, so I made it midwinter. I had decided on a druid as spiritual leader of the place and that he was going to be significant. But only after Johan actually named him Doran GoodThorn and made him an old halfling did I decide to make him really important to the plot.

As the PCs where being formed a global plot was gestating in my mind and by the time they were ready I had figured out who was involved, what they wanted, and how things would probably go if not for the PCs. I picked a few aberration monsters as opposition, made a few variants, and wrote out the most important NPCs. The books gave me some extra inspiration which was fun, but most came out of the input of the players, that was really fun. Each time I got more content and situation from them things started shifting in my mind. I really enjoyed that.

Actual Play

From 13:00 to 14:00 was planned for late arrivals and finishing up character sheets, but actual play started at about 14:30. We played until 21:00, half an hour later than intended, with about an hour brake for lunch and other things. So we had between 5.5 and 6 hours of role-playing.

I opened describing the raid on Little Green Hill by small aberration monsters, leaving the place in turmoil. This was an after-the-fact narration, but the players were involved and wanted to know details.
Then I brought the other players into play, each getting a scene so they all got into Little Green Hill at noon the next day. To'ki simply stumbled upon the place. Elysia was worried and came looking for Leon, even though she had never been to Little Green Hill before. Marius has followed and eventually killed the monsters that attacked his place and their trail had let him to the village. He was helped by fragmentary wolf track those few times he lost track of the monsters.

The strangers started walking around in Little Green Hill, trying to figure out what happened but hoping to keep a low profile. I didn't care much for low profiles though, especially not for an orc who towered over most of the halfling huts. They got the gist of what happened but were also guided to the town centre, where a meeting between the men of the town and the druid Doran was about to begin. This scene was the first time all PCs were together, so I delayed Doran's entry a bit to see what would happen. Johan made Danil hostile towards To'ki, which was not far-fetched but a bit extreme, so I defused the situation by bringing in Doran. Doran led the conversation but I made the crowd an active participant as well. Doran advocated defending the village but most people were in favor of rescuing the abductees. Fun was had as PCs tried to keep a low profile while the crowd responded blunt but sincere. Example talk: "So you're Leon's sweetheart he's been bragging about!" "No way, that can't be her!" "Aw come on man, she's pretty alright!" "We've got to save him!" and "You're a Gatekeeper?" "You fight those monsters!" "You're our savior!"
It was decided by the players that the PCs were the rescue party and would follow one of the trails today and try to be back home before dark. They had an hour to prepare.

What followed were some small scenes in the village.
Elysia had to decide whether she went home to inform her parents of her whereabouts, which would take the rest of the day, or to stick around and help now, leaving her parents in the dark. She decided to stay.
To'ki asked for a private conversation with the druid Doran, in which he showed him the strange growth on his shoulders. Doran identified it as some kind of corruption and took a sample. That triggered a mental warning for To'ki to not trust the druid, but it wasn't a thought of his own.

There were four trails, as the players suggested one to the north, east, south, and west each. The east and south one contained blood trails. They decided to follow the east one. As Marius was the best tracker Marcel was going to make the rolls to follow the tracks. I asked him for a roll and stated the difficulty (generic moderate difficulty) as well as the stakes: loss meant two hours wasted losing the track and finding it again, which would hurt as time was important. He failed but they decided to continue. They found some strange wolf trails and later on one dead body of the miller's son, which was also the end of the trail and an ambush as well. During the combat To'ki got the mental advice to use the weird patches on the monster's bodies, which turned out to be a gross but handy version of magical potions.

They returned during the night, just in time to prevent the abducting of another person; this time the monsters were moving south and some of them were defying reality it seemed.

The first scene of the next day was To'ki in another private discussion with Doran. The druid could make a medicine to halt the strange growth, but he required a few drops of blood from a unicorn. The unicorn Eamon lived to the southwest of Little Green Hill, and owed Doran a favor, so To'ki could try asking him for help.

They decided to follow the south track this time and again they encountered weird wolf trails. Marius failed another track roll so it was getting late before they got to a cave. In the cave they were ambushed again, but victorious.

That's as far as we got this session. The next one is scheduled for the first Saturday of March.

Aftermath

We had a slow start but really got up to speed about halfway through the day, which was after the first combat. Johan and Tom were happily playing their characters but Ivan and Marcel had trouble getting into it. The talk at the town square was basically about me kicking the players out of detached observer mode and giving them a mission. I wasn't set on one course of action though, as I had no specific scenario planned. I guess I expected a bit more determination from the players from the start, but now that's dealt with things are going fine.

They were a bit uneasy about me revealing target numbers ahead of time, but got to appreciate the clarity. As I also made my rolls in the open, there was no room for me to fudge dice, which made the severity of the matter quite clear. I was not holding back.
So far there haven't been much skill checks, only track and spot, but I plan to increase their frequency and their importance.

The first combat went clunky. People found holes in their character sheets and they needed to get the hang of our rules modifications. I guess you simply can't evade that. The second combat went smooth and the third even better. It lasted long only because it really was a long and involved fight, quite intense and deadly.
I'm happy the way I handled the encounters. I didn't plan them in advance, I used the D&D rules to guess what would be an appropriate challenge for what I wanted and used my pre-selected monsters.
We used a Go board for a battle map and dice and beads for environment and combatants, generating a scene on the spot. It worked but I would like some props that allow more variation.

I was very happy with the players rolling their own defense! I think more than half the rolls made this session were defense rolls only! I've seen plenty of players zone out when the GM went through a number of monster attacks in D&D, but now everyone was focused on the player rolling their defense. In the last combat, Ivan basically only got to make defense rolls, but he was very engaged. I think he would've been bored stiff if I had been rolling the dice. I'll never go back to static PC defense.

Player narration of successful combat actions also went well. It wasn't used all the time, but really good hits suddenly became really cool. A few times I said "Wow, how did you do that?" and got some cool answers.
At one point Tom scored two kills in a row, the second being a massive critical hit. His own narration made him realize he overlooked on of his PCs options, which cracked us up. He went like "As I splatter this one all over a tree, I swing back and? Hey I could've used my cleave feat for that!"

You want my best AP to date described? This is it. We all were quite happy with it.
Do you want anymore details? I rather go into them when prompted rather than write it all out, so I left a lot out.
What do you think of our modifications?

[Jasper Flick]

Ok, some additions because I was smart enough to re-re-read my post:

• Apologies for the spelling errors and glitches.
• In fact a whole lot of people were adbucted, not just the two signficant NPCs. Quite important!
• Some knowledge and spellcraft skills were also used.
• Two AP were used, one by Ivan and one by Marcel, both to augment a defense roll and both successful.

[Eric J.]

Awesome!  I'm glad to hear it.

Very clear, concise, and realevant post.

What I'm most interested in is how you got the players to try out these new rules.  What kinds of levels do you use?  From most people a lot of the shit you changed would seem really weird (especially the defense thing).  I want to hear about any friction.

I read the last thread but I did it pretty quickly and I might have missed some important things.  Basically, this seems like a complete turn-around from the way you've done it before.  The players are really getting involved in the game as a group, you've split the responabilities and it seems like things worked out.

What was the most important difference do you think?  How much would the players agree with you that it's your best AP yet?  Do you think the same sort of thing will happen the next time you guys play?

Also, what kinds of things do you want to address in this thread?

May the wind be always at your back,
-Eric

[Simon C]

I love reading about people having a good time playing D&D, because I think it's a great game when used right.  You're definitely using it right.  A well crafted combat encounter can be a great scene for displaying different character traits, for emphasising the relationships between characters, and for really hitting the players hard with what's important to their characters.  You care about something more if you've waded through a pit of gibbering mouthers for it. 

For years I ran d20 without any kind of map or anything more somphisticated than the odd diagram.  I felt like miniatures got in the way of my imagination, and I wasn't interested in tactical combat.  That was a mistake.  I started using grid printed paper in a clear plastic slip cover, and whiteboard markers.  This let me draw on scenery, show the exact postions of monsters and characters, and wipe it all off when I was done.  This was a good balance for me, which still seemed like representation of the battle, rather than a replacement for my imagination.  I was prepared for the tactical choices it presented to make combats more exciting.  What I didn't expect was that it also made people react to the combats in a more characterful way.  Having a clear tactical tradeoff for going to someone's aid, or pursuing a kill over the more "safe" option, meant that a characters actions in combat became a much bigger part of portraying that character.  In a combat-centric game, this was key to me. 

For me, making D&D work was largely about learning the rules.  D&D has masses of rules that seem unimportant, but are in fact essential to making the game run well.  The DMG tells you that forests should have something like 40% underbrush, 10% large trees, and 20% small trees, or some such.  Seemingly pointless rules like this can have a really big impact on the game, when character abilities interact with scenery in important ways.  Something I never got around to doing was printing up some "generic" backdrops for battles, like, a piece of gridded paper with trees and underbrush printed on it, that I could slip into my clearfile for an instant forest encounter. 

I have a question.

To what extent dis you preserve the "unlock the puzzle" model of D&D? You know the situation where the PCs discover something unulual going on, and they kind of have to poke around in a town until they make something happen.  This is opposed to the kind of DitV approach, where everyone comes right out and says "this is what's going on, now fix it".  I don't think either approach is really perfect for D&D.  Poking around, being detectives is frustrating, and badly done can be just a string of failed rolls, followed by the GM finally giving out the information for free to keep the game going.  On the other hand, uncovering dark plots, raiding secret lairs, and encountering unexpected obstacles is part of what makes D&D exciting.  How are you approching the problem of player knowledge versus PC knowledge, with regards to creating "surprises", without leaving the players in the dark?

As someone said somewhere in one of the articles linked from here, "a dozen goblins jump out" isn't a surprise.  It's fulfilling the expectations of the genre.  Letting the players know a goblin fight is coming, or letting the players choose a gobling fight over, say, a kobold fight or some other encounter is not messing with their expectations.  However, as a player, anｄ as a GM, it's fun to have unexpected twists, and to encounter things you didn't expect.  Where do you draw the line here?

[Yakk]

The Black dice are problematic.  For example, if nobody takes the Abuser dice, the Abuser doesn't get to do anything.

Some ideas:
1> The Abuser can give you up to the sum of your Shame and Pride in dice.  You can sacrafice up to your Mask in your own dice to refuse them.

So Alice the Abuser gives Bob 4 dice.  Bob has 2 Mask, so can burn two blue dice to refuse two of the Black dice.

Bob now rolls 2 Black, 2 Red and 2 Yellow dice.

Bob could have instead taken all 4 Black dice, and rolled 4 Black, 2 Blue, 2 Red and 2 Yellow dice.

Neat: This rolls the die count and refusal into your stats.  The Abuser's ability to give out dice grow as the players gain pride, and the player's ability to refuse dice collapses as they lose Mask.  I'm still somewhat worried that a group of people who always refuse Abuser dice may be too effective.

2> The Abuser bids a number of dice, and the Players roll as many black dice as they choose.

The Abuser gets 1 free success for every player who picks the number of dice the Abuser predicts.

Ie, Alice is the Abuser.  Alice says "I am betting they will take 0 dice".  Bob rolls 0 black dice, Charlie rolls 2 black dice, and Daisy rolls 4 black dice.

Alice gets 1 free success, because her bid of 0 matched Bob's black dice, plus as many successes as other people roll on black dice.

Neat: This prevents people from choosing "we all cooperate", because that just gives the Abuser free fuel.  Sadly, the players can just alternate between low black die amounts...

3> Same idea with the bid, but the Abuser gets 1 die for every die different than the number the Abuser bids, minus the player's Mask.

Alice, the Abuser, bids 5.  Bob(1 mask) chooses 3 Black dice, Charlie(3 mask) chooses 1 Black die, and Daisy(5 mask) chooses 0 Black dice.

Alice gets 1 Black die from both Bob and Charlie, but Daisy's mask means she get's none from Daisy.

Neat: as your mask wears away, the Abuser gets more and more dice from bidding correctly.

...

Basically, these change the pretty simple and stable prisoner's dilemma game into a tactical game between Abuser and Children.

#1 and #3 are interesting.  A mix might be fun: The abuser hands people dice.

4> The abuser gives each player up to their Pride in dice.  They can sacrafice up to their own Mask in dice to return dice to the Abuser.

The Abuser also bets "Keep" or "Return".  This bet is the same for every player.

If the Abuser bets the player will keep dice, every die kept gives the Abuser an extra black die to roll.
If the Abuser bets the player will return dice, every die returned gives the Abuser an extra black die to roll.

The Abuser's success pool is the sum of all black dice rolled, including dice kept by the players.

...

Concern: will the abuser come to dominate the endgame as player's pride and shame climbs?

Can the abuser prevent players from ever ending phase 1?

[Jasper Flick]

(I think Yakk's reply #4 directly above this post of mine got into this thread by accident.)

Glad you like it!

My goals of this thread are to share, to reflect, and to see if some useful techniques can get distilled out of it. Oh, and of course there's "Man this was cool you gotta know how cool this was! Polly wants a cracker!" but that's not that important.

Eric, there wasn't any friction, they were all very open-minded. I think that's mostly because we had a pre-play session where we got together and agreed "Ok, we all want to play but we all admit we've had less fun that we would like. How can we make it really work?" We talked quite a bit about possible changes that might enhance play. Some suggestions made it, some not. A lot of potential friction probably got killed by that democratic process. (By the way, we also ditched alignment as a character mold but kept the mechanic, as explained in the other thread.) The defense rolls was a later addition by me though. First they misunderstood but after I fixed that they found it intriguing. I guess the idea of getting to make more rolls was alluring, and it payed off big time!

So I guess that's also the biggest difference right there. We talked about it. We put everything out in the open. We came to an agreement. There was no murk to speak of, and I don't think there's gonna be. Everyone was eager to say they had a good time and wanted more; that's about the best signal I know of that you can get.

I'm not sure what you mean by "What kind of levels do you use?" Could you explain that?

I love reading about people having a good time playing D&D, because I think it's a great game when used right.  You're definitely using it right.  A well crafted combat encounter can be a great scene for displaying different character traits, for emphasising the relationships between characters, and for really hitting the players hard with what's important to their characters.  You care about something more if you've waded through a pit of gibbering mouthers for it.

Simon, I'm with you about the importance of tactical combat. Just look at the D&D rules; all those goodies! Though I don't adhere to listed percentages and such, I damn well use the features that make stuff interesting. I've had my share of boring battles; what a waste! Just saying "those squares over there give anyone in them +2 AC" already spices things up immensely.

Gotta try out that plastic slip cover!

To what extent dis you preserve the "unlock the puzzle" model of D&D? You know the situation where the PCs discover something unulual going on, and they kind of have to poke around in a town until they make something happen.  This is opposed to the kind of DitV approach, where everyone comes right out and says "this is what's going on, now fix it".  I don't think either approach is really perfect for D&D.  Poking around, being detectives is frustrating, and badly done can be just a string of failed rolls, followed by the GM finally giving out the information for free to keep the game going.  On the other hand, uncovering dark plots, raiding secret lairs, and encountering unexpected obstacles is part of what makes D&D exciting.  How are you approching the problem of player knowledge versus PC knowledge, with regards to creating "surprises", without leaving the players in the dark?

Well I'm not sure how much an "unlock the puzzle" mode is ingrained in D&D, but I surely use it in this game. There's no poking needed to make something happen though, because we already defined what happened before actual play started. Basically we cut right to the chase. The players know what happened and have to act. What they don't know yet is why it happened and what might happen next. And that's the surprise, that's the mystery.
I guess its worth pointing out that this specific scenario doesn't use any "secret knowledge" from the campaign setting. The stuff about the evil aberrations and their extradimensional masters is simply considered common knowledge.
The most significant player vs character knowledge difference concerns things some PC haven't talked about yet. The private conversations between To'ki and Doran are a good example. The PC has some kind of taint, but the other PCs don't know about it (yet) so the players don't act with that knowledge in mind.

As someone said somewhere in one of the articles linked from here, "a dozen goblins jump out" isn't a surprise.  It's fulfilling the expectations of the genre.  Letting the players know a goblin fight is coming, or letting the players choose a gobling fight over, say, a kobold fight or some other encounter is not messing with their expectations.  However, as a player, and as a GM, it's fun to have unexpected twists, and to encounter things you didn't expect.  Where do you draw the line here?

I think unexpected things are fun, if appropriate and used in moderation. In our case we opted for an overall serious and dark game, spiced up with a little in character and out of character humor now and then. The unexpected twists introduced by me will be dark, strage, and unpleasant, as is appropriate for the horror scenario we're in. Even unexpected help will have a dark side.
The players are basically responsible for the humor and we're fine with that. A nice example is when Tom made To'ki go to Danil's house. Johan said a child opened the door, so Tom reacted with "Where's your father?" to which Johan replied "My husband is inside." That's a nice example of both a player controling more than just his own character and a bit of silly halfling humor.

[Simon C]

Hi Jasper,

I think you misread some of my later questions.  Consider these two (extreme) examples of how to deal with the the same situation:

First, what is generally the "traditional" way of doing things:
GM: Ok, you see a guy in a dark cloak, a "mysterious figure" if you will, sneaking out the back of the inn.  What do you do?
Player One: "I follow him!"
Player Two: "Where did he come from?"
Player Three: "I'll ask in the bar about mysterious cults in the town."
GM: Ok, Player One, roll stealth, Player two, you go up the stairs... ...Player tghree, roll Gather Information...

After a while, the players discover a seceret cult in the sewers of the city and head off to kill them.

Second, the kind of "Forgey" approach:
GM: Ok, there's a secret cult in the sewers.  In this first scene, you're going to discover it.  How do you want to do it?
Player One: How about my guy follows one of their guys back to their lair?
GM: Ok, but if you fail your stealth roll, you'll be ambushed by them.
Player One: Cool!
Player Two: I think my guy could discover one of their victims, and cast a divination spell to find out more about them.
GM: Awesome! You'll discover the cult, and have some mystic insight into their motives.
Player Three: My guy can find out about them while he's carousing. 
GM: Cool. If your Gather Information roll is successful, you'll not only find out where they live, but you'll hear about a secret entrance to their lair!

I think the first example is full of "murk".  The players are all giving clues about how they want their characters to contribute to the story, but whether that contribution is valuable is determined partly by the roll of the dice, and largely by the GM, who has to decide what actions are going to bear fruit.  It's a game of "guess the GM".

In the second example, all the players overtly say how they want to contribute to the story, and their contributions are automatically valuable.  The dice are rolled to see if their contributions create extra complications to the story. The weakness here is that it's hard to spring twists on the players, something that's a major source of enjoyment for many players.

I don't think either approach is ideal for D&D.  You seem to be taking a middle ground.  (Your use of stake setting in the tracking scene was excellent, for example), and I'm curious about how you draw that line of PC knowledge.

[Jasper Flick]

Thanks that makes it a lot clearer. We're somewhere in between I guess, close to the second but at a lower level of abstraction. The "Why are you doing this?" is very important.

I think I should define what a twist is, at least for me. A twist is when something turns out to be something else that wasn't expected, but appropriate. I think the ultimate twist will make you go "Hold on, WHAT? Oh shit! Of course!" Your second example leaves plenty of room for that. For example: The cult? A front for something else. Its goals? Far-fetched but appropriate. The cult leader? A close friend. His intentions? Good but misguided.

I'm still fuzzy about describing a hard knowledge line. An example might help.

[Eric J.]

Thanks for the response.  It's good to hear that you were successful.

What I meant by "What levels did you use?" (a statement that I now realise could win awards for being vague) was, "How did the PCs build their characters?  Did you start at high levels or low levels?  Did you use point buy or not?  How do you handle death?"

I consider these things very important parts of D&D (I mean that's what the system is, adding up levels and races and equipment and things to see how good you are at fights and stuff).

Since your AP is a pretty good example on how to use D&D well, I'm interested in how you did some of that stuff too.

Also, when I  was first reading Yakk's post I felt really dumb like I had misread your first post and missed some of your important mechanical changes.

May the wind be always at your back,
-Eric

[Jasper Flick]

What I meant by "What levels did you use?" (a statement that I now realise could win awards for being vague) was, "How did the PCs build their characters?  Did you start at high levels or low levels?  Did you use point buy or not?  How do you handle death?"

Aha, now it makes sense!

We used the three "D&D Core" books and the Eberron campaign setting as default resources, but you could use other stuff as well if you had a reason. Ivan used some material from Frostburn, which made sense because of his ice-focused character.

Characters were created at level 6. We wanted survivable characters but not too powerful or complex. Level 6 is a really interesting step on the advancement ladder because the primary fighter types get their second attack and all primarty spellcasters have level 3 spells by then. I think level 6 provides the greatest boost of tactical diversity.

We used point buy 28, at most you can buy a 17 and you can leave only one score below 10, not counting racial adjustments, magical gear and the boost at level 4. We wanted some strong characters but not too extreme, so the caps were a bit of self-restraint.

Characters got gear worth 13,000 with a maximum item cost of about 4,000, give or take a few hundred. We didn't bother with the details of mundane gear every reasonable character would have.

Failure is an option. Death means you die; end of your story. Dying by accident is hard though, because of our rule that you can prevent it by spending two action points. Basically each PC has four lives, but you can spend those lives on other things as well.
Now I think of it, AP are a kind of gauge of intensity: the more are used, the more intense and deadly things become. This corresponds well with the expenditure of two AP during our last combat. It basically drained one of their lives and it really felt that way. So I think ideally about all AP should've been used up at the end of the adventure. This means that characters don't just die half-way, but they might very well perish at the end.