Difficulty

The difficulty of an Expedition is a fine line to toe. Make it too easy and it isn’t compelling. Make it too hard and it feels frustrating. Failing an Expedition should be a very real consequence but shouldn’t always result in heavy punishments. Here’s some bullet points to keep in mind when planning out your expeditions.

Guidelines

• Have expedition objectives not be a binary ‘Succeed’ or ‘Fail’.
  • Instead, incorporate degrees of success. Maybe the party successfully escorted a merchant caravan - but a bad fight lost them one of the carts and now the caravan master doesn’t want to pay full price or maybe an archaeologist felt insulted by the party during a dungeon delve, so they don’t tip the PCs off to a hidden door that might have led to treasure.

• Total Party Wipe, not Total Party Kill.
  • You should never make it your goal for a session to result in a TPW. However, poor rolls and bad decision making compounded onto an already difficult expedition could result in all the PCs being knocked down.
  • Plan a contingency for a party wipe that doesn’t involve every PC dying. Most creatures don’t want to massacre for massacre’s sake, nor is it fun to lose an entire party due to a single bad combat. The goblins might ransom the PC’s back to the town for a considerable price, the bandit chief decides to permanently scar the PCs as a warning, the cult strips the PCs of their equipment and dumps them in the woods.
  • Consequences from a TPW should be in most cases salvageable. Money from a ransom can be repaid, Scars can be healed with a mystical flower that blooms only on the highest peaks, stolen items can be retrieved after the guild rallies and sets out to destroy the cult again.
  • In some cases a TPW may require a Deus ex machina to not result in a TPK. Perhaps the PCs were overrun by a horde of flesh eating ghouls. In situations like these exercise your best judgment for what will lead to the most interesting narrative outcome. Does a mysterious knight saving the downed party at the last moment cheapen the impact and weight of the expedition?

• Stakes don’t have to only be a decrease in HP.
  • A session may never even involve combat. The difficulty comes from the social or environmental puzzles presented by the storyteller.
  • Be mindful that puzzles are also prone to being too easy to be engaging or difficult enough to only frustrate. It’s ok to aim for a PC to be frustrated, it isn’t ok for you to try to make players frustrated.

Labeling your Expedition

Kelek is broken up into four different groups of players, known as the Tier of Play which consists of 4 levels of characters. This means a single session could include a lvl 5 character partnering with a lvl 9 character. For this reason it is important to include what level of challenge the Expeditions being run might include. An Expedition Event is labeled with those two pieces of information, the Tier of Play and the Difficulty; Easy, Medium, or Hard. There aren't any restrictions on the difficulty you can attend as long as the Expedition is listed for your Tier of Play, but keep in mind lower level characters may be more challenged in high difficulty Expeditions.