DM Guidelines

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Starting Resources

50 points and 5200 copper should make for a reasonably good value for a campaign that starts with budding heroes. Lower values (especially in points) are unlikely to be very interesting. Higher values are more complicated, and probably not ideal for a first campaign.

Advancement

You determine how rapidly the point limit of the players increases, but if you want to keep wealth from overwhelming the power granted by points, players should gain at least 1 point per 300 copper acquired. To keep the characters who are least dependent on wealth from overwhelming other characters (such as armies and single-color mages), players should not gain points while they have less than 100 copper per point.

Point Pool Increase

The simple way to award point pool increases is to do so after battles or sessions, so the players can advance their characters on their own time.

However, for a more Shonen-esque experience, you can award points in the middles of battles. To prevent that from taking a long time, use the same sum each time, and tell the players how big the sum will be so they can prepare.

Maximum Starting Points

You can choose to specify a maximum starting point value, such that players can't build new characters which cost more than that limit. This makes keeping powerful characters alive more exciting, but means that players who play recklessly will end up being forced to play an army of cheap characters. If you use a maximum starting point value, you may want to consider increasing it as the point pool increases.

Encounter Design

In terms of encounter design, the advantage a tactical RPG has over a tactical wargame is that entry into the conflict is not so overly well-defined. An assault on a castle could start with an attempt to scale the walls, or the battle might not start until they're well inside, because they've disguised theirselves as a triumphant returning lord and servants. An ambush in an inn might be detected or avoided entirely.

That's not to say you can't have any fights with clear planned beginnings, but you will be missing out if you don't let the players have some opportunities to come up with ways to arrange battles in their favor.

Encounter Pricing

In order to maintain some campaign flow, it's better if the players win more than half of the encounters they fight. However, in order to make sure the encounters are fun and challenging, the encounters should not be trivial. Therefore, the point value of an encounter should be somewhere between three-quarters and equal to the combined point values of all players. At the higher end of that, the opposing forces should have significantly less wealth.

You can use higher point values and wealth values, but there should be sufficient advance warning of such a battle that the players can arrange to fight on their own terms or not at all.

You can use lower point values, but the battle won't be very interesting if these opposing forces don't have a significant situational advantage. Forces with no hope of actually harming the player characters should simply be handwaved to defeat, rather than going to the trouble of rolling for initiative, placing out models, and so on: when a 300 point Legend player character is confronted by a handful of 5 point bandits, the player should just say "I kill them" or "I scare them off" or something, and the campaign can continue

Defeat

The players are likely to occasionally find theirselves outmatched. Be sure to have some defeat condition that doesn't involve annihilating the entire party in mind when making an encounter. Ravenous beasts can be willing to feast on some of the fallen as the survivors flee; organized people can attempt to capture as many player characters as possible, and place them into prison. If a prison is built by competent people, it may be necessary to institute some contrivance in order to make escape possible.

Terrain

Cool set pieces are cool.

Worldbuilding

In order to rationally interact with the world, it must have some meat to it. Although statting out and describing the motivations of every NPC in the world, every cave, and every building takes far too much time, you should at least have some idea of things like social structures, major characters, demographics, architecture, and geography.

It's very tempting, when the players provoke some form of conflict, to say "well, I said there would be a thousand soldiers in this town, so that's what you have to fight", but if you want to be able to do that sort of thing, you should consider reasonable encounter design when deciding how powerful various forces in the world are.

Major NPCs

Having a few major NPCs who try to help, hinder, or work at angles with the players can spice up the campaign significantly. From a tactical RPG angle, it's good to have some major opponent characters for the players to be fighting against. If the players could ever want to fight against a character (or the character could ever want to fight them), that character shouldn't be significantly stronger than the entire party. If the character needs to be far too powerful for the players to defeat at their current point limit (like the God-King of a continent when the party is two players with a 50 point limit), then you need a very solid justification for not having that character go out on a player-slaughtering trip. Teleportation exists in this game, so "It takes too long" doesn't work very well when the God-King can send out minions with portals to locate the players, then step through, kill everyone, and step back a minute later.

For major villains that the players are trying to foil, it's perfectly reasonable to have the villain level at a rate comparable to that of the players: after all, the villain is also a proactive adventurer of sorts.