Not sure which forum to put this in, so I’ve gone with AtA, as it seems the most advice-oriented, although I am definitely interested in everybody’s viewpoints.
(Also, note to the members of my group–Knightware, Saturday players–who read this forum, please by so kind as to avoid this thread.)
So here’s the problem: after about 6 months of play (~8 hours every other week), the highest level member of the party is… 2. For a few sessions, there was a lvl 3 guy, but he was unceremoniously turned to stone this past weekend, so back to level one he goes.
The group consists of one player who has been playing since the days of editions whose nomenclature is far beyond my ken, and then a bunch of relative newcomers to role-playing games (all of us having started with 3rd edition of the game-which-must-not-be-named ™ or later). I’ve run several campaigns of 3.5 and Pathfinder with a fair bit of success, and the group is excited about ACKS, constant deaths not-withstanding.
They like the heightened sense of danger in relation to later editions, and I like that the world obeys rules according to it’s own logic, rather than the party’s power. In Pathfinder, for example, if you are wandering around, then the game is only going to throw level appropriate encounters at you. In ACKS, this is most definitely not the case. This is good; everyone likes it. The party has learned to carefully select which wilderness encounters to engage in, and is figuring out that things are much safer back nearer the civilized territories than out in the borderlands.
However, even sticking to civilized regions and not going any further than the first level of the dungeons and going through them very carefully, nobody has made it past 3rd level (and only 1 player made it to 3rd level). I generate my dungeons according to the rulebook. Draw map, roll to find out the contents of the rooms, then assign the contents to rooms in a way that makes internal sense. I generate random wilderness and wandering monster encounters according to the rulebooks, but everybody keeps dying, and people are starting to get a little tired of it.
I don’t want to turn on easy mode and start filtering out all level-inappropriate encounters, save-or-die effects, or the like, nor do I want for my monsters–the intelligent ones at least–to start behaving like idiots. However, I also want the players to get to higher levels.
One of the biggest problems we’ve come up against is the dearth of henchmen. If everyone could get a full coterie of henchmen then they would be doing much better, but they are mostly wandering around Class VI and the occasional Class V market, which means d2 0th level men and a small % chance of a single level 1 henchman available for hire. I guess we could spend 6 months wandering from barony to barony, fastidiously avoiding all encounters, until enough henchmen can be acquired, but that hardly seems like the right solution.
Clearly, though, people are reaching higher levels in ACKS campaigns out there in the world, so we must be doing something wrong.
So, I’m hoping to solicit advice on:
(1) Things I can do to help the party reach higher levels which are not simply “go easier on them.” If we wanted to play an /easy/ game, I’d run more Pathfinder.
(2) Things I might be doing incorrectly that would improperly increase the lethality of the system.
(3) Advice I could give to the players to help them keep themselves alive.
(4) Anything else that is relevant that I don’t know enough to ask.
Thank you, everyone!
P.S.: Telling them to spend frivolously more isn’t useful. They already spend almost all their money frivolously anyways (that which doesn’t go towards buying the best mundane equipment and hiring henchmen is drunk/gambled/donated away). But even that gets them a thousand XP or so with a starting character, but then he dies and they are back to 0 with the next.
