Workshop on Fronts for The Strange, Part II -- The OSR

Welcome back to the workshop on Fronts for The Strange.  As a reminder, this is just a space in which I work out how I am designing fronts for my home campaign.  The general discussion of fronts is found HERE and serves as a useful starting point.  The first post in this series included a discussion of the first front for my campaign -- the Provost's Council.

In this post, I will discuss the second of my fronts: the OSR.

Realism and Challenge

I am back with another contribution to the GM's Roundtable of Doom.

This month's topic comes to us courtesy of Lex Starwalker:

Many of us probably remember the AD&D days when the DM could roll a black dragon on the random encounter table and end a low-level party’s career. The 3rd and 4th editions of the game led some newer players to believe that every encounter should be defeatable and appropriate to their level and capabilities. However, 5th edition has moved away from this structure. 

We see this mirrored in other games as well. At one end of the spectrum is the style and belief that the PCs should be able to overcome any challenge that comes their way, that challenges should be “appropriate”. On the other end of the spectrum is the syle and belief that the world should be realistic, that every fight shouldn’t be able to be won, and that one of the requisite skills of the game is knowing when to fight and when to run.

Where do you, as a GM, fall on this spectrum, and why? Should the PCs always be able to win?

Workshop on Fronts for The Strange part I

I previously wrote about the notion of developing "fronts" as a way to plan out a dynamic campaign.  I am now in the process of planning out my actual campaign for my Wednesday night Roll20 game.  As a result, I am returning to my previous discussion of fronts to help guide the development.  I won't go into great detail on the nature of fronts (that is what the previous post did).  Instead, I use this space to work out how I plan to use several fronts for my upcoming campaign.

It should go without saying that if you happen to be playing in my games, you probably should not read this.

This might get a little bumpy -- it is basically a set of working notes -- but I think it could be useful to see one person's attempts to implement some of the key ideas from fronts for campaign planning in The Strange.