Everyone read the manifesto and agreed that these rules were the greatest gift to computer roleplaying since Ultima VII. I puffed up with pride.
The next day, we played my first masterpiece, a spelunking adventure in a maze of caves. The finale was handcrafted with care: The grim lair of giant spiders was dark, with special lighting effects. A chittering sound effect was set to go off as the party approached, and I had tiled the entry area with blood, webbing, and a highlighted "half-eaten corpse." Examining the corpse revealed that it "has been gnawed by something with great and terrible fangs. The stain of venom corrupts the wounds."
The time came for the party to approach. Scott, the rogue, was on point, but he had his sound turned off and wasn't alerted by the chittering, and there was too much "junk" painted in the entryway for him to be warned by the body. Jon and Newton rushed in to help when Scott blundered into the spiders, but the paladin, Brian, was AFK getting a soda. By the time he arrived, the rest of the party was dead, and then a second later so was Brian.
A few minutes later, after I had resurrected everyone (just this one time you understand), Jon managed to accidentally hit Scott with a spell and killed him again. Since player-inflicted deaths shouldn't count as, you know, Real Deaths, I raised Scott again. The rest of the session played smoothly, and the group assured me that this module was The Best Module they'd ever played. Of course, they had suggestions for improvement...
I grudgingly turned off the PVP flag for the second module, but kept the permanent death rule from my manifesto. I didn't want the party to think there were no consequences to battle. Just because they had played badly didn't mean it was my job to coddle them. However, in a nod to the difficulty of last session, I increased the experience point award for killing monsters - Neverwinter Nights defaulted to a 10% reward, and I upped it to 25%. Since there was more risk in my module from fewer, more intelligent NPCs than in traditional hack and slash CRPGs, it made sense to amp up the reward, I explained to the party.
With these changes in place, I designed the second adventure in a mere 28 hours. The module called for the group to kill an orc chief in a faraway fort. I planned for them to travel overland through a vast 64-tile by 64-tile wilderness zone to meet a mysterious druid, Kostas, who would then give them the information they needed to get to an orc village and complete their mission of slaying the chieftain.
What a beauty my wilderness zone was! I lovingly handcrafted it with immersive content and encounters (a dryad with an ogre problem! A goblin hunting party! A brook running into a lake with nearby fawns and deer!) and I completely scripted the main encounter with Kostas, the druid. I created an NPC faction system which tied Kostas into the entire ecology of the region, enemy to the goblins and orcs, friend to the deer and dryad.
When they zoned in (it took only about twenty minutes on Newton's dial-up), the party looked at the woodlands for about five seconds. Then they began systematically killing every living thing they encountered in the zone that wasn't labeled "Kostas." Fawns drinking at the brook - dead. Deer bounding across the woods - dead. "Why are you slaying all the wildlife?" I demanded.
"dood... 2.5 x normal xp for killing," explained Jon.
"Need to level up to fight orcs," admitted Scott.
"I'm hunting to gather dried venison for our overland expedition," rationalized Newton.
