There's two conversations happening here. Some people are looking for something more story heavy. The mod I was imagining, though, would still be a game about combat. It's just about minimising the repetitiveness of the combat, making a shorter game.
I suspect the reason Flare's playerbase is 1NVJs is that this is the sort of campaign Flare is. With a non-grind option you may be able to broaden the playerbase.
Of course you don't want to alienate your fan base. So by all means keep the grind version, and make the non-grind version an option selectable at game start. A fork would be a really unfortunate thing so it might be best to have both parameter values in the scenario definition and let the game choose which one to use according to a flag the player sets at startup. If that's considered too much overhead for the main campaign to wear, then we could work out rules for mechanical translation of the grinding campaign into a non-grinding one, though that's not trivial.
It's bad enough if the game forces you to kill goblins because every goblin has exactly one method of interaction - attack you on sight. It's worse if the game forces you to kill goblins because you need to pick their pockets in order to get the money to become better so you can achieve later missions. It's even worse if the game forces you to kill goblins because you just literally need to kill goblins or you don't get better (XPs). Currently Flare is doing all three, but the last is the most tasteless.
That said, I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to change the fundamental paradigm of the basic adventure. Probably better to build a new one from scratch with these ideas in mind, and leave the basic adventure for those who like that sort of thing.
One way to minimise the killing would be a grind-free version of the adventure. At least then you'd only have to kill a few people in the boss lair or whatever, who the narrative can establish are definitely evil, rather than needing to murder everyone who happens to live in the same county. By "grind-free" I mean an adventure in which XPs and gold are awarded for completing missions, in much larger amounts than usual, and no XPs or gold are awarded for killing monsters or looting barrels, etc.. Perhaps the monsters don't respawn (need to think about that). Any player who found they couldn't progress could go to the mentor-philanthropist and get free XPs and gold - the more you do of this, the lower skill level you are effectively playing on. I'd like to think it was fairly easy to mechanically modify the standard adventure to give one that works like this, am I right?
There's two conversations happening here. Some people are looking for something more story heavy. The mod I was imagining, though, would still be a game about combat. It's just about minimising the repetitiveness of the combat, making a shorter game.
Danimal,
I suspect the reason Flare's playerbase is 1NVJs is that this is the sort of campaign Flare is. With a non-grind option you may be able to broaden the playerbase.
Of course you don't want to alienate your fan base. So by all means keep the grind version, and make the non-grind version an option selectable at game start. A fork would be a really unfortunate thing so it might be best to have both parameter values in the scenario definition and let the game choose which one to use according to a flag the player sets at startup. If that's considered too much overhead for the main campaign to wear, then we could work out rules for mechanical translation of the grinding campaign into a non-grinding one, though that's not trivial.
It's bad enough if the game forces you to kill goblins because every goblin has exactly one method of interaction - attack you on sight. It's worse if the game forces you to kill goblins because you need to pick their pockets in order to get the money to become better so you can achieve later missions. It's even worse if the game forces you to kill goblins because you just literally need to kill goblins or you don't get better (XPs). Currently Flare is doing all three, but the last is the most tasteless.
That said, I'm not sure it's a good idea to try to change the fundamental paradigm of the basic adventure. Probably better to build a new one from scratch with these ideas in mind, and leave the basic adventure for those who like that sort of thing.
One way to minimise the killing would be a grind-free version of the adventure. At least then you'd only have to kill a few people in the boss lair or whatever, who the narrative can establish are definitely evil, rather than needing to murder everyone who happens to live in the same county. By "grind-free" I mean an adventure in which XPs and gold are awarded for completing missions, in much larger amounts than usual, and no XPs or gold are awarded for killing monsters or looting barrels, etc.. Perhaps the monsters don't respawn (need to think about that). Any player who found they couldn't progress could go to the mentor-philanthropist and get free XPs and gold - the more you do of this, the lower skill level you are effectively playing on. I'd like to think it was fairly easy to mechanically modify the standard adventure to give one that works like this, am I right?