What is Curse of Strahd ? Advice for First Time Players
Greetings everyone. If you are reading this blog, most likely you are about to play Curse of Strahd. I will briefly talk about things like how to play Curse of Strahd, how to prepare characters, what you can choose to prepare a strong character, even if the sentence is deviated.
Even though this is a game with a difficulty slightly above average, it is a game that you can use your creativity that you will enjoy a lot. We have played with 3 different groups and 13 different characters before, all of them were very nice, we had a lot of fun. I want to give you some tips according to your entertainment style. Now let's start the introduction, what kind of game is Curse of Strahd, why it is shown among the best modules, it is always in the top 3, etc.
It is Gothic Horror
In Curse of Strahd, your main enemy is Strahd Von Zarovich, and you will have to fight him and escape from here. In terms of the main theme, this game is a bit of a Gothic-themed game, and if you like vampires, werewolves, and so on, you will love it. Not only that, but it has a very deep storyline. If you like things like love, passion, drama, and so on, again, it is definitely a game that will be very enjoyable for you. You will not always see problems that can be solved using a sword and shield. You will not always see problems that can be solved using spells. You will need to use your social skills.
This will not be enough. You will need to make other friends. You may need to recruit people among NPCs. You will need to make friends. You will need to do what they want. So, it will not be very correct to focus only on damage, focusing on things like getting my damage high.
But if your dungeon master tells you about an NPC in detail and if you understand to introduce you, we need to meet this guy now, catch that hook, and meet that guy and meet that person, meet that NPC. Maybe they might be useful to you in the future, maybe you can discover something about their story. Some NPCs that we never expected went very high in the game and took completely different shapes in both games.
But in addition to this, there is something like this, when we say standard D&D fantasy RPG, we think of things like Legend of Zelda, green, there are those grasses, there are forests and things like that.
Pick a Hobby for your Character
But this place is not quite like that, this place is more dark, and there will always be rain clouds overhead, it will rain constantly, it will stop raining once in a while, we will not see the sun much while playing this module, so you will have many reasons for your character to be unhappy, so I recommend that your character have a hobby that you can describe to your friend while sitting by the fire or sitting in the tavern, chatting with your friend or alone, you can describe this hobby yourself, whatever you want.
It can be playing a musical instrument, it can be a character who does handicrafts, it can be a character who plays puppets, it can be a character who paints, it can be a character who carves wood, it can be a character who makes small toys, you can multiply these examples yourself, you can multiply your character according to the character you want to write, because you will always need such things to entertain yourself in a dark place, to keep your character's mind fresh, and you will have a lot of fun looking for them in the game.
Because when you find the materials you need to paint, for example, when you search and scan, when you find it, it will come to life even more when you get in touch with the filth, the world will come alive thanks to you, the world comes alive wherever you go, D&D is a game like that.
Story, Backstory vs Personality and Leveling
And also in this game, leveling up is not just about combat and Kombat and XP. As you explore some places your levels will go up, as you find some things your levels will go up and as you help NPCs, as you choose, as you get a little bit interested in politics... it has a very deep game and you will have a lot of fun.
You'll feel like you're in a real living world. Anyway, let's continue, we got a little bit off topic, as I said, it's a Gothic themed game, I recommend you to take a lot of notes, I recommend you to have a separate notebook that you reserve this game, even the smallest thing you see in the first chapter can and will come up later as "Oh, I've seen this".
All of the worries in this world live a life and the world will be a better place for you as you try to understand them, at least you will understand them better, they have a history, they have wishes, they have goals, they have objectives. The more you see these things, the more everything will be reinforced for you, and I recommend that you have a lot of conversations with the NPCs to understand that Strahd, the bad guy you encountered last time, is not just a guy with high powers who can hit you when he hits you.
Now that we're done with the note-taking part, let's talk about character history, you will come here somehow to the lands of Barovia, and however your DM brought you here, you do not have a past here.
You are a guest here and the things you have done here before are the things that shape you, so you may not be very likely to see things like I had such and such a relative in the past, I had such and such an enemy. If your Dungeon master specifically puts it there, maybe it will be that way.
But it will be better for you to think about things related to your character himself, what his hobbies are, what he does, what he does, what his purpose is, and so on. So I don't recommend you to write your past too full. Some friends write 5 pages full of history and send it. So after you can't use it, okay? You write it the way you want... This is something extra for DMs, if he wants to do it himself, your DM will do it. But don't forget that your heroic deeds will be written here and now, in the land of Barovia. So in the past, when you come with a character like "I went in and slaughtered 50 monsters" or something like that, after dying in the first encounter....
Do you need Cleric and Paladin?
Now we have more or less an idea about the game, there will be vampires, there will be werewolves, there will be undead and so on. Now what you need to deal with these in the dnd is a cleric, a paladin, we can say at first.
That's why you can have 3 people in your group or 4 people, it doesn't matter. I recommend that there must be a cleric, a paladin, one of the two in this group. Well, if there is no cleric among us, can you finish the game if there is no paladin? Yes, you can.
One of the groups I played was like this, there was no cleric or paladin among the four of them. However, if you create a group that focuses only on social skills, this time you will be very low in combat and you will be more likely to fail again.
So you need to balance your group weight a little bit, both strong characters in battles, one or two people, and strong characters in social encounters, one or two people. If you are careless in this module and do not listen to the warnings given by your DM, it can be a little easy to die, so after you get attached to your character, so as not to experience things like, what if he died right away...
Remember that you are writing your story slowly. That's why you want to make sure that not too many people are too frantic, so that the whole party doesn't die. I'm not talking about writing your character history together. Of course, you can sit down and write it together if you want. If you do it in the form of we four of us will be turtle men and we will all get Ninja, this is your choice. But what I mean by "write together" is; what are you going to play? Here I will play cleric, here I will play fighter, I will play wizard, or 4 people, or whatever... At least it will be good for you to know who is what.
So that the person who is left at work, if he is in between; if he is thinking whether I should play a barbarian or a sorcerer, this time he can say that there is already a strong man in the group who thinks that there is a strong man, there is a man in front to fight, let me play a sorcerer, I want to explore him anyway, or vice versa.
Play the Charater that You will Enjoy the Most
In fact, at the end of it all, the important thing is to play a character that you will enjoy.
No paladins killed Strahd, no clerics killed Strahd, and none of them succeeded until you came. All of you can die again even if you are all paladins, all of you can die again even if you are all clerics, all of you can die again even if you are all garviturgy wizards, you can die again, the important thing here is to create a character with a concept that you enjoy, a concept that you will have fun with, and play with it.
You will love the character first, then you will work with your DM and after you create a beautiful character, you will already enjoy it very much. If you have any questions about the module, you can leave them in the comments. But the videos I will prepare will be videos for DMs, or if you want to play this game to your friends, you can watch my videos on youtube. I will try to put subtitles without being too late.
I shared this article as a video, link below that I posted on my youtube channel. The video belongs to me. The subtitle is mine. Translations belong to me. All rights belong to me.
Thank you very much for reading!
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deepl.com/translator is used on this post.