The Birth of a World - part 3

Ok, so I’m still trying to build the basics of this new world.

So far I’m just doing the giant draft of the whole thing. Building the skeleton I would say.

The minutiae of the world doesn’t matter that much at the moment – all of that will get fleshed out once the skeleton is built.

And I’ve actually worked out quite a bit of the world, but by no means enough to run a game on.

This part is scary, I’m putting all kinds of work into this campaign and I’m not 100% sure it’s playable to my style of gaming. I could be doing all of this for nothing.

But then again, I spent over a year and a half just doing minor stuff about “The Valley” campaign before I actually ran the first session. And from what I’ve been told, fun was had by all, even in spite of the TPKs.

So I trudge on; adding a little bit to it every day in one form or another. (And if I don’t write it down, it can sometimes get lost forever.)

All that said, next I’m going to cover how to deal with the special personalities that show up in Japanese RPGs.

You know what I’m talking about, especially in all of the recent ones. Back in the olden days of gaming, you just gave a character a name, a class, some semi-random stats, and you moved on through the semi-coherent plot. But as time went on, plots became more prevalent and the characters were pretty much already defined. Heck the most input you could have would be name, maybe. By then all the game was to you was a story that was broken up by fight scenes that you controlled.

But if you did that to an actual player for D&D, either you or he would be on the curb pretty soon after that revelation.

So here’s my current plan as it stands, and it’s probably pretty solid as a plan.

I supply the players with a group of character concepts and then they choose the one that they most identify with. With 8-10 concepts, or personalities, it shouldn’t be very difficult to find at least one for everyone.

Then once they’ve made this permanent decision, they get more information about the personality’s abilities and so on. There will be a list of choices in classes (remember this is a gestalt campaign), traits, and so on that can be chosen from. After that, the character is theirs, with some exceptions.

Number one, the PC gets only their 2 base classes for gestalt. So if they chose fighter and paladin, they are stuck with fighter and paladin from now until the end of time.

The exception is number two; they can freely take prestige classes that are in line with the base-personality. But when they do this, gestalt is gone for that level. So if that fighter-paladin takes a prestige class, he only goes up in that class and no others.

If you’re thinking that I’m being pretty restrictive, I’m not. Prior to this campaign I’ve only allowed a few minor things from outside of the core books. The entire WLD campaign limited everyone to the core books and some Forgotten Realms and Book of Exalted Deeds classes, feats, and spells. This campaign allows more choices, but restricts the options within a personality. So a personality that is a wizardly-type doesn’t get the option of taking a fighter prestige class, but archmage is probably fully allowable.

I’m doing it this to reign in some of the power of gestalt builds and to prevent any exploitation and confusion in gestalt characters.

Granted, if you’re someone who likes to give your PC 4 different base classes in order to create some get some odd combo at the right time, you won’t like this campaign.

But in my experience, very few people water down their characters to that level. And even then, they find out that their PC just plain blows, or just can’t compare to a more “class pure” PC.

This campaign will be the first one where I will allow some classes that before I would shudder in thought about taking. The Wild Mage is a good example.

I still won’t allow the Warlock though, that class irritates me as much as the Bard does.

But honestly, I will be allowing quite a few options into this campaign. If you like a feat and we both own the book (that part is important) then it might be allowed. The same goes for spells and prestige classes also.

In fact, this game will ALMOST be a Monty Haul kind of adventure to those who only read about it. But read further.

If you were to be part of the campaign, you’d still think of me as a cruel DM who throws stuff at the players and lets them deal with it how they may, and could care less if their PC died from a series of bad die rolls or a single bad decision. Just like in a casino, the luck works both ways.

You see one day, not so long ago, I was thinking about the Staff of the Magi. It’s a pretty powerful magic item, artifact to be precise. But in any “proper” D&D game, your PC would probably never get one. It occurred to me that this was kind of unfair. You are supposed to be this awesome hero (or villain) who affects the world as you go up in power.

But how often does this really happen? The last time it happened to any characters of mine, I was 14. And boy was that a Monty Haul kind of game. Back in those days we were throwing away spare artifacts, and taking out the Nine Hells in a weekend power session.

But at what point did anyone decide that owning Staff of the Magi meant you were a munchkin? Or worse yet, getting one was the final act in a campaign. Once you get it, the campaign is over.

That sounds like a cruel pile of smurf to me.

Then shortly after that semi-epiphany, I was reading a thread on ENWorld about epic-level preparation times. Someone mentioned something about the “Shark style of gaming”. I ignored it until Shark actually showed up and talked about his style of running a game.

This Shark fellow had already had this epiphany long before I did, and acted upon it.

Who says that a standard city guard is only a level 1 warrior? Could a group of 100 level 1 warriors even do anything to any real monsters? What about all of these horrid monsters that adventurers take out all of the time, couldn’t they wipe out the city guard in a single hit-and-run attack? So shouldn’t your normal city guard troop consist of something more than bunch of low-level warriors if they are too have the power to send a dragon running scared back to its lair? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that an 18 year old city guard is the same level as a twenty-five year old city guard? If all city guards were only level 1 warriors, shouldn’t they all be dressed up in red shirts, just waiting for the mystery monster to kill them?

I’m probably not doing Shark’s idea the kind of justice it deserves, but I’m hoping you get the point.

D&D is supposed to be about fantastical adventures with legions of powerful enemies fighting one another at the right times.

D&D is supposed to be about formidable villains being fought by heroes dressed in shiny armor.

That is what I want for this campaign.

I want the paladin to get his Holy Avenger; he just has to get it from whoever has it now.

I want the wizard to get that Staff of the Magi; he just has to get it from whoever has it now.

I don’t think such a thing is too much to push for, do you?