The Birth of a World - part 3a
As what generally tends to happen, I’ve changed my mind on some things. In particular, some subjects covered in part 3 of this series (hence the “3A” title).
It’s no big deal though. I have plenty of time to make tweaks here and there.
After much deliberation and meditation I’ve decided not to do one potential tweak.
The whole power attack mess I’m simply not going to worry about.
Yes, I know I wrote about it like it needs to go, but as I thought about it I realized that on a weird level it is actually balanced.
Monsters and characters get more and more hit points while, theoretically, their armor class and base attack bonus increase at about the same rate. So if you put a cap on how much you can power attack, or if you increase or remove the limit on Combat Expertise, all you really do is decrease the amount of melee damage that can be done in a combat round. And in turn that makes melee fighting take longer and causes the fighter classes to be less valuable as the casters will have to take up the slack.
It’s a simple scalable numbers thing; as hit points go up, so should damage. Just like how AC and BAB scale to each other.
And here’s a dirty trick to throw onto any PC who uses Power Attack too much; disarm. When you power attack, your BAB goes down that same amount until your next action. This means you are more vulnerable to losing your weapon from a simple disarm action.
Think about your tricked out fighter/barbarian using a greatsword. Then he power attacks full against some harmless looking rogue, looking to cut the little runt in twain. The rogue sidesteps the swing, and with a flick of his rapier, the barbarian is now weaponless.
And so much for what I called a “solid” plan in my previous post, I’m dumping the personality concept of this campaign.
The reasoning to keep it was simple; I needed to be able to have as much the campaign mapped out as possible before we start.
But it was just not the best route. No one wants to play someone else’s PC for anything more than a one-shot game. People would quickly lose interest in the game for fear of “not playing the PC right”.
So say goodbye personality-concept and hello background augmentation-concept.
Prior to the campaign’s beginning, I will have the player send me (and not the group) a 100 to 250 word write-up about the PC. The write should be the general character concept, the goals for the character, and a story about the PC.
Then I will respond to the player with some augmentation of the PC. This can be about anything that I could use as a reason to include that PC into the story-line.
These augmentations can be both positive and negative to the PC on a mechanical level. The positives will be something like a +1 to the DC of fire spells, more starting gold, a re-roll a day, or whatever I think would work great. The negatives will along the lines of having an older PC, starting with negative XP, on the run from something, and possible even worse.
The augmentations on a story level will be simple DM additions to the PC back-story. The player then writes up a new story with this new information.
And all the while the players don’t tell one another about their character, at least not at first.
Why won’t they tell each other about their histories? Well because this is both a role-playing game, and I’m a jerk DM. Most normal people don’t go telling everyone their entire history. Especially if they are victims of plot that had them framed for a crime and there is a law man in the group.
The locking gestalt classes I’m pretty firm on (where you pick your two classes and keep them). If a player has a good concept for their PC, I might loosen it a smidgen.
And as for what classes and prestige classes I’m allowing, I’m still working on the list.
But here’s a little something I’ve got worked out so far; PCs cannot be druids, barbarians, or bards (but NPCs can).
Why? This is going to be a civilized kind of world, there is no “new frontier”.
A druid might appear to the PCs in some way or another, and only in some parts.
Barbarians will appear as class levels on some monsters, so there is a stigma against barbarians as a sort of throwback to the old, and thus wrong, ways of doing things.
And as for bards, well, I just hate bards as a class. So they are limited to NPC storytellers and entertainers. If there was one class I’d dump from the core rules, the bard would be nominated.
Yeah, I know some people can play them perfectly, but eh.
Tomorrow I’ll have the write-up of Friday’s game posted.
Right now I’m listening to the MP3 of it to make sure I didn’t miss too much, but it was 90% one big combat. And this combat was not the usual one-sided, two round combats we’ve had recently.
More about that tomorrow.
It’s no big deal though. I have plenty of time to make tweaks here and there.
After much deliberation and meditation I’ve decided not to do one potential tweak.
The whole power attack mess I’m simply not going to worry about.
Yes, I know I wrote about it like it needs to go, but as I thought about it I realized that on a weird level it is actually balanced.
Monsters and characters get more and more hit points while, theoretically, their armor class and base attack bonus increase at about the same rate. So if you put a cap on how much you can power attack, or if you increase or remove the limit on Combat Expertise, all you really do is decrease the amount of melee damage that can be done in a combat round. And in turn that makes melee fighting take longer and causes the fighter classes to be less valuable as the casters will have to take up the slack.
It’s a simple scalable numbers thing; as hit points go up, so should damage. Just like how AC and BAB scale to each other.
And here’s a dirty trick to throw onto any PC who uses Power Attack too much; disarm. When you power attack, your BAB goes down that same amount until your next action. This means you are more vulnerable to losing your weapon from a simple disarm action.
Think about your tricked out fighter/barbarian using a greatsword. Then he power attacks full against some harmless looking rogue, looking to cut the little runt in twain. The rogue sidesteps the swing, and with a flick of his rapier, the barbarian is now weaponless.
And so much for what I called a “solid” plan in my previous post, I’m dumping the personality concept of this campaign.
The reasoning to keep it was simple; I needed to be able to have as much the campaign mapped out as possible before we start.
But it was just not the best route. No one wants to play someone else’s PC for anything more than a one-shot game. People would quickly lose interest in the game for fear of “not playing the PC right”.
So say goodbye personality-concept and hello background augmentation-concept.
Prior to the campaign’s beginning, I will have the player send me (and not the group) a 100 to 250 word write-up about the PC. The write should be the general character concept, the goals for the character, and a story about the PC.
Then I will respond to the player with some augmentation of the PC. This can be about anything that I could use as a reason to include that PC into the story-line.
These augmentations can be both positive and negative to the PC on a mechanical level. The positives will be something like a +1 to the DC of fire spells, more starting gold, a re-roll a day, or whatever I think would work great. The negatives will along the lines of having an older PC, starting with negative XP, on the run from something, and possible even worse.
The augmentations on a story level will be simple DM additions to the PC back-story. The player then writes up a new story with this new information.
And all the while the players don’t tell one another about their character, at least not at first.
Why won’t they tell each other about their histories? Well because this is both a role-playing game, and I’m a jerk DM. Most normal people don’t go telling everyone their entire history. Especially if they are victims of plot that had them framed for a crime and there is a law man in the group.
The locking gestalt classes I’m pretty firm on (where you pick your two classes and keep them). If a player has a good concept for their PC, I might loosen it a smidgen.
And as for what classes and prestige classes I’m allowing, I’m still working on the list.
But here’s a little something I’ve got worked out so far; PCs cannot be druids, barbarians, or bards (but NPCs can).
Why? This is going to be a civilized kind of world, there is no “new frontier”.
A druid might appear to the PCs in some way or another, and only in some parts.
Barbarians will appear as class levels on some monsters, so there is a stigma against barbarians as a sort of throwback to the old, and thus wrong, ways of doing things.
And as for bards, well, I just hate bards as a class. So they are limited to NPC storytellers and entertainers. If there was one class I’d dump from the core rules, the bard would be nominated.
Yeah, I know some people can play them perfectly, but eh.
Tomorrow I’ll have the write-up of Friday’s game posted.
Right now I’m listening to the MP3 of it to make sure I didn’t miss too much, but it was 90% one big combat. And this combat was not the usual one-sided, two round combats we’ve had recently.
More about that tomorrow.
posted by BlueBlackRed at 9:39 PM
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