The Birth of a World - part 7

I’m wearing boots of escaping!

Friday is my birthday.
When looking for a present for me, remember to shop smart, shop S-Mart.

You’re getting a double-dose of the Birth of a World series this week. Skipping a game week or two tends to aid in that.

I originally intended to do a rant, but just couldn’t get it to come out right. So I shelved it for now. Maybe someone will trigger an irritation that will inspire me.

Last week someone brought up a valid point; maintaining balance in a high-level and high-powered campaign is no easy task as those campaigns tend to spiral out of control.

And they are 100% right. Once the party obtains the power to destroy a city, not much prevents them from doing so.

So how do I go about preventing the PCs from going insane with their power?

Here are a few simple steps:

Step #1 – Find some mature gamers for your group.
I would not run this campaign with munchkins, power-gamers, or children.
Our current group structure contains no one under legal drinking age. Most everyone in the group has been a DM before and fully understands how a game can be ruined if you invite the wrong kind of player into the group.
In fact, when we make changes to the rules, we tend to get a group consensus before doing so. It’s not 100% (I’m the only one who really hates the withdrawal from combat options), but we all try to be on the same page when make a rules call.

Step #2 – No evil PCs and no chaotic neutrals.
Aaron has mentioned this, and I’ve seen it as a rule before, but never really saw it enforced; if your PC turns evil then your PC becomes an NPC and you get the pleasure of making a new character.
I’ve ranted before about how pathetic and cliché it is for a player to backstab the party in a D&D session because it ruins the fun for everyone involved except you. Yes there are plenty of times when this is acceptable, but rarely and almost never when I’m at the game table.
And I am so sick of people who think that running a chaotic neutral PC is pure freedom and the rules don’t apply to their PC. They all want a loner “Wolverine” character that does things his way, outside of the law. In any long term game that I run, that PC will not be fun to play.
The same goes for the person who wants to play one of those “good drow”. If you want to talk about a theme in D&D that has become cliché, it’s the sheer number of Driz’zt clones.
Luckily step #1 tends to prevent this antithesis to team-work.

Step #3 – Make them earn everything.
This has been said time and time again by many people, but it’s worth repeating.
A dragon loves to hoard gold, magic, and other treasures, so why wouldn’t he use them?
Sure, your standard dragon can’t get much use out of that longsword +1, but he can easily use that Stone of Good Luck. If he has a Staff of Healing, or even some healing potions, then he can just flee from combat, fly back to his lair, heal up, and then return to take out the party later.
And I’ve spoken before that there will be some powerful magic items. Out there somewhere is a Staff of the Magi, waiting for the party’s wizard to claim it. All they have to do is take it from the lich, his guardians, and any other nasty traps he has prepared.

Step #4 – Keep control of it all.
In this campaign I will be allowing a lot more than I have in any campaign I’ve run since 2E.
But that is not to say that I will be allowing every single thing under the sun. I’ll be allowing several of the classes, feats, etc. in the core books, Unearthed Arcana, PHBII, DMGII, and a few other books I can’t think of at the moment. But I will not allow every single thing in those books, nor will I allow anything from books I don’t own, or any combination that appears to break the rules.

But there’s a fine line between keeping control and being oppressive. So I need to make sure that I only disallow something if it’s broken, it doesn’t fit into the game’s “vision”, or I don’t own the source. Just because a class gets a powerful ability is no reason to outlaw it so long as the whole of the class appears properly balanced to other classes.

You may also have noticed that I have not mentioned any of the “Races of” books. The moment I read the entry for the Whisper Gnome, I knew that someone screwed up. And since I’ve only heard munchkins and powergamers like Races of Stone, and nothing positive about the later Races of books, I decided to save my money and ignore the existence of those books.

Step #5 – Pound the snot out of the party and keep them off-balance.
Nothing scares a party more than the unknown.
There have been times when I’ve ran a simple monster that had less than a dozen hit points and because the players didn’t know what it was, they ran away. It makes for a good laugh when they’re stressing out over how to defeat it when it gets taken down by a lowly Magic Missile spell.
And boy have I made some changes to some of these monsters. E-Tools has allowed me to make some big changes to monster without me having to do anything more than click some buttons and pick some feats.
Did you know that there is no upper limit to advancing the hit dice of the Tarrasque?
Adding levels to monsters is pretty easy too. That whole fire giant troupe armed with ballista-sized crossbows that Shark mentioned is not only possible, it’s entertaining to think about what the look on your players’ faces will be.

Now don’t go thinking that I’m out to kill the PCs. My job is to challenge the players and their PCs. If they survive the 100HD Tarrasque and the troupe of fire giants with 20 levels of fighter, then they have something to be proud of. So long as I give them no reason to believe that I pulled any punches a fight like that will be told by them at their games for years.

I hope these steps are enough to maintain a realistic balance to the game in long term.

And the next topic is cleric and deities.

Do you know one of the truly irritating things about Forgotten Realms and the Kingdoms of Kalamar? There are an insane number of gods.

Kalamar has nearly 50 gods, and each has over half a dozen names.
And the deity roster for the Forgotten Realms keeps changing, and I’m done trying to keep up.

When choosing a deity for a PC cleric there are basically two reasons that you picked your PC’s deity; a role-playing match or “what do I get out of this?”

If your chose one for role-playing reasons, well I don’t have much of a beef with you there unless you’re one of those players who gets way too much into the role-playing a clergy-men it reminds of church. You sir have problems that I can’t help you with (kidding).

But if you are a player that good through domains, weapon choices, and so on to find the right combination for your PC then you will love this.

In this campaign, there are no gods.
Well actually there are gods; I’m just not going to deal with it.
No pantheons, no avatars, and no names.
Just pick your two domains and call it a day.

Yeah, this will probably cause some other problems later on, but I’m sure I can think of a way around it when it comes to that point.

And here’s something that I really need to work on as a DM.

I’ve known about this problem for a while, but it’s not easy for me to fix this.

It seems that I create situations that make the NPCs angry at the players. I don’t do it all the time, but often enough for me to say something about it here.

Part of it stems from the module-types I run. Once, back in that 2E game I spoke of earlier, I even had Talona trick the PCs into releasing a The Stand type mega-plague. When the survivors of the world found out about this, they weren’t too happy with them.

Ok, the survivors formed a lynch mob, but that’s beside the point.

Then this past weekend, during the one-shot, several people in town were killed by a large orc-raid into the city. The leader of each squad of orcs carried a drawing of the PCs (with names). So obviously the town put some blame on the party.

“Had they not been in this town my uncle would still be alive.”

So my solution for this is to try to make sure that not every NPC has a reason to hate the NPCs unless the PCs do it on their own.

And it will be the PCs job to both not give the NPCs reasons to hate them, and to work on their image on their own.

Yeah, I said it.
The group might need to get a PR rep.

That’s a good note to end this entry on.