The Birth of a World - part 8

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done one of these entries.
It’s not from a lack of want, but I really didn’t have anything interesting or new to say.

This entry is about general campaign design and character creation, and even now I’m not 100% sure how I should go about it.

I keep looking at maintaining a balanced game from all side and keeping it fun. It’s a weird thing when you try to keep a little bit of realism in a game while adding the element of high fantasy and then trying to keep game balance. Although they aren’t mutually exclusive elements, they aren’t easy to mesh.

And let’s put it this way, if this campaign ends up not living up to what I’m trying to get it to be, then I’ve wasted a lot of work and I’ll feel heavily let down. And the only person to blame is me. I’m putting way too much onto myself, but if I don’t do it, then I won’t like what I’ve done and that will bring the game down even more.

With the accumulative amount of time I’ve put into this game so far, if everyone doesn’t say “Wow!” at the end of the first night, then I did something wrong. My goal is to leave them wanting to come back wanting more. I’m going to be their D&D crack dealer.

The first session of a new campaign should set the tone for the rest of the sessions. It is the DM’s job to get the group interested in his world. If all you do is throw monsters at the group without a good story behind it all, then you’re really just playing D&D Miniatures and you should call it that.

Long gone are the high school days where your session consisted of some haphazard dungeon layout filled with monsters that had no reason to be there, and you and your adventurer buddies would raid the dungeon killing every inhabitant one by one, followed by taking their treasure so you could do it again next week with even bigger monsters. It was fun back then, not so much now.

I lose interest in those games quickly. I’m your standard 50%/50% roll/role playing kind of gamer. If I’m playing in your game don’t be surprised if I’m under whelmed when all you do is give a footnote of an excuse for us to go kill some –insert standard low CR critter here–.

I’m also not a big fan of the groups that spend hours upon hours of just role-playing with dice rarely being used. I’ve done that on occasion, but the following week was usually full of dice rolls.

I remember a Valley game where the party had discovered some papers in their adventures that named a city councilman in some power-grabbing scheme. They spent the whole night talking to a variety of people and then accusing the councilman himself. The only die roll of the evening was a diplomacy check to get people to believe them. In the end they succeeded in their goal and the councilman went into hiding but that whole session also led them to a bigger evil that allowed me to use my favorite basic D&D module – Skarda’s Mirror. And that next whole session was almost exclusively action.

So, to me, the role-playing aspect of D&D should be the part of the game that leads to the action of D&D. I have nothing against groups who don’t do it, but I certainly would not enjoy the game.

But in my normal campaigns, that is how I run them; the story leads to the action which then creates more stories and more action and so on.

Although it doesn’t appear so from my lack of “Birth of a World” entries, I actually have done quite a bit of preparation for the early sessions of the game. I have even more loosely sketched out, but I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself in case the party does something unexpected.

Most of my recent work involved a huge amount of data entry and testing. Yes, it’s incredibly geeky, I know. But many of you would be amazed, ok; maybe you’ll find it slightly interesting, that the core of D&D is pure math.

Take a look at the XP chart. Once you get past the early levels, the XP chart is pretty predictable. The designers even note that they expect a group of 4 PCs to take on 13 1/3 challenges of a CR equal to their level before leveling. That knowledge can help you in your adventure design so you can keep a tight control of how often the party levels.

One thing that isn’t so obvious is treasure progression per CR. At level 6 and up the overall treasure you get from a CR is roughly 130% higher than a CR one lower. This assumes that the challenges have treasure, and that you use the mundane and magic items charts as listed. And, as usual, this breaks down once you get past level 20.

But when you know why certain things are the way they are, you can alter them and understand how much they affect the balance in another area.

And that’s why I decided to drop any changes to the Power Attack feat. Once I took a look at the math, I understood that changing the game might actually harm it in the long run.

As your levels increase, so does your BAB, AC, damage, and hit points. And monsters were designed with that in mind. But the melee damage you deal doesn’t increase at the same rate as hit points unless you use Power Attack, so combats last longer unless the casters do more damage. And using a two-handed weapon increases that further but at the cost of AC (or an action if you have an animated shield).

Seeing these patterns really helps me understand the nature of the game design, and aids me in planning everything out and allows me to tweak things I consider a little off. Like potions and scrolls for instance.

For your minor magic items, about one quarter of them are supposed to be potions, and another quarter scrolls. That’s too many scrolls for me to figure out how to put in to a module and make sense as to why they are there, so I upped the chance of potions and lowered the chance for scrolls. Yes it throws off the perceived mathematical balance, but I’m willing to live with a little imbalance than hearing the whine of “Another scroll! Come on! Well at least the wizard loves this campaign!” Plus it makes more sense for an orc to have a potion of Bear’s Strength than a scroll of Bear’s Strength.

Now, what about character creation?

I keep changing my mind on that one. I want to allow everyone to have as many options as possible but I still need to keep my “vision” of the game intact. So I need to find a balance there.

One day I like gestalt, but then I look at the power they have and having to adjust for their needs throws balance off a lot, so then I change my mind on that. As of this moment, gestalt won’t happen for this campaign.

What about stat generation? Should I let everyone roll 4d6 dice and drop the lowest until they’re happy? Or should I go use the good old point buy method? And if I use point buy, how many points?

Right now I kind of like the standard array. That is the really low powered version where every PC gets a flat 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, & 15 places them where they want and then adds the racial modifiers. This forces some tough decision making and is actually a 25 point buy. But that is a little harsh, so I will allow the player to add 1 to any of the stats.

But that takes away from the dice rolling of character creation. Call me old fashioned, but I like to roll dice for generating stats. So here’s what I’m going to do, you get to roll 4d6 for one character, if you like your rolls you keep them (like Aaron has recently done and averages about 30 on a point-buy), if you don’t then you get a modified standard array of 8, 10, 12, 14, 15, 15 (28 points on a point-buy), and if you hate that then you can do a 25 point-buy.

Having that allows you a single chance to get lucky with the dice, if that doesn’t work to your liking then you can take slightly above average stats, or you can design your own with 25 points to get one or two high stats, and several not-so-good ones.

As for alignment, I’m allowing good alignments only. This is a good versus evil campaign, there is no room for morally grey.

What classes am I allowing? I’m still bumping barbarians and druids for reasons spoken before. If we have enough players, then I won’t heavily object to a bard PC – but I will feel obligated to pick on that player. Also any classes that have an evil “feel” to them, such as the warlock, are not allowed because there will be no morally grey PCs (the DM can use one though – but probably won’t).

I will also encourage the players to take spontaneous caster classes (sorcerer, favored soul, etc.) over the memorization classes (cleric, wizard, etc.) for the sake of speeding up the game. But this will not be required. There’s also the DM not liking the undead “on-off” switch that a cleric has.

All other classes are allowed so long as I own the book and the class “fits” the world. I own quite a few books, so that’s a lot of classes and prestige classes.

What races am I allowing? Only the simple PHB races are allowable. Also, with the exception of human, only one of each race is allowed unless both players work a real good story together. Yes, this is yet another human dominated world.

If the one person that is playing an elf is playing a wizard, then he can choose to lose the +2 dexterity bonus and instead get a +2 to intelligence. It just seems wrong to me that the elf race gets a stat bonus to a stat that doesn’t help their favored class directly.

I’m not too keen on half-orcs and gnomes for this world, but if someone wanted to play one I’m not worried too much about them.

Everyone will gain XP at rates dependant upon their own level. So if anyone starts at level 1 for instance, they may level quickly to start with, while someone at level 5 might take a little time to get that level. This will hopefully smooth out the XP to get all the PCs to within one level after a few sessions.

As for character creation itself, I want none of the PCs to know what the others are doing other than their base class. And that’s just to make sure that not everyone chooses the same class and allows them to cover the four base class types if they so choose.

Ideally I would like to see 2 fighter types, 2 healer types, 1 arcane caster, and 1 trap-finder as it allows the DM to create well-rounded adventures. But if the party is missing one class, and is loaded up on another, then the DM has to correct for that. No healers means the DM has to provide more healing items and so on.

Once the players have announced what they’d like to play, then each player and I will talk separately to get a decent, but not too in-depth, history. This history will be a collaborative effort to allow the player to get the PC he wants and the DM will be able to use the background for the overall story.

And if the player doesn’t want a background for his PC that’s fine, then his PC will have a standard and bland background and will be level 1. Because hey, level 1 characters aren’t supposed to have backgrounds, level 10 characters do. It’s a double-incentive, level one and less chance of being in the spotlight because you gave the DM nothing to work with.

Once the campaign officially starts, the DM will use and exploit your PC’s background, but he will not tell you how to run your PC.

Plus the background will have an effect on the character generation, which may give bonuses and penalties to the base character.

You can play a married father of four who is on a hunt to find his wife’s murderer. Something like that will give a PC some expert or commoner levels that can be bought off as he gains experience. But he will also be at the beginning of the middle-age category.

You can play an old seer who likes to sit by the fireplace at the inn to tell stories to anyone willing to listen. The PC would gain an extra level or two in an arcane magic class, but would be quite old and have his stats modified accordingly.

You and your identical twin sister have found a cursed item of great magical power that is slowly poisoning the both of you with an evil power and you are trying to find its creator to learn the secret to destroying it. This one gives two PCs a single powerful magic item that neither can do without and it is slowly killing them. This might give them a couple of class levels but have several points drained from their constitution and more to lose.

Maybe you want to be a twelve year old prodigy who is has forgotten more magic than most will ever learn. This puts you at a very young age but gets you the Spellcasting Prodigy feat for free. No adults will take you seriously and you would have stat modifications because you are 12.

You are a bounty hunter in search of a man who has taken the law into his own hands. This man has killed several lackeys of a known assassin because the assassin killed the wife of the vigilante and was mother of his four children. This gains you nothing but a contract for a gold reward for the safe return of your mark.

You can even be a noble knight on a quest to save the life of a princess. Yes it is cliché, but it still works. It gains your PC nothing but is always a good push for the campaign.

If you noticed, you saw a potential interaction already between two PCs. If the players were to explain their PC’s history immediately, then there could be some pretty bad results. Or maybe people can overhear the PCs talking and some bad things could result from that.

Now I’m not going to go all soap-opera on everyone. There won’t be any long lost relative that makes one of the PCs brothers with an evil bad guy. And as is usual, if there were to ever to be a romantic anything (shudder) it will be barely mentioned and not role-played out.

Remember, D&D is “guys’ night out”, as my wife likes to say. If it doesn’t get said at the poker table, it doesn’t get said at the D&D table.

Now here’s potential problem that could come to be, but hopefully won’t.

What if a player ends up not liking their PC?
Perhaps their PC just didn’t live up to expectations.

Well I say “Thank Bahamut for the Player’s Handbook II.”

With the addition of the PHBII to the game, there is virtually no reason for someone not to like their PC because you can just swap it out or remove it entirely. All the DM asks is that you have a role-playing reason that you’re changing your class/skills/feats/etc.

Beyond that the only reason would be a role-playing background issue that just ruins the PC for the player. And I’m kind of torn on that.

If a player doesn’t want to play his PC, well then I can’t really force the issue.

But what if I’ve done a lot of work to work that PC’s background into the story and the loss of that PC ruins a lot of that story? And this background is something that the player has to take the blame for too.

For now I’m hoping that it won’t come up, but if it does, I’m hoping that a good solution will present itself.

I don’t think this group has any issues at the moment with liking something one day and hating it the next. I’ve seen players like that before and have no intention of letting flakes like that every ruin my Friday evenings again.