Selaxasp

Rising Angel's page

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Scarab Sages

Hiya Everyone! I've come up with a method in my campaign of allowing players 100% creativity with their characters, yet still maintaining an even power level. I've play tested this using the Serpent's Skull adventure path, and it's working pretty well!

Let me start with my logic;

Picking up the Advanced Race Guide, I reviewed the RP costs for existing core races, and developed the following conclusions;

Each Core Race is generated with between 8 and 11 RP
Each Core Race is balanced with the other Races in the Advanced Race Guide
Alternate Racial Traits are equal to an option in the Race Builder
Any Core Race is allowed for standard point buy character creation
An Advanced Trait costs 4RP for a +2 to a base stat
The cost of raising a 10 to a 12 would cost 2 ASP
The average cost of raising any stat from any number 2 lower is 3.4 ASP

If the above is true, then the average value of 1 RP and 1 ASP is 3.7, meaning that one could consider 1 RP to roughly be equal to 1 ASP.

So ... what I did was increase the amount of base points for a standard point buy character by the maximum point value of the Core Race and simply called them "Character Creation Points." By doing this, I still guaranty that someone could get the same stats using the Standard Point Buy for the highest costing core race. It (on average) would allow someone who took one of the 'lesser' core races and get a slight upper hand on stats (3 CCP, or a total +1 modifier if used to raise a stat from 10~12).

If a player didn't want to play one of the core races, but rather one of the featured or uncommon races, then they simply paid the appropriate amount of CCP (equal the the RP cost listed in the Advanced Race Guide) and used any remaining CCP to then buy their ability scores. Likewise, if they wanted to modify a race to have other specific abilities, or even create their own, then all they had to do was use the CCP as RP to generate the race or buy the trait.

So far, I have a smattering of Core and Featured races with a race completely created through the Race Builder, and the campaign is very balanced, both against each other and against the adventure path as written. This also allows me to establish a point system for my NPC's, wherein I use the CCP's I gave the PC's and can make evil nemesis' (nemesi?) for them to battle.

The CCP I use are based off of the same structure, so Low Fantasy would be 21 CCP, Standard Fantasy 26 CCP, High Fantasy 31 CCP, and Epic Fantasy is 36 CCP. You can see that this means that no one could play a Drow Noble (yay!) without increasing the CCP available to all players.