ignimbrite78's page

If you still think that it is unbalanced when it only works on a natural 20 (IMO it is balanced) then you should consider removing the weapon or start, occasionally, giving NPCs the ability to negate the vorpal ability.

1. Disarm the fighter and take the sword away, start swinging the sword at the fighter and see how quickly he runs away.

2. Break the sword with sunder, not nice but effective.

3. Magically disenchant the sword or supress its abilities: antimagic field, targeted dispel magic, Mordenkainen's Disjunction.
3a. The Spellguant in MM2, with CR 12, can perform a disjunctive bite and render the weapon nonmagical.

4. Steal the sword, as discussed this can lead to many exciting chase scenes. You can also have the local artificer (Eberron Campaign class) remove the swords essense to gain craft points.

5. Start sending the PCs up against more oozes and undead or things that are immune to criticals. They cannot be beheaded if they are immune to criticals.
5a. Give important NPCs heavy fortification on their armour, it negates critical hits. Light fortification is a +1 armour bonus and grants a 25% chance to negate critical hits.

I quess that you do not have to punish the player for having a powerful weapon, just make their lives a little uncomfortable every now and again.

Hail Adventurers! I've been very stressful with my short times with D&D and my lack of time to prepare, so I was wondering about this question as I sat in my car, speaking with my CONFIDAN:

How would one propose DMing with two men/women/bugbears/whatever...? I mean to say, how would one go about playing such a shared campaign, but have it so each DM can get to where the other wants them to?

I have been in a campaign with three DMs.

I came up with the general overarching plot (collect all four parts of an eldrich machine) and the map (four main areas) and then we split the world and the quests up. I took the first and last part of the machine and two of the lands and the other DMs each took a piece and a land. We played through mine, got a piece and then I took over my NPC character and the other guys NPC'd their characters and did their thing.

As long as they did not change the world or move the regalia around I did not need to know the details of their campaign so I was happy as a player and they were happy to do whatever they wanted within their realm.

yep pretty sure that you are only allowed one template at the start. However, if you were to obtain another template later on, say by becoming a vampire or lich or lycanthrope that might be acceptable. Besides templates add to ECL but not usually to HD so what player wants to be a ECL 10 with only 2 HD?

Think very carefully before allowing players to apply more than one template. The dictomy of alignments etc of most of the templates should prevent easy access to different templates.

If players want to have a diverse racial history maybe you should think about the bloodlines alternate rule from Unearthed Arcana, either combined with a template or have two waring bloodlines within a character. Again this limits HD of a character so that they become powerful but have negligable hit points.

Hope this helps.

I agree with most of what has been said above. We used to roll out stats using a variety of different methods: 3d6, 4d6 drop lowest, 5d4, etc. There are rules for rerolling etc but the disparity between low and high rollers was too big to ignore. So we switched to point buy. Some people were unhappy to start but they eventually saw the light.

Point-buy is the most fair system to generate stats. You can customise your character and make it completely even or power up one stat and become one-dimensional. If players complain about the lack of randomness in their characters you can compromise by doing standard point-buy and then let people roll 1d6 and use those as extra points to be added wherever.

High STR melee artists are susceptable to many of the tactics given already. I feel that one worthy tactic is to use a monk, or something with higher base speed, and use spring attack or shot on run against the fighter. The scout class (Comp Adventurer) is ideal for hit and run tactics that have the potential to make your melee specialist scared. Alternatively use the fighters stats and create a power attack specialist/frenzied beserker to rush in and attack. After a couple of hits your fighter is probably going to want to run away and rethink tactics.
later

I agree with Luke; having an awesome and sometimes unusual concept with some sort of history generally means you care about stuff other than min/maxing. Therefore, you are not a munchkin.

For simplicity I would have to agree with the barbarian, give the barbarian a big axe and watch them play!
For flexibility I would pick ranger - the ability to fight and the skill points to operate in a dungeon or wilderness or city environment make rangers indispensable.

I have tried to run city campaigns and have found the following helpful:

Sharn: City of towers, provides some good references, but without detailed maps.
City State of the Invincible Overlord, provides some good politics, maps etc for a campaign.
Thieves' Quater: A City Resource Sourcebook, great if you want to drop a seedy district into an existing city. Good maps and plot hooks.

A year ago I was DMing City of the Spider Queen and the group was smashing through all the demons and fire giants in the main cavern . They entered the abandonded temple of Lolth and the exalted cleric was tossing some major light spells around to kill the nightwalker, they managed to kill it in a few rounds but the huge display of light caught the attention of the resident balor who appeared a couple rounds after the dispatched the nightwalker.
Needless to say the exalted party members did not make their Knowledge planes check and did not realise what they were up against and proceeded to wail on the balor. Some more crazy huge light spells and some amazing damage from the psion and the balor was almost dead in 4 rounds! :) then he just laughed and moved into the middle of the group drawing attacks of oppurtunity. This ended the balor but his Death throes proceeded to turn 4 of the 6 players into dust.
Take home message: don't mess with big things if you fail your Knowledge Planes check ;)

I love to DM adventures where the PCs provide background and motivation. I am actually starting to get tired with long-term straight dungeon crawls that have little to do with how a PC thinks. And yet it is really hard to write stuff that has recurring villains, multiple planes and plot hooks that span 6+ sessions.
Conversely I love playing great one-off adventures where you have to slink through the dungeon and kill everything in your path. Who needs a damsel in distress as plot motivation? Just do it for the pleasure of kicking butt.
I would love to run city-based, political intrigue adventures but the sheer amount of time and detail required to get them set up is prohibitive and pregenerated city adventures tend to be a little weak if the PCs don't take the bait at the start.