auticus's page

One of the things that has been a regular occurance in pretty much every game I've run since the 90s has involved crafting magic items. This by itself is pretty cool, but where it becomes a nuisance is where players want to craft items that you don't want to hand out (to get around it never showing up in a store or treasure pile)

To circumnavigate this, I've made it so crafting magical items also requires a "recipe" of sorts that involves a very rare ingredient. Certain items wouldn't be that big a deal to create, but other items could require a quest unto itself to find the ingredients needed.

Anyhow, something came up recently that I've not yet experienced.

A player coming in as a level 1 fighter wants to take craft arms/armor as a skill and wants to use his starting gold to buy half-plate, getting it for 1/3 the cost and just saying that he made it.

My take on it was that he is free to start the game with nothing but raw materials, but it's not guaranteed that he'd start off with the time to craft an entire suit of armor.

I've noticed a familiar issue where players want to come in to the game with an animal companion already trained up with all of the tricks they want because "it doesn't make sense that I'd have spent the entire time before the campaign started not training my animal".

How have you dealt with this type of thing?

Little discussion focused on how you put groups together and what methods you use for party creation.

I currently run two games. The first is a weekly game that runs Monday nights for about three hours a session and has six players. It can be found here:

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/the-age-of-kings

The second will be starting up in January and will run every other saturday for about six to eight hours a session. Its looking like it will have four players, my fourteen year old daughter being one of them. It can be found here:

http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/caer-twyn-age-of-kings

The second one is not really fleshed out yet on the Obsidian Portal.

Both are set in a homebrew world that I created a few years back. The second group is actually going to be playtesting an adventure path that I have written that I would like to have published somewhere someday.

It's basically dark ages inspired and low-fantasy, pulling from sources like Lord of the Rings, Conan, and Game of Thrones.

I am restricting most content to the core rulebook though other things may be considered at my discretion, provided I don't see it busting the campaign balance and making super-hero characters (we just came out of 4th edition. I played 3/3.5 since the beginning from 2000 - 2008 so this is our first foray back into the old system)

To encourage backgrounds and what not, the game defaults to the 10-point buy system, and any players who submit a 1000 word bio get to use the 15-point buy system. Also players who add a 500 word journal entry to the Obsidian Portal get a 10% xp bonus at the next session.

The Monday group is fairly diverse. Six player, and it's split three ways in style.

The Saturday group has some overlap with the monday group (some players in both) and has more roleplaying elements, as opposed to the monday group which contains a lot of hack and slash combat players.

I use facebook to help recruit from my friends list, and Obsidian Portal to keep track of what is going on.

I have a lot more maps at http://dnd.chrisnye.net though that site's content is overall outdated and from the last 4e campaign.

Discuss your campaigns =)

I noticed in going over the beastiary that undead no longer had the trait that they were immune to crits.

Has this 3.5 mechanic been removed?

A trend I've noticed over the past few years is how soft games have gotten. By soft I mean that many players come in with the expectation that their characters aren't really going to die, no matter what inane or stupid things that they pull, because any "good GM" is going to pull strings to keep them up. If their characters do die, they see that as the fault of the GM and that it's "bad GMing" because after all, they were only roleplaying their character.

I've noticed a lot of GMs supporting this style of play (I'm officially saying right here that I'm not saying that this style of play is bad or wrong, only that it's a newish trend in games and one that I don't particularly enjoy, but that doesn't make it bad), and in the last game I participated in as a player, I noticed that when my character would get close to death, the GM would start fudging rolls and having monsters ignore me.

I literally had to actively *try* to get killed for it to happen. In reading message boards on the webz, I've seen this particular style of play has grown very much in popularity, to mirror how many video games are now crafted (where character death is discouraged).

I have had a couple negative experiences with players dying and freaking out at the table about it in the past couple years, mainly with 4e. I had a guy playing a paladin who instructed his party members to attack the creatures that were really good at hitting AC (they had low AC) and he was hitting a creature really good at hitting REFLEX (he had a low REF). The end result was a party-wipe due to bad tactics, to which he slammed his fists into the table and went into a tirade about bad DMs.

I had a guy playing a barbarian who raged and then sprinted a good 100 feet away from the party, kicking a door down, rushing blindly into a room swinging away and then as he was the only one in the room, the monsters in the room converged on him and killed him (the party was still far down the hall), to which he raged in real life about what a poor DM that was to have punished him for roleplaying his character.

Recently I had another barbarian player (3.5/PF) rage and go running off into the woods alone and away from the party, setting off traps and injuring himself and then ending up dead smack in the middle of a bandit camp, far away from support or healing, where he was hacked down as he was the only target at that point as the rest of the party was gathered across the map still (they have since bought a collar and leash for that character). He did not rage or go into a frothing rant about bad DMs, but he was annoyed that he was allowed to be attacked by so many bandits and had to spend the fight lying in a pool of his own blood, when he was simply "roleplaying his character".

So this brings me to the point of the thread, which is my opinion followed up by what do you think...

"Roleplaying my character" it seems has become synonomous with "I want to do stupid things and because my character is prone to stupid things, you should let me do them without being subject to death for my stupid actions".

I play my monsters as I feel they would operate tactically. Stupid things, dumb undead, animals,... they have no tactics. They either fight whatever is closest, or flee.

Smarter enemies are going to employ some tactics, and when a berzerking barbarian lands in their midst alone and outnumbered 9:1, it seems unlikely that they are just going to stroll away and ignore him so that he can use his beat stick on their skulls at leisure.

Granted if a berzerking half orc barbarian came sprinting into a kobold lair or a goblin lair and there were only a handful of them in the room, I'd allow an intimidate check to set them fleeing, but then none of the players above thought to do that anyway.

This is kind of similar to how certain min/max players get angry when they make a min/max character, and then their min traits are exploited, using the "bad DM" button to describe anyone who attacks where they are weakest as if their max traits should be the only things that matter in the game.

So then, how do you handle this scenario, both as a player or as a GM? Interested to see others' take.

Little backstory. I've played D&D since 1st ed in 1988. I played 3.0 and 3.5 from the time it was released in 2000 up until 4e came out in 2008 and switched to it.

I've just finished 4e and wanted to return to 3.5 / PF and have begun my first PF campaign last night.

One of my gripes with 3.5 was lack of balance and top-heavy characters breaking encounter difficulty. A big class that gave me headaches was the old druid. They would essentially summon forth a zoo and the rest of the party would camp while the zoo fought their encounters for them.

We have a druid in the new campaign, who has dump stats and has gone top-heavy. She has a wolverine animal companion and of course, the summon nature's ally spells.

I'm not really sure how to deal with a druid. I don't want it dominating the game like they used to do in my campaigns in 3.5. My main issue with druids is their ability to essentially function like several fighters, in essence making a party of 6 characters the equivalent of 8 characters at 1st level (the wolverine is basically a 1st level fighter and summon nature's ally will bring the equivalent of another 1st level fighter).

When designing encounters or placing encounters for the party, the CR system is already forgiving in that a CR 1 encounter against a 1st level party is relatively easy for them to handle. Toss in two more opponents on the PCs side and it's unbalanced.

To get around this before I used to have to artifically inflate encounter numbers. Meaning if the group was going to fight six monsters I would have to bump that number up to eight or so to deal with the extra creatures the druid would bring in.

Another way to deal with them is to have the enemy flee until the spell wears off but indoors there often aren't enough places to run and get away from the party plus their menagerie of creatures.

So basically, do druids still have the ability to bust encounter balance or am I just worried over past experiences and PF fixed them?

How are some good ways to deal with summoner type characters without resorting to artifically bumping up numbers to account for what essentially becomes more party members?