baudot's page

I haven't logged into Guild Wars in ages, but it is free, so I suppose I could return at any time.

I've never touched City of Heroes, though I do play the completely-unrelated-yet-awesome RTS Company of Heroes.

Reclusive cabbage checking in.

It might be interesting to let the character devise a kit, similar to a disguise kit, to emulate certain traits. It might contain items to focus meditation on such as a variety of holy symbols, along with incense or other ways of delivering psychoactive agents to bring on personality and mindset shifts. I'd view this the same as the camoflage kit in Complete Adventurer that grants +2 to hide with limited charges. Sure, you don't need a base tool to hide, but there are tools that can aid your prep work, and limited charges & prep time form another balancing factor.

Colour me amused that this was an article in the Dragon issue to land on my doorstep yesterday.

I've been prepping for a Savage Tide game that refuses to get off the ground, which has given me a deal of time to think about extras for running the campaign. One that's always fun to invest some time in is music. Here's some of my favorite nautical tunes that I'll have on in the background if this group will ever get its act together:

If I Were a Blackbird by Amy White

If I were a Blackbird

I'd whistle and I'd sing
And I'd follow the vessel my true love sails in.
And in the top rigging, there I'd build my nest.

Back Home in Derry by John Close

We cursed them to hell

As our bow fought the swell
Our ship danced like a moth in the firelight
White horses rode high
As a devil passed by
Taking souls to hades by twilight
Five weeks out to sea we were now 43
We buried our comrades each morning

A Health to the Company by Owain Phyfe

Our ship lies at harbor

she's ready to dock
I wish her safe landing
without any shock

Nelson's Blood by The Seadogs

A classic sea chanty around the legend of Admiral Nelson's death in the Battle of Trafalgar. Legend has it that his body was preserved in a cask of brandy so that he could be buried at land rather than at sea. When the navy returned to shore, they found that the cask he was being kept in had been tapped by accident and they'd been drinking the Admiral's blood during the voyage home.

I've been prepping for a Savage Tide game that refuses to get off the ground, which has given me a deal of time to think about extras for running the campaign. One that's always fun to invest some time in is music. Here's some of my favorite nautical tunes that I'll have on in the background if this group will ever get its act together:

If I Were a Blackbird by Amy White
Back Home in Derry by John Close
A Health to the Company by Owain Phyfe
Nelson's Blood by The Seadogs

Be willing to roll with it.

Putting all your eggs in one basket with villain design pays off when you're plotting the final campaign villain, but you need to be willing to build up villains you'd planned to be throw-aways as well, when the players find them memorable. Listen for cues that players are holding a grudge versus intermediate villains and build those guys up. To make this more likely, it helps to have intermediate villains that do the not-stupid things that masterminds do, like making getaways given half a chance.

The economics of D&D, in comic overview, by Rich Burlew.

/me goes back to rewrite a proposal to include ...erm... let's see... pants druids and a cheesebringer.

Deathbringers are cool!

/me narrows eyes.

I must destroy you.

Much better.

See? 100% of poll respondents think Raks should be off "The List".

It is the will of the people! Let it be done!

Edit: OK, which wiseacre added Deathbringers before I could hit submit?

Rakshasa and woodland druids are on "The List"?

/me glances despairingly at the Rakshasa-centric proposal he was cobbling together.

One hopes against hope that Hasbro/WotC sees the value of the open gaming licensce. It's done more to revivify the D&D brand than any other single measure, and made game designers who would be creating competing products write for D&D instead.

The idea of doing a plot arc rather than a single adventure for epic seems to keep coming up.

The utility of full stat blocks is that they present the variables we need to reference. The downside is that there's a great deal of standard information in each one that doesn't represent what makes the listing unique and intersting.

As a DM who favors low-fantasy campaigns, I'm constantly replacing monster stat-blocks with humanoid mooks of equal challenge rating, and it would suite my playstyle (to the tune of an hour or more of prep saved) to have some standard mook stat-blocks in the reference literature. Specifically, I'd like to see full write-ups for thugs, guards, murderers, raiders, soldiers, innocents, and so on in a handful of CRs each, worked up generically as we have the generic ogre or the generic skeleton already in the monster manual. We already have the option with monsters to swap out some feats or move some skills around and use the middle-short form stat write-up. Since it seems unlikely that WotC/Hasbro is going to make a Folio of Generic NPCs a core book anytime soon, it would be nice to see the NPC listings in the DMG brought up to the level of definition where they could be listed as a standard
reference and customized from there by the same feat-swapping tricks and such we have at our disposal for monsters.

And as a side note: the #1 mook in campaigns I run:

Human Rog1/War2. (CR2)
Represents a skilled agent of most any organization the party might face, has 3 feats worth of customizatiom for flavor, enough skill points to do a couple things well, and packs a little extra threat if they surround a partymember, thanks to the sneak attack die. In short, they've got just enough up their sleeve to make a fight interesting, and not so much as to clutter my brainspace.

My do not wish for list includes: ... planar adventures...

I couldn't disagree more with one caveat: I find that the basic flavor of the planes in D&D is enough of a near miss with what I want it to be that it rubs me the wrong way. With a few tweaks, I love planar adventures. (My feeling about psionics is much the same.)

Planar adventures bug me when the author treats them as a chance to fall back on stereotypes, hackneyed plots, or NPC motivations are oversimplified because of planar roles. (Demons and Devils doing things because that's what personifications of evil do is the classic problem, but the variety of personifications of principles in D&D opens up whole new legions of hackneyed, pointless motivations.)

I love planar adventures when the author uses them as a springboard to cut their imagination loose and to have characters interact with overt symbols. Planar adventures are a great way to bring in the dream-like reasoning of classic faerie tales without having to justify how all the scenes happen in terms of spell levels. The Eberron concept of planar proxImity is particularly good for this.

Putting it another way: I love planar adventures in D&D when the planar elements are derived from human-level story details rather than the other way around.

SCAP in a sci-fi setting does seem like a natural mapping. Cauldron is begging to be a space station.

Perhaps I misunderstood, but I was of the impression that hustling proper was nothing more than spending your standard action as a second move action, meaning that you could NOT do it and take a standard action for the turn.

Also, the scenes described in Dungeon call for exotic vocabulary because they describe exotic settings. Common english describes common items and events. If we want to describe a feast, we need to pull out the old feasting words, such as Tureen, or Marzipan. It is because these words describe things outside our everyday experience that they are both obscure and useful to fantasy.

I do not however preread the read aloud parts.. I mean why would I? It is just a simple description of the room right?

Not that I'm Dungeon's most prolific author, but with words at a premium, read aloud text is fair game in my book as a place to put clues that the PCs see the moment they enter the room. Anything essential to understanding the adventure is going to be repeated in the synopsis or expanded on in the text, but my assumption is that the DM knows everything the players know and more, meaning they read the read-aloud text as part of the preperation. Why would I spend words in the DM's room description repeating what I just said moments before?

And to throw one more vote towards what others have said, I like that D&D challenges and stretches my vocabulary.

Context clues! Context clues are frieeeeeends.

That's it.
I'm submitting the Mome Rath as a new monster entry.
Fear its Outgrabe(Ex) ability.

Well, of course, it's wherever it fits in your campaign. However, the canon answer is that both are located in the quiet backcountry of Featherdale of the Dalelands of the Forgotten Realms.

Hm. I allow liberal use of the rebuilding rules from PHB2, so optimization isn't so much of a concern. The main time I've seen a replacement character get out of hand was an Eberron game where one of the players swapped out his character for an Artificer at 8th level and took his starting gear in expendible items. For a few months after that, he had Wand of Lightning Bolt charges to burn, and the metamagic (wand) feats to go with them, More than one should-have-been dramatic fight was ended prematurely by a maximized, shaped blast lightning bolt.

I have house rules for death that go something like this:

1) Death is a big deal.
a) The raise dead spell series is not a sure thing. It takes one truly favored by the gods to even attempt to call back a departed spirit into its shattered body, and the magic is so advanced that even such an experienced practicioner cannot assure that nothing will go wrong. Demons and opposed dieties may attempt to intervene and infiltrate a spirit favorable to them into the body in place of the one being called. Necromantically tainted areas brim over with spirits already fighting their way back to the material plane, and many will try to slip in in place of the called spirit.
b) Different dieties demand other things in place of the stand (5,000 gp in diamonds) material component for Raise Dead. I was particularly happy with the hints in Heroes of Horror in this regard.

2) On the upside, it's harder to die. Normally the more you go up in level, the easier it is to go from "In the fight" to "sub-negative-10 hp", because the amount of damage flying around keeps going up and -10 as the death marker stays constant. I replace -10 as the death marker with -(Con+(Level*2)). This way, high level characters can linger a heroic amount of time, and are more likely to stabilize, which they need in an otherwise gritty and brutal campaign.

All that said, once a character is dead, dead, dead, I favor letting the player come back with a new character at starting XP for the party's average level, so I'm a softie in that regard, too.

I'm still thinking this 'snow' is a myth and we're talking code for "Got in on the Dark Portal beta".

What is this "snow" you speak of?
It's t-shirt weather down here in L.A. Behold, the power of smog!

God's laws do not change. They are the same now as they were before. Man changes the laws to suit their whims.

Abinadi, if everyone agreed with your interpretation of morality and its source, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Attempting to dictate morailty from a viewpoint your audience doesn't share isn't going to win you any converts; On the contrary, it usually offends.

We need to treat our bodies as holy temples...

I couldn't agree more. I'm thinking of some of the temples of India, the ones where sculptures of men and women decorate the outside, acting out sacred geometry. This cover art also brings to mind The Song of Solomon, and Chapter 7 in particular.

That most time-honored of traditions -- personal gain :)

And you know... beauty is nice.

Plot Knitting: The Bullywug Gambit

Part 1 (To Kraken's Cove) - Unchanged, except that Kraken's Cove will be on another island. (In this campaign setting the players are starting on an archipelago, not a continental coastline.)

Part 2 (Kraken's Cove) - Unchanged? (Note: In the campaign backstory, there's an active arena in Ketebris, and trade in fighting beasts to be shown there often flows through these islands, hence the demand for the exotic creatures found here and in the earlier scenarios.)

Part 3 (The Wormfall Festival) - Wormfall is replaced with "Devil's Night", which passes for Halloween in this campaign setting. According to legend, on a night 183 years back, the sky was streaked with fire on this night as angels and demons fought overhead. Skeptics consider this a faerie tale, as no living human on Kaeth has ever seen either angels or demons, but among the old races (elves, dwarves) the holiday is celebrated also, and those alive on that day tell the same story. According to legend, the demons were winning the fight handily all night long. At daybreak, they were driven away, though regional versions of the story disagree as to why, and gloss over the fact that the angels disappeared at the same time. Devil's Night is a celebration of the demon's defeat. Devil's Night plays no further role in this adventure cycle, but should prelude future campaigns in the players want to explore Kaeth more after this plot cycle is done.

Regardless, this scene is much the same. Players who run into the tavern to warn patrons there of the runaway float will catch a brief glimpse of a theater performance there before evacuating the people there. (In fact, they have to struggle for the attention of the audience with the theater troupe, who have the audience's rapt attention with a play that echoes the story of Strahd's loss of Irena.

Part Four (Frogs in the House)
I may cut a few encounters out of this scene if experience in the previous adventure demonstates my players are as disinterested in dungeon crawls as they've suggested they are. Treasure around the house is less fantastic and more classically opulent in nature, in keeping with the family's history.

Plot Knitting: There Is No Honor

Scene 1(A Noble In Need): Unchanged, other than that the Vanderhoren family will have made their wealth as local gang bosses rather than adventurers, a fact which the currently naive Lavinia has managed to avoid acknowledging since taking over their estate.

Scene 2(Trouble on the Blue Nixie): Almost unchanged. The clue in handout #2 will be less fantastical, though I have yet to decide what will replace the various mythical creatures.

Scene 3(The Vanderhoren Vault): Replace the construct with a more low-tech trap - perhaps a poison doorknob coated with zombi powder. (per The Serpent and the Rainbow)

Scene 4(Peril Under Parrot Island): Veldimar Krund and his crew's backstory changes, as does Vanthus' relationship to them. In this version of the story, Vanthus is a willing recruit of the circle of Hags from Ravenloft side plot option "Brook No Rival". Veldimar and his crew were sent to the island already undead, in search of the Shadow Pearl. Veldimar carries fragments of the Book of Strahd and quotes passages from it as he stumbles about the rotting prison where Vanthus trapped him. ("I am the ancient. I am the land.")

Scene 5(The Lotus and the Dragon): Cut down on the magic flying around this scene: Replace some monsters with hungry animals. Consider making Rowyn a non-caster.

Plot Knitting

This entry is more of a brain dump of how I intend to modify the written scenarios to fit Ravenloft to the Savage Tide more appropriately, and weave my characters' plots into the adventures.

I am also losing a war with the common cold and expect my sinuses to be declared a national snot preservation area before much longer. My thoughts are not fully lucid just now.

You have been warned.

---

Preludes:
Other than one last minute addition, none of my players have touched a 20 sided die since before 3rd ed. I'm going to run a shared prelude session detailing how the characters meet, and how they come to the attention of Lavinia Vanderhoren. The session is going to be run in quick cutscenes, jumping between the different characters such that each gets a few moments in the limelight to establish their personality independent of the party, and no one has a chance to get bored. Each cutscene should involve one or two rolls to catch the players up on the mechanics of the game.

Some of the planned scenes, and what they're meant to establish:

For the Dragonblooded Sorcerer:

Our young outcast is stooped over delicate work, lacquering cockatrice eggshells back together to be filled with spices and sent back to the guildmages in far Ulgareth to earn their favor. (Craft:Alchemy check) His concentration is shattered by moaning and calls from above. The master of the Ulgarethi embassy, his overseer for this period of trial apprenticeship, is waking with a wretched hangover from abuse of the wizard's drug Mule. Mule is a powder which has the game mechanical effect of Feebleminding the user, and is praised for its 'healing' and 'relaxing' effects after magical exertions. The sick and abusive mage (no coincidence his guild sent him to their farthest post - they couldn't stand him either) demands the sorcerer prepare a decoction of Red Arvain (a soporific) as a hangover cure. (Craft:Alchemy, check #2)

Cut to:
The escapees. Our elf ranger (PC#2) stowed away on a Ketebrite naval ship to escape the gnolls who assassinated his parents. There he was discovered by the dwarven galley slave(PC#3), who demanded help in escaping in return for not ratting the stowaway out. The two are pondering their seemingly linked fate as they hide on the upper floor of a dockside warehouse, waiting for the Ketebrite naval patrols hunting them to pass. Luck isn't with them, as a pair of the elven sailors enter and start to search the warehouse. As the searchers grow closer, the fugitives see that they have few choices for how to escape. They can try to shimmy down the pillars supporting their floor once the sailors start to search the second floor. (Climb) They can try to cat and mouse past the sailors through the piles of boxes in the warehouse. (Move Silently) If they fail, a fight ensues. The city guard arrive quickly (2 or 3 rounds) and arrest both sides, sending them to seperate cells. If they pass their checks and avoid the fight, they make it to their next hiding place and manage to get some much needed sleep before being woken up by gang members whose turf they've intruded on. Again, the resulting fight is broken up by the city guard and both sides are sent to seperate cells.

Cut to:
The rogue. Actually, I'm still waiting on the rogue's backstory, so I haven't planned her scenes yet.

Cut to:
The sorcerer. Depending on the results of the last alchemy check, his master tells him in agravated or placated tones that there's a shipment of "material components" coming in today, and that he must head down to the docks to retrieve them. Arriving at the designated ship, the sorcerer finds that he's there to pick up a flat of cockatrice eggs. However, the eggs were fertile! They hatched on the last day sailing in to port and the sailors won't even go in the room with them, much less deliver them. A single sleep spell will put all the escaped chicks to sleep, allowing them to be collected safely, but the waves are rough that day, and it takes a concentration check to cast on the barge.

Cut to:
The prison, where the refugees await judgement. The guards open the door to let in a noblewoman. Lavinia Vanderhoren introduces herself, and explains that it was her building they were trespassing in when the guards picked them up for fighting. She comments favorably on the stories she's heard of how they acquitted themselves in the fight, especially if the fight was versus the gang, who had been muscling in on her territory. She offers the two warriors a deal - having the charges against them dropped, gear, and a good salary if they'll work for her.

Cut to: The rogue's scene. Again, not yet established.

Cut to: The sorcerer, returning to the Ulgarethi embassy with the chicks and egg fragments. His master has already awoken from the slumber brought on by the mug of Red Arvain and is dashing about his lab with manic intensity. He barely looks up to tell the sorcerer that his time collecting material components for the guild is complete, and that he should report to Vanderhoren manor for his next assignment; a favor to Lady Vanderhoren, whose parents were friends of the guild.

-- End Preludes, Begin "There Is No Honor" --

She overpowers my usual aversion to blondes.

Will the players be posting anything or is this going to be solely your account? What was your inspiration for your homebrew setting?

Arg... wrote a protracted response to this and the boards ate it. As I'm now on a NyQuil countdown for slumber, I'll re-answer in brief:

a) If any of my players do read this, they should stop here. Spoilers to follow.

b) The world is an attempt to blend my favorite fantasy styles with the things the D&D 3.5 system handles best. That's a short answer that begs a great deal of explanation, but I'm afraid I don't have the time to say it all again right now.

I'm pleased that no one in the party has any magical healing. This is going to aid tremendously in keeping the game gritty. Diseases, festering wounds, hunger, and slow healing will actually be concerns for my party.

Campaign Journal here.

A stench of decay comes off the sea, though the tradesfolk of islands are too thankful for the parting of the storms to pay it mind. The monsoon has ended, and ships sail again along the archipelago. From Ketebris in the north and Mienti to the south, traders rush to complete their business before their nations return to war again. Merchants of the vast 'empire' of Lyssan arrive with holds overflowing with raw materials for the industries of the islands. Crimelords tip their hats to each other, their feuds in check so long as visitors fill the inns and gambling halls of the island. When the storm season comes again and the mainlanders are gone, the streets will run with blood.

---

The plan: A short campaign, ending around level 12. We start off on a heavily modified version of the Savage Tide rewritten to take the party to Strahd's domain rather than the Isle of Dread. After Ravenloft, a few more sessions to wrap up plot threads particular to each of the PCs, and the campaign ends, hopefully with my group of four new players starting to wonder at some of the mysteries woven in from my homebrew campaign world of Kaeth.

Major modifications:
We agreed we wanted a grittier, more realistic game with strong story development. So I'm cutting out a great many of the more fantastic creatures, especially from the early sessions, and replacing them with more NPCs and animals. Undead in the adventures stay, but get used to foreshadow the long reach of Stahd before the party encounters him directly. The society of adventurers that the Vanderhoren elders belonged to gets replaced with another of the rival crimanal gangs of the Four Lighthouses region where Sassarine will be situated in this campaign.

What's happened so far:
Very little. The players have made their major decisions for character creation: race, class, point buy, starting skills and feats. They're starting to feel out the backstories they want for their characters. This is what they've told me, as of the end of the character creation session. We've got:

A human rogue of dubious parentage, built with the classic dexterity prime stat and thieving skill selections. Native to the island.

A young elf, his parents murdered by gnollish assassins for their political meddling. He fled into the wilderness and learned to fend for himself. (Ranger, dex/archery build, favored enemy gnolls. How he got to the Four Lighthouses region remains to be solved.)

A human from the woodland region of Orvanich on the mainland. Driven out of his village due to the magic he barely controlled, he travelled north to Ulgareth, where he hoped the Mage's Guild might help him understand his chaotic gifts. As a first service to earn admission to the guild, he was sent to the Four Lighthouses region to retrieve the rare tradegoods and material components gathered there. (Sorcerer, dragon heritage feats.)

A dwarven galley slave, escaped from the navy of Ketebris and hiding out on the island until his fleet sets sail again. (Classic fighter, cleave sequence build.)

Baudot, if/when your group gets to Expedition to Castle Ravenloft in your campaign I would be really interested to read about their experiences in that adventure in a Campaign Journal if you're up to it.

I'll try to keep one up to date...

I went with 28 point buy in the campaign I just started. I like the humanity of low point buys rather than making super-hero characters, but I also wanted my players to have the option of taking one stat to 18 and still have some flexability left to have one or two other above-average stats.

The campaign is planned to start on a heavily modified version of the Savage Tide Adventure Path (our playgroup agreed we wanted a gritty, brutal, low-magic world, so the magic and the monsters are getting toned down, and there are a shortage of truly 'good' factions other than the PCs) and transition at 5th or 6th level to Expedition to Ravenloft.

...They only have a d8 for hit points instead of the fighter's d10, but that is their only drawback.

They also can't use their armor proficiency beyond light without incurring spell failure chance, can't use their shield proficiency and keep a hand free to cast with, and have to think twice before wielding two handed weapons for the same reason.

Saying they get more spells than a wizard is obfuscatory - they follow a spell progression closer to a sorcerer, with limited spells known. Your first level duskblade only has two spells to choose from, and his choices are only useful at times when they could be smacking somebody with a sword instead. The duskblade doesn't even get the big boom spells. His attack spells are all damage/debuff blends, and the remainder of his spell choices are mostly vanilla buffs. Self-buffing is a big consumer of time, especially in a level 1 combat where hit points are so low.

If duskblades were any less powerful, bards would walk all over them.

Same here. Render took out one of my Campaign Workbook offerings, too.

One thing: Neither of the last two rejections I've gotten have had any commentary on why the articles were turned down. This makes it very difficult to offer the editors what they are looking for. Might I humbly suggest that if they editors were to devote more time to this matter, they might find the quality of submissions they get to turn down improving?

Clearly the conspiracy theories here are correct, except for their exclusion of {censored by Fnord}.

The utopian answer (IMHO) is for Hasbro to fund a buyout of Paizo that results in our favorite designers being brought back into the WotC fold, and getting an irrefusably fat wad of cash in the process.

It could always hold on to the wizard as some sort of insurance policy in case the other three PC's break free from its control, but I'm not fond of that scenario as it would force one of my players to basically sit out the next session. I would much prefer for him to escape, but I'm not sure he can pull it off.

I like this idea. Here's how I'd make it work:

1) Clear the following plan with the wizard's player before the next game session.

2) Have a stand-in character ready for the wizard's player to control while his primary is hostage. The stand-in should be the same level or one level higher than the wizard character, but only have an NPC's worth of loot.

3) Let the player apply all XP earned by the stand-in character to their primary.

4) Make the stand-in someone essential to the short term plot but one who'll vanish at the same time the wizard is rescued. In this case, I really like the idea of the stand-in being a willing agent of The Whisperer. He's sent along to keep tabs on the party and steer them. When the party breaks free of the domination, they take him down and find out from him (or his corpse) where the wizard is being kept. The circumstances of the wizard's prison, once they have the needed information and their freedom, should be a non-encounter for the party. This way the player can get back in the action without pause. One other cool thing about having the player play an agent of the Whisperer who'll be against the party is it gives them a challenge that's the player's style, not your own, which should be refreshing for them. It also gives the wizard's player a chance to try out whatever powergaming twink he's been thinking about for the last few months, but been too much of a mature player to actually put into action. (Note, this whole plan assumes your players are mature.)

Pimp him out with some spinning hubcaps, add a flame-job, and chrome everything.

But seriously, there's a whole section on this in the new Abyss book. Or for a less precise version, you could do that advancing monsters scheme from the back of the MM.

You could also just eyeball it for speed. Give him +3 to all his checks, add some bonus tweak to his major abilities, and give him a clump more HP.

Where is Pett?

I like your suggestion of 're-roll tokens' as a bribe to the players. I'm fond of action points and similar things that let the players enjoy the limelight while they have it without worrying so much about falling on their face just because of a bad die roll in the middle of their plot moments.

That said, because it's a one-shot and I'm a hypocrite, I'm going to be playing a 22nd-level duskblade in a dungeon crawl tonight. I'll let you know of the results. :-)

I'm quite curious to see how that goes. One other weakness I'd expect from the Duskblade in practice would be running out of steam, given their reduced number of castings compared to a true mage and the fact that many of their class abilities work with their spells.

Granted, by 22nd level it will have to be a pretty serious dungeon crawl before you run out of spells...

The ranger and the duskblade are very comperable. The duskblade straight up better at attack spells, getting full levels rather than half levels for caster level value, and starting with spells from first level. Meanwhile, the ranger is getting Favored Enemies, a boaload of feats, far more skill points, and a wider variety of spell types.

I can't think of another class that could do that at first level without being able to heal itself.

Sure, but every class has its niche. Look at duskblades as compared to bards or rangers. In both cases, the classes resemble each other strongly, but there are some trade offs both ways.

I personally find the duskblade uninteresting, because it's an entirely martial class with a +2 circumstance bonus to sitting on the sidelines and twiddling its thumbs during noncombat encounters. Their spell selection isn't good for much other than killing things and their skills are nothing to write home about. Not to say that they're a bad class. They certainly have their advantages, but I'd caution someone about playing one in a game I was running because they're going to be limelight impaired during plots that center on negotiation, investigation, and other themes I devote the occassional gaming session to.

It's actually a cheering thing to see that people are questioning balance with the new classes in the game, as Noonan said in his Reads Bad, Plays Good column about the mystic theurge. However, the internet is a big place and for every class, there's someone out there who thinks its a cheeseball. Take such conversations with a grain of salt.

Might I mention that one thing I often struggle with in proposals is squeezing the adventure synopsis, challenge summary, and flavor teasers into 1,000 words. The one experience I've had with proposing an epic adventure, those had to fight for space with wordcount needed to show that the adventure was one that could stand up to an epic party. (i.e. that the encounters were ones that the party wouldn't skip by use of high level divination magics, routine teleportation, etc.)

Might epic proposals be allowed to go over the 1,000 word limit a bit?