ASEO mentioned this in the Failed Wil Save thread, but I thought it was cool enough to deserve its own thead.
The idea was that characters gain all the normal benefits of levelling up, except that their HP stay at the first-level maximum. Skills, particularly sneaky skills like Move Silently or Hide, become much more important. Even a simple fight with a couple orcs could be deadly. Tensions always run high.
Sounds like an awful lot of fun to me. :-)
So, how would this kind of campaign be balanced? Leaving the higher-CR creatures intact would make them almost unkillable for PCs, dooming the players to constant fights against kobolds and goblins and the like. But if you restrict everything to one HD, that's equally unrealistic -- can you imagine an ancient dragon having the same hit dice as an orc? Maybe you could add hit dice based on CR, so monsters from CR6-10 for example would have up to 2 hit dice, monsters from CR11-15 would have three, and so on. You could also do it by creature size -- Large creatures can have up to 2 HD, Huge up to 3 HD, Gargantuan up to 4 etc, or possibly on an exponential scale so Huge has up to 4, Gargantuan up to 8, etc. (I forget the actual order of sizes). Or combine the two, so a Huge CR6 creature would have 4HD.
What about spell damage? If left unchecked, a well-placed Fireball spells instant death for anyone it hits. Admittedly that's a lot of fun for the players when they're the ones tossing the fireballs, but it's not so great when the entire party's annihilated in a single firey burst. Higher-level spells can be expected to annihilate entire groups at once -- meteor swarm is your friend ;-) -- but some of the lower-level spells suddenly become horribly overpowered.
Here's an idea of my own... Give the characters an extra hit point every fourth or fifth level, or alternatively give them the choice to spend their bonus ability score point on an extra hit point instead. That second choice might be better, because it means the player has to give up the ability point bonus to get the extra hit point. In either event, it does give the characters a slow increase in their ability to take damage. Then again, Toughness gives three extra hit points, so the players still have the chance to make their characters tougher. Maybe put a limit on Toughness so you can only take it once or twice?
Anyway. Like I said, it was a cool idea that really caught my interest. What does everyone else think?
I kept using different low HD chretures (remember that they were facing a Goblin army) for the combat oriented sessions.
Running entry level modules also worked well. DUNGEON Magazine was absolutely in valuable for this. Many of their adventures are "Mission" like. also, I could easily replace creatures in the adventures with lower HD equivialnts. If anyone is interested, I can try to hunt down my old notes and post some of the Modules I used. Like I have mentioned before in other posts, I tend to build my campaigns by linking modules and adventures from DUNGEON into a complete campaign. The fact that DUNGEON now has the variable levels for the adventures makes this type of campaign even easier.
Every fight doesn't have to be ballenced, There is nothing like watching the party burst into a chamber and slice the guards down with single blow efficiency leaving a bloody trail behind. Then seising the holy relic they were sent to recover off the altar all with out getting a scrape becuse they planned the mission well. Then watch them run for their lives as the traps they hadden't anticipated go off and something to powerfull for them to fight is summoned. Their motto was "We don't have to kill everything...but sometimes we do just for fun."
For sessions that required more than hack and slash I used a few highte level foes that could easily kill the characters. A troll was a true terror and would wade through the troops of good.
Yes, a Fire ball could kill dozens, but there wern't many beings in the game that could cast them, and what are dozens of goblins in a hoard of a hundred thousand.
The enemy spell casters tended to not have access to huge dammage spells. The PC's tended to use them as "Rocket Launchers" or "Grenades". One mission had the party teleported to a place on the battle field where an enemy caster had thrown a Fire ball and cooked a phalanx of elves. The party made a quick hit. found the caster who had already blown his heavy damage spells. The PCs then had to kill his body guard and take him out before he retired to rememorize.
I got ideas for many sessions from old war movies, like "Where Eagles Dare", and "Guns of Navarone". Just because all your foes are Germans, or goblins in my case, doesn't make it any less fun if the action is intense and the players are kept thinking.
Characters could get extra Hp based on gaining CON throgh spells, Rage, and leveling up. I allowed a PC to have the Max Hp for any class they possessed, so through the rampant multi classing everyone ended up with a fighter's or barbarian's HP.
The Multi classing also kept the caster levels lower. Most characters were at least first level clerics, Fighters from 3-6, Rogues 3-6, Sorcerers 2-5, at least first level barbarians for the movement and HP and Rage. I also allowed Paladins and Monks to Multi class as long as they stayed Lawful.
An acient Red Dragon? Armies would cower, Kingdom's tremble. Thankfully there are only a few rumors of their existance.
ASEO out
Hrm... It would definitely change the pace of a typical D&D campaign! I think I might mull this one over and see if I can talk some players into trying it out. If you do happen to have the old notes handy, I'd appreciate it, just to see how you ran it. If they're not handy, don't worry about it.
ASEO, you should seriously propose this to Paizo as an article for Dungeon. I know I'd love to see this kind of article in the magazine. I don't know, maybe I'm the only one, but it can't hurt to ask, right? :-)