Well, I'm starting AoW on Tuesday night and have never run D&D 3.5 or pre-made adventures. Anyone have any suggestions for starting out? Things to recommend to my players? Things to disqualify? Point buy balance or luck of the roll?
Welcome to 3.5! I have had great swing of opinions from my player since we converted over about a year ago. My players have gone from moaning and complaining "we have to learn more rules!?" to jumping with enthusiasm "awesome! I tumble through the ogres legs and sneak attack him from behind! Oh, and by the way, can my buddy join us starting next week??" My group has doubled in size since the conversion and I now run a second gaming session to allow the players to "level up" their backup characters.
Fairness - that to me is truly the one shining word that has captured my respect for the 3.5 version. Many of the 2nd edition extras were blatent "one ups" on the work of the previous authors. My advice would be have a ball with all of it because no one player is going to be outdoing the others, they all have a great career ahead of them! (if they live that long!)
Point buys or luck of the dice? There I can only advise that we have seen alot of "superhero" characters in my game. We use the luck of the dice type of character generation. Many of the PC's have at least two(2) stats above 16. One player even managed to roll six(6) strait 15's! Because of this I have thrown a few encounters at them that are harder than normal, and they have enjoyed it.
Last piece of advice - Don't give out high magic weapons too soon! I have had a bit of trouble for about three months now because of that tiny mistake. +2 or better weapons in the hands of 4th and 5th level characters makes alot of adventures much easier on the PCs.
Hope this helps and good luck!
I believe in point buys, too (28 pts for us).
I've seen the same problem with "super-characters." With 28 pts there are few 18s -- where are we supposed to think all these super-human specimens came from? And then they joined together by pure happenstance? :/
Regards,
Jack
Last piece of advice - Don't give out high magic weapons too soon! I have had a bit of trouble for about three months now because of that tiny mistake. +2 or better weapons in the hands of 4th and 5th level characters makes alot of adventures much easier on the PCs.
Hope this helps and good luck!
lol, I think the guy in my game with a lvl 9 half drow fighter with elite stats and 2 magic sabers, 1 is a flaming (extra 1d6) +2 with greater magic weapon permancy and the other ice enchanted and +2. Then the high lvl mage made him stuff to make his AC 27 and his strengh 28, is the worst. I think I screwed him up.
I've played a fair bit of 3.5 and other D20, and am running an AE homebrew campaign. In my homebrew I let the characters roll 5d6 and drop the lowest two. I think that was a mistake, at level one a human unfettered has a +7 to hit with a bonded masterwork rapier with weapon focus. I have to make all the encounters tougher. The bad part is one of the characters ended up with only one 15 and thirteen, the rest were lower. I think I might do the 28 point buy for five characters.
I use point buy when I DM (typicaly 32, though sometimes lower, and I am entertaining thoughts of doing a high powered campaign with something like 44 points), but everyone else in my group who DM's does die rolling. Granted, rolling is more fun, and you have a chance to get much better than anything you'll get with point buy, but we have at least one guy in our group who is known to fudge a roll here and there in his favor, and I'm tired of having such a varied power level in our group. Point buy keeps everyone honest, and everyone even, which might or might not be what your looking for.
As far as what to allow and what not to, I would recomend sticking with the Players Handbook right now, especialy if your just starting. The core classes work well together as long as you have an even mix, which doesn't always happen when you allow base classes from other books. Races are sorta kinda balanced with eachother, except for half elves (which are exactly that, statisticly half of an elf), and the half orc (who makes a good warrior type, and a poor everything else). In my game I gave half elves skills like a human, and half orc a humans bonus feat. It's more a quick fix that gives the race enough umph that I don't feel weird using them as NPCs, considering no one in my current group has showed the sleightest interest in playing a half orc, and the people who would be interested in the half elf just end up playing the elf anyways.
Once you start getting familiar with the game, and your players, look into things like the Expanded Psionics Handbook, or the Complete series and Races of. There is a good ammount of third party material out there, but there is an even bigger amount of crap. Be careful when you pick something up, even if you've liked that componies work before. I love GreenRonin, but after looking at Bastards and Bloodlines my faith got a kick right square in the pants.
Creative Director
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I believe in point buys, too (28 pts for us).
I've seen the same problem with "super-characters." With 28 pts there are few 18s -- where are we supposed to think all these super-human specimens came from? And then they joined together by pure happenstance? :/
Regards,
Jack
Well... my theory is this: Player Characters aren't normal people. If they were normal people, they'd have average stats and would live lives as cobblers, coopers, or owlbear snacks. Remember: The Player Characters are the main characters of your campaign. If they don't all end up in the same group, what's the point?
I agree with James. I use the 9d6, 8d6, 7d6, etc. method. Most of the characters end up in the 40-50 point range. Yes, they're tough, yes they are way above the norm, but I always customize published material to ensure that I challenge them sufficiently.
3.5's focus seems to be more on "cinematic" action, which is cool. If you want to run a lower powered game, it's certainly easy to do so, but the "cinematic" action is a blast to DM and to play.
In my campaign we use the "75 points" system. Which means you have 75 points to divide between the 6 abilities, thus you could have the str 13 dex 13 con 13 int 12 wis 12 chr 12 character or something else, like 15,15,15,10,10,10. Basicly the pc's are elite "elite" because the elite score amounts to 73 points. (15+14+13+12+10+8=73)
We've been doing this for years and it works beautifully.
I think it's a 2nd edition leftover ;>
Personally, I can't stand rolling. There are, after all, only three outcomes, and they are all bad. You can roll below average, which sucks. You can roll average, which is ok, but always leaves you feeling slightly disappointed and a little envious of the person in the group who rolled well (there always is one). Or you can roll well, which is cool for you, but can be frustrating for the other players. Especially when the DM has to increase the difficulty of the encounters to challenge the player who rolled well, and because he is the only one capable of dealing with the new challenge level, everyone else feels like spectators. I understand that some people think that the randomness adds to the fun, but not me.
Point buy is ok, but it has some problems too. For one thing, there are very rarely any odd scores, which bugs me. For another, it rewards some character types more than others, namly, those with only 1 or 2 key stats.
IMC players can choose one of the three following arrays to make their characters:
* 17, 16, 14, 13, 10, 8
* 16, 15, 14, 13, 12, 10
* 18, 16, 15, 10, 9, 8
This gives puts everyone on an equal footing, provides enough good stats to make pretty much any character concept viable, (IMO) gives players the feeling that their characters are powerful, but not overpowered, and throws a couple of odd scores in there to make people think a little more about where they want to put their 4th and 8th level stat bumps.
This has been working great for us, YMMV of course.
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I believe in point buys, too (28 pts for us).
This is the best way to create characters. I use it to, having seen how great it works when I got involved in the Living Greyhawk campaign. The 25-point buy is too low, and 32 points is too high. A player can customize his or her character's ability scores. We use the LG method for hit points, too. Full hit points at first level. Then, half of your character's class hit die, plus one, plus constitution bonus, if any.
I strongly recommend the 28-point buy system.
Happy gaming
Don Kenneth Brown
Salt Lake City, Utah
I prefer an assigned point aray tha all players use. When I run AoWAP (Decemberish right now), I will be using 15,14,13,12,12,10 as the Ability array. What I am doing different this time is making the players roll a table for race. All the characters will start as residents of Diamond Lake, I am hoping that this 'trapping' will add to their characters. Players will start with a 5-6 page personalized handout descrbing what they know of Diamond Lake and how they fit into the town. Hoping it works out for the best.
where are we supposed to think all these super-human specimens came from? And then they joined together by pure happenstance? :/
So make sure it isn't happenstance. In the adventure you could put in a celestial, like Nidrama from AP1, who is tasked with stopping the Age of Worms. Insert an encounter in which a disguised Nidrama-like creature gets the group together and perhaps even drops the initial hint about the whispering cairn.
Later there could be a 'oh my gosh!' moment in which they realized they were all either 'destined' or manipulated into the present circumstances.
So the Nidrama-like creature orchestrated a meeting of those she considered to have the most potential...
Sean Mahoney
Well... my theory is this: Player Characters aren't normal people. If they were normal people, they'd have average stats and would live lives as cobblers, coopers, or owlbear snacks. (...)
Exactly my thinking, so here's what I've been using:
1) 5d6, keep the best 3d
2) After stats are assigned and any racial bonuses/penalties are applied, any stat that's less than 12 gets boosted to 12.
This scheme makes sure that PCs are above-average, yet it still doesn't seem to make them too powerful. My players certainly took a beating in the first two sessions of AoW...
Or maybe the AoW is tougher than average. Or maybe I'm just getting ornery in my old age...
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I've been having players roll 4d6 to generate three sets of six stats. The player then chooses the set they want and places them in any order. On average, PCs have a total +8 bonus from their abilities. I've used this since '86 and find the occasional low score is as much fun to roleplay for my players as the occasional 18. The occasional "high-fantasy" game that I've run I'll allow 5d6 or 4d6, re-roll ones.
Ultimately, it's the players' ability to be clever that determines their success than whether their stats are high enough.
Personally, I prefer a dice roll. My experience with the point buy system is that the newbie (there's always one out there somewhere) is thoroughly confused and frustrated, ("Why can't I buy 18 for the same cost as 14?")and then there's the tendency for a party of adventurers who all have stats within 1 or 2 points of each other. That's probably due to a lack of experience and a little bit of "but they're all so gooooood,"
One thing that's definitely is not a good idea is 3d8. I did that once when I had only 3 players to give them a fighting chance... Then a 4th and 5th player showed up and we've got a party of 5th levels taking on ELs 9 and 10. Nasty and alot of work.( Oh... another young adult green dragon? But I've got shopping, you guys take care of it and call me when mama shows up.) I was about ready to have a secret demon summoner call forth a Ba'alor and accidently smudge the summoning circle just to end it all. Take my advice, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Oh and just in case you wanted to know the rules of that uber-elite farce, it was a) 3d8, reroll 1s & 2s (darn the co-DM) and a 24 gets rerolled and a free reroll of the lowest stat; b) scores capped at 22. c) scores over 20 go into a negative score adjustment. Maybe if I had a fixed stat roll instead of arrange to taste...
I always use point-buy. It keeps the characters relatively even while rewarding a bit of smart character design. Here's what I'd recommend.
1. Allow 28 points (32 if the players are all new to D&D) for players to build their characters and give players full HP at first level
2. Don't allow players to have scores above 19 or below 7 (after racial modifications).
3. Offer a few arrays of scores for players who don't want to do the point buy math.
4. Direct the characters to an online point buy calculator so there's no confusion. (My favorite, though the site is slow-loading, is at http://www.pathguy.com/cg35.htm)
You might want to set specific guidelines for what supplements the players can use to create their PCs. For example, I allow all of the PHB classes and some (scout, ninja, warlock) but not all (spellthief, samurai, spirit shaman) of the "Complete" book basic classes.
Set aside plenty of time for the players to make their characters. Ideally, give them a chance to start building characters before your first session, because the time-consuming process of character creation can be disheartening if the players are expecting to actually play during your first meeting.
How I run it is that the players get the ability scores of 18/16/16/14/12/10, arranged as desired. This gives good stats, but lacks the randomness of rolling, which is a double edged sword. You can't get lucky or unlucky in rolling.
I like the way it's done in Iron Heroes. All stats start at 10 and you have something like 24 points to spend to increase them. To increase a stat to above 15 costs two points instead of one. To increase a stat to above 17 costs four points instead of one. You can optioinally reduce a 10 stat to 8 and spend those two points elsewhere.