I was wondering though, this time around about what books I should use.
To be fair I should probably allow the PCs access to most books used to create the npcs (I dont have a full list, anyone?).
Hiya.
After being victim to both Savage Tide and Shackled City (never finished either; combining both AP's, our total PC death toll was somewhere near half-a-thousand characters...I'm not exaggerating). One of the primary reasons (aside form a relatively killer DM) was the proliferation of "one-up" books featuring rules breaking/bending feats, classes, magic items, etc. It basically turned into Rifts in terms of power level. In other words, if someone made a uber-character (say, half-brass golem/minotaur hulking hurler), any fight that would be a challenge to him would *completely* wipe out the other PC's (that is a fact; that's how our Savage Tide campaign ended just two weeks ago). And anything that is a challenge to the 'normal' PC's isn't even worth the uber-characters time to wake up.
So...my suggestion; CORE RULES ONLY! That's PHB, DMG, MM1. Period. End of discussion. Done. Finito. For any NPC's that use crap from other books...just drop them or substitute them for something from the core rules. Any monster that comes from something other than MM1, switch with a MM1 monster or VERY carefully go over what it can do.
Better yet, don't use 3.x. Use some other system and then convert it "in flavor" to your chosen system; you can make all the appropriate changes as needed for your game and groups power level.
My players have access to the core books, PHB II, the complete books and the Forgotten Realms books. Since they are experienced players and since two of them are min-maxers (who advise the other two), I have a party that is too powerful for the AP as it is written. This forces me to rework most of the NPCs the party faces.
The choice is yours, really. How experienced are your players and how good are they at min-maxing? These two factors will determine your party's strength. Adding more books to choose feats and prestige classes from will obviously make a big difference in the end equasion. So try to figure out how much adding extra books will affect your game and work out whether or not you're willing to accept that effect (and the consequences it might have for you when preparing the game).
What I did for my AoW: I allowed only core and made it possible for everyone to use select feats, magic items and presitge classes with my consent. Wizards could research spells from other sources (although they have no time in the AoW AP for this) or find them if I chose so. If you have a a homogenous group in regards to min-maxing-experience, you could chose, to give them full access to everything, or limit them to core, if the group is mixed, only allow core, otherwise the min-maxers startle the other players at every bend.
And don't worry about the NPCs, they are from different ages/societies etc. they have surprising new abilities, I would just keep them as is and maybe allow my players afterwards to mimic the new features they watched in action. And only allow things you have the book for and are quite familiar with.
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I'm kinda having a hard time with player min/maxing too. As a player, I enjoy it myself, but as a DM it causes major balancing issues.
I just finished Whispering Cairn a couple weeks ago. When I min/maxed Kullen's crew they almost TPKed the party; but when I left the Filge encounter as written, it was way too easy. So I need to play around with how much I can boost things without it being too much. But that's a problem I've had for a while as a DM.
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While the temptation to allow only the core books is there, it sucks if some of your players shell out some hard-earned cash to buy some supplements, only to be told they can't use them until the campaign is finished. We played through all of Shackled City with every book allowed, and ended up with only 4 character deaths for the whole campaign, all of which took place in the first half of the campaign. There would've been more deaths, but we had action points and some lucky rolls to save our bacons. The only books which seemed unbalancing were the Spell Compendium and the Tome of Battle: Book of Nine Swords, with the additions of spells such as mass conviction and a warblade cohort.
We started Age of Worms this spring, and I allowed my players the use of the Complete series, the Races books, the PH2, and the Spell Compendium, but with the right to veto anything I thought of as unbalancing. As a DM, I've also made use of the Magic Item Compendium, which is way more balanced than the DMG. So far we're 3/4 of the way through Hall of Harsh Reflections, and I haven't encountered many problems. In fact, I managed to kill 4 PC's in the incredibly difficult Three Faces of Evil. Lately, I've had to make certain encounters more difficult, but that mostly stems from the fact that I have 6 PC's and 1 cohort, all of which used the 5d6 method of generating stats and have had access to a few fate points from the very beginning.
I am currently running AoW and am now at The Champion,s Belt. My pc's are not munchkins or rookies, they all play balanced PCs. Best thing to do, is to allow whatever books you please(or they can find), but you MUST use a point buy for stats. Many of the feats, skill tricks, etc. are just fine as is, BUT, the stats they use would quickly unbalance later on. The point buy will also eliminate the superhero (18, 18,17,14 blah blah) player with the super rolls and allow you to tailor the encounters for the Group, and not just Superman. All of my players use 4d6 reroll 1's. My lowest stat in the group is the Half-Orc with a Cha of 11. They have slain everything thrown against them.
We used the floating reroll method (DMG page 169, example 4) and it works great. Decent stats, some players are luckier than others. Some of us have single digit stats etc. A good and balanced way to roll imo.
Some things will keep you moving in the AoW nicely...
1) A well-balanced Party - If you have 4, this means theres not much room to play around. One dedicated healer, One burly warrior type, a trap remover, and an arcane dmg caster (preferably with AoE). So many threads in this and other forums complain about TPKs, and when you read their party composition, they are usually lacking something as they tend to want to play the "new cool" thing.
2) CORE BOOKS ONLY!™ - :) This is important. The splatbook syndrome kind of ruins any edition IMHO. Sometimes the exotic classes/prestige classes are overpowered, underpowered, etc. I still say this is what breaks most games. Sometimes it doesnt look all that powerful on paper till you playtest it yourself though.
Some dangers to look out for...
1) Multiclassing too early (i.e. Jack of all trades, master of none) - another TPK waiting to happen, judging by alot TPK threads.
Getting access to high level spells asap is essential to meat grinder campaigns. Not having Neutralize Poison (for example) because your Cleric decided to take a level or two of Fighter, can kill a PC quickly. Death Ward is another higher level spell you want to get rather quickly for the AoW. Having a fireball at level 5 also saved the group from a tpk once or twice.
2) Keep rolling behind the screen when monsters attack PCs. There are times when you will want to be easier on PCs with low resources. Fudging rolls while preserving the sense of danger to your PCs makes for maximum enjoyment. :)
My current AoW campaign (at the Hall of Harsh Reflection)is on hold as well due to scheduling problems of one player. I hope to continue DM'ing the AoW soon.
So...my suggestion; CORE RULES ONLY! That's PHB, DMG, MM1. Period. End of discussion. Done. Finito.
If I was starting again, I would BAN the Spell Compendium and BAN the Magic Item Compendium. At present, i have imposed a +25% penalty on the prices in the MIC to try to rein it in a little.
The problem with the MIC is that many of the items are not just bonuses - they do special things that change the mechanics in unpredictable ways.
2 problems at present:
1) Dwarf fighter with go-go gadget arms - 15' reach 3 times a day. This person is a severe metagamer, too, as I found out last session.
2) Beguiler who, as their 'extra' spell, chose this ranged-touch spell from the SC that limits the opponent to a standard action per round. No save.
Oh - I also have a half-ogre war hulk with gloves of throwing: make a ranged attack with a goliath hammer, 3 times a day.
The rogue wants to be a pyrokineticist. About the only regular character is the cleric.
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My suggestion: don't be afraid to change encounters.
AoW is very popular, and it may be that one or more of your players has copies of the Dungeon magazines with the adventures or has been perusing these message boards.
I have made a point of making significant changes to a least one major encounter in every Adventure so far - this keeps the metagamers on their toes and makes it hard for them to build their characters in confident anticipation of what is to come.
My 2p worth.
First off, let me wish you as much heart-stopping action, jumping-around-singing joy and truly hilarious death in your run-through of the AoWAP as we had in ours.
Our trip through the AoW AP was a fairly dodgy balancing act. Human paladin/freedom variant, half-dragon warmage, shifter druid/moonspeaker, human ninja (brief stint as a bugbear), minotaur barbarian/reaping mauler and, last couple of issues, tiefling warlock.
Worth noting is that we lost the players of both the paladin and the warmage before fighting Ilthane and before Prince Zeech's party.
It's been a bit of a rollercoaster, particularly for the poor DM, who had never run a game before (and who will never let us get that fruity with our characters again), but all of us being experienced players helped smooth over the rough parts pretty well.
It helped that we're used to using whatever books come to hand, with the universal rule; "Core is fine, anything else, ask the DM." To begin with, the DM just ran the first issue as printed and made a whole bunch of notes on any issues that cropped up and how to address them. From then on it really was just a matter of understanding what the characters could do and doing some pre-emptive tweaking to the encounters, with extra tweaks on the fly when things were looking a little too easy. Even extra secret-HP and a couple of extra prepared spells, or a potion and a fudged roll to get away and drink it can make just enough difference to an encounter without it being too challenging.
One of the things our DM did with every 'important' enemy was carefully check all the prepared spells and decide in advance whether they were likely to use them against our particular party. Anything he realistically could swap out for something else a little more useful, he generally did. Of course you have to make sure you do this convincingly enough so it doesn't look like cheating, but it's fairly easy to get away with if you don't overdo it.
I'm currently running the STAP for the same group, and we've got a similar party set-up in terms of fruity abilities (skirmish...oh lord, SKIRMISH *bangs head on table*), but I'm using similar tactics here again. I know a lot of people don't like the supplements, and my own personal view is that, so much of the core stuff is tweaked at every gaming table to fit our individual group's needs, I don't see why it's so hard to do with the supplemental stuff either. Of course, I can see both sides of the argument, and the introduction of a lot of this extra material can break a game if not managed properly. However, I use the rule that, if the players can use the supplements, so can I. Class levels for monsters, swapping out feats/abilities, sometimes classes/prestige classes...
One thing I will say is that we used the 4d6, disregard the lowest roll for our stats. Also, everyone rolled two stat lines and picked their favourite. (We did this for both the AoW and the ST.) This made for some fairly significant differences in characters to begin with (the minotaur, for example, gets a total +8 Str increase and +6 [I believe] Con increase over the course of 8 levels...couple that with 4 ability points, a Belt of Giant Strength, and a natural 18 to begin with and you're looking at a prodigious score.) What you tend to end up with is a couple of fairly average-stat characters, and a couple of heroic-stat characters. This can be unbalanced in itself.
We're starting the Rise of the Runelords after christmas and everyone has voted for a point-buy system this time around, just to keep things a little more balanced from the get-go. We'll still be using the supplements, but I think all our base classes/races are coming from the PHB, so the supplements are literally going to be supplemental, probably just with prestige classes (although there are normally only a couple of those per campaign) and a couple of feats taken from them.
We do also use the MIC, and have had no trouble with it as of yet. Some of the item sets can get a bit crazy, but if you don't like them you can always just say that they're unique pieces and will require some work to get. This has the added bonus of extra adventures incurred in getting hold of all the pieces from a set, only to discover that one or more of the items have been tainted or altered in some way and the only way to restore them to their former glory is to go on another adventure to find the crazy Red Wizard of Knowledge in the Desert of Death, but the Wizard has been spirited away to the Aquatic Undercity of Soggy Doom and you have to bla bla bla.
You know...something like that ;)
Anyway, that turned into a bit of a ramble, and I think everything I said had already been mentioned, so feel free to roll your eyes and scroll past.
What I find most interesting in the discussions of what books to allow is that most of the time the issues described by folks seem to come down to (in my mind at least) issues with the DM or issues with players... not really issues with the rules themselves or additions from the books.
Sean Mahoney
What I find most interesting in the discussions of what books to allow is that most of the time the issues described by folks seem to come down to (in my mind at least) issues with the DM or issues with players... not really issues with the rules themselves or additions from the books.
Sean Mahoney
I tend to agree. In the same sense that "No adventure ever survives its first encounter with the players", we can say that "No rules ever survive their interpretations".
My experience has been that one of the key ways of maintaining play balance is keeping the stats reasonable. 25 or 28 point buy means that its much more difficult to make a really broken twinkie build. This way they can only be really good at something at the price of being weak in a bunch of other areas.
I think the supplement books are, in general, a benefit. A don't allow a couple of them, Book of Nine Swords and the Spell Compendium being the ones I find most problematic. Otherwise I think their generally fine. PHBII does make the players more powerful but I allow this one becuase it tends to address weak points in the game. Some useful but not broken swift action spells to allow Sorcerers to benefit at mid to high levels from their large number of spell slots available and lots of good feats for the mid to high level fighter are the big benefits of this book.
As a DM I'd be willing to veto some race builds. Races like Vampire and Pixie have special abilities that can break the game, even with level adjustments, in a way that say Half-Dragon won't. So I'd be careful about what races I allowed into the players to take. Otherwise the DM does need to reserve the right to veto anything thats really busted. Dust of Sneezing and Choking for example or the Frenzied Berserker but most of the time this is not necessary.
Pretty much I find that keeping the stats reasonable (by which I mean fairly low) means that the supplement books don't break things normally while a combination of lots of books and really high stats means that the players can make some truly busted builds that will ruin the campaign.