I am wondering if the following would be significant power boost for characters in an Adventure Path to replace the availability of magical items. I am prepping a game and want the world to be low-magic (arcane classes can not go over level 5 / 3rd level spells), and magical items are not abundant.
Therefore the players will not have access to buying magical items and I will be toning down a lot of magical items in the books, giving the ones that I leave in place more special (they will have names and back stories).
So in the place of that I am wondering if I allow the characters a much higher point-buy total (like 25 as I have seen many examples of 25-pt buy characters steamrolling encounters in the APs) and giving them Hero Points if that would make up the difference in the lack of abundant magical items?
I am wondering if the following would be significant power boost for characters in an Adventure Path to replace the availability of magical items. I am prepping a game and want the world to be low-magic (arcane classes can not go over level 5 / 3rd level spells), and magical items are not abundant.
Therefore the players will not have access to buying magical items and I will be toning down a lot of magical items in the books, giving the ones that I leave in place more special (they will have names and back stories).
So in the place of that I am wondering if I allow the characters a much higher point-buy total (like 25 as I have seen many examples of 25-pt buy characters steamrolling encounters in the APs) and giving them Hero Points if that would make up the difference in the lack of abundant magical items?
I'm running a Skype game, and nobody has magic items, and they are all 2nd level. the party has 25 point buy, and max hitpoints for 1st two levels. I threw 5 gnolls, 2 hyenas, and a boss gnoll at them, and they survived, but I had to fudge it from being a TPK. So they can take something 4 to 5 CR's over them.
I may retain some older 3.5E rules I had which was max HP for the first three levels, then adding 25-point buy and hero points should put them at par with characters that are decked out in their magical items. They maybe a little on the high side by level 3, but I think it would balance out in the long run.
I ran a campaign for a while that solved some of these issues. It was 3.5e, but I can convert to Pathfinder...
1) Point buy of 32, but, no one was allowed to have a score below 8
2) Max HP at first level, and after that, roll multiple dice and set a minimum, I used this system
d12: d12, d10, d8, min 6
d10: d10, d8, d6, min 5
d8: d8, d6, min 4
d6: d6, d4, min 3
d4: d4, d3, min 2
3) I created lists of "flavor feats" and required everyone to pick one at 1st level. (So, if someone really wanted to play a armor-laden dwarf cleric who had the Run feat, for flavor purposes, it was fine, and the player didn't have to compromise the character to do so.)
4) I created lists of "power feats" for 7th, 13th and 19th level that were also extras, that everyone got for free, and that included things like the ability to do 1d6 damage of fire or cold or acid (for example) so many times per day.
The players liked it, it worked, and I didn't have to have magic shops on every street corner. (Actually, I couldn't because of the kind of campaign it was.)