I want to inject some real thrill into my adventure paths. I am currently running Carrion Crown but I am enormously tempted to run Kingmaker but with either 10 or 15 points.
Do you guys think that a 10 point buy is just cruel or could it feasibly work?
We're doing a 15 point buy and it's a wonderfully balanced and enjoyable game. For perspective, were use to rolling 4d6, reroll 1s, and throw out the lowest roll - so the power differential is drastic but very enjoyable.
I'd say try the 10 point buy and see how folks like it!
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Anything lower than a 15 pt buy to me is a hard sell with most groups. Even if I squint my eyes and wear rose colored glasses, its hard to see that as heroic. If you are concerned about higher stats, I would suggest using a stat array, like 15,14,13,12,10,8 or 16,14,14,12,10,8.
The final call rests on knowing your group and what is okay with them.
If you are used to playing with the equivalent of a 25-30 pt buy, thoes stat arrays or a 15 pt buy are going to seem like playing a crippled character.
Our group used the above stat array and an added whole ability point to one stat at 2nd lvl. That balanced things quite well for our group power-wise and still let people make the builds they were after.
I'd be running the game here, so there isn't an established group to bounce this off of. I think that 15 is probably low enough to offer a challenge but not to scare people off. In order to cover as many bases as possible, I'm contemplating running the 6-player conversion.
Kingmaker straight out of the books is written for a 15-point buy party of 4. If you don't actually have 6 people, I would heavily recommend against using the conversions if you're going with 15 PB or lower.
Yeah, I think I'll roll with 15 point buy. Game will be on the forum so I'll recruit six.
I want to inject some real thrill into my adventure paths. I am currently running Carrion Crown but I am enormously tempted to run Kingmaker but with either 10 or 15 points.
Do you guys think that a 10 point buy is just cruel or could it feasibly work?
Kingmaker has a reputation as a really easy AP. If you get good players it still won't be thrilling. You might want to use another AP for that.
... really? *looks at obits thread and all the random encounter kills* First I've heard of "easy"...
I was going to say the same, although I guess that if you miss some of the random encounters then the difficulty curve might well drop a bit.
It can be very dangerous even without random encounters
you can easily wander off and find an area with a set encounter 4-5 levels above your APL
Yep, which is why it only drops a bit ;)
I'm going on holiday for the latter half of August so I'll look to kick things off in September for anyone who is interested. Looking rather forward to it now.
Our group used the above stat array and an added whole ability point to one stat at 2nd lvl. That balanced things quite well for our group power-wise and still let people make the builds they were after.
That just gave me an interesting idea. Choose a heroic array, but add attribute points every 2 levels instead of every 4... but not the same stat twice in a row. I think it'd work best at a 6-8 level start range, so you'll have gotten a few points already to customize your array.
We used a 15-pt buy with 5 players to start and at least 4 at all sessions, and it's still lethal from time to time. 10 would be a challenge, 15 is ideal. 20 might be boring.
For my group, everyone rolled one set of 4d6-drop-lowest, and I picked the result sets which everyone was allowed to use. As it happens, three people rolled sets which worked out to 32-point buy (IIRC - it might have been 28, with one 32 that got thrown out), so I let everyone choose from those three. It's definitely made them overpowered, but not so much so that things are too easy. They're also overleveled at the moment. And there's 6 of them, so I'm already using the 6-player conversion.
The long and short of it, is that they're still having fun, and they've had to use hero points to avoid death, but it's definitely on the easy side overall.