I'm currently participating in a custom campaign with a group of friends which has been going on for slightly over a year now. In the playing of it, we have founded an independent adventurer's guild in-game, and rapidly attracted a great deal of attention and money to ourselves.
The release of ultimate campaign seemed perfect for this campaign. A great deal of downtime, and a wide political spectrum to stake a claim to fame in. UCam comes out and I give it a thorough read-through, show it to the GM. He seems to like the stuff they have there, and he's keen to introduce some of it.
Then I go to the other players, and suddenly the world's gone to Rovagug. A fair chunk of them do not seem to like these new rules (Specifically, fame, honor and the downtime system).
Their reasons against it seem to be as follows:
-Fame and honor punish those with low charisma, and reward those with high charisma. Disproportionate effects would be unfair, and we should be equal in this regard.
-Fame and honor would promote disharmony amongst the party
-Downtime favors skill heavy characters
-Downtime would require additional work to keep track of effectively
-Retraining would be broken because we could reschedule the campaign timeline to fit retraining programs, and retraining is (apparently?) broken
-People would be unhappy at having to talk more in-character as a result of these rules (I swear someone actually raised this as a point.)
I of course would very much like to see the new rules bought into play, but I do have more than a little bias in this matter.
What do you think? Are their reasons valid or not? Did any of you bring in new rules mid campaign, and how'd it turn out for you? If you were to bring new rules in, how would you do it?
Greetings and salutations, comrade!
I guess one of the big arguments is "Downtime would require additional work to keep track off". Which can't be argued against and simply is the truth. If they don't want to do that paperwork as a majority, I'd say keep things as they are, informal and without any hard stats and rules.
Charisma barely factors into honor at all. The whole range goes from 0 to 100, and a Charisma 20 sorcerer only has a 6 point advantage over a Charisma 8 barbarian. Once the barbarian has performed two or three noteworthy deeds, that difference doesn't even exist anymore.
The Skill Bonus benefit for spending honor is only useless to characters who never try to use any Charisma based skills at all. But there are still the Favor and Loan benefit, that don't include Charisma at all.
And Honor only devides the party if the characters chose incompatible honor codes. That's the same thing as having lawful neutral and chaotic good characters in the same group. If the characters already go along with each other fine, they probably have similar concepts of what is honorable, and so would chose the same or similar honor codes, so no problem there.
I don't like Retraining either and don't use it in my games.
Well, we introduced it in our ongoing Faerun campaign and over the week we took everyone did something a little different while we stayed at a Harper base.
We have a crafter Elven Wizard (who also plays a psuedo-NPC Half-Orc Fighter), I'm a Battle Cleric and we have a rogue who is relatively new to the game.
Our Wizard used his downtime to research spells, got to roleplay with the DM via an intelligent/possessed item, scribe scrolls and enchant magic items for us (win for all of us, half price magic arms and armor!).
I used the time to take scribe scroll (luckily we had just leveled) and take down circumstantial spells we may need (which we actually used during the session and I was really happy I did it), PvP spar with our Rogue so she could get an idea of different tactical manuevers she can pull off, and the Half Orc who is way more experienced than me, and then research some story hooks (Our rogue is a Spellfire Channeler and very secretive about it.)
Our Rogue got to roleplay scouting with the Ranger NPC, got some hooks for our next side outting, and after we sparred spent the rest of the time looking at different combat options and feat paths.
We were all very excited about the downtime rules, but maybe you just need to let them figure out what they want to do with the downtime outside of the rules presented.
What about fame as they present it? How's that turning out?
Fame seems way too complicated to be practical.
There is shared fame, alternative identities with separate fame, good fame and bad fame, and then you get Prestige Points, which are just another form of Hero Points, I think.
Honor seems a much better Reputation system.
We haven't dove into that much. Our DM is finishing up college courses while working so he's introducing stuff slow. The group also likes to pick and choose stuff we want to introduce and he decides to add it.
We played with the backgrounds a whole bunch, but we're not touching the kingdom building rules except to create a base down the road or some of the other systems you mentioned. Maybe they're just overloaded with all these new rules dumped on their heads.
Do your other group members have the book to look over the rules in their own time? Maybe that's the real issue.
Most of them do not, but the most vocal against it do.
I'm hoping that the downtime rules encourage some of the other players to pay more attention to the rules and social stuff, a fair few of the just sit there awkwardly when it's not combat time.
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Their reasons against it seem to be as follows:
-Fame and honor punish those with low charisma, and reward those with high charisma. Disproportionate effects would be unfair, and we should be equal in this regard.
I suspect that some of them thought that Charisma was a free dumpstat during CharGen, while all of a sudden it does a little bit more. However, they were kind of fooling themselves with that; if people had been planning to take the Leadership feat the same situation would've come up when calculating Leadership score.
If you implemented fame/honor now, as base starting numbers, then the Charisma might show up as a hefty influence; having 18 vs 8 feels like a lot. But if you also give people some more fame/honor for past adventures, then the difference might be 38/28, and that's not quite as hefty anymore. You could offer that as a compromise.
-Fame and honor would promote disharmony amongst the party
Depends on the honor code. And if people are choosing wildly different honor codes, is this merely exposing some hidden conflict between the characters? Also, are those codes really all that contradictory?
-Downtime favors skill heavy characters
They've got more options, and might to better on the checks. But they've got an equal amount of time on their hands.
-Downtime would require additional work to keep track of effectively
This is certainly true. Are your players interested in actual adventuring, or in "kingdom building" as well?
-Retraining would be broken because we could reschedule the campaign timeline to fit retraining programs, and retraining is (apparently?) broken
I think retraining is a great thing, and something PF needed dearly. It's much nicer to RP taking whatever class/feat/power is currently sensible to take, rather than having to worry about build prerequisites five levels along the road. Retraining allows you to live in the now without suffering for it later, because you can retrain towards the build that'll be fun then.
Notice also the teaching requirements: finding a level 2 druid to retrain a level into Druid 2 is easy, but finding a level 13 wizard to retrain a level into Wizard 13 may be harder.
-People would be unhappy at having to talk more in-character as a result of these rules (I swear someone actually raised this as a point.)
Bizarre.
Overall, I think your players might just be experiencing culture shock - they might like the options if given some time to get used to them, but they're a bit overwhelmed. Retraining certainly kicks over some old assumptions, and honor/fame do too. Maybe you need to let them read the book, let the new stuff sink in a bit, and then discuss adoption again.
The other part is that you should talk with them to figure out how much of the "building your own organization" part they like; do they want to do that actively and in detail, or is it more of a backdrop to legitimize going on adventures?