Greetings lovely members of the advice forum I'm starting a way of the wicked campaign and im having a hard time figuring out what stats to give my players because the rp they have going on so far(for fun) (before their character sheets have even been made up) has them all being fairly charismatic and I envision them being charismatic so the stats I give them I want to reflect that the problem is a point buy doesn't feel right because because if I gave them all a free 16 they we be way over powered, but at the same time I've never liked rolling for stats because it doesn't feel balanced.
Now the idea for the good charisma came from one of my players and I really liked it because one of the things he said was with the free 16 in cha nobody would be allowed to play a class that had charisma as its primary stat (so no sorcerers, no bards, no antipaladins etc...)
So any advice for my evil characters stats?
Well, admittedly, a free 16 in charisma is not that much if you aren't dealing with charisma caster classes.
You could just make a stat array, and lock charisma in, and then have a different array for cha classes.
At the same time, you might want to consider making them highly skilled at discussion, but not due to a high cha.
Sense motive and perception are keyed off of wis.
And going back to an interesting discussion about why drow have the seducer alt trait keyed off wisdom- cha is the stat of the social butterfly, intuitively noticing important cues adn forcing her way about. Wisdom is the stat for the profession skill- it is the stat for experience and foresight. So when a drow uses seduction, it is not some crude use of their force of will (all drow have that, so it gives no edge when dealing with other drow), but carefully calculated moves used to manipulate the target. Much like an experienced dominatrix that views her job not as an act of passion, but merely an exercise of her profession. (I like this comparison to profession since I remember a dev basically going "...uhhhh...yeah, that sounds good actually, lets go with that" or the drow discussion)
Anyway, you could give the players free profession skills (cause lets be honest- who takes those normally?) and allow them to use that skill instead of a diplomacy check in certain circumstances (such as profession: merchant when negotiating contracts and payments, or profession: soldier when trying to talk to guards). If your players can coordinate this well, that could give you many different scenarios where you can get any of the players involved (instead of the usual "I didn't put points into diplomacy, so I am off to make more snacks" situation)
And with this, you could also give them a nice extra bonus to their free profession skill, and that could serve in place of your CHA boost. And it wouldn't necessarily end up over powered like saying +5 to diplomacy since you can limit where that profession skill can be used.
I like lemeres' idea: Make them charismatic with bonus to skills rather than stats. There is far too much fun in evil cha based classes. the feat Summon evil monster lets your summoner summon pugwampis. PUGWAMPIS!! ...ok rant aside: You can do something like give them a racial bonus to 2-3 social/professional skills of their choice, that way they can choose how their character is charismatic. a 12 +2 bonus would be just as good as a 16 and doesn't prohibit any classes. While normally one would try and limit Diplomacy/bluff, part of the fun of evil campaigns is not only getting away with travesties but blaming it on someone else, so from a fun perspective having a slightly too powerful bluff is awesome.
It really depends on your character classes. In my group 4 out of 5 pc's ended up with Cha 20 (Sorceror, Oracle, Antipaladin,Bard/Swashbuckler)
I used a modifed version of the dice roll system in way of the wicked in that I used 1 set of dice rolls for all 5 players , they have had a lot of fun making use of high social skills so far.
If you think the players will enjoy spending their time manipulating npc's give them a high charisma. The game mechanic effects are not that high unless they play classes which need good charisma in which case they would take it anyway.
There would be implications if they become Liches/Vampires later as a high cha makes that very attractive
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Way of the Wicked actually proscribes granting all PC's two bonus skill points per level, restricted to social skills. The reasoning is along the lines of "this is a harder game, everyone and everything else is trying to kill them".
I am running WOTW as well, PCs are currently in early Book 3.
1. I gave them all the proscribed +2 skill points (social only) per level, and also strongly recommended they don't dump charisma because Leadership is a big deal in this campaign. There's rules for running an evil organization, and your number of followers matters (they can take organization-level actions to forward the PCs goals, etc.)
2. For "Thorn's Training" at 3rd level, I gave them all the Additional Traits feat instead of just the 1 Thorn's trait. They got to pick 1 Thorn's trait like normal, then pick a second trait per the Additional Traits feat.
This campaign can be very tough, especially if you "hard mode" them by bringing in the player's own heroic PCs from other campaigns to fight against them, as the author suggests. Or your own optimized heroic monstrosities lol...
-Goh