I'm doing a campaign (I'll call this one Blue-Edge) set up as the afterlife and players are limited to anthopomorphic animal races and Noble Animals from the Noble Wild. The thing is, I'm also running another campaign (Red-Edge) where every character is one of the 24 RP races I homebrewed, with most of them having a 2-class gestalt, and I want to have these campaigns to be roughly similar in power. Do I give the Blue-Edge characters Samsarian traits on top of what they already get, give them 2- or 3-class gestalt, or some combination of the two?
Any suggestions?
Any suggestions?
Patience, friend; on these forums replies can easily take hours to come in---and that's during the time of day when most posters are awake, which isn't now. :-)
(Personally my instinct says to match race power to race power and class power to class power, but that's instinct, not experience.)
And speaking of not being awake, it's time for me to go back to bed!
We'd be able to give better advice if you show us your homebrewed races.
So, what should I do?
Any more suggestions?
Hello?
You seem to be stirring a lot of elements together. As for power, you just have to pay attention to the APL of both. If you're giving one group 24 RP races and gestalt, then you are tinkering with the APL and need to make sure you have it figure out. If you want them both to be equal, then just give the other group access to templates or something similar to increase their APL.
My bet is that you won't be able to do it.
Powerful races and things like gestalt tend to increase the variance in character power. In other words, even in just looking at your red-edge you are likely to have a wide range of character power with some characters going for builds that synergize for a particularly powerful specialist effect and others going for builds that generalize, being able to cover more bases, but not being able 'better' at anything than you would expect a single class 10ish RP character to be. So just this one campaign is likely to present intra-party balance issues. This increased variance makes it even more difficult to predict how 'powerful' a party will be in advance than in a more normal game, and even in a normal game it isn't easy at all, two parties, all core-book humans with a single class can end up being dramatically different in capabilities and the challenges they can overcome, do to both how the individual characters are built and how well the party works together (or doesn't) to become more than the sum of its parts.
Then, to try and add options to your other campaign, so that the red-edge and the blue-edge parties will end up 'balanced' against each other, it probably impossible.
Ok, so I balance for either the skill floor or the skill ceiling. Which one should I balance to?