The Gaming Den

I've been pretty much running D&D for 12 years now since getting a hold of my brother's old first edition manuals. In that time I've DMed probably around 8 campaigns, some of which ran for a couple months and others which lasted for the greater part of 2 years and spawned (what can best be described as) fan fiction of sorts on the part of the players. I've played in about the same number, but never got as much enjoyment from being a player as in being able to create worlds and toy with the stories that make those worlds feel real.

In my time as a DM I've never run a game based on a pre-packaged setting and have actually come to loathe FR for its excessive level of generality -- that is, it seemed that no matter how hard the players worked they would never have any influence on what the world was going to be like in a couple years. I am a strong believer that a game like D&D which take an epic amount of time in real life should lead to epic stories (of course, that does not imply that the characters are epic level -- most of my games actually finished before level 15).

Anyway, we always had the same group of core players for these games and together we were the reason much of these games were so fun. Our longest game went just over three years (in real life) and took place in 2nd edition, ending with the 14th level party ascending to be demi-gods of sorts (more like caretakers) over a ruined and nearly dead world (and that's the happy ending). When we picked up 3rd edition, we moved on and held three more major campaigns, each running for about a year and a half.

However, as anybody who frequents this board knows, 3rd edition has a bit of a different take on it than 2nd... Namely, what could happen in the game world was strictly bound by what was given in the rulebooks. And many of those rules were... asinine, to say it kindly. As we played on, I found that my gaming group differentiated between the people that knew the rules well and those that did not. Since the more rule-ept helped out the others with character creation there was not a huge power difference in the party, but there was a difference in how they played their characters. And, as a result, it meant that there were two players that always commanded the spotlight (by necessity more than anything).

Further, I found that even with a three foot high stack of third edition accessory books (metaphorically, of course), players were unsatisfied with their character's flavour. They had an awesomely imaginative idea for their character, but an implementation of it was either non-existent or a gimped myriad of unrelated PrCs.

So, after we finished up our third campaign in 3.5e (an evil campaign where the players installed themselves at the head of a dark empire at the end of the game) we were inevitably craving something new. We were all finishing up our respective undegraduate degrees as this point and so took a short hiatus from play. Although, I must admit, part of the rationale for the hiatus with our (my) general displeasure with how the 3.5e games would play. I came to the conclusion that we needed something that wasn't published by WotC to make up for it.

But the thing was: we'd been playing D&D for a decade now. We knew D&D well and liked the flavour of the system and had our imaginations tuned in this direction. Another system was pretty much out of the question, although I investigated a lot of options, and even tried to put one together myself. In the end, it didn't really work. Eventually I called it quits and decided to just use D&D... kinda.

I sent out an email and asked for players to send me character concepts. I received many confused questions with regards to what game system I was planning on using, and overall just replied with "Send me your character concepts and I'll get back to you." I received back some cool descriptions and ideas -- an Anne McCaffery style dragon rider, a spirit-totem shaman, a dream walker, a gnome in a giant mechanical exoskeleton, etc.

For each of these characters I came to the conclusion that the most important thing was that everybody got a bunch of cool easy-to-use abilities, some cool equipment and a unique personality that would be fun to play. At the risk of sounding like I spent too much time in the 90s, I felt that everybody should have a memorable and "cool" character to play. So I went ahead and designed a class for each of the players. Shot the classes back at the players, received some suggestions, updates, etc. and generally improved on the design at each iteration. To make a long story short, I was really happy with the result.

This design required some additional tweaking (read: overhaul) of the D&D rules as well -- for one, characters had "minor" skills and "major" skills. Every character received an assortment of spontaneous spells per day that increased in power with level, so even fighters had some power to warp reality.

Charisma based skill checks never determined the outcome, only influenced it. The former were at level ranks and the latter were at level + 8 ranks. Gold was no longer useful to purchase magical items, and so did not appear in copious quantities. Magical (and mechanical) items were much easier to create, and encouraged in general. For one, the Gnomish artificer / mech (read: McGuyver) basically had the ability to create "whatever the hell he wanted" if he had one day to work on it. There were a lot of other small tweaks that I won't go into here, but they probably couldn't be compiled into some greater manifesto since they were so campaign specific.

When we played it out, everybody got their moment in the spotlight at some point. And overall, I was very happy with how it turned out and had a really good time, even though that campaign only lasted a couple months. It really reminded me (in an 80s cartoon / video game nostalgia sort of way) of why I started playing D&D to begin with.

Anyway, regardless of the D&D bashing that pretty much defines much of the Gaming Den's existence, does anybody have any positive stories about the game and what they had to do to be able to enjoy it again?

My DM, a guy obsessed with Eberron, allowed me to not only switch out of the flabtastic Fire Mage mid-campaign, but allowed me these changes to my character:
- A custom race. It's between a Tiefling, Feytouched, Faun, and Sun Elf. I call it "Devilfaun", half the group calls it "Faunevil" much to my disappointment. My girlfriend calls it "Retarded", although she was allowed a Tiefling/Elf that changes into a cat form as by the Tibbit ability.
- Switch to Sorcerer. I showed him why Sorcerers need their spells known list bumped earlier by 1 level and after about an hour of debate he allowed me to, on the condition that "if it's too powerful, you'll change to a Wizard". I agreed.
- Replace the Sorcerer's familiar with Firey Burst reserve feat, but it's independant of saving your highest level spell. Damage is pretty much 1d6 per odd caster level, Close range, Reflex save half, lights targets with failed save on fire. So, some minor changes there.
- "Mount" spell with 24 hour duration. It summons a boar named "Pepper" from the devil-faun's home plane.
- Possibility to swap spells known later, mid-level, but I must do the 'retraining' as by PHB2 rules. Same with feats.

He's also let my girlfriend playtest a custom warrior class, with nerfing of some abilities as needed. This isn't a problem since the abilities can swap out like spells do.
Last night, with my Sorc's "Enlarge" spell, she was dealing 2d8+10 damage with a greatsword (without Power Attack too). Unfortunately, her AC 16 was low for a L2 warrior, especially compared to the Warforged's AC 20 (and his damage output was 1d8+4)

So, in short, even with my girlfriend's fears at first that "he'll just nerf everything to the point where it's not even worth it!", we got lucky in finding a fun group and wise GM that puts the goals of players before any attempts to steer towards a "campaign theme".
He takes reasonable requests, stews over them a bit, and then allows changes with minor conditions.
At the end of every session he asks if everyone had fun and if any goals were not met or not considered.
And that's expertise in GMing right there.

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1203386532[/unixtime]]My DM, a guy obsessed with Eberron, allowed me to not only switch out of the flabtastic Fire Mage mid-campaign, but allowed me these changes to my character:
- A custom race. It's between a Tiefling, Feytouched, Faun, and Sun Elf. I call it "Devilfaun", half the group calls it "Faunevil" much to my disappointment. My girlfriend calls it "Retarded", although she was allowed a Tiefling/Elf that changes into a cat form as by the Tibbit ability.
- Switch to Sorcerer. I showed him why Sorcerers need their spells known list bumped earlier by 1 level and after about an hour of debate he allowed me to, on the condition that "if it's too powerful, you'll change to a Wizard". I agreed.
- Replace the Sorcerer's familiar with Firey Burst reserve feat, but it's independant of saving your highest level spell. Damage is pretty much 1d6 per odd caster level, Close range, Reflex save half, lights targets with failed save on fire. So, some minor changes there.
- "Mount" spell with 24 hour duration. It summons a boar named "Pepper" from the devil-faun's home plane.
- Possibility to swap spells known later, mid-level, but I must do the 'retraining' as by PHB2 rules. Same with feats.

He's also let my girlfriend playtest a custom warrior class, with nerfing of some abilities as needed. This isn't a problem since the abilities can swap out like spells do.
Last night, with my Sorc's "Enlarge" spell, she was dealing 2d8+10 damage with a greatsword (without Power Attack too). Unfortunately, her AC 16 was low for a L2 warrior, especially compared to the Warforged's AC 20 (and his damage output was 1d8+4)

So, in short, even with my girlfriend's fears at first that "he'll just nerf everything to the point where it's not even worth it!", we got lucky in finding a fun group and wise GM that puts the goals of players before any attempts to steer towards a "campaign theme".
He takes reasonable requests, stews over them a bit, and then allows changes with minor conditions.
At the end of every session he asks if everyone had fun and if any goals were not met or not considered.
And that's expertise in GMing right there.

One of my off-and-on DMs took a shine to Eberron for a while. He ran a campaign, so I ended up playing a Kalashtar Soulknife who was dedicated to killing Inspired in Khorvaire, and generally putting a monkey wrench in the quori's plans at every opportunity.

Yeah, I know. Soulknife. But I used my Google-Fu to dig up some fixes, meshed two of them together, and thanks to one of those Kalashtar racial feats, had an extra +1 to play with (One of the features of the Soulknife fixes was that you just gained enhancement points, which could be divvied up among enhancements and magical features as you want. And the feature list was much expanded).

The end result was a fun guy to play. Alignment normally grates on my nerves, but Koth was right on the money for Chaotic Neutral. Impulsive, somewhat easily distracted, doesn't always think out the things he does.

We were playing online, but the DM told me that something Koth said got him to crack up.

It's a shame the game dried up after a couple of sessions.

Shifters are so weak they make me weep.
And I had to explain to the player of a Changeling that she is immune to hostile polymorph (Shapeshifter subtype grants the ability to resume normal form as a standard action).
It's a fucked up setting, what with robot Ninja Turtles, and dinosaur-riding halflings.
My 12 year old brother can make and does make better settings, races, and characters.

I'll go check out any Soulknife fixes, that looks interesting. Links to what you found would be nice too!

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1203660179[/unixtime]]Shifters are so weak they make me weep.
And I had to explain to the player of a Changeling that she is immune to hostile polymorph (Shapeshifter subtype grants the ability to resume normal form as a standard action).
It's a fucked up setting, what with robot Ninja Turtles, and dinosaur-riding halflings.
My 12 year old brother can make and does make better settings, races, and characters.

I'll go check out any Soulknife fixes, that looks interesting. Links to what you found would be nice too!

To summarize:

-One fix was a general tune-up in pretty much every area except BAB--skills, bonus feats, the huge mindblade flexibility. Pretty much my basis for this.
-One was a big list of feats this guy had cooked up that were...well, some of them would have been alright, or at least interesting, but many of them had prerequisites that made no sense and would have involved cross-class stuff to handle. (Like K (Architecture/Engineering) to make a harder mind blade)
-My DM endeared himself to me by ruling that if you can make your mindblade into a shape, then you can create it as that shape. (So you didn't have to pass through that intermediary stage of forming it as a short sword and could instead just make a longsword or bastard sword).
-One nice suggestion was giving the Soulknife the feat Hidden Talent as a bonus feat. Apparently, it gives you one 1st-level power, so you could use it on something like Skate.
-You probably couldn't go far wrong by giving it Full BAB and slightly more Psychic Strike.

Here's the link to the feats for right now.

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.ph ... r][br]I'll try to use Google to dig up the rest.

Edit: Turns out putting "Soulknife Fix" into Google works pretty darn well. Here's the main one I used.

http://forums.gleemax.com/showthread.php?t=310984

Further Edit: Now if someone could just come up with a way to make the Soulbow appealing...Although there is a pretty funny bit of wording that implies the Mind Arrow enhancements improve the BAB as well. Meaning that a Soulknife10/Soulbow10 could get a final BAB of +17/+12/+7/+2

Thank you very much.
And for a very funny followup, I had saved BlainTog's class when it arrived but forgot about it completely. -_-
Never played a Soulknife for more than a few hours, but this is what I would use.

As for Soulbow wording, I can't even find the feat or ability. yarg.

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1203735545[/unixtime]]Thank you very much.
And for a very funny followup, I had saved BlainTog's class when it arrived but forgot about it completely. -_-
Never played a Soulknife for more than a few hours, but this is what I would use.

As for Soulbow wording, I can't even find the feat or ability. yarg.

Go look at the except for Complete Psionic excerpt if you'd like, but I'll quote and bold the interesting bits:

Complete Psionic Excerpt wrote:

Mind Arrow (Su): As a free action, you can create a semisolid arrow composed of psychic energy distilled from your mind. If your base attack bonus is high enough to grant you multiple attacks, you can create multiple mind arrows as part of an attack. You must have one hand free to create and project a mind arrow.

The bolt is identical in all ways (except visually) to an arrow shot from a composite longbow. For instance, a Medium soulbow materializes an arrow that speeds toward the specified target, and if it hits, deals 1d8 points of damage (crit x3) plus extra damage equal to the soulbow's Wisdom modifier. Soulbows who are smaller or larger than Medium create mind arrows identical to arrows shot from composite longbows appropriate for their size, with a corresponding change to the arrow's damage (see Table 7-4 and Table 7-5 in the Player's Handbook). You gain the usual benefit to your attack roll from a high Dexterity bonus.

Whether a mind arrow hits or misses, it dissipates 1 round after being shot. A mind arrow is considered a magic weapon for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction.

A mind arrow can be charged with a psychic strike as if it were a mind blade. If a soulbow has enough soulknife levels to have the knife to the soul ability, that ability also applies to her mind arrows.

You can use feats such as Point Blank Shot or Precise Shot in conjunction with a mind arrow (see bonus feats provided by the class for further guidance). You can also choose mind arrow for feats requiring a specific weapon choice, such as Weapon Specialization. Powers or spells that upgrade weapons can be used on a mind blade. Any feats previously requiring specific weapon choice (such as Weapon Specialization) for your mind blade also apply to your mind arrow, if applicable.

Your mind arrows improve as you gain higher levels. At 3rd level, a mind arrow gains a +1 enhancement bonus on attack rolls and damage rolls, and at 7th level the bonus improves to +2. These enhancement bonuses stack with previous enhancement bonuses gained earlier for your soulknife class levels. Likewise, these enhancement bonuses also improve your soulknife base attack bonus. If your return to your soulknife class progression, these mind arrow enhancement bonuses on attack and damage are cumulative bonuses on top of any new enhancement bonuses gained, and they benefit both your mind blade and mind arrows.

Even in places where psionic effects do not normally function (such as within a null psionics field), you can attempt to attack foes with mind arrows by making a DC 20 Will save. On a successful save, you can freely produce mind arrows for a number of rounds equal to your class level before you need to check again. On an unsuccessful attempt, you must wait 1 round before trying again while you remain within the psionics-negating effect.

Straight off the Wizards website.

Edit: This is from Complete Psionic, not the EXH. Oops.

Ohhhh no wonder..

Well in any case, that's an easy fix. Cut out that line you bolded and it doesn't seem to interrupt anything else.
I've never seen any previous wording of Enhancement bonus increasing BAB, and this isn't a good place to start doing so.

sigma999 at [unixtime wrote:1203759168[/unixtime]]Ohhhh no wonder..

Well in any case, that's an easy fix. Cut out that line you bolded and it doesn't seem to interrupt anything else.
I've never seen any previous wording of Enhancement bonus increasing BAB, and this isn't a good place to start doing so.

I'm a little intrigued and amused by it, actually. The stupider parts of the multiclassing rules mean a Soulknife10/Soulbow 10 gets a BAB of +14/+9/+4, and with that...weird little addition, this one can come out to +16/+11/+6/+1, giving them the combat ability of a cohort of a cohort.

(Turns out my earlier estimate was wrong. That's what I get by running off of memory).