Tome material

[Ravengm]

So, I'm thinking of starting up a new campaign here with people from my playgroup since the normal DM is starting a semester at school that won't allow him time for such and my options were A.) Play Pathfinder or B.) Run my own campaign.

I'm going with option B.

Anyway, since I haven't actually run a game with Tome material before, I only want to incorporate some of it. The main things I'm definitely using are the morality options (specifically Playing With Fire) and pretty much the entire Economicon.

Given this, what do you find is an appropriate amount of Class/Feat/etc. material to incorporate without simply using everything? I know that I'm going to change (at least) martial classes somehow regardless of if I use Tome versions or not, but seeing as I'm pretty inexperienced with actually using Tome, I figured I'd defer to the wisdom of experience.

As for background of the players, they're pretty competent at making effective characters and dumpster diving for good stuff. There's a leaning toward less-efficient (or effective) options like limiting presitge class dipping and using Evocation spells, but they certainly know what they're doing. Sometimes it takes a little guidance, but at least a couple of the players know the game intimately.

tl;dr How much Tome is too much Tome for a DM new to it?

[Zinegata]

Our group mainly used Races of War to help beef up the martial classes - we used non-Tome base classes but allowed RoW feats.

We didn't use The Edge and its related feats though.

The DM didn't go insane with that campaign. For the most part.

Edit: You may also want to be more specific on how you want your campaign to look like so we can suggest more appropriate materials.

[ubernoob]

What you *must have* is either book of gears or Kaelik's version in his thread. I find BoG to work pretty well for the first ten levels or so (once we hit level 12 I noticed as a DM that the players could probably use more effects from items, but they didn't really feel lacking with just basic bonuses since they were all playing tome classes or spellcasters).

I'd say use the martial classes, scaling feats, and the SLA classes (conduit, firemage, etc). The redone races are pretty optional, tome of fiends (minus the conduit) is optional.

But definitely BoG, martial classes, scaling feats, and SLA classes.

[Maxus]

The various Energy Mages aren't a bad move.

Monk is basically a must.

[Zinegata]

Rechecking with my DM, we also did use the K-Monk.

It was a bit of a non-magic party though, so no real Tome caster class.

[Josh_Kablack]

For the most part, using Tome Classes is really easy. It's just like using optional base or Prestige Classes from any other 3rd party supplement. Like any 3rd party supplement, you have to watch out for the hidden bits in the class that interact with rules that might be elsewhere in the supplement (most noticeably this happens with the Tome scaling Feats (found in Races of War) and Spheres (found in Tome of Fiends) but sometimes you'll find Tome classes using or receiving weird non-core spells that you'll want to either track down or replace.

The Tome feats are generally a good idea, but do add a noteable amount of complexity and do really slowdown chargen for people new to Tomes. Also, there are some gaping holes in the "official" tome feat list and you need to either
A> hunt around on The Den and D&D wikis
and/or
B> write your own patch feats
and/or
C> shaft some people with only the core feats
whenever one of your players wants to do something like use metamagic, have a non-class armor/shield proficiency, or wants a version of Improved Unarmed Strike without a Monk level attached. (and those are just the ones which have come up in generating the first three characters for my partial-Tome game, I'm sure there are more gaps)

The Edge is an interesting idea, but adds complexity and at least one potential abuse. However if you are not using it, you may need to rewrite a couple of the Tome class and feat abilities.


The Tome Armors are thematically very nifty and do give reasons why more than 4 armor types actually exist - but the Tome Armors have several major issues in terms of both rules complexity and being tied to D&D default settings assumptions. So if you are worried about too much Tome, I would actually recommend against using them wholecloth.

The Tome advice on choosing morality settings, how Iron Age rule and heredity work, running a game economy with the D&D spell list in play and suggested adventures in the lower planes are all awesome - and can be all implemented without needing to hit the players over the head with another 10,000 words of rules.

****


As for Tome classes that I have actually seen in play: Fire Mage and Snowscaper run smoothly for new players to handle and function at a decently high power level with enough non-combat abilities to be broadly useful. Assassin is a class that can be great or not-so-much depending mainly on what classes the rest of the party is, and Thief Acrobat appears underpowered compared to other Tome classes - you could probably give it either full BAB or every-even level sneak attack progression.

[JonSetanta]

Use Josh's campaign compilation. A lot of effort went into that.

[Josh_Kablack]

Thanks for the vote of confidence sigma, and while I did post it here so people could reuse for their own games I would caution that

I. A fair bit of my effort was tweaking a re-flavoring things to be setting-specific. This could cause issues if you have a different setting in mind

II. There are still holes, imbalances and unresolved rules issues. I likely added as many as I "fixed".

[Ravengm]

Thanks, that gives me a good idea of what I'm going to use.

As far as setting-specific stuff goes, I'm not worrying about it too much yet since I have some time. I'd rather get the crunch done before the fluff happens. I'll check out Josh's post for some more info.

And don't worry, I'm not looking for perfection. Just a starting point to make classes actually playable.

Also I'm looking forward to getting them to call me Mister Cavern.