Expedition to the Ruins of Greyhawk

So it turns out Big Brent has some family issues that have to be taken care of. Illness in the family and he is needed. We will miss him for the time being, but that left us at an impasse next week. The fact that Jarrett so easily stepped aside told me that he wasn't that married to his Mystara campaign. However, Big Brent had opened a can of worms by allowing everyone to create super-ultra-mega characters (the idea of triple gestalt characters was bandied about for a while--no seriously, it was actually considered) at a much higher level than our group is usually used to playing.

Now let me explain a few things about our group before getting too far into this. David and Tenar (a married couple) have only recently started playing 3rd edition so they really don't know the rules too well. Tenar at least has played nothing but rogues so far so she is starting to get the hang of the rogue shtick. However, David likes trying something new all the time, and he doesn't seem to take much time outside the game to read up on the rules, meaning he spends all his time during the game looking things up. Travis and Donna (another married couple) have more experience with 3rd edition, but they aren't exactly good at optimizing their characters. Little Brent is just happy to be playing. Then there is Jarrett, who is quite knowledgeable of the rules and capable of building well-optimized characters. There is a huge disparity in skill level.

One of the biggest challenges a DM can face is making sure everyone in the group feels like they are contributing something. When you have a group like this, that challenge becomes even greater. For that reason, I strongly prefer beginning all new characters at 1st level. It gives new players a chance to learn their powers from the ground up while reducing the advantage veteran players have in character building. By the time they reach 5th-level, the novice players at least know how to play their character and the veterans have already learned much of what the novices now know.

But as I said, the cat was out of the bag and there was no getting that feisty feline back inside. Having seen the glory of "high-level" characters, the players in my group (not all of them, but enough to cause concern) were salivating at the thoughts of casting 3rd level spells more than once per day and having hit points nearing triple digits. To make matters worse, both Jarrett and Big Brent had been allowing us to use ability score arrays that were worth somewhere in the area of a 45-60 point buy.

I had asked Jarrett if he would mind if, instead of continuing Mystara, he let me take the DM chair again. He wasn't opposed. So at that we began discussing what it would take to make everyone happy. At this point I realized I was going to have to compromise. My preference would have been to have them start at 1st level with a new campaign (or pick up the Shackled City campaign again, which received lukewarm reception at best) but let them have slightly higher ability scores and some nifty equipment while using some house rules (like soft critical hits) to ease the difficulty. Our group has been vocal about the fact that they don't like games that are too challenging; they want to feel like heroes with awesome power who always win. I can accept that. Jarrett managed to convince me that in order to actually feel powerful however, the PCs would need to be killing more than bugbears and orcs. They want to slay dragons and powerful wizards and reap the rewards of great treasures.

So I decided to let the PCs pick the campaign. Since I don't have time to write a campaign myself right now, I grabbed several of my published adventures and allowed my players to pick one. I have some 10+ level adventures, but I left those at home, because as much as my players would probably like being that high level, they just aren't ready for it. I selected Eyes of the Lich Queen, The Red Hand of Doom, Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, and Expedition to Castle Greyhawk. I gave my players each a small description of what kinds of encounters each would entail as well as the relative difficulty of the campaigns (having read them all already). I put Castle Greyhawk in the middle difficulty-wise and told them it was a mix of urban adventuring and dungeon-crawling. It was a split decision between that and Eyes of the Lich Queen, but eventually Jarrett decided to vote instead of staying neutral and Greyhawk it was.

So they created characters. I let them have any masterwork equipment they wanted and choose magic items for them (otherwise we would have been there all night). I also restricted feat and spell selection to the core rules, although I allowed them to select base classes from other books if they desired. In addition, they will be able to research new spells later if they wish, and they can take advantage of retraining rules from the PH2 if they gain the ability to learn new feats (which I plan to allow them to do if they join certain affiliations).And so it is that the adventure has begun. Tonight we kick out the first session after the prelude and my PCs get to explore the Free City of Greyhawk, many of them for the first time. It shall be interesting to see what adventures they have in the weeks to come. And just to give you a heads up, future updates on my campaign will contain spoilers for the adventure, so you might want to turn a blind eye if you are playing in the campaign.