Search results

Agreed. In a pirate campaign I'd expect the ranked causes of death to be: 1. Combat 2. Drowning 3. everything else put together.

Some careful curation and pruning of the spell lists would be in order, for sure. Another option would be to run it as an E6 style game, where level advancement caps at a fairly low number after which you only pick up new abilities (feats etc.) at a slower pace. There's all kinds of design...

Solution: have the captain be a quasi-PC shared among all the players and let the players collectively make the captain's decisions, die rolls, etc. Other random thoughts on a pirate campaign: --- as @payn already noted, checking out the Black Sails TV series is a must! --- you can slip in a...

The root problem would seem to be one of trying to make the combat side of the game work equally well for a cautious 5-minute-workday party and a plow-ahead eight-battles-a-day party. Over the editions, the design focus has, unevenly, moved from favouring the former to favouring the latter. 1e...

True, it would need to be pinned for a few weeks.

Further, the randomizer doesn't (and shouldn't) care whether a given player is playing her Nature Cleric or her Fighter or her Magic-User at the time a party going shopping; it just spits out what it spits out and there's either something(s) useful there or there isn't. For adventure treasure...

In-character it makes a lot of sense that they'd go for the most practical items first. Hard to complain about that. And IME if they've got the spare cash they often will buy interesting items. If those items turn out to be useful, that's good; and if they don't they're still much lighter to...

That's fine with me, as I usually never know which characters will be in a given adventure anyway there's always going to be some extra unused items even if I try to curate ahead of time. That, and treasury is always divided to value here anyway; thus if there's (numbers conveniently set to...

You need to a) randomize what's available at any given time and b) limit the number; this to reflect the idea that what comes on the market isn't predictable and there isn't that much of it. Not sure how you hand out magic items in the adventures you run, but if you use any sort of random...

They can if there's a way to have a poll thread that has comments shut off while the poll remains open to vote on.

It can be a bit of both. Look at how real-world people approach their careers. Some people let their professions define them 24 hours a day, others are only their profession during working hours and at other times are something else (e.g. someone's a dentist during the day but when not in the...

Agreed, though personally I do it the other way round - the "Adventuring" piece is assumed unless "Stay-at-home" is noted. :)

For me, the overarching problem with that "particular narrow experience" approach is that every time I or the table wanted to do something different I'd have to buy and we'd all have to learn a whole new system. No thanks. It would also be very difficult to vary from that narrow experience...

Agreed. Thing is, homebrewers gonna homebrew no matter what design is put in front of them, and there's a whole lot of homebrewers out there. Thus, IMO this is something RPG designers in particular need to keep top-of-mind at all times: how can we keep our shiny new system flexible enough to...

Which, now I think on it, makes me wonder why the OP framed the question around a 60-session span (or any limited-number span) rather than simply asking what's the best system for a campaign whose duration is open-ended i.e. it'll keep going as long as everyone's willing to keep at it.

In total, yes; but the martial side and the caster side would each have to be weaker than their single-class counterparts such that the total of the two parts is roughly the same strength as the dedicated classes. To clarify: You have a pure Fighter. You have a pure Wizard. You have a third...

I think @GobHag is proposing that each character would have two classes - one social, the other combat, mix and match - and that there'd be solid mechanics to support both (i.e. way more in-depth social mechanics than we have now). Personally I'd likely never play this, but it's a very...

In both 1e and 2e they do a lot more than just artillery; by 3e Evoker (the blaster option) had become one of the weaker Wizard options. The designers did this knowing full well people would play them anyway, as caster players tend to love their blast spells. The problem with buffing other...

Hmmm. Interesting. You have: Zealot - spreading beliefs by any means necessary Noble #1 - ingratiating and using social structure to advantage (I'd rename this one 'Diplomat' as I've a different Noble below) Meek - blends into the crowd and uses that anonymity to gather information Some...

It would sort of have to be, wouldn't it? If a single-class martial or a single-class caster has a power level of 1 then the martial power plus the caster power of a half-caster should in the name of balance also add up to about 1. Otherwise, why would anyone play just a martial or just a...