D&D 3E/3.5 3.5 questions, thinking of DMing again
- Thread starter kage69
- Start date
Dandu
First Post
Well, you start with a big axe and...
Now, personally, I just make a character with Fey Heritage, Fey Presence, Fey Legacy, and Fey Skin.
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Celebrim
Legend
Yes, but none of them are really useful except as an excercise. The best generate maps based on tile sets. Even those are only moderately useful. The best use of a random generator is to give you some ideas to flesh out yourself. It is the same with maps.
But, speaking as a DM with 25+ years of experience, you don't need to worry about maps much. You need only bottom up your world and work out the shape of it later. The chances of you exploring any signficant portion of a campaign world are between zero and none. Start with a town or village in a general setting, and work out from there. You'll be wasting prep time to do anything fancier than that.
If you really need tips on making maps, we can turn this into a map thread.
The first thing to keep in mind is that D20 provides excellent guidelines, but you are the DM. NPC's do whatever you want them to do and are stated however is convienent. Do not waste too much time trying to get your math exactly right according to formulas and templates in NPC creation. What do you need the NPC to accomplish? Stat that and not necessarily what is in a book. That's all you really need. Templates and formulas again serve the purpose of inspiring you. Don't let them become straight jackets. If your numbers are off by one or two for the attack bonus or the skills, chances are it won't matter. It's more important to keep the game moving.
Secondly, figuring out how the races relate to each other is probably more important world building than making maps or stating out NPCs. Can Ogres and Dwarves mate successful? If they can, why are or aren't their half-Ogres? Why aren't their families with Elf fathers and Dwarf parents, or vica versa? Are your races fertile, fecund, and social, or are they disparate, xenophobic, and mutually sterile? Which races tolerate each other's company and why? If a villager sees a goblin, what's his first thought:
1) What's that?
2) Run!
3) Time to do a bit of pest control.
4) I wonder if I got a few silvers for some moonshine.
5) Look lively, the boss is watching.
6) Hey, Gnob, how are you?
And so forth. There is no need for you to take any other persons campaign for gospel. What do you want? Do you want a world where characters can be 1/4 elf, 1/4 dwarf, 1/4 ogre, and 1/4 human? Go for it. I'll be happy the help with any mechanical issues once you tell me what you really want.
Celebrim
Legend
One thing that I have learned over time is that the sort of game that you play is highly influenced by the number of people you have. The smaller the group, the more rewarding a role-play heavy game can be and the less rewarding it is to view the game as a heavily tactical cooperative skirmish level wargame.
Two players, a DM and a PC, create a very intimate game that is basically all about the character. You can play out extended lengthy private conversations, because no one is forced to just sit back and watch (not that that can't be fun if the participants are good RPers). You can play out the otherwise mundane details of life - preparing and eating meals, packing for a trip, tending an animal, sights seen along the way - in highly granular detail because with only one player, the player gets to decide how much importance he wants to give to every scene. Two player games are all about narrative arcs and really deep immersive character development.
Three player games have much the qualities of two player games, but because there are two PC's they end up being about the relationship between the two PC's. In my opinion, in a three player game, its very important to right from the outset have a strong hook between the two PC's - family members, rivals or enemies thrown together by circumstance, lovers, best friends since childhood, master and servant, etc. Much of your play is going to be dictated by the character's relationship to each other, and how satisfying it is depends heavily on the ability of the characters to bring that relationship to life.
By the time you get to a four player game, you are beginning to lose some of that intimacy and ability to go highly granular. You now have three players who must take turns sharing the spotlight, which means granularity slows the game down a little bit, but probably not enough to force you to abandon low drama completely. At this point, you now truly have a 'party' which is beginning to show signs of being well-rounded and capable as a unit. At this point, your story will take on less of the form of a extemporaneous novel and more of a trope RPG story. Quests and purpose were optional up to this point, but become increasingly essential as we add more players. Emmersive roleplay was essential up to this point, but increasingly optional as we add more players. Still, with only 3 PC's, there is plenty of time to have storylines that are all about a single PC's character development. The group is not yet all important. Compared to a 7 or 10 player game, the 4 player game is still heavily focused on role play.
By the time you get up to nine players, you've lost the ability to play an RP heavy game as a group. To do heavy RP, you must begin to break into smaller groups. You are at this point likely to need a party 'caller/leader' who is responsible for coordinating action with the DM, and your game is going to increasingly look like that described in detail by Gygax in the 1st edition DMG. Suddenly, Gygax's advice in that tome will be clear, meaningful, and relevant to you in a way that it just won't be if you only have 1 or 2 friends over to play every few weeks.
Small groups favor stories with very limited risk of death, so look to scaling the challenge level way way WAY down. Randomness will bring its own risks with small groups, and PC death is almost never good for the game with small groups. It's far more important that you do your best to ensure continuity with the characters. That doesn't mean that there are no risks, just that because the game is about RP it doesn't have to be as much about overcoming tactical challenges to be rewarding.
My advice to you is to try to match your ambitions to your party size. I would not in fact advise EVER having a DM PC. It's ok to have an NPC within the party, especially if the party is small and needs a boost in its abilities. However, that NPC should always be clearly subordinate to the players. You should NEVER EVER EVER be stealing spotlight from your players. There is never any excuse for that, and true DM PC's are nothing but spot light stealers. Play something of lesser stature than a PC instead.
For example, in one 3 person mini-campaign the NPC party member I played was the dog. Granted, it was a quite intelligent and capable dog, but it was never going to be stealing excessive spotlight from the players and clearly never going to be more than a loyal servant. I would strongly advise that if you decide to add an NPC traveling companion to a 2 character party, you make much the same sort of choice. Rather than adding a half-nymph character who is fully capable in her own right, I'd play a sprite, house elf, pixie, or some lesser fey companion. A wizard's familiar of slightly higher than normal power but still less capable than a true PC (a cat capable of speech and minor shapechanging or spell use in its own right, for example) makes an excellent DM NPC. Or you can play a party members loyal henchmen, porter, coachman, manservant, squire, page, jester, guide or whatever. There are all sorts of stock henchmen types you can draw on from literature that are highly amusing in play while still serving to keep focus on the player. The important point is that you never protagonize yourself. Keep the focus on the PC's and don't try to share that limelight. They are the stars; that is the bargin made at the table in exchange for your greater authority over the story and the game world.
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