D&D 3E/3.5 3e Sword & Sorcery

[Philosopher]

I'm just pointing out that there are always more options. Especially when it comes to those most dangerous and unpredictable of creatures: player characters.

Absolutely. I was only describing how I'd do things.

 

[Philosopher]

I would remove alignment from the game. S&S almost never has objective good/evil; the world doesn't care about you. (This is why, incidentally, I would not allow the paladin, even if spellcasting were removed.)

Agreed.

On this point, I should point out that I have used alignment and paladins in S&S games. The sort of thing I've been thinking about recently is what I posted about above. As I said, though, there are other models.

I've run games that used Law and Chaos as objective forces (but not good and evil). You consciously aligned yourself to one or the other (or rejected both). It was not merely a description of a character's behavior. Paladins, in this game, were warriors devoted to Law. However, to help evoke the right tone, they could be quite brutal in the fight against Chaos.

Also agreed. I'd like to see a more useful Healing skill, frankly. I think that, with some weak "herbal" remedies would be enough to offset a lack of healing.

Interesting idea. Perhaps allowing the use of potions of cure light wounds, but understanding them as herbal rather than magical. I think, if I were to go with this idea, I'd not allow them to be used in the middle of combat. Rather than a potion, I'd use a salve that needed to be applied before a wound was bandaged. Then, after perhaps a short time, the hit points would be regained. That might have some merit.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Personally, the only race I'd allow is human, and the only classes I'd allow are barbarian, fighter, ranger (replacing spellcasting with some bonus fighter feats), and rogue. (I'd probably also allow some of the UA variants for these classes.) Other races may exist (although even if they did, I probably wouldn't use the standard PHB races), and spellcasters will definitely exist, but I would want to them to be sufficiently rare and exotic.

1) Running an S&S campaign would make me make a custom list of Classes. To your list, I'd probably add a few, including a spellcaster or two of some kind- after all, even Fafhrd and Grey Mouser had some arcane skill.

2) Unless I was running this for a bunch of S&S aficionados, I'd expand the race list beyond humanity, but probably avoid the more exotic ones. Elves, Dwarves, Goblins, Orcs pass muster as being "mundane" enough to fit in well. Beyond that would depend upon campaign-specific details.

One thing's for sure, though: Unless I just went with the "PCs are intrinsically rare" type justification, I'd borrow one mechanic from the original version of the Stormbringer RPG. In that game, they made sure the races/nationalities lived up to the power (or lack thereof) as described in the book. That meant that Melniboneans were extremely powerful- think of a D&D game in which, by virtue of race, a PC in the game was ECL7 in a Lvl 1 party, and you're close. Pan Tangians were not far behind, and some other races were notably more powerful than the average human. That, of course, made everyone want to play a Melnibonean, Pan Tangian, or the like.

So they had a %ile chart to determine a PC's race or nationality. Now, I wouldn't do it quite like that, but I would group the available PC races by "rarity" and give each player a roll. Say...75% of PC are from Common races, 20% from Uncommon races, and 5% from Rare races.

I also like the idea of magic being something only granted through a pact with unspeakable beings. For this reason, I'd only use sorcerers, as the high Charisma could be seen as necessary in dealing with such beings. (Part of this would involve re-flavoring the sorcerer. Rather than gaining their powers through a bloodline, they gain them through a pact. I wouldn't feel the need to introduce any mechanical differences, other than the possibility of having one's magic stripped.) I may also be tempted to use the insanity and/or taint rules from UA when dealing with magic. (If spellcasters are NPCs only, this wouldn't directly affect PCs, so I would probably not need to use the finer details of these mechanics.)

To me, the study involved with finding out how to make such pacts sounds more like Wizards...or Binders.

Sorcerers, to me, would be virtually unchanged- their ancestors had a little dalliance with powerful beings and the bloodline became altered because of it. Warlocks would be in much the same boat. IOW, there would be serious use of the Heritage feats (CompMage & CompArc) and the Bloodline feats (DCv1 and the like), and I might expand those feats to have different effects for Warlocks.

However, to keep spellcasting rare, I'd require that any PC who wanted to be an Arcane spellcaster of any kind burn a feat at 1st level. For balance, though, every PC would get an extra 1st level feat- all of which would be used on something related to their ancestry. Thus, I'd have to expand the list of "Ancestry/Heritage/Bloodline" and similar feats for balance.

I'd also rein in magic in other ways...perhaps by using a fatigue system.

Divine casters would probably be a bit different, given that their powers are granted rather than innate. While they could cast in armor, unlike most of their Arcane caster counterparts, Armor Proficiency would be absent from most of the Divine caster classes.

Without healers, I'd give some boost when it comes to taking and recovering from damage. Not too much - I would want combat to be a danger still. I'd use one of the variants from UA (not sure which one).

The fatigue thing may work here as well.

So also might be the reducing of the number of healing spells in the game, and replacing them with something like the Divine Feats that let you gain spell like effects, like the CompDiv version of Sacred Healing. Those might be built into the classes as features, though.

I'd use Action Points.

Ditto.

In terms of setting, I'd use a sandbox style campaign, probably centered on a city. The city would be rife with corruption.

Cities- the grittier the better- or caravans/nautical voyages are pretty common themes for S&S. You simply can't go wrong with them.