Anyone playing everquest d20? mixing with DnD 3.5

[QuaziquestGM]

(post 2 in series)

Hey guys.
My group still isn't sold on doing a western game (and my copy of Recoil hasn't arrived yet), so I'm looking around my random d20 book selection and I'm pondering possiblities for the upcomming semester. Therefore you will see various unrealted threads from me asking about various game mixes. Please indulge me.

I have the 3 core books for EQ d20, but haven't played with them yet.
I'd love to hear of people's experinces with the game and it's systems.

I've also been comtemplating trainwrecking EQd20 and 3.5 together.

I see no problem with allowing the races from each to cross over. I like the thought of having lowlight vision, infravision, dark vision, and ultra vision in the same game. The gnomes have completely different stat adjustments, and in my mind, the more gnomes the better. (and haflings, and kender, and gully dwarfs, and tinker gnomes, and forrest gnomes, and spy gnomes, and hobbits, ...and hell, haflings on dinosaurs)

I also see little problems with the non caster classes. I can either lett them take all of their attacks at once, or make the d&d guys wait an initive count between swings. That or just drop weapon speed....no big deal.

What problem I do see is that the Dnd casters will get creamed by their combat oriented, mana recharge per hour resting, EQ counter parts. Any thoughts on this?

I'm thinking of handleing it by making Norrath a contenient on a "Mana Upwell", and that after you sail past the 3 mile limit, there isn't as much mana around. The caster can only recharge mana on a per day basis. I think this would put them on a spell per day staning more equal to 3.5 casters ( and offer an explination as to why the 30 hd norrathian kabolds haven't taken over all of 3.5 land...their shamans won't lead the tribe out of norrath)

This way if the party wants to take a mission in Norrath, then their 3.5 wizard is along to open doors with knock, and in 3.5 land their EQ cleric is there for his ranged healing spells. (I don't have the EQ arcana book, and won't be using it).

Any chance of this set up actually working?

 

[Donovan Morningfire]

A while back I ran an EQd20 campaign, though I didn't use any D&D material (this was pre 3.5e).

As for extra attacks and weapon speed, all the weapon speed does is change when the character gets their extra attacks. So at a weapon speed of 4, a character with a +9 attack bonus and making a full-round attack gets three attacks at +9/+5/+1 instead of the usual +9/+4, and a guy with a greatsword (speed 6) would instead have +9/+3 (fewer attacks but bigger damage). Most of the weapons in D&D are either listed in EQPHB or have an equivalent so figuring out their weapon speeds isn't too difficult.

Mind you this is from a personal opinion, but the two game systems have such fundamentally different natures, especially in the realm of spell-casting, that it might be easier to go with one or the other. EQ spells are heavily focused on combat (as per the nature of an online game), while D&D has a broader range of spell types, including utility spells that a hard-core combat-caster would avoid. Not to mention calculating a balanced Mana cost for the D&D spells. I'd suggest going with the EQ casters, and if you want to include D&D spells, figure the mana cost is [(Spell level x 2)+1]. Not perferct, but since D&D combat spells scale up while in EQd20 you have to learn bigger & badder versions of similar spells, it should work. I think it was the Heroes of Norrath supplement that listed EQd20 versions of some D&D utility spells, but since most of it is focused on characters level 30 and above, you probably won't find much use for it.

Another issue is experience requirements for levels. If I recall right, EQd20 uses a slightly different progression rate than D&D for each class level, not to mention ECL vs. Experience Penalty.

This being a free country, you can do whatever you want with your game, but I'd suggest using one or the other. As I said upfront, I ran an EQ campaign for a short while (died out due to scheduling issues amongst the players) using just EQ mechanics, and it ran pretty smoothly.

 

[Voadam]

I use the EQ monsters in my D&D games, sometimes using EQ magic abilities, sometimes swapping in standard D&D magic instead (like turning those eyeball things into D&D enchanters instead of EQ ones). They fit in as fine as d20 menace manual monsters from d20 Modern.