Card start to a Campaign

[Haltherrion]

Wow - Great paint jobs on those mini's!

He does a great job painting. Our painter is in the top 50 on Coolminornot.com as sivousplay (the site seems to be down tonight for some reason). You can also find his web site here although it isn't up to date. He does commissions and will also sell some of his stuff on Ebay.

I could see some players feeling a little confined or railroaded in havings their selection of PC's pre-determined, but it looks like you have done an exhaustive job in providing them a great number of options, and still allowing them some customization by adding class levels.

That's a real concern. But the players were involved from the beginning on the overall mix of races. Even after the figures were painted, they had the option to nix a few figures and we ended up swapping out 3 or 4.

We did two full drafts and the group chose which draft they wanted to play with. With six players and two drafts, there were 12 portfolios and 11 of the 12 were ones the players were happy with. Seems to indicate some robustness in the system (and a set of reasonably accomodating players.) We've played for 8 or 9 sessions now and everyone seems to really enjoy their PCs and portfolios.

The limitations inherent in the system were intentional- by limiting it to 36 choices, I felt I could control the options and characteristics well enough to ensure a playable set of PCs but still give reasonable choice over what is in the end quite powerful PCs that you don't normally get to play. I made significant deviations from the standard races and ECLs to arrive at this. (Personally I find many of the ECLs overstated, especially the dragons under age young.)

There was one combination that proved unplayable (Firstborn-saint) but the player was cooperative and we nerfed it.

The current party as played is:

• Paladin very young male bronze dragon. (He has a boatload of hit points but definitely doesn't dominate).
• Half-giant/half fiend female paladin
• Half-bronze dragon male champion of light with young silver dragon companion
• Nymph sorceress
• Male elf (homegrown prestige class)
• Male firstborn barbarian lion guardinal
• Female human kensai
• Female half-fiend/half-celestial cleric with very young gold dragon mount

The dragon companions are also a product of the draft (for those players who went heavy on the dragon suit cards). Also, certain cards gave two players the option to play 2 PCs which is why 8 PCs are listed for 6 players.