Character Creation Bonus?

[King Nate]

At CharGen the only goodiie I throw to my players is a free Adventurer`s Kit.
Throwing out extra feats would be a big no-go for me, for an extra feat at first level screws up the balancing pretty badly.

I am perfectly fine with letting a player choose any skill as a class skill though, if it fits the concept. This generaly helps since in our group we ruled out themes and limited background benefits to one benefit per char.

And I guess I could be persuaded to grant an extra skill, especially if the group is small(i.e. there are less han 4 players). But an extra feat? Nope, sir.

As far as magical items are concerned as a DM I am a lot more restrictive than the CB as well. i will give out magic items as per the official guidelines as far as levels are oncerned but do not expect me to give away frost/radiant weapons for frostcheese/radaiant mafia. In fact, the Lasting FrostWintertouched-combo is banned at my table for being too cheesy.

There may be further restrictions, butr these generally depend on the group. For example, in my current group I have a warlord in my party so I will not allow Bracers of Mighty Striking until the party hits Paragon. The two strenght-based melee characters are giving my monsters a hard time anyway weith their warlord support, so my group is nowhere near missing the extra damage these bracers could offer. i don`t like to play 4E as a variant of the Cold War where both sides of the game try to bring as many nukes to the party as possible.

Giving out bonusses to ability scores helps some classes while the benefits to other builds are quite limited. If i had a party solely consisting of MAD classes then maybe I might give this try for a high-power-approach. But generally i would be careful with this as well.

BTW: Why the interest? Are you planning to beef up a party of experienced players who want to advance more quickly? Or is this just some experiment to take a closer lok at the math and the feeling involved?

I’m interested in this because it’s what I’ve always done since I first started playing D&D with Keep on the Borderlands. In that module it states that the DM may opt to give the player characters a special item of equipment to begin with – mules, a weapon, some trade goods, or virtually anything of small value (within reason). Also since I never played the module with 6 – 9 players, it also suggests that I give magic dagger, some magic arrows, at least one potion of healing, and men-at-arms.

Over the years I have always given out stuff to players, testing out different things. I’m about to start a new campaign in 4e and thought I would check with the community to see what kinds of things they hand out to maybe add to my collection.

From my experience the only two things I have seen as some-what game breaking on the previous list are the extra feat of choice and magic weapon or implement, which I corrected on my current list but added to this post to see if other people use them.

I currently allow extra feats but only chosen from a preselected list. The things on the list are flavor feats such as Far Thought, Honor-Bound, or Linguist. Stuff that doesn’t break the game yet adds a unique flavor to the character should he chose to pick it.

Making players more powerful means giving them much hgher level monsters to challenge them.

4E has the most powerful First level character, why the need to make them super men ?

I could see swapping skills that make more sense for a char concept, but NO need to give out extra powers & feats were none are needed.

In a level-based system if you want more powerful characters the best way to do it is generally to play at a higher level. By making that one change, and nothing else, you get the more powerful characters you want and don't need to make changes to the rest of the system to compensate. (And don't worry about feeling like it's 'cheating' - we'll promise not to let WotC know! )

If, instead, you give bonuses to ability scores, extra feats, free magic items, or whatever, then you'll adjust the power level somewhat, and have to compensate. That's fine, and can be done... but it's much easier just to up the level and leave everything else as-is.

(Of course, that's a truth that even WotC have failed to learn - 4e characters are more powerful now, at any given level, than they were when 4e was first released. And the same was true over the lifespan of both 3.0e and 3.5e, too. It's almost certainly true of Pathfinder, too. This has meant that new monsters have also had to be more powerful than old ones, and has even meant that the entirety of the 4e monster math has needed to be revised!)

I don’t hand out stuff to increase the power level of the players. Everything is handed out to add flavor to the character. Other things I encourage players to take advantage of, to add flavor to their character, is creating an unusual mechanical option from their background to add a unique touch to their character. This was suggested in the Player’s Strategy Guide and I allow players to add their stamp to their character.

My group used to give a lot of bonuses at character creation, and now we only give one:

One trained skill can be any skill you like.

This lets us cover a critical skill with any class, and has worked out quite well for us.

The skill stuff everyone is talking about is pretty much what backgrounds do, and as stated above, I try to encourage player’s to create a unique mechanical option apposed to selecting the skill. There are a few players that don’t want to go through the trouble of creating one so they just chose the skill or language.

What kind of bonuses did you group use to give out?

 

[Kzach]

In the last few years I've mainly run games for temporary groups of people that never stay together for more than 5-6 levels. In this circumstance, I've found that providing incentives to create character detail creates more problems than it solves. Inevitably, people feel entitled to the freebies and when they don't meet your standards of creativity, they either feel resentful, left out, or disparaged against.

Instead what I find works better is simply to provide benefits as we play through roleplaying. A player who has spent time on developing some sort of backstory will get more involvement and interaction with the story elements and therefore more out of the game. I find that this tends to motivate other players to go back and put the effort in to flesh out their characters. People see the benefits and rewards and realise that the onus is on them to provide the necessary material to facilitate that involvement.

 

[King Nate]

In the last few years I've mainly run games for temporary groups of people that never stay together for more than 5-6 levels. In this circumstance, I've found that providing incentives to create character detail creates more problems than it solves. Inevitably, people feel entitled to the freebies and when they don't meet your standards of creativity, they either feel resentful, left out, or disparaged against.

Instead what I find works better is simply to provide benefits as we play through roleplaying. A player who has spent time on developing some sort of backstory will get more involvement and interaction with the story elements and therefore more out of the game. I find that this tends to motivate other players to go back and put the effort in to flesh out their characters. People see the benefits and rewards and realise that the onus is on them to provide the necessary material to facilitate that involvement.

It's not a reward system based off how creative they are in providing a background, it's an additional item to help add flavor to their character. If I have a player who wants to play a fighter with a pet dog, but doesn't want to play a ranger because he likes playing a defender, I can give him the animal companion as stated in the DMG2. The power level of the character doesn't change and he has himself a pet dog. A fighter with a pet dog has a different feel to the character than just a fighter and a different feel than a beastmaster ranger.

 

[Zaran]

I've given Humans an extra +2 to a stat. I know this makes them the favored race which was my intention.

I've given Melee Training to certain classes for free. I always give the Power Swap feats for free although I do keep the level prerequiste. I'm talking about the feats that allow a PC to drop a power for another so they would still need the Multiclass feat.

I've also given Non Combat type feats such as Linguist or Skill Training at odd levels.

 

[was]

I give extra xp for both character histories and pictures, I also have homebrewed background feats and I let people choose 1 for free at creation.

 

[mneme]

Before trying to come up with ideas for extra rp stuff to give players, I'd look at the Backgrounds, and more, themes subsystems. Functionally, that's what those subsystems do--take the Fey Beast Tamer or Beastmaster theme and the player gets a pet; take the Noble theme and they get an ancestral item (eventually, anyway), and so on. It's easy enough to modify an existing theme for what you want or even make one up.

Of course, you can draw outside those lines without seriously unbalancing the game. Particularly when it comes to GM controlled benefits like pets, intelligent magic items, and servants that are under GM, not player control.

I also wouldn't worry that much about giving out magic items in the right tier (or even "ancestral" items that are intended to grow with the PC); other players will also get magic items, so things will balance out pretty quickly.

That said, the thing I'd very much avoid giving anything that provided a static bonus to hit or damage (or even an easily abusable situational one) that wasn't easily duplicable by other players [so a ring that provides a +1 Item bonus to damage? Sure; good alternative to Iron Bracers; letting the character be Large and thus wield a large weapon? No, no, a thousand times no]. Worse, even, is giving something that provides a bonus to the weapon die size (which is a static bonus to damage that grows with level and power). Doing this ends up seriously hurting the balance between characters unless others end up with bonuses that similarly increase their overall power over the course of the entire campaign, and this kind of thing is very hard to balance.