D&D with a twist

[Bagpuss]

original posters blog

You been reading my mind? (only difference is I was going to have the only magic available by pacts with demons, and no PC magic/psionic classes.)

 

[MarkB]

Some great ideas here - I do enjoy a campaign which takes a different angle on some of the standard rules. I'm currently playing in a game whose ground rule was "no standard PHB classes or races", and the resulting party was an interesting mix that worked surprisingly well together.

Oh, and Action Points too. I can't remember if this is an actual rule, or a houserule, but we could burn an action point to stabilize at -1 instantly too.

Eberron's AP rules allow a character to spend an AP on his turn to auto-stabilise when down and dying.

 

[gribble]

How about a campaign where you had humans and x-touched races only? I.e., the planetouched aasimar, tieflings, genasi, and the shifters and changelings (lycanthrope-touched and doppleganger-touched, respectively?) It might take a little work since the earlier races are all LA +1, which is something WotC seems to be trying to get out of doing now. Maybe a little tweaking to make them back to LA +0 and you're good to go? Presumably this campaign would feature a world with lots of interplanar trafficking of some kind. I imagine a setting that is primarily (if not entirely, at least from the point of the view of the players) based in a massive city. A fantasy Coruscant, if you will.

Did anyone else read this and think Planescape? I mean, the city you describe is basically Sigil...

 

[Desdichado]

Oh, I almost forgot (I guess it has been a while since I ran that game after all...) we also used a rule from Unearthed Arcana where armor converted a certain amount of "real" damage into subdual damage. So a couple of game hours after a fight, the PCs had recovered from their subdual damage and were usually at about 50% or so. That along with changing Heal to work like Treat Injury usually got them up near 75% (we were playing around 6th level, so it's not like the PCs had gajillions of hit points yet either.) That made a huge difference in how much healing was needed.

There was also a spell available that could heal, but since it tended to do Sanity damage, and the only guy in the group who wanted to learn spells had the lowest Wisdom and Sanity in the group, they tended to never use it.

And re: gribble -- yeah, I didn't intend to outright imitate Sigil, but the basic concept being so similar is difficult to avoid.

 

[gribble]

And re: gribble -- yeah, I didn't intend to outright imitate Sigil, but the basic concept being so similar is difficult to avoid.

Wasn't meaning to criticise - just seemed like something you might be able to mine for ideas...


In fact, I actually stole a couple of your concepts, and blended them together for a campaign I might run at some point, in essence:

Basically, it was a peaceful world, ruled over by a benevolent pantheon of gods... Until the demon overthrew the gods and "killed" them all. Only they didn't... Like the Kalashtar from Eberron, the gods actually hid themselves inside a group of mortal heroes, who became the beginnings of the kalashtar race. So basically you have a world, where all divine magic comes from demon princes (i.e.: all clerical/divine magic is inherently evil - no spontaneous curing or turning undead, no druids, paladins or divine casting rangers - though there are some neutral clerics that draw on the power of the demon princes, so you can have PC clerics in a non-evil party, but they're generally feared and not trusted). The "good magic" is psionics, so base classes are psion, psychic warrior, soulblade, as well as the usual non-magical classes, non-magical version of bard/ranger and the knight from PHB2 (replacing the paladin). There is no known arcane magic, though there are rumors of the occasional stranger who manifests unusal magic that isn't psionics and doesn't seem to be demon tainted... There are dragonmarks (a la Eberron), but they aren't tied to specific races, and there aren't dragonmarked houses (at least not in the same way as Eberron). The main races of the setting are human and kalashtar. There are some halflings and dwarves... Still undecided on the other races, but probably no orcs, elves, gnomes or dwarves (though I might throw dwarves back into the mix... Cos they're just too cool).

That was a snippet from an email to a potential player... what I didn't say is that the "unusual magic" is actually arcane magic (sorcery), manifested by the dragons and those who serve them... they're also behind the dragonmarks. So that adds a third (hidden) faction to the war between the gods (aka the kalashtar now) and the demon princes. They will bring with them sorcerers (all sorcerers will use the dragonblooded substitution levels from Races of the Dragon - in the RAW, I feel they're a little weak), and the dragonborn (or at least a variant thereof which aren't so tightly tied to bahumat, but rather any dragon - will have to re-read them and see how that might work though). And of course the motivations/goals of the dragons in the "war" will be unclear, once they're discovered.

Well, that's my thoughts so far... something quite different from the standard, but hopefully still very D&D.

 

[Desdichado]

Well, that's my thoughts so far... something quite different from the standard, but hopefully still very D&D.

Hey, I'd play in it if you ran it.

That's what I'm hoping for too--my last game, I really hesitated to call D&D. Some kind of d20 Dark Fantasy that bore a faint resemblance to D&D maybe... but not D&D.

For this campaign development, I'm trying to still monkey around with assumptions quite a bit, but at the same time, end up with something that's at least as recognizably D&D as some of the other more esoteric 2e settings, like Dark Sun or Al-Qafreakingdim.

 

[Stockdale]

What a great game this was/is!

I don't know who'd want to play in a game like this! As fun as it sounds, it was a lot of fun to play. The use of insanity and the conversion of real to subdual damage through armor made otherwise less effective characters (and I don't think there were any core-class type characters - I played a Wildlander) quite playable. Moreover, J-Dawg's stroytelling is superb; I had to check my own sanity with his description.

J-Dawg.

I'm interested if you'd like to run a session. And I know, in all that immense free time I have.

Stockdale

 

[Desdichado]

Stockdale! How's it goin', man?

Hope you can come up for air soon and get a few sessions of gaming in with us again soon. We miss Snig, the goblin-pimp.

 

[I'm A Banana]

main races of the setting are human and kalashtar. There are some halflings and dwarves... Still undecided on the other races, but probably no orcs, elves, gnomes or dwarves (though I might throw dwarves back into the mix... Cos they're just too cool).

What about the XPH races? Some of them have LA, but the CP has some rules for making them playable at low-levels, too.

 

[Desdichado]

Today's blog post, cross-posted yet again:

OK, so here's some more detail about the "twist" of this setting. Because what I said a post or two ago sounds like it's re-treading one of my earlier campaigns a bit, I want to pull back a little to "nominal" D&D first, and stick a little bit closer to it.

So here's the deal--any "full-time" spellcasting classes can only be taken if you have more levels of a non-spellcasting class than you will have of a spell-casting class. "Full-time" spellcasting classes include (from the core classes) wizard, sorcerer, cleric and druid. For purposes of this campaign, psionics count as magic too, so classes like the Psion would be subject to the same rules.

In addition, any non-core classes, like the Wu Jen, for instance, or Favored Soul or something like that, would also be subject to the same rule. I'm not going to specificy exactly all the classes that this applies to, but with very few exceptions, it should be obvious anyway. In addition, I'll encourage -- but not require -- that players pick non-core classes anyway. Someone was just telling me not long ago of a game they ran where the only character creation rule was "No Player's Handbook races or classes" and how fun it was. I'll encourage this too with classes.

With races, of the PHB races, only the human will be admitted. Of other alternate races, I haven't exactly given it enough thought. I'll certainly encourage the four Eberron races as well as the races from the recent Races of xxx series and the environmental series, as well as the races from Oriental Adventures and the Expanded Psionics Handbook. Mostly, though, if a player picks a race, I'll find a way to work it in somehow. This is supposed to be some kind of planar crossroads, so it shouldn't be too hard.