Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="giant.robot" data-source="post: 5299564" data-attributes="member: 93119">On Wednesday with the allowance of home made characters a guy showed up with a Shardmind sorcerer. I don't have any problem with him wanting to play that character and since he was the same level as everyone else it was pretty balanced. However at that point in the DDE campaign the number of survival days the characters had was becoming an actual issue. If you were running your own Dark Sun campaign you would need to be really careful allowing Shardmind and Warforged characters because the survival day mechanic doesn't really affect them.These kind of things don't break the game or cause people not to have fun but they do kind of break the module. In Encounters if the module is broken by some subtle combination of optional powers players bring to the table that affects everyone playing. The DM either has to rebalance things on the fly which not all DMs do even if they know how or let it slide and everyone just walks through the module with little threat of failure. I've enjoyed the fact the Dark Sun Encounters' characters are not as optimal as you could possibly make them as it makes the module overall fairly challenging.Some of the Essentials builds are not as heavy hitting as ones from the Core books. They're easier to play and understand but don't necessarily hit as hard. In an encounter balanced around Essentials classes and powers someone rolling in with a character decked out with every option possible might completely destroy the challenge of that encounter and potentially the entire module. The big danger there isn't so much someone hurts the module writer's feelings but that whirling Dervish player intimidates a new player sitting with their pregen hand-out character. The new player might not feel like they can contribute if the person sitting next to them is munchkining the game. If the DM and the munchkin player don't realize and appreciate this that new player probably won't come back the following week. Having everyone try to make due with the same level of characters I think makes for a more involving game.</blockquote>

Verification