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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 3733004" data-attributes="member: 43283">So I talked with the players and said, "In an effort to make my life as a GM easier, I'm thinking of making a bit of a change to the skill system. I plan on doing this for the NPCs, but I thought I'd mention it to you guys and see if you're interested in trying it for your characters."Someone on another board mentioned that the Saga version of skill focus apparently adds another +5. that means that if I used that version, then characters would only be a couple of points behind the normal way of doing things.2 of the 3 liked the idea quite a bit (my wife is the third one and apparently likes shuffling around skill points), so it looks like the players as well as the NPCs will be doing this.I'm poking around now for a suitable module to start things off with. As I mentioned, the idea is that they're going to be members of the Watch. All sorts of groovy goodness possible there. One of the players (I picked him as going for a Sun Magi, and it looks like I was right) said, "That's great!!! So are we going to be like regular cops, or are we going to be like SWAT members?"To which I said, "There's a chance you'll be SWAT members, but we'll deal with that in-game." Of course, before I pitched the game I'd considered making them members of something like Special Branch/SWAT, but figured, "Nah, soft pitch it and go for the city watch."So what I'm going to do is have everyone make their characters at the table together, and their first adventure will be a Graduation Exercise. The premise will be "You've demonstrated you're fit for the Watch, now we'll see if you're worthy of being members of the elite." They'll be starting out at 3rd level (as the Everstone book suggests), and... well, I guess it depends on whatever module I decide on.I've thought about it, and there's basically two approaches to take for determining "success". 1) At least one person must "survive" of the team (if it's a dungeoncrawl module) or bring back the object/person (if it's more urban focused).2) Success or failure will depend less (but still be influenced by) whether they succeed in whatever the goal is, and more on how they function as a team, and how much destruction/law breaking they engage in to accomplish the mission.I think I'm going to go with option 2, because I'd like to reinforce the team mentality, and kinda gently nudge them in the direction of "blowing up everything isn't really always an option".Although I'll still let 'em blow up some stuff. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I'm thinking part Hawk and Fisher (novels by Simon R Green) and part Badboys/Die Hard.One advantage to doing the players doing their skill the way they are (besides making things a bit simpler) is that between the class they pick and the skills they opt for to be Trained, I'll have some immediate pointers to the style of game they're looking for.One guy I know is going to be going for the flashy blaster mage (Sun Magi), and I think the other is going to go for the sneaky git (Shadow Magi). I'm not quite sure which way my wife is going to go yet, as she hasn't had a chance to go through the book yet (I've got 2 copies of the book, one to loan/have available at the table, and my own personal one).I don't _think_ she's going to go for a War Golem, but that's about all I can figure. She's had some fun doing a Shifter fighter in Ebberon, but she's also grooving on doing a thiefy type in a Roman based D&D game we're currently in. She _might_ go for a Moon Magi, which means we'd have a "classic" triumvirate by the book.I've been working a bunch of overtime though, so I haven't gotten as far in going through Ptolus as I'd like. I think I just need to settle on a district and go from there. I might cheese out and simply have 'em posted to Midtown (which is where Delvers Square is).I also need to figure out something to do about the Temple area, since Everstone has only very recently had its gods coming back. And the city is pretty newly inhabited (only 80 years). I think I'll just make it easy on myself and simply have the city having been established long ago, and it emptied out (mostly) on the Night of Terror 300 years ago. When everyone came back out, it was resettled and is in the process of being repopulated by different folks. And some that never left the city, and instead went underneath it.So I think the Temples will be to either "outside" deities that the newcomers have brought with them, or in some cases might be to what people think is a different deity but is really simply another aspect of another deity.The only other thing I'm really going to have to do is get a handle on exactly what races are "established" in Ptolus, and replace them with something appropriate. Like D&D Elves and Dwarves don't exist in the default Everstone book. The dwarves are a simple replacement, but I haven't decided what to do about the elves.</blockquote>

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