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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Peni Griffin" data-source="post: 3376198" data-attributes="member: 50322">I meant taking out the Fane of Tiamat entirely and letting the adventure lead to your keystone thing instead.  I may not understand your keystone idea sufficiently.  If you use the idea of the draconic faction vs. the traditional goblin faction, might the draconics have means/motive/opportunity to hijack the keystone phenomenon for their own purposes?My group started in Sunless Citadel, too, and have an alliance with Yusdrayl the Kobold Queen.  What a lot we have in common.I guess it's time to explain my problems now.  I'm not sure that the kind of help I need is possible to get on the net - but if there's a resource out there someone could steer me to I don't want to miss it. My chief problem as a DM is that I'm not good at mechanics.  This is less of a hassle than you'd think during the game, because I'm (without false modestly) very good indeed at character and story and two talented game mechanics sit at my table.  They are as anxious as I am for the story to go smoothly and I can almost always (they are human, after all) trust them not to try to trick me into giving the party an unfair advantage.  As long as the story keeps moving, and everyone gets to at least try out their clever strategies, use their cool class features, and set up their dramatic scenes, we're a happy bunch.  I'm running modules specifically so I don't get bogged down in the tedious business of making gobs of stat blocks.  Most modules have a logic flaw or two, but I can alter a map or rewrite a motivation without feeling burdened.We're also playing 3.0, whereas RHOD is written for 3.5, using the PHB (not PHB II), DMG, and MM primarily.  Splatbooks and online features are allowed only selectively, dependent on the ability of the person who wants to use something selling me on its story possibilities, or if I can't find what I need for the story in those three books.   Two of our players have limited budgets and experience of tabletop gaming, and making the switch to 3.5 would be a burden on them, not to mention that the sometimes subtle differences have the potential to screw me up.  In retrospect, I probably should have looked harder for an older module, but we're committed to RHOD now.  Everyone knows there's a discrepancy between some of the module assumptions and the campaign assumptions, and we've agreed to accept the stat blocks in the book without subjecting them to comparative scrutiny, though there've already been instances of the game mechanics getting weirded out.  No system's perfect.But, because they're being good sports about this, any NPCs I have to stat out for myself (Sertieren, Avarthel, Delorra Zann, Kellin Shadowbanks, and Morlin Coalhewer, so far) or rewrite completely I need to make 3.0 legal.  We've completed Part 1 and the PCs, with Avarthel, Sertieren, and Morlin are sitting in a deserted Drellin's Ferry waiting for a response to their message to the Ghost Lord and trying to figure out how to attract allies.  I told them we'd need about a month hiatus while I worked out the ripples of all their efforts so far, and we've switched to somebody else's campaign.  I managed to get the Ghost Lord section squared away, though I was upset (when GL and Ulwai got into a lying contest as she tried to keep him from learning that his phylactery was stolen and he tried to keep her from knowing that he's gotten a communication on that subject) to find that Ulwai has no Bluff score.  I admit it - I'm so bad at mechanics that I have trouble absorbing info from a stat block until I try to use it!  The next phase I focused on was: What's going on in Brindol?  Because I'm treating the Elsir River as a highway rather than a barrier, refugees arrive in Brindol before the Horde even gets to Drellin's Ferry.  Miha Serani, as the Horde spy able to pass as human indefinitely, started the module in Brindol. I'd already modified her some to make her more effective - a Wand of Sending instead of the scroll, a hawk famliar instead of a viper, and some walking around treasure.  I went to roll and see what she learned from the refugees, and that's when I discovered she had no Gather Info skill.  This is absurd in a spy and I can't ignore it, but when I dismantled her I found that I couldn't just (for instance) cross out Disguise and plug in Gather Information.  Almost all of her skills are cross-class under 3.0.  I found myself adding on two rogue levels just in order to give her the most important spy skills, without bringing them up near as high as the module does.  This increases her C.R.  I don't have a problem with that - much - because she's a lone agent.  If she doesn't succeed in infiltrating the party, they'll make mincemeat of her with tactics and teamwork, because that's what they do to lone monsters. But it took all evening to rewrite her, I'm not convinced it was the best solution; and now I'm going to have to go through every NPC provided, focus on the stat blocks, ask myself "How am I going to use this character?," and break down and rebuild every single one that doesn't work for me.  I know I'll have to do it to Skather, who previously I'd just been going to graft on top of a MMII or III critter called the Durzagon - a half-fiend, half-duergar - but now I don't trust that to work. And if I rewrite him, then the assassins in "marked for death" have to be totally rewritten, and what else am I going to turn up?So I guess what I want is shortcuts for converting 3.5 NPCs that don't satisfy my needs into 3.0 NPCs who do!  Methods.  Net tools.  Tricks.  Anything to keep me from taking six months to get back to the campaign!</blockquote>

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