NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TornadoCreator" data-source="post: 5539051" data-attributes="member: 6672078">I played a campaign on release, using just the first three books, PHB, DMG and MM1. The campaign was pretty well balanced mainly because the PC's where crap. I made a Fey Pact Warlock with a hatred of Gnolls, we has a Wizard specialising in Frost Magic, A Glaive weilding Fighter (who rolled statistically abysmally and died three times during the campaign), A Dragonborn Paladin of Bahamut with a Bastardsword, and a Dwarven Cleric of Erathis. Not one of us set our stats out optimally, building our characters according to what we wanted to play rather than stats. This lead to us having a Cleric that couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, A fighter who could trip people up a lot but couldn't be relied on to do more than 3 damage a round, the dragonborn was our greatest damage dealer but his lay on hands was actually useless, the warlock teleported a lot... and did sod all else, and the Wizard had a rediculous plus stupid skill in Arcana, a sky high intelligence, and very little else as he refused to do anything that wasn't ice based in case it broke character.With this group, our first ever group, which we played quite a bit, we did surprisingly well and felt challenged right up to level 12 where the group got wiped out fighting a Dragon on a sinking boat in the final battle...The next group we tried however. We we had two Elven Rangers (playing a brother and sister pair), A Dwarven Warlord, An Infernal Pact Warlock, Another Dwarven Cleric (this time of Moradin), A Human Tempest Fighter (this was the week after Martial Power came out, but we still didn't have Monster Manual 2, Players Handbook 2 or pretty much any splat-books, I think Martial Power was the first).The sheer amount of damage we could kick out from this team was such that at one point the DM actually cried (but in a manly way) when we one-round-killed a recurring villan using nothing but PHB and Martial Power stuff at level 11. We could on a regular basis carve a nice valley though all the monsters with ease and without panic so much so that he started adding additional hazards, like making us fight in a swamp so that if we stayed still we'd start sinking and take poison damage, then putting in enemies that use stun or knock prone abilities... and even then we won with ease.Monster Manual 1 is underpowered almost entirely... as a rule of thumb, I instinctively double the damage of anything. If it says it doesn 1d10+4 in my games it does 2d10+8. This seems to work well (be warned, there are some rare powerful monsters in MM1 that, if you double there damage WILL give you a TPK, so use common sense. You have been warned).</blockquote>

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