h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'd love to discuss this here and the ideas that I have for my campaign world...but then there are people on this forum that are involved as players...so that's out.

On random wandering about I came upon this a subject much in my mind at the moment..

I have a similar problem with discussing the D&D (math's ed, based on 3rd ed) campain I'm starting, but I haven't named it yet

Rather than give away our plots, what about discussing the house rules we use with D&D ?

Math

Fire away, I have a priest who took the feat that allows the casting of two spells in one round. He used it to cast Harm and then Inflict Moderate Wounds on a NPC Necromancer to take her out in the second round of combat (thankfully her Golem lackey punched him in the side of the head in revenge).

In the aftermath I'm considering inposing a saving throw for the Harm spell despite what the PHB states.

By the way, what's the breakdown of the PC party?

I have to babysit:

Skaraton; human, male, Clr 7/Keeper (setting prestiege class, divine spellcaster) 6. With followers: Rehanna, human, female, Com 2/Brd 5; and Eldishar: male, azer, Rog 4.

Vexander; half-elf, male, Rgr 8/Sor 1/AA 4. With follower: Detlef; human, male, Rgr 6/Ftr 1.

Mannon; human, male, Brb 5/Sor 8. With follower: Gell; human, male, Ftr 6.

How 'bout you?

At the moment it looks like I will be starting with a fighter and a rogue, as I'm starting with just the two I have decided third level, we'll probably get underway in the new year.

As I have no spell users I'm having a much easier scrapping alignments and reducing the ease of production of magic items. In my last game the bard and sorcerer went over the top in production terms breaking game balance.

I have to admit I would prefer to be running the game in Rolemaster rather than D&D but I lent the books to someone (a friend ?) who I've been asking for them back from about year, and getting excusces instead.

Math

is that any one i know ???????? go on i wont use it ? lol

well vexander is the best character in the campaign,

if u do change the harm spell S will be pissed, but that was good with the gollum

also i nedd to discuss vexanders history with u cos that has bin causin me problems

The fact that Vexander can't remember his own past is a major element of the plot as far as your character is concerned.

And it's Golem, not Gollum!

And actually, Skaraton (who was rather the worse for a large amount of Badger's Arse, this weekend) informed me that he thinks the combination of Quiken Spell, Harm and Inflict Moderate Wounds is far too powerful and he intends to change it for the Reach Spell feat.

I'm still working on the idea of a close combat feat that will allow you to use a bow without provoking an attack of oppertunity, so watch this space.

As far as I'm concerned the alignment rules in D&D have always been a stumbling block and something that keeps the system from evolving into a more mature and flexible set of rules. The only real time that I find these rules useful is to decide what an NPC might do in a certain situation and how a city or nation would conduct itself.

As for characters manufacturing magucal items, the only advice that I can offer is to keep them from having acess to the means with which to make them. Keep them on the move and keep them occupied, that way they find it very hard to sit down and craft items. You try forging a magical blade whilst you're being harassed by a bloody dragon!

On the other hand you have to reward characters for the choices they make in selecting their skills and feats and the way that they roleplay their characters. One character in my campaign spent time forging his own weapons when wandering the wilds all alone and as a result wanted to learn smithing to be able to make additions to and repair the groups aresnal. After he took the time to find a weaponsmith to teach him the party spent a good deal of time in a dwarf deep that their quest had lead them too. Of course the deep had a well equipped smithy and the character decided that as they had slain a young dragon, he would try to make good use of his skills. The end result was a dragonscale breastplate and a suit of banded mail as well as one masterwork dagger forged from one of the dragon's fangs. Valuable items, but not enough to unbalance the game. The character had the satisfaction of using his skills and the game went on its merry way. On one hand you need the cooperation of the players, but keeping them on the move helps as well.

Sorry I've been out of the loop a few days, its the whole xmas thing getting in the way of my life by insisting reality has concerns too.
On monday night me and one of my players were discussing the D&D which I'll be starting to run a week monday, inparticular we discussed the problems with the alignment and magical systems, neither of us like the idea that there are only ten levels of spells (from 0-9), and the way the two are tied together makes it hard to change one without the other. As I mentioned before neither of my players is planning on a spell caster, but it seems both were considering multiclassing into cleric at some point, so I've had to really look at and fix the whole thing. Once started on rearranging the system it was hard to stop, I mean if I'm going to change magic to my liking I'm going to have to make some changes else where to fit in and so on. After some hours of deliberation and debate with the player who was there, we have the same basic rules to D&D with the whole character system changed, and completly new way of looking at magic. My version of D&D now has no classes, and a whole lot more spells. We've put a points based system in for character creation, and for gains made when levelling, magic is in part taken from rolemaster, three realms of magic, essance mentalism, and channeling (we decided not to include arcane), and at character creation the player picks a level of magic a non-spell user, a semi-spell user, or a full-spell user. We then changed magic system into skills for each list of spells with different costs for non, semi, and full spell users (yes we decided to allow non spell users to pick up spells, but its expensive). As a consiquence we needed to make combat into a skill based system to balance out, so we did, breaking it down to unarmed combat, one-handed edged weapons, 1 handed concussion weapons, two handed weapons, polearms, thrown weapons, missile weapons, and artillery. We also put a cost on feats so people can pick them up or not as they level, and added the special abilities of the various classes to feats, generally with level requirments and the requirment to have aquired the feats of lower level before it. For example to get the Monks Ki strike (+1) you would need to have got all the special abilities monks have before that. The monkly combat abilities (the extra ac and adding wisdom to ac as well as dex, the changing damage dice for unarmed combat, and additional movement) we decided should be aquired at character creation and not available later (of course if a player REALLY wants it, and roleplays its aquisition an exception might be made, but I doubt it will come up in my game). Back to the changes to character creation, you have points to spend and a cost for picking skills as class or cross-class or leave as the default of non-class (we kept the terms for ease, though I will allow people to pick up non-class skills for triple the cost of class skills and limeted to 1/4 of what a class skill could be, as I did when running the game without so manty changes to the rules), this includes picking the combat skills, but the costs for spells are defined by which type of spell user you are. There are costs to choose which progression your resitances increase by, and points have to be spent on your stats (no longer rolled, because when I last made a character I rolled 18 17 17 15 14 12, and no one else had a single stat above 15). All in all I think we have added a great deal of versitility with a tollerable amount of complexity.
Any questions ?

Sorry I went on for ages about how I changed the system, but I figure anyone reading it to the end will have to have been interested

Math

Changes to the system are always intriguing and it seems like you've spent a long time pondering the implications of the rules and your needs.

Apparently the Epic Level Handbook provides scope for characters to develop spells of 10th and higher levels, but that's by the by.

You seem to be harking back to the Rolemaster system in your modifications a lot. Many of my players have voiced their dislike of that system due to a preponderance of tables, but I've never played in such a game and reserve my judgement.

Have you considered simply playing the campaign you have planned using the Rolemaster rules?

I'd love to play the game with rolemaster, but I lent the books to a "friend" a few years ago for a game he was running, I've been asking for them back for over a year and getting avoided and occasionally an excuse. I still have however a copy of spell law which I had spare. Unfortunatly I cannot easily replace them because my local roleplay shop is run by a twit who is incapable of ordering things, while they are available on the net I have no credit cards (far too dangerous in my hands) and until this "friend" tells me he no longer has the books as I suspect, I don't want to potentialy waste the time and money. (Also the edition I had is now out of print, and I would have to replace those few books I still have for it.)

I guess I refer to rolemaster a lot because it is far and away my favourite system, I find it to be extreemly flexable, and once the game is started smooth to run.

As to rolemasters percieved complexity and use of tables, I find it a wonderfuly simple system to use. Character creation does take a while, at least an hour per character even with the use of the spreadsheet I developed to keep track of everything, but once playing all rolls are the same and refer to either a static manouver table or moving manouver table for general actions, or spell casting table and combat table as apropriate. General actions boil down to roll D100 add skill modify as per GM for difficulty is result 111+ in which case perfect sucess, less than that is a partial sucess. For combat there is a table for each weapon and various critical hit tables but a little photo copying as preperation and thats as smooth as any system, the only problem with combat system is a lack of facility to cope with a targeted atack, like aiming to hack off an arm, rather than to kill your oponent, but thats easily delt with by on the fly difficulty adjustments, and interpretation of results.

When I first encountered RM I was in uni' and playing with a rules lawyer (I'm sure you know the type) and the GM hit us with rolemaster, and the rules lawyer gave in over the year, (the GM had been playing for years) was changed into a roleplayer proper.

I would however say RM does require a confident GM who is able to use or ignore rules to make a game flow, and who knows those rules well.

D&D spells above level 9! spells with more potency than wish and miracle, is that a good thing ?

The basic RM spell lists go from levels 1-50 and even then level 50 spells aren't as all powerful as wish, though some could be considered more powerful in thier specific area. Rolemaster does have spells above level 50 but not many, though it does have optional rules for spell research. The thing I like about the RM spell lists is the great number of utility spells, like there are some that will increase the speed of reading, some for copying documents (low levels ones for non-forgeries), almost any effect you could ever wish for can be found somewhere in the spells.

Math - goes on far too much given a chance

I find that there are even more amusing annecdotes to be found when you have a rules lawyer as a player.

What did your one come up with?

*tries to stretch mind back 6 years*
I can remember some names, some vague faces, a vast quantity of beer, even some pretzels, a vague recolection of a plot which started as a space opera, and then decended into a planet bound time surpassing epic in which some people ended up playing their own children... sadly detail escapes me.

I do recall in another game at the same time someone lost two characters in a row by having helecopters crash on him, and a third to trying to throw a grenade through a bullet proof window and being suprised when it bounced back.

The application of a torniquet to neck wound (in a game) and the resulting death and recriminations (a dwarf yelling how he knew nothing of tending elf wound and that was standard practive amongst his people...)

I recall the "crenalated earth debate" we figured that world wasn't flat, but it coundn't be round like some fool had tried to tell us so after a few hours of debate we decided it was wavey...

Sadly my memory is ... umm what was I saying ?

Math - happy to have a short name he can recall

I recall a heated debate between the DM and the most celebrated rules lawyer I ever played with. The situation was such that the party had been attacked by a large flock of griffons using their airborne advantage to harass the PCs. Now the ranger that the character was playing had managed to pick up an intelligent weapon along the way that allowed him to fly and turned him into a sort of horrible parody of Superman and Robin Hood. Upon sighting the griffons he duly took to the air and soared towards them to engauge them in their own element. As it happened the sword gave the ranger the ability to move a little faster than the griffons and he thus argued that this would allow him to slip around them and attack from behind. The DM pointed out the fact that he was in clear sight of the griffons as he approached them and in his opinion this meant the creatures would be able to react and follow his movements thus keeping their faces to him. The argument raged for around ten times the period it would have taken to resolve the combat had he just shut up and accepted the DM's ruling.

There was also the infamous dwarf fighter who met death many times but always came back to challenge the bounds of sanity thanks to the faithful ressurection spell. There was the time that his party were being persued down a river bed by armed riders. Tired of running he decided that he would make a stand by baring the blades attatched to his armour and curling up into a ball on the riverbed. When the riders reached him he was promptly trampled to death. The same fighter later came across a deep pool of water at the bottom of which was a horde of treasure. After leaping in to retrive the booty two points became apparent; firstly he had forgotten to remove his full-plate armour and secondly he had forgotten to learn to swim. Finally the hapless dwarf was part of a group that stormed an orc stronghold where the green-skins had been supplied with a large quantity of rather nasty poison. Taking sensible precautions the party cast the Delay Poison spell on themselves, but unfortunately no one had the arguably more useful Neutralize Poison spell. After the romp through the orcs the Dwarf found himself to contain enough poison to depopulate Western Europe twice over and promptly rode off towards the nearest city in the hope of finding a spellcaster to cure him before the Hold Poison spell wore off and the poison took effect. The rest of the party later found his curled up body by the side of the road a mere hour or so away from the city gates.

Aww have to feel sorry for the poor dwarf, though it does serve to remind me of one of my favourite characters and how he died
Davin started out as reformed drunkard dwarf just enlisted in the priesthood of Kinmaknar (it was palladium (not rifts), I'm not sure of the name of the god, but it was one of the dragon gods), the reason he was joining the preisthood was fear, he had seen his family destroyed by the accusations of priest, and had a natural fear of gods anyway. This had lead to the five years drinking that had destroyed his inherited wealth and then on sobering up he decided to join a priesthood, to get the protection one god against the others. This was how he started at the begining of the game. A RL year later (at about 20 hours a week) the character had gained a degree of confidence, had two conversions under his belt and one divine intervention to save a companion, and a whole host of other stuff.
We were exploring and underground cavern system about two hours walking away from the nearest exit we knew of when an earthquake hit us, Davin was knocked out very early on in the ensuing chaos. I came round to find myself trapped and alone in the dark, I had a single spell I could try to get out of their with, move through rock, unfortunatly GM decided I wasn't quite quick enough to cover the ground without an athletics test of somekind, he plucked a target number out of thin air, and I failed by 1. Rather than kill Davin out right he had me breach the surface to my knees when the spell wore out and my lower legs became one with the stone. I had the choice then of continuing the character disabled, or facing my fears, dying and facing my god (GM gave me the option of dying from shock, how nice of him). After much thought and debate I decided that Davin had over come his fears sufficiently, and with reluctance he died.(In the end I rolled a dice to decided it, I called it a fear check at the time, set a target myself and passed.)

Math

That's an unpleasant way to go...touch wood, I've actually never lost a character yet despite the manic odds that I've faced over the years.

Apparently characters drowning due to the fact that the player forgot to make sure they could swim is not that rare, as is characters in full armour leaping to a watery grave.

I think such things are conclusive proof of the idea that common sense is neither common nor a sense

I've done a little live roleplay, and worn chainmail for a three day period, even to sleeping in it, as that was better than putting on cold mail first thing in the morning, though it was only a long mail shirt not full mail no coif or skirt, and by the end of the three days it was like a second skin I could forget about. Though cleaning it when I got home did take some hours, the best way I found of cleaning mail armour is to put it in a bag with sand and shake before oiling.

Math