Alruneza: Saving the Kingdom

[Dracos]

Something that I was stewing over yesterday is the insinuation that D&D simply only works with characters close to the same level.  It's one they make a couple times through the GM's guide mostly with the focus on battle, and while it's true with a standard adventuring party, I can't help but think that it also skews the possibility of the game being used to tell other tales.  I think the obsession with that is why you also see almost always young characters and starts at low levels as well, since it's optimal for providing the most stable dungeon crawling experience.

Thus, a somewhat generic adventure/hero story.  At least I think it is despite the fact I can't think of what specifically I'm ripping off.  I think it'll be clear when I announce the roles.

This will be a 4 person game.  On the forums and slowly paced.  Anyone seeing how slow  I've been lately  should know what to expect since work takes most my time.  Hoping this'll work like that but what the hell.

Each player will take a role that will be partially outlined here.  You can be creative with it outside the small outlines, but part of it is for the story telling and part of it is that I believe such roles are part of how to make the whole thing work.

Everyone:
You must be from True Neutral or higher alignment.
You have 80 CP to build yourself at level 1.

Roles:

Mentor:  The mentor will get  9 class levels (Total level 9, not 10) to establish themselves with.  They must within their background accept the duty of looking out after the other characters.  They do not need to admit this to the other characters.  THe mentor character must be at least middle aged or venerable with all associated penalties.  Narratively, the Mentor's objective is to forge the younger into legendary heroes and/or keep them alive.  You will also need a longer backstory with a few ally NPCs in various places of the kingdom.  You are required to take Knowledge Local.

Male lead:  This youthful and optimistic character has 3 class levels to build themselves with.  They come from a rural village which may or may not have burned down.  Needless to say, they've got an enthusiastic desire for regime change and are, without knowing it so far, the legendary hero to drive off evil.  Must be good alignment.  He cannot be older.  Narratively, his objective is to drive off the  evil empire.

Female lead: This reliable friend/romantic interest/whatever has 4 class levels to build themselves with.  They also come from the same rural village.  For one reason or another they are traveling and staying with the male lead through thick and thin.  She cannot be older.  Narratively, her objective is to assist the male lead.  You are also a legendary hero, if not The legendary hero and as such you can talk with the requisite magical sidekick.

Magical Animal Sidekick: Well not quite but this character may have between 4-10 levels of monster and 1 level of character.  This cannot be a humanoid monster.  You can work with modifying a monster base.  You foresaw the coming of the legendary hero and have aligned yourself in some manner as his trusted pet.  You are required to take knowledge: Legendary Heroes and utilize it in all ways animal advisors tend to be able to do.  As a restriction, you may not reveal your sentienence or intelligence to any character but the two young kids.  Revealing it to the mentor will invoke a -2 morale penalty to all rolls for 24 hours  (This restriction may leave later).  Revealing it to anyone else outside the party invokes a -4 penalty OR a -2 penalty per person revealed to for 24 hours (whichever is worse, max limit of -10).  The animal sidekick is required  to have an intelligence of at least 10 and a charisma of at least 12.  You are also in the role of protector.  Narratively, your objective is to help raise the legendary heroes and lead them around the countryside battling evil and acquiring the garbs of magical coolness that was made long ago for such a circumstance.


I think I was pretty detailed there, but any questions on that can be answered here.

How posting will be done?  This will be done chapter based with an emphasis more on narrative than on puzzle solving.  This thematically will be matching the type of legendary hero/magical accomplice genre and as such while you can expect mystical Dark General types, you probably don't have to worry often about random encounters.  Taking a page from Rat's book, most encounters will be with few characters.

I also want to experiment a bit with forum battling.  A more tactics oriented system I saw elsewhere.  Instead of doing thing turn by turn, what I'd like to do is something like this:

GM: Scenario, setting, enemies that are visible.
Player 1: I'm going to be generally attacking the nearest enemy.  If the other characters get hurt, I'm going to be covering them and using a cure potion on them.
Player 2: I'm going to be shooting my bow and staying behind cover whenever possible.
Player 3: I'll be casting these spells in these scenarios and healing folks if they get wounded.

Then I'll roll everything and write out the battle, only stopping for more feedback if the scenario changes greatly: Someone goes below 0, More enemies appear, a devestating critical is delivered, that kind of thing.

The belief here is this'll let battles go a lot smoother but it's also an experiment since I've not used it before.

Questions and interest below.  I'll elaborate on setting once we got some people.

Dracos

[baka]

I'm interested. Given a choice, I think I'd play either the male lead or the magical animal sidekick.

What kind of books would I need to get my hands on to play?

[Dracos]

We'll be using D&D 3.5 for this.

PHB 1 is definitely allowed.  So I think is PHB 2.

Most if not all complete books are allowed.  For the magical creature, Savage species obviously.

I will mostly be checking over as you go for anything absurd.  Shouldn't be a problem though.

[Merc]

Sounds interesting. I'd be willing to try out in any of the roles.

You must be from True Neutral or higher alignment.
You have 80 CP to build yourself at level 1.

What does 'higher' alignment mean? Ie, just TN, LN, LG, and NG?

I can't say I understand the 80CP reference. 80 CP for the ability scores? Because that's essentially four stats of 18, one stat of 16 and one stat of 14, and that doesn't make sense either...

[Dracos]

Eighty from zero.  Not Eighty from 3.

Example:
Str: 18
Dex: 18
Con: 14
Int: 10
Wis: 8
Cha: 12

I don't think that'll be too high, buut should give enough room to be flexible with your build.  It's an average of 13-14 in every stat, effectively 'heroic' builds.

Obviously min of 3 and max of 18 (before racials) at start.

And yes, Alignments are TN, NG, CG, NG, LG.

You guys are the Good Guys and thus an evil character or Neutral Chaotic character is inappropriate to the game concept.

Dracos

[Merc]

Eighty from zero.  Not Eighty from 3.

Example:
Str: 18
Dex: 18
Con: 14
Int: 10
Wis: 8
Cha: 12

Ooooh, eighty from zero with every stat worth one point.

Okay, I was assuming you were using the Nonstandard Buy Point system presented in page 169 of the DMG, where stats start out at 8, and you get character points to raise those stats, with your cost of raising a stat raising the higher you take it.

Usually 32 points is considered high-powered under this system, so seeing a post suggesting 80 character points just boggled me and I didn't understand how you were going to manage that.

Anyhow, gotcha now.

[Dracos]

Yeah, I never liked that system even though I like pointbuys, since it sort of punishes specialization.  I don't see any reason why it should cost more to have eighteen in one stat than 12 in 4, because you're getting +4 bonuses at the attribute level either way.  So I sort of use a system I cribbed from another GM years ago that just treats all points as equal.

Dracos

[Rezantis]

I'd give it a go as either of the leads (I refuse to be the magical talking rabbit).

[Dracos]

Please, edit/grab your preferred role if you can, ideally so I don't go "We have four players who want to be the Legendary Hero?"

Baka:
Male lead or Magical animal

Merc:
Any

Rez:
Male or female lead

[Dracos]

Addendum:

Cross class no longer exists.

All skills cost the same for everyone.  No there is no extra new skillpoints.  I don't think this will result in any massively different skills, but I think the whole concept just double punishes the low skill class and basically gives them a pittiance of skills to pick with their meger skillpoints.

Dracos

[Brian]

This is fascinating.  I hope this takes off like my 'tiny game' plan did not.  I'm going to be eagerly watching.  :)

[Edward]

Something that I was stewing over yesterday is the insinuation that D&D simply only works with characters close to the same level.

Actually, relative power of the PCs is a concern, whether the system is level-based or not.  It's a bit daunting if someone else rolled Superman and the best you could manage was Jimmy Olsen.  (Something similar happened in a long ago game of Villains & Vigilantes.)

Yet fiction, regardless of medium, is full of groups with disparate power levels, whether they be the Avengers or the Fellowship of the Ring.  Something that challenges Obi-Wan would annihilate C3PO or Jar-Jar.  

I haven't played level-based RPGs recently, but my experience was that the power of starting characters was lower than in point-based systems, and differences in the power between those beginning and experienced characters were more extreme.

I'll be interested in seeing how this goes.  You've got around the first problem by having the lowest PC level be 3.  I am curious why the female lead is higher level than the male lead and the animal companion could be higher level than the mentor.

[Dracos]

On the male lead, it was half whim and half considering that narratively as the legendary hero, I intended to also have heroic luck come into play as well as the likelihood that at any given point he's likely to get nifty equipment first.  Additionally from a narrative standpoint, I thought it was  interesting to have the character with the most potential for future power have more reliance narratively early on.


The animal is 'monster levels' + 1 character level.  The reason being that the monster level schemes both tend to be complex and often not necessarily well mapped to pc levels.  I decided I'd rather let more flexibility in chosing what monster ends up.  

The other reason is a player level of ability to do things.  In an RP sense, they have the strongest restriction far more than the mentor.  Thus increasing the odds of benefit in battle and in odd abilities.  The inability to talk to folks outside the party, in my mind, is a pretty strong penalty to offset power elsewhere.  Acting in the same role as the mentor will, effectively, render it 4 levels lower which would always be lower than the mentor.

Equally so, which I didn't mention, is that the monster will also start with the least amount of material wealth or things that are more for the legendary hero than it.  Not sure which way I'll go there yet.  The intent being that monsterous characteristics will be able to make up for such.

Dracos
Looks up to a 4 hour lecture on narrative analysis by an insane actor.

[Edward]

Dracos
Looks up to a 4 hour lecture on narrative analysis by an insane actor.

"Don't you just wish you just had a shotgun sometimes." - Shinesman Red

[Carthrat]

On monster levels; remember that CR is not an adequete comparision for a PC; you need to calculate it via HD + Level Adjustment.

Not all monsters have the latter, so... it'll be interesting to see how this gets adjudicated.