Monday, June 26, 2006

Grodd Bless Players...

...and their greedy, power-grubbing little hearts. In my mind the character build rules for my current D&D campaign are the height of generosity. The races, class, spell, and equipment choices span approximately a dozen published sources. We use the Gestalt rules to allow for broad ranges of power in individual PCs. And yet all of this is still not quite enough for some of my players. "Can we retool this prestige class to allow a good-aligned character to take it?" "Can you look over this class from the Wizards website?" The first time this happened I was annoyed. Like my reaction when I agree to buy my daughter a toy at Wal-mart but then she decides she wants 2 toys. But more and more I care less and less about this sort of thing. My only real concern is intra-party strife. If Doug's PC gets levels in Orc-Faced Killer and Jonathan builds a Dewonkeeper my campaign world isn't going to implode. But will it annoy Stuart and Jon? They're both grown-ups who can deal with it, but resentment is resentment no matter how small and silly the emotion. I think if half the party gets shiny new toys, then it would be best to come up with some sort of gimme for the others.

4 comments:

  1. Choices can be frustrating.

    Prestige classes are, essentially, classes that are custom-tailored to fit specific concepts. Some of these concepts (Eldritch Knight, Archmage, Duelist) are pretty broad. Others (Dragon Disciple, Assassin, Shadowdancer) are narrower. Still others that appeared after the DMG (Shadowbane Inquisitor, Black Flame Zealot, Daggerspell Shaper) are pretty damn specific.

    What gets frustrating is when Wizards decides that there are concepts really close to the one you have which they will design a prestige class around, but then limit it such that you can't take it for your character because your concept is the 'wrong' alignment or race or whatever.

    That just seems lame to me.

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  2. I agree. And I want people to play the character they want, not just the best approximation they can achieve. I didn't immediately approve Doug's Orc-Faced Killer request because of my natural instinct to nix special requests outside the scope of the rules as written.

    Feat and skilled-based requirements are better. Then you simply have to grapple with whether or not you're willing to spend the feat slot(s). Changing races in play is considerably more problematic than guiding character progression at leveling. And alignment... I don't really want to talk about it. I only address alignment at all in play because of the spells and class abilities that are coupled to it.

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  3. If you take a look at Savage Species (chapter 11),
    there's some rules on becoming a monster, and
    switching races.

    You might also want to check out 128-129,
    just saying ;)

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  4. Wow! I forgot about all those templates! With all these books I need to go through and review them periodically.

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