Author Topic: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring (closed to new interest)  (Read 2872 times)

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kamikasei

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To new readers: thanks for your interest, but we're at capacity now and aren't looking for any more applications.

I'm looking for 4-6 players for a low-level, short-term 3.5 adventure (which may be spun into a longer game if the group comes together well, but the initial quest will be fairly bounded in scope; think of it as the pilot episode) taking place on Plothook. The spark for this was a friend pining for a "classic, JRPGish, fantasy adventure", so that's the core of what I'm aiming for.

Exact details will depend on the players; I have a general idea of the game's premise, but many aspects of tone, style and content are open to change based on player preference. This means I'd like to recruit people in large part based on how involved they seem likely to be, so if you're interested in the pitch below, please stick around for some back-and-forth with myself and the other prospective players as we see what kind of game everyone's after. Recruitment will be based on how well I think a group would work together, which will depend not just on your character ideas but on my expectations of your availability and my ability to poke you when you need to post (being on AIM would be a big help here). Having played with me in the past is a bonus. Having played in other games I can see, here or elsewhere, as I'd hope you'll play in mine is another. Recruitment is explicitly not first-come-first-served.

I'm going to provisionally describe the game as:
  • 3rd level;
  • 32-point buy;
  • standard WBL;
  • all material available, subject to approval;
  • no particular restrictions on character concept, so long as you can all work together in a party;
  • no notable houserules to start with, except that I may trim down the skill list a bit.
My approach to character creation is not to rule anything out to begin with, but to get everyone to talk about their ideas and make mechanical choices with an eye to mutual balance and usefulness. You can reflavour to your heart's content so long as mechanical restrictions are maintained. I'm quite open to buffing normally weak classes or other options to bring them in line with the general optimization level if they serve the concept. The most important guideline to bear in mind is simply not to be a pain in my ass during play - a character with a limited list of options that can be used creatively but in ways I can plan for will be much preferred to one who slows down play or gives me brain-implody due to bookkeeping overhead.

The one thing I will pre-emptively rule out is Magic of Incarnum, due to my own lack of familiarity with the system. ToB, psionics, and ToM (or at least binders) are not just permitted, but encouraged.

The pitch:[spoiler]You start out in a town (doom status: indeterminate). Maybe you grew up there. Maybe you're a recent arrival. Maybe you're just passing through. In any case, something needs doing, and you're the one to do it. One of the ones. There is a quest, and because of your status in the town, childhood friendship with those with status, or just your altruistic or mercenary inclinations, you've been charged with the quest or signed on to help those so charged. You will travel, brave hazards, do battle, make friends, vanquish enemies, discover magical artifacts and hit people in the face with them. Some day, you will eat a tree frog.

The setting is pseudo-late-medieval with some standard Hollywood gloss on things like social mores and hygeine. "Civilized" races mix in larger settlements, being subject to various different overlapping authorities outside them, with the starting town being in a mostly-human kingdom. "Uncivilized" races abound, living on the margins, but can often be dealt with diplomatically. The normal folk aren't in constant danger of being eaten by monsters, nor are they covered in excremend and dying of old age at forty; at the same time the spaces between settlements are dangerous and adventurers have a role as wandering troubleshooters.[/spoiler]

Questions on style:[spoiler]How free do you want to be with violence? Would you rather face large numbers of anonymous minions for guilt-free slaughter or should killing be something to avoid where possible? Are you willing to take prisoners? (In the latter case, you won't be punished for working around encounters.)
How subject to authority do you want to be? Are you operating with a mandate from some power - and obliged not to stain its reputation too badly - or are you entirely free agents, with no support or backup save what you can wheedle for yourselves? Note that having a patron or superior will have benefits as well as drawbacks, as will a more anarchic style.
How do you want to handle treasure, and rewards generally? Would you rather start out with your family's heirloom sword, and have it get more powerful as you do (possibly paying for upgrades, or just getting less treasure to start with), or would you rather get a series of better weapons each replacing the last? Would you like to find your gear at random and see what use you can make of it, or make/commission it to spec? Do you want sacks of coins recovered from bandits, or rare treasures or uniquely valuable items you can trade for favours or plot hooks? For XP, would you rather level relatively quickly and treat it as an OOC matter, or more slowly and only when you have some downtime?

(I should admit that I have biases here, but am willing to adapt to what the players would prefer. By default I'd run the group as operating under a lord or church's sponsorship, and you'd receive support from them - able to use their name to give yourselves authority, able to remand prisoners to their custody, etc. Intelligent enemies would be people and subject to laws, though summary execution (or less summary if you have someone in the party with the authority to serve justice) may be appropriate in some cases. Some gear could be found based on what you've told me you'd like to have, some you'd commission from your patrons or other contracts, some I'd surprise you with for novelty value.)

I intend to play this fairly straight-faced, not as a parody, but that doesn't mean grim or cynical, and it doesn't mean there's no room for humour; it just means the world and its inhabitants will act as though they're real people with real lives.[/spoiler]

Setting info / starting circumstances:[spoiler]Storm's Gate is in a pass between mountains, on a secondary trade route on the border of the kingdom that used to be more important a generation ago, before the dwarven settlement in the nearby mountain of White Tooth was abandoned. Today it's a prosperous but quiet town watching over the river valley below and the farmlands to the west, seat of Lady Drakemont, meeting place for humans, dwarves, elves and other races.

Two weeks ago Lady Drakemont went east, down the river to the capital city, to a council to discuss a brewing war between two neighbouring nations.

One week ago the captain of the town's guard and much of its fighting power went west, down the storm road, to aid the farmers after reports of raids by mountain tribes of orcs.

And two days ago, the tremours began. The town awoke to find the ground shaking, as though the gods themselves had decided they didn't like some nearby part of the earth and were hammering it in to a new shape on a great anvil. And not long after that, clouds began to gather over the White Tooth. Storm clouds, vast and black and unseasonal, and still growing.

The castellan of the Dragon's Hold has summoned you. What you can do, he hasn't yet told you - but whatever it is, you get the feeling you'd better do it soon...[/spoiler]

House rules:[spoiler]Psionics/magic transparency is in effect. Furthermore, knowledge: arcana can sub for knowledge: psionics, and vice versa, at a -2 penalty. The same goes for spellcraft and psicraft.

You can take ten on untrained knowledge checks, so that you can automatically know things with a DC less than 10 + your int bonus. (This is as opposed to the normal rule where you can only make DC10 checks for untrained knowledges, regardless of intelligence.)

Several skills have been combined:
Acrobatics merges Balance, Escape Artist, and Tumble.
Athletics merges Climb, Jump, and Swim.
Disable Device merges Disable Device and Open Lock.
Stealth merges Hide and Move Silently.
Perception merges Listen and Spot.

Each of these new skills has the same key ability and is affected by ACP (or not) as its component skills, except Disable Device. Its key ability is the higher of Dex or Int, at the player's option. When it comes to tracking synergy bonuses and the like, the simplest thing will probably be for you to leave the skill list on your sheets the same and just put equal ranks in to each component skill per point invested in the combined skill.

There may be other small tweaks for balance once players have been chosen and characters are being statted up, but these are the only "global" changes for now.[/spoiler]

Please post interest and describe your character idea; if possible, please provide an AIM contact (via PM if you'd prefer) for more real-time discussion. At the moment recruitment is open-ended until we have a reasonable pool of suitable candidates, at which point I'll start cracking the whip to firm up details and set a start date.

PlayerConceptName
AlisAtAngnomish beguiler
Friadventurous archer
Axinianpacifist swordsage
Kanraildwarven clericRagonaar Darksteel
Neon Knightrunaway princess
Ryuuksage wizard
dougfanpsychic crusader
Drascin
Twin Bladesreformed mercenary
pktt
Chambersguttersnipe thief
Overlord Rionsavvy factotum
Pyritepaladin
dgnslyrRKV
garter snakeelf combat medicInnes Ienear
« Last Edit: August 12, 2011, 08:32:17 PM by kamikasei »
Bardiche/Raising Heart OTP.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]

AlisAtAn

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #1 on: August 09, 2011, 01:36:41 PM »
Posting interest. Skillmonkey, probably Beguiler. I havent fleshed it out much yet, but I`m thinking a gnome of some sort, who likes to think he`s really a great bard Bard, even though he cant pull off any "bardsy" stuff, but carries around a lute anyways (Which he sorta kinda play), and uses illusions and a high bluff\sleight of hand checks to make it look good.

I dont have AIM, but feel free to PM me.  ;)
« Last Edit: August 09, 2011, 01:42:30 PM by AlisAtAn »
Odin, Feral Shifter Feral Shifter. "Can I drown the dead rat now?"
Loke, Dread Magnate "Me all good and nice. Ask any questions and I`ll kill you twice."


DnD classes is kind of like art. You make lots of stuff that everyone loves but aint no fun to play. This one is like getting a nude pic of Britney Spears when she was hot above your bed.  Anyone can appreciate it. And it works as it should in practise, not just in theory. -Me to Strato regarding his Elemental

Prime32

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #2 on: August 09, 2011, 02:06:41 PM »
taking place on Plothook.
Broken link - SMF doesn't take well to quotation marks. ;)
My work
The tier system in a nutshell:
[spoiler]Tier 6: A cartographer.
Tier 5: An expert cartographer or a decent marksman.
Tier 4: An expert marksman.
Tier 3: An expert marksman, cartographer and chef who can tie strong knots and is trained in hostage negotiation or a marksman so good he can shoot down every bullet fired by a minigun while armed with a rusted single-shot pistol that veers to the left.
Tier 2: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything, or the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.
Tier 1: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything and the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.[/spoiler]

kamikasei

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #3 on: August 09, 2011, 02:17:51 PM »
Posting interest. Skillmonkey, probably Beguiler. I havent fleshed it out much yet, but I`m thinking a gnome of some sort, who likes to think he`s really a great bard Bard, even though he cant pull off any "bardsy" stuff, but carries around a lute anyways (Which he sorta kinda play), and uses illusions and a high bluff\sleight of hand checks to make it look good.

Sounds good. I haven't decided on all the details of any changes we might use to the skill system, but at the very least I'd intend to merge Disable Device/Open Lock, Hide/Move Silently, and Listen/Spot, which if you're thinking of a skillmonkey I should probably mention now.

Since mechanics will remain a bit up in the air until we have enough candidates to talk about power levels and the like, perhaps in the meantime you could state your preferences on the style questions and anything else you have strong inclinations for/against for the game?

Broken link - SMF doesn't take well to quotation marks. ;)
Fixed. I think the autoformat did that somehow. =_=
Bardiche/Raising Heart OTP.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]

AlisAtAn

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #4 on: August 09, 2011, 02:48:37 PM »
Quote
How free do you want to be with violence? Would you rather face large numbers of anonymous minions for guilt-free slaughter or should killing be something to avoid where possible? Are you willing to take prisoners? (In the latter case, you won't be punished for working around encounters.)

As much as I love playing out a great story, kicking ass and killing things in new and interesting ways never gets tired. I dont see why the enemies would have to be "anonymous" for us to kill them without further thought, I always found that finally besting the BBEG and killing him was the high-point of any campaign (I.E. I`m NOT one of those people whining over how Bin Laden wasnt brought to trial for his crimes). That being said, I have nothing against taking prisoners, provided its part of the mission, or serves a function.

As for subject to authority, I love the idea of a band of freelance agents brought in to take care of  a problem, no questions asked. So yes to authority, no to us getting spanked for doing what needs to be done.

Regarding treasure: I loooove my gadgets, and I dont see this char gaining much from owing a family heirloom sword, so I`d rather be tripping and excited whenever we get to loot the BBEG for new stuff. So yes to a series of weapons that gets better and better, and stuff rather than gold, as gold quickly gets old. Also, if  we get random fun loot, we can just sell it if it isnt worth keeping  around...

I love seeing my chars progress through the levels, and gaining new abilities keeps things spicy and exciting, so yes on fast leveling, although not too fast. 

Did I miss anything? This is how I generally prefer dong things, but I`m not set in stone. I`ll adapt my playing style to whatever the other players prefer.  :D
Odin, Feral Shifter Feral Shifter. "Can I drown the dead rat now?"
Loke, Dread Magnate "Me all good and nice. Ask any questions and I`ll kill you twice."


DnD classes is kind of like art. You make lots of stuff that everyone loves but aint no fun to play. This one is like getting a nude pic of Britney Spears when she was hot above your bed.  Anyone can appreciate it. And it works as it should in practise, not just in theory. -Me to Strato regarding his Elemental

Pktt

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #5 on: August 09, 2011, 07:35:03 PM »
I'm interested. My AIM is pleasekillthetoy.
I'm not entirely sure what to play as yet, both in concept and mechanics. I'm generally the guy on a team who picks last and fills in whatever the team lacks, so I'd be fine with that.

I have some ideas though, but they're dependent on setting and whether Eberron races are allowed (I left a post in the preference thread too; I'm on a big Eberron kick). The two that I have most fleshed out right now are a street urchin Dael'kyr Half-blood Rogue (with throwing scarab), and a wanderer Psiforged Soulknife. Otherwise, I'd probably try something unconventional (Elf Barbarian? Who knows.) Of course, if the party needs an airship pilot named Cid, I'd be up for that too.  :P
I'm also a big fan of warmages, but I don't own CAr, so that option is probably out of my reach.

Style wise, I don't mind beating the tar out of minions, but I'm not a big fan of summary execution of random encounters/minions. Summary execution for the BBEG? That's fine. Most of the BBEG's are dumb enough to try pulling the heroes off a cliff with them too.
I'd prefer to be working as free agents. It's fine if we work for the authorities from time to time, but we're adventurers. Trouble follows us wherever we go.

For loot, I'd prefer random drops (the classic JRPG question of: what is that spider doing with a potion of resist fire?), moreso because I'm the kind of guy who keeps two crowbars on his character, "Just in case I have to throw one at something." The wizard may be batman, but Batman is not MacGyver. Similarly, I'd prefer art object over stacks of coins, for the plot hooks and possibility of finding creative uses.
"Are you mad? That statue is a priceless artifact!" "Yes, but it's also just the right height to jam this spear trap."

However, for gear we constantly use (our armor, weapons, any spell aids, etc), I'd prefer progressive upgrading, simply because "So-and-so, the hero whose sword has accompanied him on countless quests" sounds more impressive than "So-and-so, the hero who looted his latest sword from the bandit caravan he smashed last week."
The heirloom item upgrading in particular sounds like a cool idea, as long as someone writes it into his/her character. It also sounds like the kind of thing that would fit very well with the Bearer of the Ancestral Weapon PrC (link to giantitp forums).

XP... I dunno. Either way is fine I guess.

A question from me: What's the approximate optimization level? Would I be fine and viable sticking to core + XPH, or would I have to dig up the X Class handbooks?

I'll be crossposting this to plothook too.

ShadowViper

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #6 on: August 10, 2011, 05:57:52 AM »
Would you be open to the idea of Pathfinder instead of standard 3.5?
« Last Edit: August 10, 2011, 06:03:12 AM by ShadowViper »
I hear it's amazing when the famous purple stuffed worm in flap-jaw space with the tuning fork does a raw blink on Hara-Kiri rock! I need scissors! 61!

" 'Giving up' kills people. When a person refuses to give up, he earns the right to walk down the road of humanity." - Alucard

kamikasei

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #7 on: August 10, 2011, 06:04:00 AM »
I don't know Pathfinder, and from what I do know of it it doesn't address the parts of 3.5 that aren't to my liking.
Bardiche/Raising Heart OTP.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]

Prime32

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #8 on: August 10, 2011, 10:15:24 AM »
I don't know Pathfinder, and from what I do know of it it doesn't address the parts of 3.5 that aren't to my liking.
It has some nice stuff too though, like races, merged skills, feats at every odd level, and buffs to paladin and rogue. Mix-and-match ftw!
« Last Edit: August 10, 2011, 10:18:05 AM by Prime32 »
My work
The tier system in a nutshell:
[spoiler]Tier 6: A cartographer.
Tier 5: An expert cartographer or a decent marksman.
Tier 4: An expert marksman.
Tier 3: An expert marksman, cartographer and chef who can tie strong knots and is trained in hostage negotiation or a marksman so good he can shoot down every bullet fired by a minigun while armed with a rusted single-shot pistol that veers to the left.
Tier 2: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything, or the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.
Tier 1: Someone with teleportation, mind control, time manipulation, intangibility, the ability to turn into an exact duplicate of anything and the ability to see into the future with perfect accuracy.[/spoiler]

veekie

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #9 on: August 10, 2011, 10:35:18 PM »
Prime has the right of it, just steal whatever the hell you like.
The mind transcends the body.
It's also a little cold because of that.
Please get it a blanket.

I wish I could read your mind,
I can barely read mine.

"Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. At 2:15, it begins rolling up characters."

[spoiler]
"Just what do you think the moon up in the sky is? Everyone sees that big, round shiny thing and thinks there must be something round up there, right? That's just silly. The truth is much more awesome than that. You can almost never see the real Moon, and its appearance is death to humans. You can only see the Moon when it's reflected in things. And the things it reflects in, like water or glass, can all be broken, right? Since the moon you see in the sky is just being reflected in the heavens, if you tear open the heavens it's easy to break it~"
-Ibuki Suika, on overkill

To sumbolaion diakoneto moi, basilisk ouranionon.
Epigenentheto, apoleia keraune hos timeis pteirei.
Hekatonkatis kai khiliakis astrapsato.
Khiliarkhou Astrape!
[/spoiler]

There is no higher price than 'free'.

"I won't die. I've been ordered not to die."

Flay Crimsonwind

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #10 on: August 12, 2011, 08:12:29 PM »
So, I take it from the link that this game is full? If not, I might be able to whip something up...

kamikasei

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Re: [3.5] Dungeonshy - 20% more "classic" adventuring
« Reply #11 on: August 12, 2011, 08:35:50 PM »
We're pretty full up, but have only one primary arcanist candidate with no detail yet. So if that slot interests you and you can have a concept (not necessarily a sheet, as there'll be time after player selection but before the IC goes up to work out mechanics) posted in the next ~8 hours, you'll at least be considered. (You can try for another role, if you want, but competition is fiercer there.)
Bardiche/Raising Heart OTP.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]

kamikasei

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Recruitment complete, players chosen. Details in the Plothook thread.
Bardiche/Raising Heart OTP.
[spoiler]
[/spoiler]