What’s a challenge rating?
Some kind of system to give xp based in the number of monsters killed?
I dimly remember reading something about that in the 2d Edition Dungeon Master book, never used it, never will, never needed it.
Give your characters XP based in how they roleplay their characters and the good ideas they have.
Frodo, Proud 2ed DM who refuses to use half the rules in 2ed and never even read the later eds.
Ok, so let’s skip the magic-balancing stuff for now - I think that’s going to either require a switch of system, or some kind of balancing act, which will probably require its own thread. Let’s talk races.
First off - I definitely want to limit the setting to a handful of races. For one thing, I think cultural clashes are more interesting than racial ones, and for another, I’ve always thought the sheer number of species in D&D was a little silly (and I say that as a confessed owner of the Fiend Folio). Humans are definitely in, because it’s nice to have a default. But I’m a little unsure of what to do for the rest. One option is to keep it all-human, and do sub-races, with some minor bonuses or stat adjustments. However, I do enjoy playing with somewhat more alien cultures, so unless it gets totally awkward, I’d like to use some non-humans. However, I don’t want to do the standard ‘Elves in the forests, dwarves in the mountains, humans in the plains’ kind of thing. And I’m not even sure I want to use the standard races at all - on the one hand, you get a lot of free connotations, but on the other hand, you get a lot of free connotations that may not be what you want. For instance, if I use elves, I don’t want haughty, aloof, better-than-thou elves, but I don’t know if I could really divorce them from that role. But then, making up new races always seems a little gimmicky to me. Tough choice.
My other big concern is keeping things relatively close to humanity - I want hints of alien culture, but I want all my races to be able to relate to each other, at least on some level. Basically, that means I want cultural, rather than cosmetic, differences.
In 1st Edition, XP was generally awarded on a “per monster slain” basis. An orc, for example, is worth a base value…say 10 XP, +bonuses for any special abilities, like spell use, high hit points, etc. Also, by rule, players were entitled to XP for the value of treasure looted, and sometimes even for magic items…but those rules were optional.
What I usually did was calculate average value…say a hill giant was normally worth about 2K XP. I’d multiply 2000 x # of hill giants slain, divide by number of party members, and each party member would be awarded that much XP. I’d then sometimes add individual bonuses for players that did something outstanding…solved the puzzle to open the locked chest or whatever.
Doing things that way, I knew how much XP was available to players in a particular session if they got all possible XP, and I knew which players were close to leveling up, so I could plan for the downtime they’d need to go train.
For magic items, the biggest key is to just control what items they get. Make it very hard for them to make their own, and absolutely don’t put in a “magic-mart” where they can just drop coin for whatever loot they want.
Beware, though, that just cutting back on the items does not make a campaign low-magic. Several of the classes are inherently high-magic, and removing magic items just makes the gulf wider between the inherently magical classes and the nonmagical classes. A fighter can fly… If he has a pair of winged boots or a magic carpet or the like. A wizard can fly without the boots or carpet, just by waving his hands a bit and mumbling under his breath. If you want a low-magic world where nobody can fly, then you need to cut the full-spellcasting classes out of the game entirely, or at the least very heavily houserule them.
TPK can apply to any game in any edition-- It’s short for “total party kill”, meaning everyone gets wiped out with nobody to even drag their corpses back to town. CR is Challenge Rating, a system used in 3rd edition to gauge the difficulty of an enemy or other challenge. Roughly speaking, CR ranges from about 1 to about 20, and a foe of a given challenge rating is supposed to be a reasonable typical encounter for a party of the same level (the sort of thing you expect to fight several times a day). Monsters don’t actually have fixed XP values in 3rd edition; there’s a table that tells you how much you get based on your level and the monster’s CR. A 10th-level character wouldn’t get any experience at all from killing a basic orc, for instance, because the numbers are so different that the orc shouldn’t have posed any challenge at all to the character.
Are you at all familiar with Palladium role-playing system? I actually always preferred it for a few reasons. One of which is an alignment system system that is more flexible than D&D, and can help with us vs them stuff. There are some interesting magic classes like the Diabolist(Rune-mage) who doesn’t have active cast magic, but must prepare ahead of time with written runes. It also has a system of high-quality but non-magical items.
It is a fairly complex system, which you can easily spend another $200 on books, and your players might need to spend 30 or so. You might not be interested in learning a new system, and teaching players, but figured I would suggest it.
All right, I’m gonna give up an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time, as I’ll probably never DM again anyway.
You can base your world on your favorite TV series in non-transparent ways. I was thinking of running something loosely based on Babylon 5. The Minbari were going to be “Moon Elves”, The Centauri were going to be human pirates, the Narn were going to be an advanced form of lizardmen. Only I would know the basis of these races…to the players it would appear to be a normal D&D setting…I’d just use the B5 political stuff in “Big Picture” ways. Narns don’t like Centauri, but probably aren’t going to attack them in the streets of civilized areas, the Minbari have access to ancient secrets (and possibly a Vorlon)…all races are pursuing their own agendas, etc.
In your situation, maybe let everybody be “human”, but loyal to different kings/gods/whatever. The main plotline will be intrigue among the factions, but nothing says you can’t roll up a dragon to terrorize the kingdom to spice things up once in a while…
The last 3.5 D&D game I played, we started at first level, and most of us didn’t see a permanent magic istem until we were lvl 5 or so, and the game went just fine. It CAN be done, but it does take a little work. As far as spells go, yes, you want to limit certain spells and maybe not allow certain broken spell completely or at least nerf them (polymorph).
Just make sure that your players know how your campaign will be before hand, so the players that like a challenge will be the one to pick a mage…this will cut down on any whining.
As far as the CR of the monsters go, I’d just make the first couple of challanges be a little weaker than you think they should be; ramp up the fights as you go until you get the degree of difficulty you want. Nothing kills a campaign faster than a TPK in the first fight.
As a seperate tip, wolfman has a great tip from the last thread…run each player through their own solo adventure…it doesn’t even have to have any fighting at all, it could simply be a conversation with a few npcs. The reason? The best plothooks…the hooks that your players will actually enjoy, are the ones they help create themselves. Encoraging your players to give you some background through a solo adventure based on an “interview” you have with the player will give you those hooks.
Yeah, I don’t recall if I ever responded directly, but that is a damn good idea. Especially since I’m new to this, and running a game for one has to be easier than running a game for four.
Also, since I’m not familiar with Challenge Ratings and what-have-you anyways, I don’t expect it will make too much of a difference to adjust monsters. I’m planning on mostly humanoid-on-humanoid encounters anyways, so as long as nobody has +5 vorpal swords things ought to work themselves out.
Ok, so I’ve got the general idea of my main players down. First, we have Group A, my Saxon/Gaul/German analogues. These guys have been living in the area for quite a while, and are organized along clan lines. They have a caste system, with a group of rulers/warriors, a hereditary priest caste, and an artisan/crafter class. Farming is done by slaves from other clans, who are owned by the nobles. Basically, they’re set up as an extended family, with the head of the ruling family having a great deal of authority over everyone in the clan. Most of the clans are still quite small - sometimes only a half-dozen warriors and some farmers. These are usually more traditional, and less feudal. As the clans get bigger, they get more organized and hierarchical, but even the really big ones only have maybe a few dozen warriors at most. Because farming is done mostly by slaves of other clans, nobody arms their peasants, so conflict is fairly small-scale. They’re not united in any sense - there are/were a few clan alliances, but for the most part, everyone’s out for themselves.
Next, Group B, my Normans/Romans. They’re a little more cosmopolitan than Group A, and they’re a big influence for moving from clans to feudalism. They essentially came in, allied themselves with one of the larger clan-alliances, and set about conquering a good chunk of the remaining clans. However, once they’d gotten a good grip on the area, they decided not to leave, and set themselves up as kings. So, the king, and the top tier of the nobles, are from Group B, but a lot of the other nobles, and pretty much all the commoners outside of immediate households, are from A. This setup means that Group A has basically split into three factions - there are some clans who were never conquered (I’m thinking there’s a river or other natural border that they’re behind), a few clans who support Group B, and in return got land and power, and the clans who resent Group B and would like nothing more than to kick them out. Also, there are some external lands populated by Group B which don’t have much in the way of Group A inhabitants. Oh, and Group B has a central church, which has assimilated the local-spirit worship as part of their system of saints/angels under their God(s). In theory, all the Group B who’ve been conquered have converted, but there’s a lot of the old ways still floating around.
Mixed into all of this is Group C, who I think are nonhuman - they’re the Welsh analogues, and they’re just ‘other’ enough to keep them out of the conflict. They’re basically clan-oriented as well, but they’ve settled into much bigger almost-nations made up of related clans. These individual kingdoms do a lot of fighting between themselves, and hire out as mercenaries to the humans as well. There’s some minor raiding that goes on between them and the humans, but both sides know that if they do anything drastic, the other race will unite against them pretty fast, and their neighbors would like nothing better than that, so it’s limited. Some of the C clans have been given land by Group B in exchange for mercenary work, to the extent that there are Group C nobles inside the bounds of the Group B kingdom. Since Group C also practices internecine slaving, there are also slaves and their sometimes-free descendents of both races inside the other’s borders. That, plus the occasional border-skirmish, prisoner-taking, and just plain old emigration means the borderlands are very mixed. I haven’t yet decided if there’s interbreeding - traditionally, that works for elves but not dwarves. I’d kind of like for there to be, so that you can run into people with unexpectedly ‘other’ heritage, but I’m not sure about the details - how common it is, how obvious, that sort of thing. Hell, I’m not even certain that they’re nonhuman - it’s possible that they’re simply very different-looking humans. Maybe they’re immigrants from somewhere far enough away for them to be noticeably unrelated, culturally and physically.
As for the surroundings: I plan on there being at least a couple groups who mostly just raid the area, and at least one separate kingdom populated by Group B. I’d love suggestions for other political entities/relationships.
Anyways, that’s where I’m at so far - comments? Questions? Suggestions?
I’ll go with elves for group C, use them carefully to avoid stereotypes.
More Faerie elves than Tolkien or traditional Elves.
I like it. I think one of your next steps should be to draw a map…at least a sub-continent’s worth of territory, and indicate major geographical features…mountain ranges, coast lines, forests, plains, swamps, cities, roads, rivers, ports, bridges/fords. Doesn’t have to be detailed, can be subject to revision, might help you flesh out the political stuff. You may want to also at least sketch out a world map…at least continental outlines, trade routes, what other races/cultures exist and generally where they live.
You, sir, have given me an Idea. So. I’ve already got this idea of local spirits, and the worship thereof. What if the local spirits that Group C has are basically your Fae creatures - not necessarily just elves, they can have a variety of manifestations, but that’s the general flavor. Now, Group C, in addition to worshiping the Fae, are in some way either interbred with them, or at least connected to them. So, they’re my version of Planetouched, except they’re Faetouched. First of all, that gives me an excuse for them to be weird, but not too weird - they’re still basically human, but weird humans. Next, it means that individuals can freely integrate with the regular humans - they can interbreed, and will have different levels of Fae-touchedness, so some of them will be barely Fae at all, some will look unusual, some will look normal but maybe have a couple odd talents, that sort of thing. In the borderlands, pretty much everyone has some level of Fae blood in them, but it’ll be in varying levels. Plus, it gives me an excuse to make that nation stereotypically fond of fighting and quick to anger - which means they make perfect mercenaries, but awkward neighbors. That’s exactly the relationship I want them to have with the mainline Group B folks. Finally, it lets me use a pretty standard template, without having all the baggage that Elves or Dwarves have. Excellent! I like. That was sort of the last thing I wanted to get figured out before I sketched out a rough map (lest I run afoul of the usual fantasy-race terrain affinities).
Cool!
I like that idea too.
Glad to be useful 
You also want to give some thought to what kinds of characters your players want to play, and why those characters would work together as a party. Are they strangers that happen to be traveling the same way? Have they grown up together? Are they from one (or more) of the factions you mentioned, or from somewhere else? Are they united in some cause…loyal to one or more factions…or is there friction in the party related to political differences? Are they mercenaries or altruists?
Are you limiting PCs to certain races or classes? I always had one guy that had to be…discouraged…from running a chaotic evil assassin in a party with an already approved paladin, ranger, and a cleric of Apollo.
D&D: Help me plan my first campaign setting/adventure!
“So you’re all sitting at a local bar, you’ve known each other for years. Suddenly a mysterious stranger walks up to you all and offers you a drink.” I’m pretty sure that is how every DM started their first ever campaign, why mess with tradition?
I could have offered more help had I not started drinking a few hours ago.
Alrighty, time for an update. I’ve got a couple of rough maps sketched out - the first is the world (or at least a couple of continents), with mountain ranges as red lines. The second is a bigger map of the area I’m focusing on - I’m calling this about the size of Britain, maybe a little bigger, which makes both my continents about Europe-sized. I’ve done some fleshing out of the groups involved, too, including (finally) naming them. So:
The sort of default starting-area will be area A, inhabited by the Trevathi, but recently (three generations ago) conquered (mostly) by the Harrish (Area B). Area D is the section of Trevathia that hasn’t been conquered.
Some history: Three generations ago, the Duke of Harland (area B) helped one clan of the Trevathi to conquer their neighbors. Afterwards, rather than the payment he’d been promised, he set himself up as ruler of Trevathia, and subjugated his former allies. However, his neighboring Duchies, alarmed at the increase to his holding, mustered to attack, and he was forced to retreat to hold them off. In his absence, he left several of his nobles, and was able, by offers of land and title, to convince some of the Trevathi to swear fealty. He maintained a foothold on the peninsula, and, by bribery or conquest, he and his descendants have managed to expand them to encompass Area A. However, at this point they’ve pretty much stalled, and the occasional uprising in the lands they hold keep them busy.
In the three generations since the original Harrish invasion, the Trevathi have split into those who support Harrish rule (generally with large rewards), and those who still resist. Generally, the cities are held by the Harrish, and many of the more urban clans support them, while the smaller and more rural clans are still off-and-on rebellious.
Area C is inhabited by my Fae-touched. I think I’m going to keep that as a mildly-derogatory slang for them, but they call themselves the Botorran. Some refinements: Instead of having the Botorran spirits (I should probably give them a name too) be literally Fae creatures, they’re going to be noncorporeal like everyone else’s minigods, but the Botorrans will have a religious ceremony that involves letting a spirit possess you for a bit. Since some of the spirits are, shall we say, the lusty sort, the Botorran also have some hereditary powers, which is what makes them Fae-touched. I’m toying with the idea that their clerics and/or warriors will be able to do the possession thing in battle to get a little extra oomph. That’d be a class thing though. In any case, in addition to some amount of magic inheritance, the Botorran are notoriously fickle and easy to anger, and a bit odd, by everyone else’s standards. I suspect that most people think it’s a little twisted to let your gods inhabit your body, which adds to the Botorran’s otherness.
There are three main kingdoms of the Botorrans, Tokoit, the southernmost, being the largest and thus most important in-game. The other two kingdoms will get names later, because I’m lazy.
As for the rest of the continent, I suspect that the northeast section has several kingdoms made up of the same people as the Harrish. I know Harland is part of a (rather weak) kingdom, because I’m totally cribbing that part off the Normans. However, I think Harland’s neighbors are much more of a threat than Normandy’s, which is why things are still unresolved - too much effort has to be spent fending them off.
I’m not sure what all is going on outside of that group of people, but I think there’s a larger empire on the southern continent. Also, I’d like to have some sea-going folks wandering about, possibly hailing from those islands off the southern continent. They may be non-human - frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out where non-humans fit into this kind of small-scale, clan-based setting. I mean, when your loyalty is mostly to your family, how do you integrate with Elves without completely erasing the distinction? I’m thinking the mainland is more diverse than the rather backwards area I’m dealing with, so maybe Harland has another race or two. Actually, having spent so much time just now cribbing off history, I’m having a hard time getting back to thinking fantasy-like, so any magical/fantastic suggestions would be welcome.
Although you clearly put a lot of thought in this campaign, ask yourself this: is it worth the time and energy? You mention that you just get together with this group of people and that you start DMing yourself. Don’t you think you get ahead of yourself?
Creating a world from scratch is a tremendous amount of work, which, from my experience, is hardly ever worth the effort, especially with new players. Do you know their intentions with this game? How often will you play? For example, if you only play once or twice per month, players usually just want to sit down and start playing. They don’t really mind if the plot is a bit contrived, as long as they can hang out with their friends and bash some monster skull.
Have you discussed your ideas with your players yet? Do they feel that they want to put the effort to learn about a new world, or do they just want to jump into the familiar surroundings of Waterdeep? Do you already have an idea on what kind of characters they want to play? For example, if two players have a clear picture of a Raistlin type wizard, or an Aragorn ranger, then maybe a subtle, low-magic campaign is not for your group.
Tell us more about your players before we continue with the world.
I agree with this completely.
Finding out about your group first (what characters + adventures your players would enjoy; how often they want to play etc) could save you a lot of well-intentioned but wasted work.
I teach roleplaying at my school and use a village to introduce new players to the World. They can’t get into much trouble and can meet various useful contacts (and disguised villains 
).
When pupils want to write their own first adventure, I give them a simple template:
Get the hang of it before diving in!
:eek: You… teach roleplaying??
That *must *be the coolest job in the world. Far, *far *above astronaut, international secret spy and ice cream flavor tester.
