Thursday, December 27, 2012
Fumblin’ around with The DMG – character creation
Dan Dan The Power Game Man™ has been scratching to get out of the house. His wife just had another kid last week, and his Mulholland manse is chock full of relatives from around the globe. After a hard partyin’ Christmas weekend, I was not totally up for a full game of any kind. But with only Dan and Andy available anyway, I thought why not sink some Newcastles and do character work for the new campaign, and maybe a little combat encounter or two.
With a return to more BTB game play in this 1st edition campaign, I wanted to be strict with the character creation. Strict for me, anyway. Racial stat and level limitations were in play this campaign, and with none of us being DMG experts (despite my recent ongoing efforts), there was quite a bit of fumbling through the beloved tome to try and make sure our bases were covered. I have a pdf of OSRIC I printed and bound to serve as a backup play aid in this campaign, and it was a little useful. It would have been moreso, but here’s another book I need to read and familiarize myself with. It’s better organized than the DMG, but it ain’t perfect when you need a particular piece of info. Nothing I wanted to look up in OSRIC was listed and easily found in the index's, but that may have been more bad luck than anything else. I am going to take a better look at it though (it is, like, a 400 page thing).
Before delving too deep, we did that stat rolls so they could start formulating ideas on what to run. So I had them both do up three full sets of stats, each with roll 4D6 use best 3D6, in order. This is a tightening up of my usual assign to taste preference. There would be no stat dumping here. You get three full sets to make a choice from, and that still seems fairly generous. I allowed only very minor tweaking, and only in cases I suggested. I took ZERO player suggestions on stat swapping and such. Nope. Mr. Tough Guy. Despite that, they came out pretty above average in most respects. Dan even got an 18 in strength for the set he chose.
So harsh restrictions in the book popped up only once or twice to burn players. Mostly in Dan’s case. He wanted his fighter/MU/cleric to be a full grey elf, but the rules say he’d have to be half elf. He was fairly disappointed for some reason he could not be the full elf, and I almost caved. But Andy chimed in and kept me on the straight and narrow. I’m happy for that, because hell, full elves are these immortal dudes. There should be reasons to make it harder to be one. Despite being all over the place, 1st edition does have some balancing acts going on, and I don’t want to do my usual willy nilly houseruling to mess with it. So it’s a half-elf for big Dan.
So after fumbling around to get characters properly created by the book, I set them up with a little giant rat killing at a city tavern to stretch the combat muscles for the pair.
New characters getting done up is always big fun for me, and I’m glad we’ll get to stretch it out when the other players are there to roll up. I had to admit, it was kind of refreshing to “go by the rules” for character creation. We’ll soon hopefully see how that goes for long term gameplay.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Sounds very cool. I did a strictly AD&D by the rule campaign this past year and it was a lot of fun and difficult not to throw in house rules. I had them roll up stat 4d6 keep them in order, but only once. Then I played a little Monty Haul with them. They could keep this character or they could roll up another, but then they would have to play that 2nd one. Made it interesting for two of the guys. There were worried about having a complete rounded party and I was like if you guys have three thieves and a magic-user we'll go with it. Made it fun.
ReplyDeleteWe played AD&D for years...and then moved on to 2E, 3E, etc. 4E was the turd in the punch bowl though. That's what caused me to look back and say, "Hey, those rules were decent enough for us to have fun all through university, maybe they're good enough today."
ReplyDeleteAnd since, we've played through Tsojcanth and G1 (last night) with the old 1E rules.
Last night's foray was with 9 players around the same table (at one time we had 11) utilizing the pre generated characters for the most part (w/ a few people rolling their own).
Most of the game was run BTB, or as closely as I could manage. And let me tell you, that was tough. Some of the guys hadn't played 1E in decades and coming back to it from Pathfinder / 3.X was a difficult transition at best. They kept trying to use the minis / map in a much more tactical manner than the rules were written for. That slowed things down a tad.
But overall I think it was a great success. Only complaint I had was my inability to roll well and forgetting how nasty dwarves w/ Dwarven Throwers, and Rangers were against giants. That was ugly... the characters mowed through the giants quickly and efficiently. The whole debacle was way too one-dimensional.
That and many of the players had either played or read the module, so knew very well what to expect. Which flattened out the challenge that much more.
Still, all in all, it was a hoot and I'm going to run the Glacial Rift next year at the same time. But this time around I'll do a bit of tweaking here and there in order to up the ante a bit.
Good luck on your endeavor! Wish I were out in your neck of the woods to experience the joy of AD&D in more of a campaign setting.
Tim: in the event of character death (and seeing as I'm being stricter/harsher this campaign there for sure will be), I'm going to let them roll up one more set to add to the existing two previously rolled, and they will have that three to choose for the new character.
ReplyDeleteJeff: I think the G1 is a bit of a slog with underpowered characters, so you may have gotten off easy. I can't really imagine doing it in one sitting unless it is a marathon session. One of the group lent me the giant series (that copy that has all three within one booklet) as I had lost mine long ago, but I don't think he has it memorized or anything. Though any old schooler will kno the set up more or less. Anyway, giong to use it as a mini-campaign of 2 or 3 games with the now high level characters from my last campaign.
Yeah, I can see how some might consider it a "slog". I played through it while in High School, and have VERY fond memories. But it's been decades since I've looked through it again.
ReplyDeleteLast night WAS a one session marathon, per se. The true meaning was to bring together like minded guys from three different gaming groups that had never met. And as such, it was a roaring success.
But the module itself was woefully one-dimensional, as I had mentioned in my previous post. The group, knowing basically what they faced, had more than an adequate grasp on how to circumvent the sheer power of the giants.
Without getting into tedious details, I can say that having 3 of the 4 front line fighters tailored to kick ass specifically against giants, and their "kin", supported w/ very intelligently placed spells, was nearly an insurmountable obstacle for the giants.
And when they bum rushed the group, one of the clerics raised a horde of zombies to act as shock troops. Well played on their part.
Saying that though, the 'G' series would be an excellent challenge in a campaign setting. There's a sense of care that's taken by players running their own characters. It's a whole different beast.
I had read somewhere (I think in an older Dragon magazine maybe?) that the original series was run back to back with the same characters, in a tournament fashion. And that G1 was a cakewalk for the most part. G2 posed more of an issue and G3 was tough going.
After last night, I can absolutely see why.