The Cast

• Tarlan, ex-human githyanki mind warrior
• Maevith, half-dragon goliath swordsman on the road to turning himself into a golem
• Cordiss, phrenic human psionicist and pseudo-poltergeist
• Riker, half-fey human archer

Everyone took level adjustment and used LA buyoff, so nobody is actually 20th level yet. To start the campaign off and get everyone used to epic level characters I'm running Storm Lord's Keep from Dragon #310. It's the first epic level adventure WotC wrote. I'll be changing it some to make it a jumping off point for an entire campaign based around the impending death and rebirth of the multiverse.

The play report for our first session. It was pretty short, some folks were late and not everyone had their characdters done, but it did highlight some shortcomings that people were given a chance to rectify in between this session and the next.

Cool stuff.

I like your House Rules and I would be interested in hearing about out the variant critical and fumble rolls work out.  1's and 20's come surprisingly often so it should come into play fairly regularly.

Using the character's level as the negative hit point threshold is an interesting idea; it doesn't come into play until after the character has reached 11th level.  I've always done the variant of the character's Constitution score as the negative hit point threshold.

Also, I would be interested in hearing about how much preparation work  you are doing for this game.  Are you spending a lot of time on stating up NPCs?  Or are you just winging non-essential NPCs?

Quote from: Drohem;522355Cool stuff.

I like your House Rules and I would be interested in hearing about out the variant critical and fumble rolls work out.  1's and 20's come surprisingly often so it should come into play fairly regularly.

Last session (not the one that's written up) the 1's and 20's rules came into play a lot. Tarlan, the monk, couldn't miss the CR 11 rocs even if he rolled a one, so he never had to roll against them. On the flip side the warrior cleric (who takes Maevith's place) couldn't make a reflex save against some thunder worms even with a 20, meaning he always took full damage when they engulfed him or unleashed a thunderous boom. It almost killed him a couple of times.

QuoteUsing the character's level as the negative hit point threshold is an interesting idea; it doesn't come into play until after the character has reached 11th level.  I've always done the variant of the character's Constitution score as the negative hit point threshold.

It saved a cohort and a character last session (though the cohort still ended up dying).

QuoteAlso, I would be interested in hearing about how much preparation work  you are doing for this game.  Are you spending a lot of time on stating up NPCs?  Or are you just winging non-essential NPCs?

I've never spent much time on non-essential anything. I've got a random NPC generator that creates names and personalities for me if needed. Beyond that I do as little as possible, especially in high-powered games like exalted, scion, or epic D&D. There's just too many roads open to the PCs to try and plot everything out. I tend to create plot trees and NPCs with goals, so I have a general idea where the PCs could head as well as where the NPCs will go if they're not stopped.

It's for Shadowrun, but this is the general idea for how things get built when I've got lots of time. It's based on some cool articles on node-based scenario design. If I have less time I tend to toss together a quicker structure like this, based on the 5-room dungeon model.

This campaign is a re-imagining of a prior epic campaign I ran with a different group. While I don't have the stats for things anymore (and a lot of them wouldn't apply anyway), I've still got the basic outline in my head. So when the time comes to make things up on the fly there's a few things I can grab as stall tactics while I flesh out something larger.

Part 2

• The monk finally gets to show his stuff, to devestating effect.
• A new PC is introduced, alongside a new NPC cohort.
• lots of near deaths and by the end of it the NPC cohort is a revenant just waiting to die so she can be revivified.
• There's a lot less detail because I had a very busy week.

Quote from: James McMurray;523447Part 2

• The monk finally gets to show his stuff, to devestating effect.
• A new PC is introduced, alongside a new NPC cohort.
• lots of near deaths and by the end of it the NPC cohort is a revenant just waiting to die so she can be revivified.
• There's a lot less detail because I had a very busy week.

Cool.

So how are the players taking and/or reacting to the House Rule on Fumbles and Criticals?

The monk seems to like it. He can hit some stuff without rolling and sometimes doesn't have to roll saves.

The melee cleric doesn't seem to like it much. He also can hit some things without rolling, but there are times when he doesn't get to roll saves.

Neither have expressed an opinion outright.

It would interesting if you tracked how many times a 1 or 20 is rolled and the House Rule is applied. (Well, to me at least.

It's only that way for one character, and only because he took a ton of classes with poor reflex saves (Cleric, Fighter, Prestige Paladin, and Bone Knight). He also doesn't have a resistance bonus from an item, so he's got a +9 including his 18 dex.

Few of the saves have been over 39 (just the three thunder worms in the second session, which had one save DC of 43 and some others of 32). It hurt like hell every time their massive area attack recharged, but if he'd bought a +5 cloak to start he'd have a +14 and would still have passed them on a 20.

AFAIK he plans on rectifying that once they get a little down time.

Right on, and that makes sense to me now.  Out of curiosity, what level(s) are the characters?  When I click the link for the characters on your webpage, I get an error message:

Page
Notice: Undefined index: HTTPS in /hermes/waloraweb010/b1181/moo.rpgtoolsorg/dnd-epic-win/index.php on line 55
http://rpg-tools.org/dnd-epic-win/pcs/maevith not found

Sorry, I just got the sheets this weekend. They'll be uploaded as soon as I both remember and have time.

Tarlan started at 21st. He's the only one that started off without LA.

Cordiss started with +2 LA from the phrenic template, but it was bought off so he started at 20th level. He's now 21st.

Kastiel started off with more LA and was only able to buy off some of it, so he started at 20th level but with one of those taken up by LA, so he's ECL 20, Character Level 19.

Cordiss got a slight boost in XP when the campaign started for running the other campaign we play in the group, otherwise he'd be 20th alongside Kastiel.

Err... never mind, I just found the Character Creation page.

Although, it would still be cool to see the PCs character sheets.

Quote from: James McMurray;526740Sorry, I just got the sheets this weekend. They'll be uploaded as soon as I both remember and have time.

Sounds good.  Damn, you're quick! It's like I'm casting a summoning spell. lol

Part 3

It's been a funky couple of weeks, so it's really short.

What's the deal with the freebie do-overs?  Why is a character changing his race after creation and play?

Because I'd rather people play the character they want, and sometimes what sounded like a cool idea turns out to be less enticing once you've actually taken the wheel and driven the character for a bit.

Whenever I run I typically let people change their characters in between the first and second session, up to and including complete rewrites (like Maevith being replaced by Kastiel). These guys aren't hardcore gamers, and have never played a game beyond 14th level. It took them 3 years to get that high, and I'm still having to explain what types of actions you can take in a round. Since epic is an entirely different ballgame I extended that window out to the start of the third session.

The characters you see now are the final versions. Any changes that get made from here on out will have to happen via in-game events and the retraining rules.