Recruitment for an Upcoming RPG Game Campaign

This is a recruitment pitch for a game I plan to host. It was first posted on my forum, and is copied directly to her from there without editing. So far, I have all of two players. You are more than welcome to join the game if you want, just email me your application and get in touch with me. It is a weird game and I am rusty as a DM, and frankly it is overambitious for me, but I am still doing it.

This is, coincidentally, also the game that I promised I would blog here about, mostly as an experiment. This game is not an Eden game. That is important to say. I’m not running Eden games yet because I want to get more stuff done for it first. Though when such a time comes, I may interrupt this game for a few sessions (if it is still alive) in order to do the playtest games of Eden.

If I ever should be run short on players and be unable to play a night, we will run a pickup game of Maid: RPG instead of the campaign. Which I will blog about.

Please do not join if you will be there to cramp my style. I’m a weird D&D player who loves video game references and metagameisms, house rules, anime (especially bishojo). If you hate all of the above, I will not miss your presence.

EDITED APRIL 17th WITH CHANGE OF PLANS

Time: Thursday nights (7 or 8 PM Eastern Time to 11 PM or 12 AM Eastern Time. If we can get 7 PM, we can stop at 10 PM.)

Place: IRC, channel name and password forthcoming, but definitely on rizon.

Level: 6

PB: Begin with this array: 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10 and you can spend 5 points (maximum stat 18,) among any stats on a 1 for 1 basis. So I could, say, spend mine like 16, 16, 16, 12, 11, 10. Then add racial bonuses as normal.

Wealth: As normal, but you get an extra wondrous, foot or arm slot item of level 5 or lower. Shields don’t count for this extra.

Allowed Books: Anything except Dragon Magazines above 368, which I haven’t read thoroughly. No playtests. Anything on my site is fair game, including the Bowlord or Fleurian Pact Warlock. The Open Game Table is fair game.

Classes Allowed: PHB 1 and Faerun main classes. You can multiclass into PHB2 things, but cannot take them as a main class.

You can use the 4e monk from the Open Game Table Anthology as a main class or multiclass. It can be found here: http://abutterflydreaming.com/4e-monk-project/ my blogbuddy Scott has worked pretty hard on it and I trust him.

Important: No duplicate main classes, every player I choose will be one with a different main class and role. No duplicate races either. So you will be in direct competition with somebody depending on what you choose.

Looking for 4 players.

House Rules:

Character Generation

•Power Swap feats no longer have level prerequisites.
•Multiclass feats no longer have ability score prerequisites.
•Every character gets a bonus multiclass feat at 1st level.
•No Weapon/Implement Mastery feats allowed.
•All characters look humanoid with mild features from their race, rather than looking exactly like the race. (See below).
•All characters without Ritual Caster start with 1 ritual of their choice they can cast, and learn 1 more ritual at 11th and 21st.

Advancement

•Paragon Multiclass 11th gives you an At-Will power, rather than letting you swap for one.
•Paragon Multiclass 11th allows you to recover an encounter power from your multiclass whenever you spend an action point.
•Paragon Multiclass gives you a bonus feat at 16th level.

Actual Play

•Honor system – don’t use the chat roller, just roll for yourself and show me the math.
•Characters have an extra bonus to attack rolls equal to their tier range (Heroic is +1, Paragon +2, Epic +3).
•Stunting is encouraged (improvised maneuvers like in the DMG Page 42), and certain terrain features to help stunting happen will hopefully be included often in battle maps.
•You can use any item’s daily power once per day but have no restrictions on your own uses.
•While I don’t mind cheesy combos, you’ll start seeing critters with powers that just read “stops stupid combo” in my notes.

•Be sure to calculate your power’s average attack bonus vs defense (11 + your attack bonus, yes, this average is cheating) and its average damage ([Maximum Dice Result/2] + static bonuses). On certain rounds of combat, I will declare that all damage is averaged, or that all attack rolls will be averaged. This has fluff reasons, but is mostly a construction to speed combat and make it a little more interesting. Half of a battle approximately will be average damage rounds, and averaged attack rounds will be rarer but present.

•Important: Movement will be abstracted. Maps will be provided, but will not be updated in real time. They will actually have coordinates as I found out how to get some done in my Dungeon Tile Mapper. So fuck yeah, chess speech. DWARF FIGHTER TO A8. However, I will do my best not to let it bog down anything – it’s just helpful for positioning information. Don’t get too hung up on it.

Read here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/4112306-post25.html for something quite similar to what I would do, from Mike Mearls, one of the lead devs of D&D 4th Edition. However, my take on his “combat zones” in the map, is that each “combat zone” is actually a terrain type that offers certain bonuses and such. It’ll be interesting, hopefully, and less nerve-wracking than the chessboard gameplay of normal 4e, allowing you to hack away without as much worrying.

Information:

This campaign will be sort of a megadungeon campaign. By sort of I mean that yes, the vast majority of the action takes place inside one massive dungeon with numerous varied levels, enough to host a whole campaign in. The megadungeon is merely referred to as “Obelos.” It is a monolith of black glass with numerous openings and divisions which can be seen from the outside. It looks like a half-assed game of Tetris went on to produce it.

Your characters are not from fantasy universes, but rather from Earth. However, you have amnesia. This is a convenient take on a classic gaming trope – characters in old games of D&D are generated extremely quickly, so they don’t have a backstory, you just make it up as you go along. Here, you do have a backstory, but your character doesn’t know it, so it doesn’t matter. You also won’t be writing it to me. We’ll go into that later.

Your characters will all be humans at base but with characteristics of your chosen race. This is just fluff though. You use everything from your race. Anybody who just picks straight human is…well, straight human.

Though you don’t know about your identity, you do know your name, your age and your birthdate, and any information which would go at the top portion of a government form such as your address. You are also aware of things from the current modern world, such as technology. This is important because the megadungeon is going to be full of anachronisms.

In-game, your powers, items and rituals are in the form of cards. Rather than finding items, you can find an item card. You will also during the course of a game find one-shot “attack cards” that you can either use as a consumable item (giving you one attack of that power) or can use to swap one of your powers for that power. You also can see the AC/Fort/Ref/Will of any creature, along with a “health bar” which isn’t number accurate but solves the problem of you knowing exactly when something is bloodied or not. There will be a few more gameisms, especially as far as Skill Challenges are concerned.

The game will be semi-serious. To your characters, depending on your outlook, things will be pretty freaky and weird, which to us playing is funny, but to them would probably be frightening. Things/people will die so there will likely be some tragic moments, especially if players die (which is always possible if you do something extremely stupid or if you have the world’s shittest luck and I’m batting a thousand that night). There will be morbid humor, as well as my usual metagame humor and references. The game will also be weirder than most I run. If there’s something weird somewhere, you can have fun overanalyzing it. If your overanalysis is fun, we can even run with it (as you’ll see below).

You will start the game on the basement level of the dungeon, and from there will be introduced to the mechanics and given your deck of cards. All starting decks will include a couple of those consumable “extra cards” including a few consumable item cards and attack cards. I will pick whatever is included in each, and email you the information before the game.

Application:

Name
Gender
Age
Race
Class(es)
Alignment (all alignments will be watered-down versions, so Good is “nice”, Evil is “jerk” and Unaligned is “balanced”, the extremes (Chaotic/Lawful) would be more like “real” Good and “real” Evil are in 4e.)

Appearance (you don’t need to include what your armor would look like since you’re wearing clothes and your armor is just an item card that grants certain bonuses or penalties, and so forth)

Character Image (safebooru.donmai.us is a great place to find character artwork)

Personality (you haven’t lost your predisposition to certain things even if you did lose your identity)

Backstory: Your backstory is to be kept strictly in your head. Instead, we’ll play a little word association. As you go along the game, if you find something that seems like it would remind your character of his/her identity, you can give a small anecdote about it. How you know if it would remind your character of something, is the point of the word association game.

Write down the first word (or short phrase) that comes to mind about your character after hearing the following:

Parents
Home
Love
Death
Fun
Fear
Hope
Friend
Pride

Be sure to have a sheet linked, from Myth-Weavers preferably. Make sure it is PUBLIC.

A small fluff intro will come in the next post.

Characters will be chosen mostly based on interesting responses to the word association game as well as class and 4e role.

Also important, gender. While I’m willing to DM all female characters, I will not DM a sausagefest game. It’s not my style.

Extra Special Note To Blog Readers: This Is Not A “Megadungeon Project.” I will not be posting levels, maps, etc about the dungeon, I will just talk about it, and post monsters or items that I cook up for it. But not like, an actual floor plan. Don’t ask for one, because you won’t get it. This is in fact a satire of megadungeons and will  probably make no discernible sense to anybody with an inkling of knowledge about real megadungeon games.