Do you play the game completely by the published rules or have you tweaked them? If you've tweaked them, how far? We tampered with the magic system because we felt that it cut the balls off of the wizards. While there are still limitations based on experience levels, a wizard or sorceror in our campaigns can chuck any spell from the available levels any number of times. To offset the obvious power surge in a character class, we assign a 5% cumulative chance for spell failure if you try to cast a spell over and over again. As a result, we now have spellcasters that behave more like Merlin and Gandalf instead of David Copperfield and the Amazing Kreskin.
Actually i have found that a properly done wizard of sorceror understandard rules is pretty powerful. However I have tampered with it a bit on occassion and ruled that scrolls require no money or xp to create just time and given Sorcerors Scribe Scroll. I have also ruled on occasion that magic works like psionics, a point based system.
The Scifi subforums make my sex-appeal go down precipitously, but role playing as a whole I've always found very nifty.
What's great is more and more women are roleplaying. I play in a Marvel Superheroes game that half the players are women. Only one is single, but then again I am the only single guy so....
Yes. I've heard of several people I know who are casually or seriously into role playing also noting that. I'd imagine they are pretty intelligent, nice women, also.
Tweaking is the perogative of the DM. By the way for character more like Merlin I suggest the Warlock from Complete Arcane very limited in number of powers but they get to use them infinitely. On class i feel gets hosed feat wise is Clerics so i give a bonus feat at 1sts, 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, and 20th level in excahnge for stripping away Heavy Armor Proficency
3.5 really is the best, the different classes actually make sense now and multiclassing easy to handle. Skills and Feats really let you customize a character the way you would like to play them.
Not in D&D my friend, been playing that for 19 years now started back in first, helped my group switch to second and then on to 3rd and 3.5. Some alternate rules have a cumulative spell failure percentage, but the only time you see it in any core rules is Wild Mages or wearing armor and using a shield.
The changes from 3 to 3.5 didn't look too terribly signifcant, certainly not enough for me to buy a whole new set of books. WOTC has a downloadable supplement that takes care of the changes, but maybe our game has become so tweaked over the years that we've stopped viewing changes as anything too noteworthy. Running since 1981, I found my first character sheet, a fighter named "Arrgh!" who met an untimely death on the way to the first dungeon. He never even made it to room 1, having made a truly miserable Dex roll in a minor landslide concocted by our DM just to make the journey a little more dramatic. He graciously allowed me to take over an NPC, a total nobody with average scores who wound up retiring with noble titles and several major holdings. I inherited the gameworld in 1985 when our DM accidentally got a real job with real hours, real benefits, and a real corner office in Chicago. Among the goodies he gave me was an original post-Chainmail box set in primo condition. I've only recently learned that it's worth a few bucks, and my husband and I are trying to remember what box in the garage it's in!
3.5 did have a few changes that were worthwhile. Clarifying Monk, giving Ranger real personality, and streamlining spells. All in all a good investment if you can get them on sale like I did. Gotta love 90% clearance sales I stocked up.
When I used to play dungeons and dragons years ago, most of the tweaks I made were to the environment characters were playing in. The first biggest change was to make it so that encounters for anything 'mythical' were extremely unique. I tried to make the world akin to medieval Europe. The world was dominated by humans for the most part. The majority of the NPCs were either superstitious, poorly educated, or lived their lives never having encountered anything legitimately mythical. Any race other than human needed to hide or lie about their identities. Magic users, illusionists, or people with blatantly enchanted items needed to hide their powers. Clerics were the only publicly accepted form of magic because of it's religious affiliations (they could cast healing spells, and refer to them as 'miracles'). BTW- when I say unique, I don't mean uncommon. Almost every campaign involved mythical stuff at some point. There was always armies of Kobolds raiding merchant caravans, cursed undead villages, or visits to the various different planes of existence.....anything along those lines. One rule modification that I allowed was that players could chose to use lizard men, drow elves, full blown Orcs, and occasionally centaurs as player characters.
domesticated om -Sounds like you threw in a good mix of "Ars Magica" and "Pendragon". Did you have either of those games?
No, there wasn't not in any books I could find, just checked my 1st edition (first printing god I paid for that book), second edition and 3rd edition. In effect there always was a 5% failure chance, but that was becuase it was always possible for the victim to roll well on the saving throw.
Nope. There was always a 5% cumulative spell failure per difference in spell caster (or creator's, if an item).
That is if using a scroll. It does not effect your memorized spells. I was wondering where you got that cumaltive rule and now I know.
No, I never obtained the books for either of those games, or ever had the opportunity to play with other people......although now that you've mentioned those two names, It makes me want to check them out. AD&D and MERP were the only quasi-medieval themed role playing game I ever played.
