Seriously: we’re having fun. I think the players are managing to immerse. And this diary lets me edit out all of the awkward pauses, mistakes, sophomoric humor, and confused looks; and edit in little details that make it feel more real, like a more thorough description of a dragon’s appearance.
Both of those seem like small things, but … honestly, I think my campaign has improved as a result. The diary helps the players remember the good parts and fills in gaps, and when they come over to game, they bring that with them.
I’ve changed my mind about demihumans. I don’t care for race-as-class, but five classes for each demihuman is sufficient that it doesn’t feel like that to me anymore.
So elven characters are going to be available from Lord Demosthenes’ and Iamanu’s longterm breeding plans.
And dwarves are genderless, grown from a stone seed carved by a master dwarven artisan. The art is long lost… maybe.
Magical experimentation is very nice!
I’m allowing a character re-design, as long as it doesn’t violate existing canon.
(Canon: things like “Chlodomer has Leadership; Galswintha casts fireball all the time; Vulfelind knows how to track people.”)
So far, Chlodomer’s player has asked to play an aristocrat (we’re working on a Class Proficiency list for it); Galswintha wants to be an elf (which … I’m thinking about and working on an option for her); Vulfelind would like to build a werefox class, on the theory that the XP chart will be less brutal; Merideth just wants to tweak the cleric to be more “knight-like.”
We’ll see.
At any rate, I’ve let them know that anything they build and I allow, NPCs may also end up using.
I agree with Merideth. I like being able to separate the church hierarchy from the warrior monks, so I took the priestess and cleric classes and tweaked them into a priest and templar for the pseudo-European realms in my campaign.
The templar is just a cleric who loses two-handed fighting style, drops from unrestricted armor to broad armor, gains the Riding and Weapon and Shield Fighting Style proficiencies for free, replaces Fighting Style with Armor Training on their proficiency list, and gets a more knightly weapon selection: lance, sword, mace, dagger, short sword (for captured scimitars), and torch (for burning heretics). None of this changes the cleric’s XP progression.
Cameron, this campaign gets better and better. We are very close to the DAW kickstarter, so if you become a backer you'll have access to those rules. (The rules are 99% done; the kickstarter will be for art assets and production costs).
I'm thrilled that everyone is digging into the Player's Companion. James, your Templar class is very cool. If you do a write-up, we can post it to the site.
Merideth’s player has yet to get back to me on what changes, specifically, he envisions, but I suspect something like your solution will be pretty close.
I’m thinking about it. It’s … shoot. I don’t know how to say this in a good way: I kind of wish I didn’t know about it until I stumbled across it on a game store shelf. Those days are long gone, I realize.