Hey guys. I'm currently putting together a 5e D&D campaign
that I'll be hosting on roll20. This thread is gonna be a pretty
massive wall of text with information about that, so you can see what
this campaign is going to be about and judge if you're interested in
that or not and so that I can see if you have the attention span
necessary to read through the post. While not foolproof, this has
proven to be somewhat effective at weeding out people that just
randomly sign up for campaigns and never actually show up or lack the
commitment (which, believe it or not, does happen quite a bit).
The Cliff Notes
So, okay, let's get to it. In a nutshell, what I'm aiming to do is
a somewhat more freeform version of kingmaker which some of you might
know from pathfinder. I'm probably going to run this with 4 people,
which will give everyone ample time in the spotlight. Personally I
don't care if you have previous roleplaying experience or any
experience with this edition specifically, as long as you're willing
to put some effort into picking it up. Overall, this will strive to
be fairly player driven, I'm going to rely on you guys to provide
hooks for sidequests and such as based on your characters. So if
you're only looking to consume content created by the DM, this might
not be for you. If you've watched RollPlay Dungeon World on itmeJP's
channel, this is along the lines of what I'm aiming for in terms of
player involvement. Someone asked about how long this will run. That depends on the players about as much as it does on me. I have no set end for this in mind, but it's potentially a campaign that goes from 1 to 20. So definetly not a one-shot. Currently we're looking to play on Sundays at about 2 or 3 pm GMT+1 , I expect sessions to be about 3-4 hours, kinda depending on how things go and where we hit a good stopping point. I *might* have to move the day in november, but that is unfortunately not something I can say for certain right now as the reasons for this are beyond my control. We will be using Skype for
voice chat. While everything has it's pros and cons, I've been using
skype for a while now and I've got all my other roll20 peeps in there so
I'll stick with that. The campaign
… will be set on the western border of the duchy of Vestis. The
setting is quite similar to what you might be familiar with from the
forgotten realms or lord of the rings in terms of what exists and
what does not exist, as far as magic and technology goes. Magic and
magical weapons are quite rare. The duchy is currently at war, which
rages along the eastern border. The drawn out conflict has sapped the
duchy's ressources severely and in an attempt to secure the eastern
border (which is mostly unexplored wilderness from whence monsters
frequently wander into the duchy and cause trouble), the duke had
several outposts established there a while ago. However, during the
last couple of months, nobody has heard anything from the outposts,
the birds stopped coming in, messengers sent have not returned.
Normally, the duke would send a detachment from one of his legions to
deal with the problem (assuming there is a problem, which seems quite
likely), but as the army is otherwise engaged, the duke has put out a
call for adventurers, to discover the fate of the outposts,
reestablish them (and make sure they can be self-sufficient) if they
are destroyed and generally pacify the region to the west. In return,
the leaders of the successful expeditions will be rewarded with a
patent of nobility and be allowed to rule the area they are
responsible as a new noble house under the duke. Smarter characters
might be able to figure out that this is a pretty sweet deal for the
duke, and not quite as sweet for the adventurers are are free to draw
whatever conclusion they wish from that. :)
And that is basically as far as we're gonna go in terms of
railroading. Beyond that, it'll be up to you guys to figure out how
to get this done. What does an outpost even need? How are you gonna
get that if you aren't loaded with money?
The campaign itself will (try to) be mostly player driven. For
one, I'll have a series of questions for each character that will
lend themselves for character specific sidequest and encounters and
every player is free to add to that. Basically I'm going to outsource
part of the hard work to my players because I'm quite lazy when you
get down to it. For example, one of you might have heard of an
ancient sword that is buried in the general area of where the Duke of
Vestis wants you to go and you're along for that as much as for the
actual job, maybe even a little more. But we're gonna stop with the
player involvement at that level, if this item exists and the exact
stats it has is something I'll make up myself. No +10 holy avenger of
vorpalness for you guys, sorry. ;)
As for the quests themselves... The problems or obstacles I will
present you with, will rarely have a solution planned out. I will use "fronts" which you may or may not be familiar with from other systems. Stuff simply happens in the world and if people don't stop it or interact with it, it just progresses as it would. Time waits for no one. Some things can simply be resolved by punching them, but I'm not
going to attempt to balance everything in a way so that it can be
solved by brute force. If there is a dragon sitting in cave, it might
be virtually impossible to fight it and live to tell the tale. Maybe
there is an army of 250 orcs on the march that you happen to see.
Also probably not the best thing to fight directly. Small tribe of rambunctious goblins? Can probably be dealt with forcibly. Might have other solutions as well, but should be punchable.I guess what I'm trying to say is: not everything is easily hack and slashable. House Rules
I'm gonna houserule a few things and I'm willing to listen to
suggestions from players, but I'm not making any promises here.
Overall I'm wanting to have just a little bit more realism than
vanilla 5e provides, some of the things they do just seem a little
too far fetched to me. I'll give you a few examples down here so you
can judge if this is a dealbreaker for you or not. Overall I'm
probably going to change things in favor of the players more than I
will change things „against“ them.
One thing I already know that I will change is non-lethal damage.
Taking someone alive will be more difficult than killing them, if
that person is not surrendering. No randomly declaring that the
crossbow bolt you fired at someone was somehow non-lethal. It's
probably going to be something like attack at -5 with a sharp weapon
(„flat of the blade“), -2 with a blunt weapon and impossible to
deal non-lethal damage with piercing weapons. Sorry, I just don't see any way to knock someone out by launching a crossbow bolt at them.
I'm also thinking about requiring crits to be confirmed (similar
to 3.5 or pathfinder) because I find they usually work against the
party much more than in favor. Especially at low to mid levels, a lot
of monsters can one-shot even fighters or barbarians if they crit and
don't roll below average. This I am probably going to leave up to the
players because I don't really care much if one of my monsters gets
randomly one-shot, I can always make another monster.
I might look at and change a few other things that I feel
disadvantage players unfairly or make large parts of their options
incredibly unattractive (paladin + concentration spells leap to
mind). Character and Party Creation
We're going to use 4d6k3 (roll a d6 four times and keep the 3 best
results) to generate characters.
Evil aligments are barred and on top of that, I'd like all the
players to get together and discuss the party as a whole before we
actually get going. This probably isn't necessary, but recent
experiences have taught me to be better safe than sorry on this. Just
to make sure everyone is on the same page and we don't discover that
we have two diametrically opposed characters 3 sessions in and we can
only resolve it by one guy killing another guy. Trust me, 5e is
plenty deadly without the party killing each other. I can handle that
just fine, thank you very much. ;)
If you wish to be a race that is not currently part of the
released content we might be able to work those in, but I'd like to
reserve final judgement on that and it's not going to be more
powerful than what already exists, this would be mostly for flavor.
As far as background and stuff like that is confirmed, we can
either use what's in the book or we can make something up as we roll
for stats. Generally, I'm probably going to be fine with everything
that is done for flavor and roleplaying reasons, not so much with
things that are done for powergamey reasons. ;)
I'm currently considering two options on how to actually start
out:
One option is to start at level 3, which funny enough, is actually
the level the creators of 5e expect people to start out at
eventually. This option is going to assume that all the characters
know each other already and have successfully completed a mission for
the duke already which is why he trusts them with the current
mission.
The other is to actually play the mission where the party got to
know each other and start everyone at level 1 for that. This might be
fun because the outcome of this mission is going to play into the
longer campaign in some way. :) Once this initial job is complete
everyone will in all likelyhood be level 3 and ready to take on the
dangers of the wild. Tokens and Stuff
As this has put off some people in the past, I feel I need to make
special mention of this. I will rarely, if ever, use battlemaps and
tokens. I feel they don't work well for how I want to run games and
that's really all the reason The time spent drawing out maps and
tokens for encounters I do not want to railroad anyone into is time I
would rather spend otherwise. If players wish to map out their course
through a dungeon, I'll switch the map over to a blank page where
things can be sketched out roughly, but for combat we'll use the
power of our brains to figure out where everything is. Time and Date The campaign is going to take place in a GMT-friendly timeslot. Sunday in the afternoon (around 2pm GMT+1).
How to apply for a spot
If you managed to read through the wall of text: Congratulations!
Feel free to drop me a PM or leave a message here with any
information about yourself and your roleplaying experiences and
preferences and anything else that you feel I should know. A pretty good way of doing this is to put yourself in my shoes. If you were hosting this, what would you want to know about your players. Then write that and put it somewhere I can find it. If you have questions feel free to include them in the PM or a post here. If I forgot something relevant I'll update this post.
Disclaimer:
If this is anything like the last campaigns I hosted or played in,
there will be many more applications than spots. This isn't going to
be first come, first serve, I'll try to allocate spots on who I
believe fits best.
