D&D 4e Homebrew Story Campaign

Hi guys, quite a nice thing you have here. My Name is Jacob and I have been playing RPGs for about a year now. I have played D&D 2, 3.5, 4, and next, and Pathfinder, and AGE. Im currently a player in an AD&D campaign but I want to get back to DMing. I'm looking for a group of people who want to play D&D 4th edition. I like my D&D games with lots of story and stuff. I've DM'd a campaign ( <a href="http://www.epicwords.com/campaigns/2204" rel="nofollow">http://www.epicwords.com/campaigns/2204</a> ) for my friends in 4e and we got to Paragon tier and the group split ways for various real life reasons. I am definitely able to DM this group and if everyone likes how its going we could keep it, and if not, we could trade off turns or work something out. My last game was very story based and included a lot of funny and challenging situations for the group to figure out. Unfortunately, I had two people who didn't give a crap about what was happening and just wanted to screw around (ie Burn down cities with no reason, Murder various Royalty because they can, Expose themselves to maidens, etc). It made it awkward and annoying for everyone who was trying to do a little bit of story progression. As for time, I'm available most weekdays after 9:00pm EST and can stay up pretty late. Thursday Nights preferred, but I'm flexible. If we can all agree on a time during the day, it might be possible. I can do video chat and have a pretty nice headset.

I'd be interested, I just need to hear more about the setting and the nature of the campaign before I start floating character ideas around in my head.

I’d be interested too in this game if you’re willing to take on a newbie :P I do have some experience in playing 3.5, so hopefully 4th edition isn’t too different.

I'm interested in joining your campaign. I agree with Taylor about having some more information before being able to come up with a character. I would be perfectly fine with Thursdays, or any other day of the week aside from Sunday. What level do you want to start us at? Do you have any special restrictions for making a character?

I'll join. I've been plying 4e for a while now. Thursday works for me.

Gordo, I've only played 4e, but AFAIK it's pretty darn different. That said, it also seems simple, so I wouldn't worry. I'll leave specifics up to those that actually know what they're talking about, though. :P

My only experience with any PnP RPGs is with D&D 4e and I have to say it is pretty simple and easy to pick up. Some stuff can be a little bit weird but for the most part it should be fairly easy for you to pick up Gordo. I've actually been looking into Pathfinder as I am interested in seeing if I might like a slightly more complex system.

Easy is always good lol was able to get a copy of the rule book, so will give it a read

The campaign setting will be classic high fantasy like D&Ds typical Forgotten Realms or Lord of the Rings. The world itself is homebrewed in that fashion. I do have a thing about races. Some of them are completely ridiculous like Shardmind and stuff. If you wouldn't mind sticking to more traditional Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Eladrin, Dragonborn etc. If you have good reason, maybe I could write in other races like Genasi or something. You would be starting at Level 1. For those who dont know, 4e is divided into tiers. Levels 1-10 is heroic tier. Minimal influence on the world. You can protect a few villages maybe. Paragon Tier is levels 11-20. That's where planar travel is important. Your actions affect Kingdoms and entire continents. You have garnered attention, and most know your name. Epic tier is levels 21-30. You vie for the attention of gods. You are legendary. You influence the nature of the world itself. After Epic tier, You have whats called an 'Epic Destiny'. That's what you decide is your characters ultimate destiny in history. You can create a realm in the elemental chaos and ascend to godhood, You can become an all knowing hermit, or pretty much whatever you want. Creativity is key, and you will have plenty of time to think of these things. For class, its pretty much first come first serve. If its on character builder, Ill allow it. I shy away from homebrew classes for the most part. If you want to modify the flavor of an existing class though, that's fine with me. I'd like to have a balance on the battlefield like at least one defender, and one leader role, with however many strikers.

Also I would like to have only myself as DM, and 4 players. So far we have... 1 - Taylor Vincent 2 - Gordo Freeman 3 - Galen Mahon 4 - Muckitymuck If you decide you don't want to after all, just let me know at any point and we can recruit more people. So go ahead and shoot me some character ideas if you have any.

Do we have a night picked? I don't want to commit if it is going to be Mondays, and I don't want to drag everyone else to another night if Monday works for the rest.

Jacob do you have an email address I should send stuff to? I have access to the character builder so I can send a few different formats if you have a preference. I haven't started working on the backstory yet in case there is anything special you wanted us to include in it.

If someone drops out send me a pst, I'll join as a Drow Assassin (Executioner); if you require a reason for this race/class, I can easily come up with a good one.

Tuesday nights? Say 10:30 EST? How is that for everyone? We will all work on background stuff together a bit later on. You can make a generic background if you want to make it early. My email address is ramahx(at)gmail.com Do you guys all have Google+ for hangout? If you do, you can add me with that email address.

I dont know if you guys use iplay4e, but its a pretty awesome way to interact and share character sheets. You could post a link to your character sheet that way. If you want to go ahead and say what role or class you want, you can do that now also. iplay4e.appspot.com/

I am not good for Mondays or Wednesdays. So Tuesday is perfect.

Can everyone make that day and time? Tuesday night at 10:30pm EST

Tuesdays are great! I'd prefer an earlier start time, depending on the length of the session, if that could work for everyone. If not, I can still probably make things work. As for character and background, I'll wait until I can hear what the rest of the party wants to do, as well as the nature and themes of the campaign. Are we doing themes and background benefits, and what is the pantheon of the setting?

Tuesdays are fine with me. As for my class, I'm thinking I want to play an Elven Archer. I'm going to send the .dnd4e file to that email after I post this. As for the Google+ thing, I never really got into it and I have no idea how it works but I'm fine with whatever everyone wants to do.

As it is, that's about the earliest I can play. I imagine the games will last anywhere from 2 to 3 hours. Generally when everyone is really done, or I run out of planned content. Backgrounds and Themes are a yes, but make sure they match your character at least somewhat closely. Like, don't pick 'upper-class citizen' for the Diplomacy bonus and actually be a gutter rat in your backstory. The pantheon is Forgotten Realms. Raven Queen, Vecna, Bahamut, Mephistopheles, and the rest of them. I mostly leave that stuff alone. Its way too confusing to change any of it haha.

Now that I think about it, we do kind of need a base of operations for scheduling and messaging throughout the week. If we could do Google+ since it caters to groups, that would be great. I can post loot, recaps, current quests, and some backstory fiction there if we get that going.

that day n time sounds good message me about my sheet though

Character sheet looks great! Good balance and lots of flexibility. 1 - Taylor Vincent 2 - Gordo Freeman 3 - Galen Mahon - Wood Elf Ranger 4 - Muckitymuck

If anyone needs/wants any help creating a character I'm pretty familiar with the tool so I'm more than willing to help. I've spent more time seeing what I can come up with than I care to admit.

Tuesday sounds great! I should have my character to you sometime today :)

I have an avenger of Tempus I'd love to break back out, but I'm assuming striker slots will fill up quick. Otherwise I'll look at what gods I may want to make a battle cleric of. If we need a defender, I could probably do that as well (though the only controller I'm interested in is the Essentials hunter, and we already have one bow elf). Any more hints as to the nature of the adventure? Do we need some kind of glue to keep the party from wanting to split up? Someone organizing or employing them? I've played that before, can do so if needed. My email should be on my profile if you need to reach me!

The adventure will call you all together from (possibly) different backgrounds and areas to complete a similar task. From there, you get swept up in the plot. Ill provide the glue. Just make sure your character is at least somewhat motivated by something other than money. Maybe a lust for adventure. If you want something unique and personal, like trying to break an ancient curse against your family just let me know and Ill work it in. The world is very flexible, and you guys have a say in what happens. We have one striker already. Defenders become pretty important later on as damage scales upwards. Leaders and controllers are completely up to you guys if you want to play them. I dont want to force any role on anyone, specially for a long term game. Does anyone really want to be a defender or controller or leader? If not, I can always scale and modify encounters appropriately.

It might just be me but I find controllers to be more or less useless. I feel like you could replace any controller with a striker and be better off in the long run, at least that's how 4e feels. I can't speak on any of the other variations of D&D though so I could be wrong. The last campaign I ran we had a Witch with Beguiling Strands and that ended up working out pretty well but that was mainly because what we had to work with was extremely small corridors and small rooms. If we were in some of these larger dungeons I think that PC's usefulness would have been more or less nil.

My RL game's wizard uses Phantom Cage to great effect. I'm also fond of how the hunter's stuff works. It's very single-target control, good accuracy, etc. It's part striker, which is why I like it. We're not talking invoker levels of low damage and buffs/debuffs here. I don't mind playing a leader at all. Be happy to, I like battle clerics. I just want to make clear that I can play almost anything we need, so I'll let others pick first.

Yeah, I've seen that Ranger in action. Someone was playing him in the first campaign I ever played. That character worked well with mine, Rogue, since he could just prone stuff all over the place so I could get CA all the time. Like I said though, my perception probably is what it is because I don't have experience playing with many different people and/or controller builds. It's kind of funny that you specifically mention Battle Clerics. My roommate is going to be playing a bow-wielding Wood Elf Battle Cleric in another campaign on here, if it actually gets off the ground that is.

Yeah, there's feat support for that, isn't there? I'd love to do a halfling cleric of Sehanine thanks to the feats for that. Some wonderful flavor/support there. As for elves, I wanted to make a dual-wielding avenger that was able to compete, but couldn't quite get it to work.

Yeah I'm not 100% clear on what he took or didn't but he reasoned that if he is going to be healing from the back then he doesn't have much use for a 1Her and a shield.

Good reasoning. Unless someone else wants to lay claim to a leader, I'm gonna work on a battle cleric of Torm. Probably human, maybe not. I'll mail something in if I get to anything I'd call final.

So we have 1 - Taylor Vincent - Battle Cleric (Leader) 2 - Gordo Freeman 3 - Galen Mahon - Wood Elf Ranger (Striker) 4 - Muckitymuck

Hey, not sure how else to send it to you Jacob, but here is my character let me know if I need to make any changes to it.

Chaotic Evil? O_O Also looks like your stats are way too high. What method did you use to generate them?

Seconding that. EDIT: Or we just let it go and see how long it takes my cleric to arrest (or worse) his behind for something dumb.

Meh. I'm not worried about the alignment so much. I'm sure it would end up sorting itself out. The stats is the thing that concerns me the most. If I'm not mistaken he used the method in one of the books where you roll dice for your stats. Gordo, I don't want you to take this the wrong way but would you like some help making a Rogue? The first character I played was a Rogue so I've got a little experience playing the class in 4e. Also, we should probably make sure we all pick different languages for our characters. The one, and only, campaign I've played on Roll20 was one where pretty much everyone picked the same thing and it was pretty redundant. I can't change my language so I've got Elven covered if everyone else wants to pick different stuff. Goblin, Draconic and Dwarf are probably pretty solid choices and I would imagine they will serve us pretty well. I would also like to say that any suggestions I make are not anything more than that. If someone has a certain reason for picking something(be it race, alignment, powers, feats, whatever) then that's fine. I'm not trying to force anyone to change their character. I'm only trying to speak from experience, the little bit that I do have, to try and help everyone out.

I have goblin and draconic at the moment on my cleric. I'm going for a frontier marshal sort of vibe, and that's what his enemies the goblins and kobolds would speak.

Oh nice. I don't really know what languages, other than the ones I listed, are really all that prevalent in the world so I wouldn't know what to suggest for everyone else.

I used the dungeons & dragons character builder and used the roll dice, so not sure why my stats would be considered high my racial traits were also added +2 Constitution, +2 Wisdom. As for alignment I guess I put it in wrong it should be Chaotic Good not Chaotic Evil lol my bad. I ended up choosing the language goblin because it kind of made sense to know the language of your enemies that way I can taunt them :P

Take my stats on my Archer for example. 10/11/20/10/16/8 with racial bonuses to Wis and Dex. That is using the default point buy system which gives you 20 points to distribute. There is a table that shows you how many points it will take for you to increase each stat. With the way you did it you are essentially playing with a 33 point buy system which is way more than the norm. In my experience it is pretty standard to use a 20 point buy system. Also, if you want to be a Dwarf Rogue Scoundrel, I would like to suggest you choose Strength instead of Wisdom since Strength is your secondary stat.

Here is my character with revisions.

I tried to recreate those stats in the character creator and that still isn't right. It looks like you have more points invested in that set of stats then you did before. With your racial bonuses, Str/Con, your ideal stats, at least if I was playing the same character, should be 16/13/18/8/10/10. This stat line gets you access to Tunnel Stalker which is a good pick for a Dwarf Rogue. That stat line you have there, because you don't have 13 Con, doesn't get you access to that talent. It is also probably in your best interest to choose something like Deft Strike instead of Sly Flourish. You get a bonus to your damage equal to your Cha mod with Sly Flourish but your Cha mod will be 1 at best. Using Deft Strike you get to move two spaces before you attack and that can make a pretty big difference sometimes. Gordo, I would like to reiterate that I'm not trying to offend you or tell you how to play the game, or your character. I'm just trying to help you get your character straightened out so I hope you don't take this the wrong way.

I could go Paladin Defender if you need an off-healer.

I think I'll have healing pretty well wrapped up, as well as a little off-tanking, but a defender would still probably be good. Maybe a slayer or other 2H tank?

Tired to generate my ability several ways but I guess I keep doing it wrong even when it’s as simple as rolling 4d6 and taking the highest 3, which I did but you guys seem to think its way to high even with simple rolls. I’m dropping out of this game as I’m looking for a game for starters in 4e where I can experiment with character classes some. Good luck in your game cheers

"I think I'll have healing pretty well wrapped up" I've heard that one before. I don't have the books handy for Slayer, how about a Battlerager Fighter?

What races are allowed?

Hey guys. I just got home. Gordo sorry you feel that way man. You can still be in if you want. Its my bad, I should have said to do a point buy instead of rolling 4d6 drop lowest. Im sorry about that. Ill be more than happy to get on skype or hangout and figure it out with you if you would like.

Gordo, rolling is usually done with real player groups. Where the first session is character creation, even if just rolling the stats so you have proof. I've rolled before and had three stats at 18, two at 3, and one at 13... It makes you to OP to be able to roll without proof. Thus the 22 point buy, and the Array's were made.