Gamers for Christ 2.0 Disclaimer

We are coming up on our 6 month anniversary for Gamer's for Christ. It has been a lot of fun developing a campaign setting that has seen so much growth in that amount of time.  In that time many of us have been adjusting to learning the new 5e system, the Forgotten Realms settings status in the new time period, and the direction we want to go. A lot of things have been up to experimentation and many others have had to be created on the fly to address many of the things that have risen during that.  Originally, I set up the campaign with some basics to help us get started on our way. We have learned by experience the impact that different things can have on the 5e system and it is time for a bit of an overhaul.  I take responsibility for many of the implementations that have led to one of our DMs losing interest in the campaign because of the direction things are headed. We have strayed quite far from our original goal of creating an exciting gaming experience in a well-balanced and moderated setting.  Many of the implementations have been a result of a lack of detail within the 5e books that leave much of the work up to a DM to decide how things are handled. Unfortunately, this kind of flexibility does not work in a Westmarches style campaign setting.  So the purpose of this thread is to amend, retract, and implement decisions that have been made that have caused our campaign to veer off course.   Let me begin by clarifying the caveats of this group: The campaign is designed for Christian fellowship in gaming. Vulgar language, inappropriate material, and otherwise offensive material/behavior should be avoided out of respect for the community. This campaign is not a home brew. Material not included in the core rule books (PHB, DMG, and MM) or Forgotten Realms setting should be avoided as it does not enhance the experience of the campaign setting. Request for any homebrew material (magic items, classes, races, backgrounds, equipment, spells, etc.., not listed in the books) will be denied. If you are looking for a homebrew campaign, this is not what you are looking for. This campaign is a role-playing group. Meta/power gaming is considered disruptive to the role-playing experience. Please search the books to emulate the character that you would like to role-play; not the character that will somehow break the system and have advantage over everyone else in combat. This play-style is not enjoyable for other players as it focuses on one player/character instead of teamwork. No player enjoys watching one character steal everyone else's thunder. Focus on characters that will be enjoyable for others to play with. Additional weakness create more role-playing and humorous situations.  I will be using this thread to address each update to our campaign one at a time. Input from others is appreciated to help get things back to what our original goal was.

Armor Class Our standards for armor class have exceeded the boundaries of the 5e system. 5e was not designed to achieve armor classes as high as what could be done in 3.5. Armor class maximums (without spell effects) should look something like this: 1st-4th: AC 18 5th-10th AC 19  11th-16th AC 20 17th-20th AC 21 FIX: Masterwork Items will no longer provide any benefit other than an increased durability of 150% (increased from 110%) and meeting the requirements of creating magic items. Masterwork items no longer desired may be downgraded to normal for the corresponding refund. Creatures in the Monster Manual do not reflect the benefits of masterwork items, thus making their CRs inaccurate when PCs are able to benefit from them. 

 Are we, at this time, keeping the volo races?

Some of the DM's including myself are kinda fresh so guidence on some of these issues should be a priority. If a DM loses interest I would hope he/she would take time to teach people what there doing wrong. I for one would love to learn new things and still continue to learn every session. Only thing I dont want is people to quit without addressing the issues they have with that person and whatever they are doing. It also puts a lot of work on whoever there telling about all those issues. Beats me but thats my 2 cents. Also what do we do with characters that have homebrew weapons (like greatbows, lajavs, bolos, ext). And races from other books that are 5e but not mentioned above?

Volos and The Sword Coast are both Forgotten Realms source books. No changes being made there. Mostly 3.5 stuff being weeded out and some tighter restrictions on magic items and treasure being applied.  There are no hard feelings and I think no one wanted to interfere with other people's play styles. No one is upset so no worries. It just brought to my attention that we were straying from our original path. I would like to say that I would others to keep communication open and don't hesitate to express any concerns you might have. This is a great group of people and while we cannot tailor to every play-style, I want everyone to continue having fun.

What Mark said.  There are different kinds of fun, and many different ways to play the game.  My last couple sessions I ran became something more closely resembling a tactical boardgame than a roleplaying game.  That's one kind of fun, and I do like combat, but I basically allowed that portion of the game to overshadow everything else.  That's probably on me as a DM.  I want to change some things in the way I run adventures in the future - gridless combat, more of a narrative feel, more emphasis on character development that is more than just mechanical, to name a few things.  Another factor is the time issue - because there was so much combat, there was less time for social interaction, and I felt the pressure of finishing the session on time (so I could go to bed), and the story got lost in the mechanics.  Having dedicated characters for a given storyline will help with that time pressure, and I'm going to try to manage that better. The only thing that I would say by way of guidance for players would be that you need to play your character, not your character sheet.  Your character should be more than a collection of stats.  You have flaws, goals, bonds, etc.  I'm going to be tweaking bonds a little bit in my session, and work more on character development and roleplay, of which combat is a part, but not the sum total.

I also submit that we probably need to delete discussion threads where permission appeared to be given for home brew type stuff, so that new players don't stumble upon it and get confused. I know when I joined, I looked back through topics before asking a question.

BTW Daniel, I don't think Mark meant this to be a blame game and to your credit, you actually posted a thread requesting criticism and nobody took you up on it. So don't think that your the bad guy here

Agreed. Well put by both Gozer and MIx. The entire campaign is a learning experience for us all. Even an experienced DM has to learn how to adjust to a Westmarches style campaign. Westmarches and 5e are new to me so I have made a lot of mistakes along the way. I am working to amend those. My main goal is for us all to keep having fun while we adjust to the new 5e system and Westmarches style of play.  If you can point out any of the confusing threads so I can give clarification or remove them, it would be appreciated. Thanks guys and as the saying goes... have fun storming the castle. :)

Daniel S. said: Also what do we do with characters that have homebrew weapons (like greatbows, lajavs, bolos, ext). And races from other books that are 5e but not mentioned above? I think it's only fair that the 4th level limit on reworking characters should be suspended for a one time rebuild for anyone who has based their character around some of these things.

Mix said: Daniel S. said: Also what do we do with characters that have homebrew weapons (like greatbows, lajavs, bolos, ext). And races from other books that are 5e but not mentioned above? I think it's only fair that the 4th level limit on reworking characters should be suspended for a one time rebuild for anyone who has based their character around some of these things. Agreed. I am doing this mainly because it has been impossible to calculate the party threshold otherwise.

I feel like the overhaul was a success, so we are on to our next order of business. A few years back I had a campaign and it grew to about this size. It was just a small group of us but we had a LOT of content. The campaign ended up doing EXACTLY what this one is starting to do... lag, lag, and more lag. So much that it began to be detrimental on our sessions. It appears that we have already reached that breaking point here. I expected it to happen eventually so I already had some ideas as to what we could do. With the amount of material that we have, I would like to use this campaign as our central hub for as large as we would like to grow. In order to do that, we will have to begin implementing sub-campaigns. The vision I originally had for this would be that we could break the campaign down into regions. Waterdeep is large enough that it could be its own campaign page. The same is true for Neverwinter and Baldur's Gate. Traveling from one place to another might actually require vaulting your character's from one campaign page to another.  We definitely need to do something now before we add more content or we will find this campaign to be unusable. Here are the options for DMs... DMs Active at the time of this post: I would be willing to transmogrify your material to a separate campaign set up with Character Vault capability. I will need a list of what you want transmogrified tagged with what it is. I.e (map), (character), (handout), etc... After transmogrified, these items will be removed from the current campaign to help improve performance. If you have a large list of items that need transmogrified, I will instead duplicate the campaign and let you rename the duplicate and delete anything you wish to not use.  Any DM: You may create your own campaign with Character Vault settings turned on. If you use this option, you will be unable to access anything other than Character Sheets and Monsters from other campaigns. Any old unused maps, handouts, etc... from this campaign will be removed to help improve performance. I will be moving all of the Undermountain material to its own campaign page as soon as I can to help improve performance here. Thanks everyone. 

Oh... I forgot to mention this as well. We have also reached a point where the schedule is almost full. Having other campaigns will also allow us to run sessions at the same time. This will be necessary as we grow larger.

More games = good. Finding it difficult to jump into a campaign with my schedule as crazy as it is, and the games all fill up too fast to join.

I will open up a new game for my storyline.  I won't be able to transmogrify in that case, but most of my maps are made in Gimp, so I can just bring in new ones.  However, I'll want to make copies of my journal handouts.  I'll remove items that I no longer need myself.  If I delete a map that someone else wants later, I can always re-import it.

Does archived material still slow the game down?

Also doesnt seem like I have permission to use the tool to trasmog right now on our campaign 

Daniel S. said: Also doesnt seem like I have permission to use the tool to trasmog right now on our campaign  You can't transmogrify unless you're the campaign owner, and you can only transmogrify from a campaign you own to another campaign you own.  

It would be great if you were to create a campaign titled "The Hoard of the Dragon Queen (Gamers for Christ)" and transmogrify the content in my campaign folder over in addition to the maps, which most are labeled with "Hoard" in their name lol. (Hoard Keep for example). If you could do this Mark then I could then I would very much appreciate it as this campaign is HUGE and would most certainly lag as I continue to add the content.

Daniel S. said: Does archived material still slow the game down? I don't think it does. Archiving the maps not being used might help.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen sub-campaign all set up. Does not take much time at all.  I was wondering if we are the first group on Roll20 to basically be setting up a gaming guild of sorts. We are at least the first Christian guild. This is growing to something bigger than I expected. Pretty exciting. Really glad to be a part of this growing community. God is awesome and I always in awe of how he puts a thing together. lol

Oh... anyone else want me to set up a campaign page for them? Here is what I was thinking, btw... Since it all started in Waterdeep, I will keep this campaign set up as Waterdeep. We can work together to continue bringing it to life with maps, stories, NPCs, etc... We can also use this as the main hub for keeping our large archive of monsters so we can vault them wherever we need them. Players can come here to read the Downtime Activities, Factions and Organizations, and other general campaign handouts.  This will be a transition in progress and there is no deadline or hurry for that matter. That is just my eventual vision for our central campaign hub. Let me know what you all think about that. If anyone else has any inspiration on this, please share. 

I could use a separate campaign page for Findle's Guide series, but hold off on that for now. Need to figure some rl stuff out first.

go ahead for tiberious :)

i can use mine for side missions as well

Sure, Saturday Morning Coffee Crew seems to be standing strong thus far. If it helps, we'll gladly skip over to another campaign.

Mark S. said: Oh... anyone else want me to set up a campaign page for them? If you could transmog one for Trade War. I have TW in the title of each map. i'll need the orcs and drow monsters. 

Will get to these soon. Working long days this weekend, but I should be able to get them all set up Monday since they don't take long. 

At least a couple of people (Mike and Mix) are using Waterdeep and the surrounding area. I would like to transmogrify all of the Waterdeep stuff to its own campaign. This way it will be easier for anyone doing Waterdeep stuff to collaborate on maps, story, etc... I will be working on getting this one ready this week. I will turn this main campaign into a hub for Downtime Activities, Factions, a library/archive of maps, monsters, etc...  Is anyone focusing on an area other than Waterdeep or its surrounding area?

Bumping this conversation up as a reminder.