Roll20 uses cookies to improve your experience on our site. Cookies enable you to enjoy certain features, social sharing functionality, and tailor message and display ads to your interests on our site and others. They also help us understand how our site is being used. By continuing to use our site, you consent to our use of cookies. Update your cookie preferences .
×
Create a free account

Session 0: Character Creation Rules

While we already have a set of 5 pre-made characters available to us, I suspect that you'll all want to roll your own characters either now or in the near future. Plus I can point back to this if you ever find yourself... in need of a new character. >:-D Here are the rules to keep in mind: In addition to the Player's Handbook, I'll also accept race & class variants from the  Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and will consider (but would like to discuss with you first) the playable monster races from  Volo's Guide to Monsters . Check your email inbox (or reach out to me) for access to these additional books. This is purely optional ; feel free to use only what you find in the PHB. We will not be rolling for ability scores. Please use the Standard Array: 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, & 8. Optionally you may use the Point Buy rules defined on page 13 of the PHB to customize the Standard Array for your character. I will be allowing Feats, as defined on page 165 of the PHB. This includes the optional Variant Human Traits defined on page 31 of the PHB. When your character is first introduced you will draw from a Knowledge Deck a number of times equal to your character's Intelligence modifier. As an example, a character with an Intelligence of 15 will draw two cards from the deck, since the modifier for a 15 ability score is +2 (page 13 of the PHB). These cards give you, the player, knowledge of things your character would know about the world and past/current events prior to the start of the adventure. You may choose to share this information freely with our characters/players, save it for a critical moment, or guard it jealously – that is up to you and your character. If your character's Intelligence modifier is at least zero , I will also select  one additional card from the deck to give to you. Characters with lower than 10 Intelligence (thus a negative modifier) receive zero cards from the Knowledge Deck. I'm happy to answer any questions here in this thread, on Discord, or privately over email.
Following up on the Knowledge Deck : I have abandoned that in favor of sharing two background items with each of you as a Handout in Roll20. One of these is a short-term goal ; it is your motivator for what has brought you to Phandalin beyond the wagon escort job. The second is a " flashback " which tells you of an important moment in your past. Most of these moments will prove to be important months from now, but are generally not directly about the troubles you'll find in the town of Phandalin today. Starting next week we'll kick off each session with a short (~5 minutes) playthrough of a character's flashback, until we've explored all five. We'll begin with exploring Recto (Merrill)'s flashback.