Thursday, January 23, 2014

Gods and Classes

I was going to write a post about gaming complexity balance.  I should say, I did write it, but deleted it cause it sucked and a little too pedantic.  So I wrote this instead.  It's your fault for reading.

This campaign I'm opening a couple things up, classes and gods.  I'm opening up the classes because they're are so many available and the variety is a lot of fun.  While there will be a lot of choices the classes a fairly straight forward.  I've added a few culture based classes to reflect the region and what they hold valuable.  You won't find any race class stuff.  I've never been a fan of elf or dwarf being a class.  I'm beg, borrowing and stealing ideas out of my gaming books and all your blogs out there.  Once I have a collection of them I'll edit them for the region, but I won't put limitations on the PCs.  They like to feel special.

Gods.  I normally run a 10 god pantheon with a long back history, tales and lore that go along with it, but being inspired by the Petty Gods project I've been creating a lot of nook and cranky gods.  It's been a blast creating them.  I like the weirdness that infuses into a world.  The clerics will reflect their god instead of being cookie cutter clerics.  I'm going to leave the interpretation up to the player to figure out and then we'll role-play it out.  Example, if a cleric of Lavinia, a goddess of Mercy and Healing tried to cause light wounds its not going to work and the cleric will lose his spell for that day.  But if they are healing someone they'll get a bonus to their roll.  And the gods are fickle, I'll roll reaction rolls each month to determine the god's mood.

What do you do to differentiate your religions and/or clerical abilities from one another?

3 comments:

  1. I should schedule a Firing Squad interview with you and make (ask) you to talk about gaming complexity balance. It seems to drive people out of the woodwork to tell us how wrong we are (no matter the opinion offered!), so it would be a fun topic.

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  2. I'll have to ask you for the digest version of gaming complexity balance on Monday night (assuming I'm not dead by then).

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  3. In the old days (when I was playing a lot of D&D), I tend to go with the second ed. Complete Priests sort of variant weapon/armor restrictions sort of thing.

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