Current Events > D&D fellows, I Need Suggestions and Critiques! (3.5e)

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Hello Hivemind. I need some suggestions. If you are a player of mine, turn back now, or all your future rolls are destined to be natural 1s for at least the next ten sessions. (I'm not sure they use this site, but one can never be too careful)

So, with that out of the way, it's a long story, but I'm running my group through a full gamut of games and campaigns. And in one of them, the game will start with them at level 20. Established heroes coming off the heels of a long successful campaign. But, the catch? They accidentally unleash a curse on themselves trying to figure out a particular magic item left by the big bad.

What happens? It unleashes the big bad upon the world in a more powerful form and curses the PCs to lose XP during their adventures. They will spend the game trying to accomplish their tasks and get stuff done before they are too weak to do much about it. They will de-level through the campaign. But I plan to do them a favor and let them pick which feats and skill points they lose (that do not violate prerequisites). They will also roll to see how much HP they lose.

Any suggestions from my fellow dms about pitfalls or issues to consider? Maybe something mechanical I'm overlooking? Or has anyone else done this?

Sounds okay for like a 6 session mini campaign but otherwise that just sounds awful.

I assume you ran this concept by them before hand? That would probably turn off a lot of players if they didn't know about before hand.

Yeah this sounds awful. Being like weakened for a sesh or 2 would be cool, but to just get fucked every single session is rough. There is no dopamine rush of a new level/ability, just endlessly slapped down. Also I don't know how advanced your players are, but for most people making a level 20 3.5 char out of the blue would difficult, and they cant really fix a shit build they did if they are going backwards.

Doesnt sound fun imo

My players were excited for the concept. So...

Any other comments?

gunplagirl posted...

Sounds okay for like a 6 session mini campaign but otherwise that just sounds awful.

And yes. This will be a shorter game, as opposed to longer. It's a gimmick. It can only last so long.

I'll just add that I plan to help compensate their loss in power with magic items and gold. Possibly property, access to armies, a favor from the king, and other resources from their previous adventures.

They're not going to be totally helpless. But, they will lose powers.

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Lunar_Savage posted...

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Sorry man looks like nobody has anything else to say about it other than "it sucks"

If people see it coming it could be interesting but it sounds like the opposite of what people would usually expect

Dingydang166 posted...

Sorry man looks like nobody has anything else to say about it other than "it sucks"

Eh, my players are advanced and this doesn't seem like an annoyance for them. So, I'll just say the people here weren't open to it. *shrug* But, if any good suggestions or thoughts or discussion points come up, I'm still open to it. It's a long story to explain why and how we're going down the rabbit hole, but there are things I'm planning to help balance it out like magic items, gold, property, access to property, favors from powerful people, etc. and, the campaign is meant to be short. I don't see it running longer than say, 10 sessions? I at most, expect to delevel them at most to level 10? But, they won't and shouldn't know they won't or shouldn't...go lower, unless they do something...odd.

Lunar_Savage posted...

I'll just add that I plan to help compensate their loss in power with magic items and gold. Possibly property, access to armies, a favor from the king, and other resources from their previous adventures.

They're not going to be totally helpless. But, they will lose powers.

None of that would equal what you're taking away from them. With the big bad guy back & worse than ever before, they will need the levels they're losing. A favor from the king won't mean jack compared to that. Gold will be pointless. Armies are generally a ton of very low level warriors, which would be useless against a BBG.

Magical items are a maybe-- but they'd need to be really powerful to make up for lost HP, ability points, etc.

Honestly, this sounds like the opposite of fun to me.

pfh1001 posted...

None of that would equal what you're taking away from them. With the big bad guy back & worse than ever before, they will need the levels they're losing. A favor from the king won't mean jack compared to that. Gold will be pointless. Armies are generally a ton of very low level warriors, which would be useless against a BBG.

Magical items are a maybe-- but they'd need to be really powerful to make up for lost HP, ability points, etc.

Honestly, this sounds like the opposite of fun to me.

So, that begs the question of...what would it take? And, uh, what kind of worlds has your DM run that had low level warriors for a war or some shit? Like...not really that good.

I love that I had a player laugh at the thought and said "hell yeah" where most of you are just agonizing the thought. It's weird.

The first thing that comes to mind is that you have absolutely no good reason to not let a Cleric just call their god to remove the curse beyond "Because the DM said so" (ie. purely metagame). Even if the character is new within the context of existing as a function of the game, a level 20 Cleric *should* be able to have enough sway of their god that basically no curse actively stick in the way that you want. This holds true for a lot of classes as well as at level 20 the ability to "just be cursed" isn't something to be taken lightly while at the same time if someone has the power to curse a level 20 then they would invariably be stronger than level 20, and thus you would need for them to somehow become stronger than how they started.

After that you have the standard issue of de-escalation: everything you have to bring before the player has to progressively be weaker and less impressive because a level 20 can absolutely wreck anything that a simple army could bring to the table unless the character was actively made for roleplaying. Similarly if you are giving away magical items the entire point the campaign would be made pointless if you balanced it right because you would either have to give incredibly high-powered items to keep parity while if you progressively made their curve weaker you would end up in the awkward situation that whatever level you balanced the items around would inevitably be the level that they would effectively act at.

That all said as far as a one-shot the idea probably won't have too many holes poked into it, so the first one won't necessarily be that big of a deal, so the main issue is going to be the second: the balancing. My recommendation there is to largely have things be relatively trivial in nature, but because of the speed at which the curse goes it creates "option paralysis" because of having to largely figure out how to actually proceed far more than fight through something. With that in mind giving stuff to get around the encounters without combat would be the most effective way to make sure that you don't end up in a situation where the only solution is to just hit harder. Mystery and the like makes the inherent power drops less meaningful but at the same time it makes it so you don't end up spending all of your time trying to dig the players out of holes.

ellis123 posted...

The first thing that comes to mind is that you have absolutely no good reason to not let a Cleric just call their god to remove the curse beyond "Because the DM said so" (ie. purely metagame). Even if the character is new within the context of existing as a function of the game, a level 20 Cleric *should* be able to have enough sway of their god that basically no curse actively stick in the way that you want. This holds true for a lot of classes as well as at level 20 the ability to "just be cursed" isn't something to be taken lightly while at the same time if someone has the power to curse a level 20 then they would invariably be stronger than level 20, and thus you would need for them to somehow become stronger than how they started.

After that you have the standard issue of de-escalation: everything you have to bring before the player has to progressively be weaker and less impressive because a level 20 can absolutely wreck anything that a simple army could bring to the table unless the character was actively made for roleplaying. Similarly if you are giving away magical items the entire point the campaign would be made pointless if you balanced it right because you would either have to give incredibly high-powered items to keep parity while if you progressively made their curve weaker you would end up in the awkward situation that whatever level you balanced the items around would inevitably be the level that they would effectively act at.

That all said as far as a one-shot the idea probably won't have too many holes poked into it, so the first one won't necessarily be that big of a deal, so the main issue is going to be the second: the balancing. My recommendation there is to largely have things be relatively trivial in nature, but because of the speed at which the curse goes it creates "option paralysis" because of having to largely figure out how to actually proceed far more than fight through something. With that in mind giving stuff to get around the encounters without combat would be the most effective way to make sure that you don't end up in a situation where the only solution is to just hit harder. Mystery and the like makes the inherent power drops less meaningful but at the same time it makes it so you don't end up spending all of your time trying to dig the players out of holes.

Okay, on the fluff part. I do have a legit reason. It's a loooong term reason I've been building to culminate into a 20 year dm story across a lot of different games.

So in terms of game reasons, even the clerics and their deities are outshined here. It's a loooong story. But I built a monster that was basically originally a thorn in the side of my players as a side quest/agitation. It grew to massive levels. lol

But, I have read the rest of what you said, and I think you're right. I have a hell of an act to pull off in the mechanics and balance. I don't always want them to fight weaker and weaker opponents, because some of their old foes should be coming out of the wood work for revenge. But, I do need to make sure they can still get lucky. But one of the big goals is to force my players to get really creative as we approach their big final game. So this campaign is kind of like an exercise.

Lunar_Savage posted...

And, uh, what kind of worlds has your DM run that had low level warriors for a war or some shit? Like...not really that good.

What kind of world do you have where the vast majority of soldiers are anything more than conscripts (aka commoners with no real training) or low level fighters? By design, the higher level a character is, the more unique they're supposed to be according to everything in the DMG.

pfh1001 posted...

What kind of world do you have where the vast majority of soldiers are anything more than conscripts (aka commoners with no real training) or low level fighters? By design, the higher level a character is, the more unique they're supposed to be according to everything in the DMG.

A world that got used to power gaming PCs and required champions to keep their asses in line from breaking every fucking law that existed. I have very chaotic players....so that might just be a temporal inflection across the playing board.

Lunar_Savage posted...

So, I'll just say the people here weren't open to it.

Personally, I wouldn't be opposed to it if my DM was pitching game ideas and that's what the group decided on, but it most likely wouldn't be my first pick.