Post/Author/DateTime	Post
JamesMaissen 02-06-06, 04:29 PM	There are many rules in LG that distort the game from the core rules. Some are just due to the nature of a Living Campaign. These we have to live with. But others are not, and as such in my opinion would be better if changed so as to be closer to the core rules. Such things include but are not limited to: 1> Cohort advancement and treatment. Cohorts should not get 50% of gold and xp, but rather they should be getting the fraction that they are of thier leader's level. (Ie a 4th level cohort of a 6th level leader would be getting 2/3s xp and gold). This would help keep them viable and would make it easier for them to maintain thier level with thier leader. Cohorts should not be disposable heroes. They should not become 'new' again each and everytime thier leader levels. Rather a concession due to the nature of the living campaign would be to allow them to become 'leveled' when thier leader levels, but not to require it. If leveled they are set in xp and gold values (and can 'buy' thier items from thier gold value or the leader's gold value if so desired). 2> Crafting rules Mundane items should be craftable via appropriate craft skills. (We currently allow for rolls to be made in 'making cash' so rolls here would be allowed as well as normal core rules allowing for taking 10). Access to some 'rare' items could be handled by standard LG methods (ie encountering them, etc). Scrolls can have multiple spells. As consumables allowing crafters to save cash here is nowhere near as problematic as with permanent items. Potions are not limited to a list in the DMG. (There are core limitations on to what kind of spells are brewable, of course). 3> Permanent effects and effects carrying over Permanency has long been a spell in D&D. In 3rd edition it's much easier to use even (much lower level, only xp cost). Other than tracking problems there should be no reason to take this out of the game. Now that we use things like an MIL tracking would become very easy. Even a separate sheet could be so used that's *very* much like an MIL in nature. Certain items store spells by thier nature. By LG emptying them each module it artificially lessens thier use. Even casters that can fill such items have a lessened benefit from them. A noncaster with a ring of counterspells always used for a rare (but bad) occassion has it's usefulness greatly reduced. Such things could also be easily tracked and recorded. Even if the nature of the Living Campaign required such things to be cast by an NPC to be maintained (and thus randomly cost the character) it would increase the use of these items. Anyway, these are just a few items with a common goal.. keeping as much to core D&D as possible within the confines of a Living System. Thanks for your time, James
solbergb 02-06-06, 06:17 PM	I don't disagree with your basic idea (we should try to stick to the flavor of the core rules and the greyhawk setting as much as possible). However in the cases you mentioned, there are pretty good reasons for the status quo in all the points you made. You may not agree with the reasons (I don't with everything) but there ARE reasons, and they are tied to the nature of a living campaign. 1. Cohorts aren't like they are in home campaigns. They don't play every time the master plays. There is also a temptation to use them as magic item factories, or as suicidal speedbumps, etc which is harder to track if you don't have the same DM keeping an eye on things. The current cohort rules are there because the Circle doesn't want to eliminate Leadership entirely, and it is the best compromise they've come up with, in their eyes. The nature of cohorts may change, but they're unlikely ever to be very much like how they'd work in a home campaign. 2. Access to items is the most restricted thing in LG. Magic crafting feats (especially craft wondrous) open up that access to some extent, but the concept that you had to have encountered the item at least once in your travels is a firm one, and has only tightened over the years. In year two, crafters just "crafted" gold (much like mundane craft skills are today) and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted. This "magic mart" traumatized the campaign...and everything has gotten more restrictive, year over year since then except that the favor portion of the AR tends to be where open-ended access gets granted, that lets you plan your character to some extent. The use of DMG tables instead of crafting formulas is part of the restriction. The use of PHB tables instead of letting you buy any mundane equipment is also part of the restriction. It is fair to argue about small areas to be less restricted, eg no longer using the DMG potion list, and many have done so on this forum, in various ways. The craft mundane item...there are many threads for that as well. Check them out. Expect small, evolutionary changes here though. You won't see anything drastic..and most of the time the trend will likely be away from access via anything but an AR. 3. In a Living campaign, anything that gives a benefit for XP is automatically suspect - spending xp = more play opportunities + more wealth for your level. Permanency duplicates the effect of several magic items and does some things that are flatly impossible without it (permanent enlarge person, for example). Its only cost is XP, which nobody cares about. The reason it is restricted is entirely due to the nature of the campaign. This is also why Fabricate can't make stuff that lasts beyond the adventure...this houserule thankfully prevents the whole "I make a room full of fullplate from my wall of iron" arguments...bottom line...don't expect this to ever change.
JamesMaissen 02-07-06, 12:55 AM	I don't disagree with your basic idea (we should try to stick to the flavor of the core rules and the greyhawk setting as much as possible). However in the cases you mentioned, there are pretty good reasons for the status quo in all the points you made. You may not agree with the reasons (I don't with everything) but there ARE reasons, and they are tied to the nature of a living campaign. Well the point of the thread was more to make a statement that this should be an underlying goal. Rather than simply fix leaks, that we should have this as a direction for the campaign to strive to move towards. In some cases admittedly this will fail. I accept that as part of the nature of a living campaign. But I disagree on your comments on where to draw the line I guess: 1. Cohorts aren't like they are in home campaigns. They don't play every time the master plays. There is also a temptation to use them as magic item factories, or as suicidal speedbumps, etc which is harder to track if you don't have the same DM keeping an eye on things. The current cohort rules are there because the Circle doesn't want to eliminate Leadership entirely, and it is the best compromise they've come up with, in their eyes. The nature of cohorts may change, but they're unlikely ever to be very much like how they'd work in a home campaign. None of this has any bearing on the cohort merely getting 50% rewards instead of the 3.5 based ratio he/she is entitled to. The current Cohort rules, imho, turn the cohort into a disposable hero. His death is meaningless because any levels he looses are automatically restored when the leader levels. Likewise his treasure is meaningless as it too is either restored or stripped away at that time. That they wish to limit when you can use a cohort is fine and I understand that. Likewise as a result of thier limiting when a cohort can be played the cohort will fall behind in level from thier leader. It is even inevitable because we're not giving them what the core rules say they should be getting. This means that some way to bring them in line is doubly needed. But I think the current method is too heavy handed and destroys much of the feel of the cohort as a trusted companion. You've thrown out the baby with the bathwater so to speak. And I think it's not nessisary. Two simple changes I propose in this case and neither would be hard to implement. First let cohorts gain xp and gold like they should be allowed to in 3.5 rather than the old half rule. And second make the 'adjustment' when a leader levels optional so that the leader can choose to level up if it needs it. Neither of these seem impossible to do in a living campaign. What am I missing? The only 'extra' rules for cohorts should be that you can't always bring them along and as such that when you level you can *elect* to adjust them to what a newly recruited cohort would be at. Simple fixes for thier own treasure would need to be adjusted to taste here. But could probably be done with minimal restrictions. 2. Access to items is the most restricted thing in LG. Magic crafting feats (especially craft wondrous) open up that access to some extent, but the concept that you had to have encountered the item at least once in your travels is a firm one, and has only tightened over the years. In year two, crafters just "crafted" gold (much like mundane craft skills are today) and you could buy pretty much anything you wanted. This "magic mart" traumatized the campaign...and everything has gotten more restrictive, year over year since then except that the favor portion of the AR tends to be where open-ended access gets granted, that lets you plan your character to some extent. The use of DMG tables instead of crafting formulas is part of the restriction. The use of PHB tables instead of letting you buy any mundane equipment is also part of the restriction. It is fair to argue about small areas to be less restricted, eg no longer using the DMG potion list, and many have done so on this forum, in various ways. The craft mundane item...there are many threads for that as well. Check them out. Expect small, evolutionary changes here though. You won't see anything drastic..and most of the time the trend will likely be away from access via anything but an AR. It was not the unrestricted access but rather the combination of free gold and wierd rules with cohorts upgrading 'signature' items that caused the problems. I personally expect no changes here unless something stops working. And that is both my worry and my point. We should be exploring ways to move the campaign closer to core rules as much as is possible in a Living System. Rather than having a mentality of 'don't touch it, you'll break it' that I think we currently have. Arbitrary rules serve little purpose and need to be pressured to be removed as soon as we're able to do so. Things like restricting ourselves to scrolls from random tables serves no rhyme or reason. If there is a desire to restrict which scrolls can be purchased for some specific goal then by all means make an explicit list that includes all that you find acceptable and excludes all that you don't. I will not believe that list happens to coincide directly with an incomplete random item table, however. 3. In a Living campaign, anything that gives a benefit for XP is automatically suspect - spending xp = more play opportunities + more wealth for your level. Permanency duplicates the effect of several magic items and does some things that are flatly impossible without it (permanent enlarge person, for example). Its only cost is XP, which nobody cares about. The reason it is restricted is entirely due to the nature of the campaign. This is also why Fabricate can't make stuff that lasts beyond the adventure...this houserule thankfully prevents the whole "I make a room full of fullplate from my wall of iron" arguments...bottom line...don't expect this to ever change. Your note on the xp cost is well on the mark. But rather than exclude random things that charge XP (and let others remain), address the that problem head on. Instead of charging XP for certain spells and actions, have it instead cost gold. Several spells have been changed going into the SpC to reflect this already. Rather than have some wierd limit on how much xp you can use by casting spells, have it simply cost gold. Limited wish is something that's greatly affected by this. It is a must have sorcerer spell in core rules. But then in LG a 14th level sorcerer is going to have only one 7th level spell and not be able to cast is as many times as they have 7th level slots! Have it cost gold and the balance is done. This is what the point of my post is here. Don't just do *Band-aid* fixes. Have a *goal* or *direction* in mind. In this case, minimizing the amount of changes we need to do to have a Living campaign version of the core rules. -James
rogerd 02-07-06, 02:14 PM	If it were a home game, the spender of XP would still be adventuring with the non-spenders, and would be lagging behind for it. A simple rule that makes XP costs hurt would be to simply add the XP costs to the character to determine their effective level for the purpose of APL, experience and gold.
zadoc 02-07-06, 09:30 PM	If it were a home game, the spender of XP would still be adventuring with the non-spenders, and would be lagging behind for it. Of course, in a home game, the spender of XP would eventually start getting more XP than the non-spenders, and start to catch up. Additionally, in the home game, he would be likely to be spending some of that XP on items for the party, or casting spells to benefit the group, as opposed to living with the restrictions making this more difficult in LG. Penalizing XP spending characters forever, when they would normally recover from the loss, isn't particularly fair, and is just another level of record keeping.
solbergb 02-08-06, 02:47 AM	1. James, when they developed the Cohort rules in their current form there were literally thousands of posts on the LG Discussion List pro and con. It isn't like they just woke up one day and decided on it. Net result? A few people left. Most people stayed. More people joined. Cohorts are fairly rare, tending to cluster on characters that tend to get forced into weak tables a lot (slot zeros, folks who travel alone to unknown conventions, etc) or are taken for roleplay reasons (where it doesn't matter what the rules are, the player will imagine the story so it makes sense) or both. Unlike in a home game, the cohort can't travel with his master to every adventure. If a live player comes along, the cohort gets bumped. That means most cohorts rapidly fall behind without an artificial "catch up" mechanism. A small but vocal group of players had cohorts that played nearly every adventure, and were vastly wealthy compared to the NPC totals used in the "Catch up" cohorts (even half player gold >> what NPC's get). The current rules ensure an even cohort playing field. They're draconian, but they're simple and they work fairly well. A cohort will always be a sidekick, it won't overshadow other PC's. Do I think the cohort rules are perfect? No. But they worked pretty well to fix the perceived problems that caused the change. The folks that hate the rules...have already left. 2. In a normal game, item access is controlled by the GM. In a campaign of this size, item access is controlled by AR's, or by DMG tables, or by metaorgs, or by LGCS. Three of these four are overseen by Circle and to a lesser extent Triad, the 4th won't change. The "arbitrary" rules are no weirder than a DM saying that the local town is out of spell ink, that nobody around here has Greater Magic Weapon in his spellbook or that the local churches only sell stuff to followers of their religion - and they're picky about what spells they endorse, based on their beliefs. The difference is that in a living campaign, all the access sources have to be visible, so a player can prove he is allowed to have the stuff his character owns. The core rules say it is up to the DM what magic is available, they only mention economic limits on price based on population. The way LG does it is as "core" as any campaign I've ever played in. Just taking scroll access alone, even with the holes in the DMG tables, it is a lot easier to play a low level arcanist here than in a normal campaign where you can't just buy 6 scrolls of CLW every time you walk into a 50 person town. 3. Changing xp for gold on spells is not "more core" than the curent method of just restricting spells and limiting xp burn/adventure. You're changing one balancing mechanism for another, and while in LG the "pain" of losing gold tends to be more than xp, and that's the reverse of many home campaigns, you can't safely say that it is equivalent, and make a sweeping change like that across the board. Just as an example, I pay 250gp quite often for an enlarge potion use, and haven't noticed the cash burn since level 9 or so. By the time limited wish is in the game, a 300gp cost is trivial compared to the cash earned at that level...but 300xp is a bigger chunk of your earnings. (cash = xp breaks down after level 6) Not everyone wants to "stall out" at level 13 or 14...just as some folks happily burn xp today to play more often, others will happily burn gold to crush challenges and race to retirement faster. Also with gold over cap, one encounter with a guy weilding a nice weapon, and you can cast limited wish (or whatever) the rest of the mod for free! Sweet! (not!) Band aid fixes have their place in the world. As any code developer who has worked in business knowns...while refactoring everything is nice, doing as little harm as possible when patching a system is often preferable when dealing with large, complex systems. There is a reason the medical profession starts with "first do no harm" before intervening...human bodies are complex and mysterious. A living campaign of this size is an unknown quantity...there aren't other examples to draw on. You can try to draw lessons from dead campaigns like Living City, live but smaller campaigns or even from MMORPG's, which have some similarities. But in the end, if you have something that mostly works, that has worked ok for several years, with play numbers rising from year to year...you make small changes if you can. God knows that WOTC seems to force big changes on the campaign every 18 months or so. With a disruptive force like that, plus normal turnover/burnout, we really don't need to introduce big changes of other kinds without a specific problem that we're trying to solve.
solbergb 02-08-06, 02:58 AM	Rather than have some wierd limit on how much xp you can use by casting spells, have it simply cost gold. Limited wish is something that's greatly affected by this. It is a must have sorcerer spell in core rules. But then in LG a 14th level sorcerer is going to have only one 7th level spell and not be able to cast is as many times as they have 7th level slots! Have it cost gold and the balance is done. In any campaign, Limited Wish is usually the first or second Sorc pick. There is no expectation of burning 4 limited wishes a day...if you did that you'd never ever leave level 14. Sorcerers have llittle trouble finding uses for their highest tier slots, even if their one spell known there isn't useful. By the time a sorc is 14, he's got metamagic, and plenty of spells that can be cranked up to a 7th level slot, plus there isn't anything stopping him from using those slots for lower level spells, if that's what is needed. You take limited wish, because it in one spell frees you from the tyranny of consumables to fix holes in your spells known for edge conditions where a situaion wildly different from anything you planned for when choosing spells comes up. You also take it because it can be used as a "helper" spell, in conjunction with another spellcaster to drop saves, or ensure a hit, or do anything else similar that is likely to end the combat now before we have messy deaths or a TPK. Using it once every 3 encounters or so is..high...compared to how often it gets used in a home game.
JamesMaissen 02-08-06, 12:50 PM	1. James, when they developed the Cohort rules in their current form there were literally thousands of posts on the LG Discussion List pro and con. Yes, I was there. But I don't think the solution is a good one. I didn't then and I don't now. There are ways to achieve what is desired by both sides without sacrificing the other side to it. The current rules make Cohorts disposable heroes. Why we bother even tracking them now I don't know. I don't play games like Mark of Heroes or the like because I like the idea in LG that my character develops and moves on. Heck that's what makes this a living campaign! For my one character with his cohort, they were a pair. These rules destroy half of that pair, and for a gain that could have been done without such destruction. There needed to be a way to 'level' up cohorts because due to Living campaign restrictions they would fall behind. Fine let them be 'leveled' when needed (insert whatever restriction you desire) but don't destroy them in the process. The 'equality' or 'level' playing field is what Mark of Heroes or the like does with reseting players. We find that unpalatable in LG for our characters.. we should find it equally unpalatable for those around them. 2. In a normal game, item access is controlled by the GM. And if there was some reasoning to using the DMG tables other than 'it's easy' I could accept it. But it's arbitrary and without thought, and that I object to. Draw lines in the sand.. fine. But have some purpose when you do so. In general if you are going to restrict the players (or enable them) there needs to be some thought and purpose in mind. Taking something at random is a disservice to them and that's what I find objectionable here. 3. Changing xp for gold on spells is not "more core" than the curent method of just restricting spells and limiting xp burn/adventure. True. In my mind I found it a less evasive deviation, but perhaps my observations are skewed. I find casters in general more willing to cast (the old) Stalwart Pact than to cast a Stoneskin (unless someone else paid for it). Also with gold over cap, one encounter with a guy weilding a nice weapon, and you can cast limited wish (or whatever) the rest of the mod for free! Sweet! (not!) I guess I don't understand how over the cap gold works. I would think that one would need to sell such a weapon during the mod in order to so benefit. Am I in error here? Band aid fixes have their place in the world. I guess I only see them as a means to an end and not something that should be made permanent by the sheer fact that one is afraid to rip it off to check and see if the wound has healed (to extend the metaphor). But in the end, if you have something that mostly works, that has worked ok for several years, with play numbers rising from year to year...you make small changes if you can. That's fine to an extent. But you have to have a goal.. a direction.. in mind. Otherwise you will lose your way and you will lose perspective. And that's the heart of this thread. Thanks for your time, James
TheMagus 02-08-06, 01:27 PM	I would love to see cohorts simplified, especially in a way that reduces the need to revisit their gold and equipment every time they level. Why do we track XP for cohorts? Their level advancement is dependent on the leader. When they level up, compare their total equipment value to the NPC chart for that level, if the total value is less than listed on the chart, give them a boost. Why does it have to be a hassle? Oddly enough my primary character has retired, and is the only one that has a cohort, so I guess this discussion is a little late to help me.
solbergb 02-08-06, 01:41 PM	Gold over cap works pretty much like this. 1. You have to earn the cash. At the beginning of the adventure, you have zero "adventure cash". After somebody pays the party 100gp each to do something, you have some cash. Likewise after you beat up the assassin and sell his stuff, you have some cash. 2. If you have "adventure cash" it can be shared freely by the party and used to purchase things, services, spells, etc. Unlike "AR cash" it can be pooled. There is no limit on how you can use adventure cash during the adventure, you can use it all up if you want. 3. At the end of the adventure, sell back any items bought for "adventure cash" that nobody actually wants to purchase right now for half cost. This cash goes back into the pool. All items found must be sold. All items purchased during the adventure that aren't sold back are assumed to be bought with "pre-adventure cash" from the player who wants to own it - and the player MUST put the item on his AR, with "after cap" gold. You never get to walk away with anything for free. 4. Any remaining "Adventure cash" is divided up, and that's what you get. If your share of the "adventure cash" is greater than the cap, you get the cap. If you spent too much, or didn't find everything, you could get less than the cap. (one adventure I ran had 13gp per character, due to the decision to raise a low level party member who died in the final encounter) The bottom line is that anything that both begins and ends during an adventure can be bought with "Adventure cash", and if the "Adventure cash" is obviously way over cap (ambushed by 6 trolls with flaming/shock bows, captured a 10000gp boat at APL2, etc) then you don't have to worry about spending it during the adventure. This can mean free stoneskins, or even free raise deads. If you both have the adventure cash and are in a major population center, it's fairly smart to load up on expensive consumables like fly, tongues or water breathing potions..just for use in the rest of the adventure, knowing you'll sell them back if they're not needed.