Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Exploratory Thread: Mercenaries (3.5e)

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Exploratory Thread: Mercenaries (3.5e)

    Mercenaries. That's what you are. Oh, sure, you can call yourself an adventuring guild if you want. Whatever makes you feel better...

    You've been around the world. More than once. Killed pretty much everything. And then some. And now...you're bored. Everywhere you go, it's 'been there, done that'. Bleh.

    So now...now you had the bright idea to form a company. You, and whoever else you've convinced to join you. Now you get to send out snot-nosed recruits who can barely tell which end of the sword is pointy out to do odd jobs you can't be bothered with. Nice, isn't it? Sure it is...

    It's harder than you think. You have to figure out who to recruit, and who not. Which jobs who gets to do, which jobs no one does. Which ones you think would be cool to do yourself. As if that wasn't enough, you get to spread the word, and convince someone else that your time is worth their money. It's easier said than done. Trust me.


    -----------------




    Ok, so with that fun intro, here's my idea. You'll get a planet map, fully populated with cities and whatever. I'll give you some general ideas of what exists where. You will create two characters each, one med-high level and one lower level. The lot of you will get to decide where you start out, and some other general things. I will present you with quests with varying rewards and descriptions. You get to pick and choose which ones you do, and which characters do them. As you succeed, you get money. Money goes to the coffers. You get to pick and choose what you spend the money on. A portion of it goes to the 'owners' (you the players) for your personal characters. You can hire new recruits, and I'll present available characters.

    This will be a bit of a trick, and there are some basic concepts that are important to note:
    1) You can send recruits on a quest and have me (through random dice) decide how they fare.
    2) The group can choose to take over a particular party sent on a quest. That is, you actually play out the quest yourself using whoever you've chosen to send on it.
    3) Experience is allocated only to those characters on a quest, and it will be based on encounter difficulty. That means you could send a group of level 15 characters to trounce a level 2 encounter, but they'll only get a little gold and no experience. That's probably a good strategy to gain money early on, but I suspect that will get boring pretty quickly.
    4) Handling new recruits may need some tweaking. I'm expecting to hand you a randomly rolled character sheet to peruse that includes a specialization, of sorts. Either the players or I can handle feat and skill allocation in accordance with that specialization. I don't want to limit your control, but I don't want to bog down on minutiae either. As the company grows, I expect I'll end up with a public dropbox folder to store all the character sheets and other data.

    Ok, I guarantee this will be rocky at first as we find a pace to make this manageable. I promise to stick it through as long as there is more than one player interested or until everyone generally agrees it's a failure (hopefully it won't come to that).

    Other facts:
    -3.5e
    -SRD is the basis. If it's from other books and you think it's important, we can talk about it. I suspect we can create custom prestige classes fairly well if needed.
    -I have my own pantheon, with its attendant mythos. I also have my own religious orders and cults. Cleric domains that are available will depend on the affiliated religious orders. Some of them aren't open to clerics.
    -This world DOES have other planes (I'm calling them realms). There's a central city where travelers first arrive that is neutral. From there, you can travel to other realms. Not all of the gods have their own realms. Some share. Some realms are only open to the proper alignment.
    -I expect that each set of adventures will consist of the players allocating who does what and then choosing which quest to join. You can choose among yourselves as to who plays the characters on that quest. If all else fails, random dice rolls can be used to make it random and interesting.
    -I'll add in homebrew rules if/when I think of them. The biggest will be clerical domains. If there's anything specific you'd like to request, feel free.
    -You should expect to fail some quests. There's no way you can know what your characters will actually face, and it's entirely possible that they will be outmatched.
    -The company has prestige. Completing quests grants prestige and expands your influence. Failing or refusing quests does the opposite. Sometimes, refusing a quest could expand influence with certain people while hurting it with others. Yay complexity!

    Right now I'm just curious if anyone is interested in playing a complex morass of various questlines where death is virtually guaranteed.
    I'm not here anymore.

  • #2
    I'm up for it.

    Comment


    • #3
      Do I get to do wonderful magic item/trap goodness if I go wizard? :P

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by Chrs View Post
        Do I get to do wonderful magic item/trap goodness if I go wizard? :P
        Within reason? You'll be given a total starting gold for your specific characters and another to be used in the creation of headquarters and purchasing supplies. Whatever craziness you have planned would have to fit within that pool, and be ok'd by your compatriots. We might have to discuss particulars...
        I'm not here anymore.

        Comment


        • #5
          Okay :D

          What level starting at?

          Comment


          • #6
            Level 5 and probably 20. I want to give you the occasion and need to explore the other realms, and that takes being big enough to survive them. It also takes someone with Astral Projection, though I will probably homebrew that all casters of sufficient level have access to that particular spell. That, or there is a special gate...
            I'm not here anymore.

            Comment


            • #7
              I'd be up for it. I'd probably have fun with some weird build for my Level 20, then make a unique character for my Level 5 recruit.

              I actually once toyed with an idea similar to this where the PCs formed their own budding mercenary guild (albeit they were much lower level).
              Have You Touched Grass Today? If Not, Please Do.

              Comment


              • #8
                This does sound interesting.
                Don't call it a comeback. It's a riposte.

                Comment


                • #9
                  Originally posted by Spartacus View Post
                  This does sound interesting.
                  Can a newbie like me join.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    You have an entire fully populated planet mapped out? How long did it take you to do that? It's a very interesting concept.
                    --------------------------------------------------------

                    Nakonec pravda vitezi (In the end the truth wins)

                    Nobility Among Us and Beyond the Mist are now on sale worldwide, as is my first poetry collection, Selected Verse - Faith and Family and my second, Selected Verse - Heroes and Wonders

                    Explore the Cinematic Superverse

                    A Hope That Burns

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by Ben Zwycky View Post
                      You have an entire fully populated planet mapped out? How long did it take you to do that? It's a very interesting concept.
                      Mapping the world itself only takes a few minutes: http://donjon.bin.sh/fantasy/world/. I've used this before for other things, and I typically generate a few worlds before settling on one that suits me. It's not technically fully populated yet, though, since I was saving some of the effort for after I found out if anyone would want to do it.

                      Creation of the pantheon took longer, but I'm actually copying directly from another world loosely based on D&D in which I created gods to fit each clerical domain. Given a domain as a primary attribute, it's more a matter of describing how they got to be what they are. Not so hard as all that.

                      In the interest of full disclosure, I expect to make use of a fair number of random generators the results of which I'll tweak myself. I can get away with that here since most of what you'll be doing isn't related to a single overarching plot. I will have story arcs buried within the world for you to discover and explore at your own behest, and in those cases there will be less randomness and more specific planning.
                      I'm not here anymore.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Pinoy View Post
                        Can a newbie like me join.
                        All are welcome. There's enough experienced players here to help you out as needed.
                        I'm not here anymore.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Chuck me a PM if you need help.

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            What rolling up method? 4d6? 5d6? Point buy?
                            --------------------------------------------------------

                            Nakonec pravda vitezi (In the end the truth wins)

                            Nobility Among Us and Beyond the Mist are now on sale worldwide, as is my first poetry collection, Selected Verse - Faith and Family and my second, Selected Verse - Heroes and Wonders

                            Explore the Cinematic Superverse

                            A Hope That Burns

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Edit: nevermind, wrong thread.

                              Hoping for points buy :P

                              Comment

                              widgetinstance 221 (Related Threads) skipped due to lack of content & hide_module_if_empty option.
                              Working...
                              X