A new beginning

Hi everybody,

last saturday I tried to wipe out every player character in my
campaign by tossing random encounters at them, because I was very
dissatisfied with my campaign and with how powerful the characters
had become.
Well, the four vampires didn't do the trick and neither did the three
red dragons nor the countless phase spiders...
In the end I had to ask my players to retire their characters in
order to start with level 1 again, because I simply could not kill
them anymore without being unfair.

This time I am trying to correct all the mistakes I made with AD&D in
general and my spelljammer campaign, so here a few things I learned
and improved after this first campaign:

1. No more Dual class characters: If someone has the extraordinary
stats needed for a dual class character, I do not think he should get
even better by becoming a dual class character.

2. I am not going to use the maximum number of spells rule for
intelligence in this campaign. However the chance of a spell failure
for low wisdom now applies to clerics and wizards alike in my
campaign.

3. This is going to be a single sphere campaign, since most of my
spheres were empty or poorly designed anyway. When concentrating on
only one sphere I can put more effort into it.

4. The bard is going to have spelljammer related songs as discussed
on this list (the Macross / Robotech approach...).

5. Level Drains suck big time, so monsters with the level drain
ability will instead have an automatic "vampiric touch" attack as the
wizard spell of the same name.

6. Warriors advanced too slowly in comparison to wizards, so I
modified the warrior advancement table: lvl / exp ; 1 / 0 ; 2 / 2000
; 3 / 4000 ; 4 / 8000 ; 5  / 16000 ; 6 / 32000 ; 7 / 48000 ; 8 /
72000; 9 / 108000 ; 10 / 220000 ; 11 / 330000 ; 12 / 660000 ; 13 /
1000000 ; 14 / 1250000 adding 250000 more per level to 20 / 2750000.
Paladins and Rangers need to earn 10 % more instead of the 12.5 %
more.

7. The age is decided by the characters and not rolled for.

8. Fumble and Critical hit tables and Richard Gant's hitpoint-dieroll
modification table as discussed on this list made it into my new
campaign :).

9. When a character dies, the player's next character receives half
the experience the old character had, so that the new character is
"fit enough" for the party.

10. Negative armor classes were annoying (to me as a DM), so magical
armor is going to be RARE. At least magical plate armor will be.

11. On the same subject there will be more weapons with a magical
damage bonus and very few weapons with a to hit bonus instead of the
"normal" magical weapons which increased both damage and to hit
probability.

There are a few more changes but odds are I bored you guys / girls
already, so I better stop now.

With regards,

Kai


"[...]And then the butterfly said to the ant:'look,
I can fly!'"
Unknown poet, probably Frank G. Dietrich
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