Post by Finarvyn on Mar 15, 2009 9:54:12 GMT -6
In general I tend to run low-level, low-magic OD&D campaigns but for once I decided to run something high-level so that my players could experinece some of the bigger spells and such in the rulebooks.
I wanted to run my players through the AD&D G-D-Q sequence (at this point the campign has stalled on the 4th of 7 modules and I'm not certain if we'll ever get back to it or not) but I wanted to start them at some sort of higher level rather than working their way up from first.
What I decided to do was to let them roll out characters the usual way, but with higher hit points and picking more spells. The part that stumped me at first was how to give them some sort of array of magical goodies to simulate the fact that these characters would have been adventuring prior to the campaign's start.
My solution came as an inspiration from Gary himself, or at least from Gary's 1E AD&D DMG, where there is a list of magical items along with some approximate values in GP. What I did was to simply give each character 10,000 GP and allow them a one-time shopping spree at the "Magic Shoppe" with those pages in hand.
I didn't want to put many restrictions on them other than the listed costs, and a few of them cooperated when one wanted something toward the end and was a little short on gold, but overall each player had a great time with their shopping and everyone spent pretty much every GP they had. At the end they loaded up on as many vials of healing potion as they could afford, just in case. One restriction I did put on was that if more than one of an item was requested I would need to roll to see if it was "out there" and that its cost might be more expensive.
As I said, my games tend to be extremely low-level (8th level is Super Hero, after all!) and it was an interesting diversion for the group. Particularly for my wife (who loves to play wizards) and my son (who is at heart a power gamer) becasue they got to try out things from the rulebooks that they had never gotten to try before.
Anyone else make use of these charts? In what way, and how did it work out?
I wanted to run my players through the AD&D G-D-Q sequence (at this point the campign has stalled on the 4th of 7 modules and I'm not certain if we'll ever get back to it or not) but I wanted to start them at some sort of higher level rather than working their way up from first.
What I decided to do was to let them roll out characters the usual way, but with higher hit points and picking more spells. The part that stumped me at first was how to give them some sort of array of magical goodies to simulate the fact that these characters would have been adventuring prior to the campaign's start.
My solution came as an inspiration from Gary himself, or at least from Gary's 1E AD&D DMG, where there is a list of magical items along with some approximate values in GP. What I did was to simply give each character 10,000 GP and allow them a one-time shopping spree at the "Magic Shoppe" with those pages in hand.
I didn't want to put many restrictions on them other than the listed costs, and a few of them cooperated when one wanted something toward the end and was a little short on gold, but overall each player had a great time with their shopping and everyone spent pretty much every GP they had. At the end they loaded up on as many vials of healing potion as they could afford, just in case. One restriction I did put on was that if more than one of an item was requested I would need to roll to see if it was "out there" and that its cost might be more expensive.
As I said, my games tend to be extremely low-level (8th level is Super Hero, after all!) and it was an interesting diversion for the group. Particularly for my wife (who loves to play wizards) and my son (who is at heart a power gamer) becasue they got to try out things from the rulebooks that they had never gotten to try before.
Anyone else make use of these charts? In what way, and how did it work out?
