Rath Darkblade wrote: ↑Mon Jul 05, 2021 6:23 pm
Wow.
Death dogs are obviously dangerous, especially if you have a low CON. But not many characters will have a low CON, 'cos that's obviously stupid.
Right?
Depends on how people build their characters.
I used to be a big support of rolling dice for character stats.
However, in the Anita Game - it became painfully clear that some people can get some EXTREMELY lucky rolls.
Anita, who was playing a Ranger - rolled something like: 18, 18, 17, 16, 15, 15.
Which is insane stats.
What ended up happening was this gnome ranger, became as effective as the Dragonborn Barbarian.
So if the barbarian failed, the gnome would walk up, and try - and often succeed.
I could see how it was undermining the person playing the Dragonborn Barbarian.
I ended up making some house rules, in regards to ability checks, as a result.
Now, for all my games since then - I do the point buy system.
Point Buy Puts All your Stats at 8:
STR 8, CON 8, DEX 8, INT 8, WIS 8, CHR 8.
And you have 27 points to apply to those stats. But no stats can go higher than 15 (unless racial modifiers allow it; so for example if you up your DEX to 15, and you're an Elf that gets +2 to DEX, your DEX becomes 17).
Rath Darkblade wrote: ↑Mon Jul 05, 2021 6:23 pm
As for NPCs having quirks ... heh. This reminds me of one of my favourite NPCs, in the first full-length book I wrote. The party was clearing out a dungeon, and were hearing rumours of a dragon. They found it ... and it turned out to be an imp. An imp with low self-esteem, because everyone else in heck was picking on him. So he tried to make himself look more important ... and failed ... and started to cry ... so the party took pity on him and invited him to join them.
The imp was very happy, and decided to take charge. Unfortunately, it also started to refer to itself in the first person. "I, Thrip the Daring, will lead you!" *THWOMP; he fails to notice a crack in the floor and falls on his face*
Eventually he turns out to be quite useful, even if he doesn't look like it.
I wish I had a party to run this guy for.
That's essentially Daggerpoint's personality - that he tries to make himself far bigger and more important than he really is!
Depending how things go; he may linger with the party for awhile.
I already have one very fun NPC - Twilight's parrot is a parrot that was on a pirate ship - so it knows how to launch "racial slurs" (calling gnolls, motherless, flea ridden, carrion eating, cowardly, half bred wild dogs - for example) during combat.
I even had it sing a song when the heroes got back to town -
"Gotta take down the troll nosed boss
So the watery druid threw her snake
Willing to take the loss
To let her weapon break!
Snake go boom
No more end of the world doom
All the heroes died
But I'm still alive, so no one cried!"
