c0r1nth14n
2009-03-21, 12:58 AM
Hello, everyone! I have a couple of questions I think might be right up your respective allies. My friend and I are creating a D&D 4e campaign in a zombie-infested, post-apocalyptic world. Alternate timeline, the various nonhuman races emerge, zombie virus infects the world, etc. Pretty standard stuff. Anyway, he's DMing and I'm playing, but I'm helping him come up with some house rules to get the setting right. We want a survival-based game, full of hordes of zombies too numerous to defeat, so most of the combat will be hit-and-run, fighting retreats, or heavily based on lateral-thinking tactics.
Towards the goal of this post-apocalyptic survival/horror feeling, magic items are being somewhat restricted, as they are supposed to be fairly scarce. It's sort of a Mad Max thing, where rather than a neat progression of magical items as players level, they just have whatever mismatched scraps they can find. The characters are starting at level 8, everyone gets one magic weapon (or implement, or wand, etc) for free. The rest of your magic equipment, you get to choose whatever you want, but the combined levels of all your magical gear cannot be higher than 8 (not counting the free weapon). So, for example, if you took a level 8 armor, you wouldn't be able to have any other magical items, or you could take two level 4 items instead, and so forth.
So with that in mind, I have two questions. The first would be, aside from grabbing eight level 1 items, is there any way you can think of to break or exploit this idea? Our group tends to be very crafty with things like this, so we'd like to figure out the ways this can be broken before any of the players do. Even the eight-level-1 thing seems like it would be pretty ineffective, as I don't think there ARE eight level 1 items that any one character really has use for... but I'm sure you crafty minds can think of something.
The second question is for me personally. As an Invoker, what would you consider the most essential magical item within these constraints? Since the campaign will feature mostly guerrilla tactics, I'm leaning towards Versatile Armor (level 3) for ease of escaping and then probably Bracers of Perfect Shot and Eagle Eye Goggles (both level 2) for better ranged attacks. Items from PHB, PHB2, Adventurer's Vault, and any other books are fair game. Any thoughts?
Towards the goal of this post-apocalyptic survival/horror feeling, magic items are being somewhat restricted, as they are supposed to be fairly scarce. It's sort of a Mad Max thing, where rather than a neat progression of magical items as players level, they just have whatever mismatched scraps they can find. The characters are starting at level 8, everyone gets one magic weapon (or implement, or wand, etc) for free. The rest of your magic equipment, you get to choose whatever you want, but the combined levels of all your magical gear cannot be higher than 8 (not counting the free weapon). So, for example, if you took a level 8 armor, you wouldn't be able to have any other magical items, or you could take two level 4 items instead, and so forth.
So with that in mind, I have two questions. The first would be, aside from grabbing eight level 1 items, is there any way you can think of to break or exploit this idea? Our group tends to be very crafty with things like this, so we'd like to figure out the ways this can be broken before any of the players do. Even the eight-level-1 thing seems like it would be pretty ineffective, as I don't think there ARE eight level 1 items that any one character really has use for... but I'm sure you crafty minds can think of something.
The second question is for me personally. As an Invoker, what would you consider the most essential magical item within these constraints? Since the campaign will feature mostly guerrilla tactics, I'm leaning towards Versatile Armor (level 3) for ease of escaping and then probably Bracers of Perfect Shot and Eagle Eye Goggles (both level 2) for better ranged attacks. Items from PHB, PHB2, Adventurer's Vault, and any other books are fair game. Any thoughts?