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atomicmatt3
2009-11-23, 05:01 PM
So I just watched "Water World" last night and the whole time I was thinking "I want to play this in DnD."

It would lack some elements that traditionally make up a DnD game... for instance, there would be very few proper dungeon crawls and no real wilderness adventures. At the same time, though, it would add elements of resource management (always on the edge of running out of clean hydro to drink), elements of social strife (four people stuck on a tiny boat, who gets the food? The water? Who steers?) and very easy random encounters (Smokers show up).

I guess part of the appeal of this sort of game is that I always want to force my PC's into impoverished situations... but, if they can afford to buy a sword, they can afford to buy food and if they can use magic, they can just conjure up water. In my ocean-punk game, there wouldn't be any magic in the traditional sense. There would be Wizards, but they would be referred to as "Resourcefuls" (like Gregor from the movie), because they would always have something up their sleeves to throw at the enemy. Warlocks would be Smokers, or Smoker-Exiles, and have a unique brand of "Resourcefullness," specifically, they never seem to run out of bullets. "Arcana" would be replaced by "Resource Management," "Rituals" would need to be re-formatted into "Maneuvers," useful but expensive tricks to squeak out of a tight situation.

Martial classes wouldn't have to be formatted at all. Divine characters would have to be flavoured as "Confident," or medics of some sort. Primal characters are tricky... Druids are definitely out (because, without magic, there isn't any explanation for why they can turn into a bear... also, nobody in Water-World has ever seen a bear), Barbarians could be in without too much trouble, Wardens could be in as well and Shaman would have to be re-configured heavily... into something like "Hypnotist".

As for fantasy races, the Smokers from the movie screamed "Goblin" to me, with their indifference towards life, their patent and blatant culture of waste and their tendencies to reproduce to extremely taxing numbers. Elves could be flavored as "mutants," with half-elves being "Half-mutants," and Eladrin being very "resourceful" and extremely stealthy mutants (instead of teleporting, they would move with impossible stealth). Dwarves are almost inevitably out, for it would just be an exercise in cruelty to put something with such a connection with the earth in a plane of endless water. As far as Dragonborn and Kobolds are concerned, I couldn't really implement them without deviating heavily from the source material. But if I wanted to borrow a little from things like Steamband (which I do), they could be stranded aliens who, after several hundreds of generations stuck on Water World, lost almost every sliver of their technology (and the knowledge of how to re-build it.)

So I don't want to inflict a giant wall of text onto everybody, but I am interested in everyone's opinion. I think I could streamline dehydration by expressing it through healing surges: if you don't get your ration of clean hydro, you don't get any healing surges back. That way the tough citizens of Water-World could go maybe a week without any water at all before exerting themselves in one way or another and falling over dead from that. Streamlining dehydration and re-framing magic as resourcefulness would be pretty much the only two major changes; other than that things would function almost identically to regular version 4 DnD.

Any opinions?

Tiki Snakes
2009-11-23, 05:09 PM
If you are using fantasy races and so on, I don't really see a reason why you shouldn't allow magic and so on anyway.

I take it by Version 4 you mean 4th Edition DnD, right? :smallsmile:

It's not like any of the classes have easy ways to make large amounts of drinkable water anymore. I think there's a ritual, but for what you get it's expensive enough to give you options rather than completely break the water-based-economy.

It shouldn't take too much work to figure out how it would be different in a fantasy-style take rather than requiring it to be an almost-direct-port of the film.

As to your question/s though; I believe that what you are looking for reguarding the dehydration issue is pretty much an Endurance check. That is, in-fact, exactly what it does. The DM calls for checks every so-often, at a DC of his choosing, and if you fail then you lose a healing surge. It doesn't come back until you remove the enviromental thingy causing the problem. (Ie, you get something to drink in this case). There will be suggested guidlines in a DMG somewhere, I'm sure.

atomicmatt3
2009-11-23, 05:24 PM
If you are using fantasy races and so on, I don't really see a reason why you shouldn't allow magic and so on anyway.

I take it by Version 4 you mean 4th Edition DnD, right? :smallsmile:

It's not like any of the classes have easy ways to make large amounts of drinkable water anymore. I think there's a ritual, but for what you get it's expensive enough to give you options rather than completely break the water-based-economy.

It shouldn't take too much work to figure out how it would be different in a fantasy-style take rather than requiring it to be an almost-direct-port of the film.

As to your question/s though; I believe that what you are looking for reguarding the dehydration issue is pretty much an Endurance check. That is, in-fact, exactly what it does. The DM calls for checks every so-often, at a DC of his choosing, and if you fail then you lose a healing surge. It doesn't come back until you remove the enviromental thingy causing the problem. (Ie, you get something to drink in this case). There will be suggested guidlines in a DMG somewhere, I'm sure.

Thank you for your input! To answer some of the points you brought up:

I would not want magic in the game. I feel that a lot of the characters in Waterworld had an almost magical affinity for resources, for instance, the Smokers who never ran out of bullets, or Gregor and his quasi-mystical balloon. While I am normally all for sorcery being part of a fantasy campaign, I think it would lend to suspension of disbelief if "Resourcefuls" replaced "Wizards"... in fact, that's one of the aspects of this idea that appealed to me the most!

As far as fantasy races are concerned... I might end up throwing them out altogether. While I am adjusting things I might allow for different races of humans rather than different playable species altogether: an Atol dweller is just as different from a Smoker as a Human is to an Elf, really.

As for dehydration: I don't want to make Endurance a skill that everybody drops a feat taking. Additionally, I want to streamline the rules for it, because it's a major theme to the entire campaign, I wouldn't want to make it an episodic hazard that can be ignored with Endurance checks. Everybody in Waterworld has to deal with it and there needs to be a way that the PC's could (theoretically) go several weeks with just tiny sips of ocean water, all the while making it very clear that a fresh cup of hydro is worth everything you traded for it. Also, as the DM, it would be easier for me to only have to keep track of healing surges and water rations instead of having to keep track of those things on top of Endurance checks.