Soul draining Idea for Campaign

[HMS Invincible]

My dm introduced a plot device that I want to expand in my own 3.5 campaign. He had this plot item that granted benefits based on how many souls you feed it and how much of ur soul that you pay into it. The most important bonus was that it gave full spell casting to the wielder.
That got me thinking of starting a campaign where I ban tier 1 and 2. Then give everyone a copy of the soul draining item. Add in a curse that stops you from ditching it, describe how sufficiently evil it is, require good(maybe allow neutral) PCs and stir.
I was thinking of using the power point system of casting spells and then converting the usage into a tainting system. I just tie the casting equal to the player's level (a fighter 10 would cast like a wizard 10) Add in some monsters or loot that delays the taint and see how long the players last in the face Of temptation.
I know when I was playing, the plot item made everyone aggressive and the encounters harder. Thoughts?

[Godskook]

This has nothing to do with balancing classes, and in fact does something quite the opposite and ensures that whomever takes the cursed item becomes unbalancedly powerful.

Not saying its a bad idea(or a good one either), but you framed your idea in a context that's not really what you're apparently aiming at, which is plot discussion, rather than game balance.

[Calanon]

My dm introduced a plot device that I want to expand in my own 3.5 campaign. He had this plot item that granted benefits based on how many souls you feed it and how much of ur soul that you pay into it. The most important bonus was that it gave full spell casting to the wielder.
That got me thinking of starting a campaign where I ban tier 1 and 2. Then give everyone the soul draining item. Add in a curse that stops you from ditching it, describe how sufficiently evil it is, require good(maybe allow neutral) PCs and stir.
I was thinking of using the power point system of casting spells and then converting the usage into a tainting system. I just tie the casting equal to the player's level (a fighter 10 would cast like a wizard 10) Add in some monsters or loot that delays the taint and see how long the players last in the face Of temptation.
I know when I was playing, the plot item made everyone aggressive and the encounters harder. Thoughts?

I'll save you the headache and tell you this doesn't work and the players eventually become Demon Princes and the Campaign evolves into them trying to conquer the other at which the Original Demon Princes come down and completely wreck them at there own games. :smallannoyed:

[sonofzeal]

D&D as a medium offers plenty of opportunity for rewarding corruption already. I really don't think you'll see anything interesting this way, nor will the game be more balanced.



Instead, it might be more interesting to do the reverse - have some artifact powered by goodness. Explicitly reward players for being good, and then throw some complicated moral quandries at them. Have NPC doing evil things with good motives. Give the villains Morality Pets. Make it unclear which course of action will trigger the "goodness" clause of the artifact, and see which way players jump.

This will not only produce richer player behaviour, but also help balance a little since quite a number of higher-OP options could easily be considered evil. By no means all of them, certainly, but a goodly number. Summons aren't disposable trapfinders, planar binding is now a thornier issue, chain-gating Solars is straight out, Pazuzu is a no-go, etc. Getting players to critically examine the ethics of in-character action will help things, if only a little bit.

Oh, but you might want to ban "Commune" and "Contact Other Plane" for this sort of campaign. The point is to get the players to think for themselves and see what they do, not have them cast the right spells and get answers spoonfed to them.

[HMS Invincible]

Having it powered off good acts is intriguing. If it's limited by good, then keeping it vague would be the only way of stopping the players from always using teir 1 degrees of magic.
A couple of notes, there is no tier one or 2. Using the item too much would cause the player to gradually lose control of their character. And every of would have their own item. The idea is to limit how much full casting magic they will have. Yea, banning commune type spells is probably a good idea.