[3.5] So I want to DM in the Tippyverse...

[Vectis]

Greetings to the good people of the Forum. I come to you for advice and clarity.

I'm about to start DM'ing a new campaign. I've played the 3.5 since it started and I'm no stranger to optimization and have DM'ed before sucessfuly a few times, but our table's resident DM has moved to another city and I'm about to step up to fill in some pretty big shoes. We've shifted his campaign to PBP, it's been running for about 6 years and we love it very much. It was a dark fantasy sandbox 3.5 game of thrones style "anyone can die" game. Ok, enough of this personal context stuff.

Some time ago I read Emperor Tippy's definitive guide to the Tippyverse and that just stuck with me. I want my campaign to be a Tippyverse... I've been designing the cities and the wilds, the dungeons the plot, the NPCs and all that... I decided to come to the Forum to ask for advice on DM'ing the Tippyverse, if anyone has done it before, if you have some stories about sucesses, failures, common pitfalls, that sort of thing. I've been considering writing a campaign journal as it goes, tell me if you'd like that too.

Thanks!

[Fouredged Sword]

Well, you have to decide how you are going to deal with resetting traps. They are all fine and good for the setting, but letting your players have a self resetting trap of heal on their armor going off each round is a little hard to DM around.

The other thing is money. Most stuff will be basically free due to wish traps. Crafting can be preformed by hand by anyone with jack of all trades and an resetting trap of guidance of the avatar.

[Aegis013]

I've successfully DM'd a Tippyverse game for a group of people who were, originally, less than thrilled about the super-high magic setting.

Here's a couple of things that might help.
A simple houserule that magical traps are placed on a square and thus immobile will solve a lot of potential problems such as the self-resetting CL 15 Heal armor mentioned above. It also means that you can't just bring a Wagon of True Resurrection with you into the wilds or anything, allowing those areas to still be highly dangerous.

Mine was set up so that the most powerful casters were the rulers and would guard the most game breaking spells/combos as secrets to ensure that nobody else could challenge their position, so by advancing in the court, you could learn powerful magics. This also gave mine a dystopian feel, as the Shadesteel golem/warforged police force would kidnap people who discovered such secrets without going through the proper channels.

There were also more widespread bans. An example is that the summoning of Outsiders was forbidden within the city limits. Factions could see how much good could be done through being able to do that, but the government doesn't want anybody summoning Nightmare's for their incredible power.

Things like that allowed me to have a game with a lot of court intrigue, political unrest, and good old-fashioned dungeon crawls. It was quite fun, and I hope this helps.

[Endarire]

My module, The Metaphysical Revolution (http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?614036-3-5-MODULE-The-Metaphysical-Revolution-%28Levels-1-3%29-Now-on-RPG-net!), was inspired by the Tippyverse. It intends to make a world where the aesthetics and rules work together instead of separately. (No ludonarrative dissonance.) It doesn't take the Tippyverse to such an extreme at these low levels, but the foundations are there.

[Phelix-Mu]

I'd also advise careful monitoring of what homebrew you allow, if any. Tippyverse dynamics are based off of Tippy's mastery of the RAW and what Tippy (quite reasonably) believes the logical outcome of the mechanics will be in an unrestricted-use setting (no gods, no fiat, etc). Introducing homebrew that is powerful or substantially gamechanging should alter the dynamics of the powers at work in the Tippyverse. For instance, Grammaerie, a popular homebrew subsystem on this site, has huge implications if added to a Tippyverse, as it allows an alternate means to mechanically accomplish many of the effects already possible with the ruleset, along with a bunch of novel effects.

There's nothing wrong with allowing homebrew, but you should talk to players early about what they are seeking to do with their character concepts and make sure your setup incorporates a place for concepts to be useful/viable. This is especially true at high levels of play, when the pace of Tippyverse and its high optimization threshold make the most pronounced difference between various characters.

I also advise that, if Tier 1 or 2 characters with op-savvy players will be in the game, that you throw a bone to anyone playing low tiers (4 or 5). Two sensible suggestions I've seen bandied about are to allow Tier 4 to gestalt with any Tier 4 or lower (or, more aggressively, allow anyone Tier 3 or lower to gestalt with Tier 4 or 5, so that you would, in theory, end up with Tier 3//Tier4 or 5, and then the Tier 1s and 2s). I don't have to tell you, but even with this, Tier 1s and 2s have hugely higher optimization potential, so you really don't need to worry too much about overdoing it in terms of helping the non-full casters.

The other suggestion that I have is to give Tier 4 or lower (or 3 and lower if you are feeling gutsy) the advantages of Drolyt's Vow of Poverty Fix (available in my extended sig) without requiring them to get rid of their items. This is nice, because it makes sure low tier players have all of the essentials while allowing them to blow their WBL on utility stuff and coolness factor (which the high tiers get access to through their base class features). I ran a campaign for a while like this, and it really opened up the door for players to field some unusual character concepts (that usually wouldn't be quite up to snuff in the Tippyverse). Also, only Drolyt's thread, there is a nice suggestion for an epic extrapolation of his VoP fix on page three of the thread. Has some pretty cool suggestions.

[Vectis]

First of all, thanks for all the responses...

About the issue of traps: I was thinking something along the lines that Aegis013 said. My first measure to ensure they won't render the challenge moot is treating them like money printers that also happen to be high-grade military weapons of mass destruction. By that I mean, the Government of each city will deal this in their own ways, but all of them will treat it like something super-secret, the magical components for manufacturing the traps will be closely watched and it will be virtually impossible for someone inside the cities and outside the high-ranking hierarchy to have acess to the traps. Of course, that is moot on the wilds, where a wizard could magically gain the knowledge on how to craft the traps and could create them with magically obtained components... As a solution to that I believe the "traps are immobile" suggestion is a great way of reducing the ways to abuse creating traps on the wild...
But creating money wish traps could still be problematic... But so would entering the United States with millions of counterfeit dollars.

About the Tiers:

I'm banning a lot of classes. I'm not entirely sure wich ones yet, but all of Tiers 1 and 2 are not going to be playable from the start.
My players are going to be dwellers of the wild and they will discover "The cities" after a long time. I'll begin with levels 1 to 6 with some dungeon crawling on old ruins and doing some quests that involve being in the middle of two warring barbarian tribes.
Then transition to the cities. Since retraining and rebuilding rules are available, at that point people might go crazy, but I believe that it won't be an issue. For the first levels I'm thinking that the only caster options will be the Adept and the wild-Bard. I'm not entirely sure about what I want to do about the ToB classes. One of my players really loves them, I think they will stay.
I only have one player at the table that cares about character optimization, and he is very reasonable. We've been playing with this group for a long time, almost 10 years now, dealing with character imbalances isn't a problem anymore. Our current PBP group is level 15, and is composed of a druid, a cleric, a scout and a knight, and we never had problems, because we all are very reasonable people who love the game and we understand the fundamental problems that come with the inherent diferences of power level the game has.

To help the noncasters, I'm thinking of using the Midnight setting "heroic paths" instead of the vow of poverty. Each character can choose one of those on the start of the campaign, but if somewhere along the way they get a (full)casting class or prestige class, they lose the Heroic Path.

For those unfamiliar with the Midnight setting, it is a low-magic survival setting built around the premise "What if Morgoth had won the war against the Valar". Orcs are the meanest, strongest, most populous, more well equiped race, and they get to enslave and dominate the humans, elves, dwarves, etc. Magic acess in that setting is by default very rare, so the Heroic Paths are there to provide what the items would, but instead of being fixed bonuses like the Vow of poverty, each heroic path is a set of special traits that you unlock as you level. When I get some time I'll compare them to Drolyt's Vow of Poverty Fix, as suggested by Phelix-Mu.

Well, that is it for now, please keep up the comments and advice!