Decreasing power, increasing skill (3.5e Campaign-ish thing)

[Return of Lanky]

Decreasing power, increasing skill

Inspired by this thread.

Premise: You possess an ultimate power. A power which you could surely use to slay your enemies... Except you must instead give up this power to prevent catastrophy on a worldwide scale. Only the experience gained as a result of your travels in giving up this power will allow you to prevail.

Quick'n'dirty Rules

Essentially, Levels function in the exact same way, with three exceptions: Feats, Skills, and Ability Scores. You determine your campaign's start point and end point, and then reverse them. So for a campaign progressing from 20 to 12, your characters are 20th level when considering class abilities, HP, saves, etc... but considered 12th level when considering skills and feats. For each level "lost", they lose the appropriate amount of power and gain the same for knowledge, so from the above example the 19th level character would not have the skills and feats of a 13th level character.

Ability Scores would be increased by 1 for each level lost, to help balance out the lost power. Call it residual energy from the ultimate power or whatever. Maybe once every three levels, you can "delay" the loss of certain abilities by a level as another balance feature.

I know this is rough, but I didn't want to derail the original thread.

[erikun]

Ability Scores would be increased by 1 for each level lost, to help balance out the lost power. Call it residual energy from the ultimate power or whatever. Maybe once every three levels, you can "delay" the loss of certain abilities by a level as another balance feature.

Um, wow. So a level 20 fighter with 18 Str (+24 hit, +4 damage) would end up a level 12 fighter with 26 Str (+20 hit, +8 damage)?

Spellcasters would probably take the biggest hit, as they're losing their biggest abilities each level. Fighter-types would take the least, because (as pointed out above) then don't take as large of a hit.

What kinds of equipment will they have? Simply degrading +1's off their magical equipment is fine, but what if they have something more specific? It's a bit harder to systematically degrade a Staff of the Magi, or a Holy Avenger, or a Ring of Regeration.

Still, sounds like an interesting situation. Wasn't this basically the story behind Elric of Melniboné, at that?

[Kizara]

Hard to follow what you are saying here.

[AstralFire]

Given how many things in D&D depend on having a requisite number of feats/skill points/etc, I really do not think that a class system is ideal for this kind of game.

[Meek]

I think the can of worms this opens up outweighs the novelty it has.

[Return of Lanky]

Perhaps.

I dunno. The idea, as presented in the other thread, shows a lack of a measurable dichotomy. I'd prefer it if the players FELT a sense of accomplishment, y'know?

Maybe just reduce Saves/HP?