Breaking C&C

[alcyone]

In the life of most DMs, you make a few mistakes. Maybe you gave a player an inch and he took a mile. Or you trusted the random treasure table and produced a killing machine. You forgot a rule and made a new one in its place that didn't work. The game broke.

Maybe that happened 20 years ago, and since then you've been careful, even paranoid. If you make a ruling, you call off the game for 3 weeks so you can retreat in the woods and meditate on it, cross-referencing with every example in every book you own.

But here we are today, playing C&C. It has a reputation for being pretty bendable. Dependencies between rules are weak or non-existent, so changes can be made in isolation. Oh, you can still break the game, or your campaign. Overall though, I think it's made things a lot easier.

So, in your C&C campaigns, have you ever made a house rule or interpretation that had a negative side effect that broke or severely warped the balance of your game? (no griping about balance... all games have SOME balance.)

On a side note, it surprises me how often something that certainly worked in another variant of D&D requires pages of discussion to see if it will work in C&C. It will almost certainly work .

[Omote]

I peronally do not care much about what happens when the random treasure tables are rolled. I love, and I like to play up that element when random treasure is found. But over the years, all of my C&C experiences have been sound, with little in the way of broke-ass stuff.

There are two exceptions that come to mind immediately though:

1.) A 4th or 5th level monk that came upon an Amulet of Mighty fists +2 (maybe +3?). The monk became a lethal killing machine that surpased the fighters in almost every way. The fighters were very sad for a while.

2.) Most recently. I use ROF (Rate of Fire) for bows into my C&C campaign. I have since the CKG came out. No problems there. However, I let Pull Weight for bows in the same campaign without giving a ton of thought to allowing both of those rules to work together. The PCs are 3rd level now. Once they discovered the combination of ROF + Pull Weight (STR 18), the characters that could use bows and have a STR of 18 (a fighter and a bard), are shooty-McShooterstins. The bow has become THE weapon of choice for a fightin'. Sure, I don't allow them to use ROF in melee combat, but they went around that by making sure they are never right up agsint a bunch of enemies and they always spend a round laying out a ton or arrows in front of them so they can shoot so fast. Unfortunately I had to house rule that stuff fast.

~O

[Arduin]

So, in your C&C campaigns, have you ever made a house rule or interpretation that had a negative side effect that broke or severely warped the balance of your game? (no griping about balance... all games have SOME balance.)

No but, after "DMing" for >30 years I know by even thinking about a new rule whether or not it will seriously maul a given game system that I run now.

[redwullf]

2.) Most recently. I use ROF (Rate of Fire) for bows into my C&C campaign. I have since the CKG came out. No problems there. However, I let Pull Weight for bows in the same campaign without giving a ton of thought to allowing both of those rules to work together. The PCs are 3rd level now. Once they discovered the combination of ROF + Pull Weight (STR 18), the characters that could use bows and have a STR of 18 (a fighter and a bard), are shooty-McShooterstins. The bow has become THE weapon of choice for a fightin'. Sure, I don't allow them to use ROF in melee combat, but they went around that by making sure they are never right up agsint a bunch of enemies and they always spend a round laying out a ton or arrows in front of them so they can shoot so fast. Unfortunately I had to house rule that stuff fast.

Or give the same power to monsters. Have a group of ambushing Orc archers with heavy Orc bows bring the same pain.

[Treebore]

Nope. Haven't done it in a long time. There were some Bow Shooting rules I was play testing that were turning out to be pretty broken. But they were in play test, so were simply dropped once I saw how over powerful they were. I have new ideas about it now, so will be giving it another shot.

[ThrorII]

I allowed the multi-class rules from Castle Zygag Class Options & Skills. It allowed the M/C character to be unbalance and much superior to the regular characters.

As written, the M/C character averages one level behind his peers, but is way better on saves and hit points.

A Rogue 4/Fighter 4 multi-class character was peers with 5th level characters, but he had 8 HD and 9th lvl saves.

I've since altered the MC rules to rule that the MC character adds 1/2 a hit die upon leveling (if 2 classes) or 1/3 a hit die (if 3 classes), and treats his highest class as his level for saves. That way the MC character is broader in abilities, but slightly slower in advancement.

[Omote]

2.) Most recently. I use ROF (Rate of Fire) for bows into my C&C campaign. I have since the CKG came out. No problems there. However, I let Pull Weight for bows in the same campaign without giving a ton of thought to allowing both of those rules to work together. The PCs are 3rd level now. Once they discovered the combination of ROF + Pull Weight (STR 18), the characters that could use bows and have a STR of 18 (a fighter and a bard), are shooty-McShooterstins. The bow has become THE weapon of choice for a fightin'. Sure, I don't allow them to use ROF in melee combat, but they went around that by making sure they are never right up agsint a bunch of enemies and they always spend a round laying out a ton or arrows in front of them so they can shoot so fast. Unfortunately I had to house rule that stuff fast.

Or give the same power to monsters. Have a group of ambushing Orc archers with heavy Orc bows bring the same pain.

Too true. So very true. If you give this ability to monsters (which you should), it's important to note that monsters tend to have a better BTH than PCs, at least they're equal to the fighter class. Watch player's expressions dwindle when the 8 HD orc comes with his BOW OF DOOM!

~O

[Treebore]

2.) Most recently. I use ROF (Rate of Fire) for bows into my C&C campaign. I have since the CKG came out. No problems there. However, I let Pull Weight for bows in the same campaign without giving a ton of thought to allowing both of those rules to work together. The PCs are 3rd level now. Once they discovered the combination of ROF + Pull Weight (STR 18), the characters that could use bows and have a STR of 18 (a fighter and a bard), are shooty-McShooterstins. The bow has become THE weapon of choice for a fightin'. Sure, I don't allow them to use ROF in melee combat, but they went around that by making sure they are never right up agsint a bunch of enemies and they always spend a round laying out a ton or arrows in front of them so they can shoot so fast. Unfortunately I had to house rule that stuff fast.

Or give the same power to monsters. Have a group of ambushing Orc archers with heavy Orc bows bring the same pain.

Too true. So very true. If you give this ability to monsters (which you should), it's important to note that monsters tend to have a better BTH than PCs, at least they're equal to the fighter class. Watch player's expressions dwindle when the 8 HD orc comes with his BOW OF DOOM!

~O

I consider that the real test for if something is "broken" or not. It is one thing when just one or two players are doing it, but another thing entirely when you give it to a mass of monsters with many more individuals doing it. The bow rules I mentioned earlier weren't bad when looking at just the one player who wanted to be the bow master. Then I did a group of 20 monsters, an average of 3 HD lower than the party, something they normally handled pretty easily with their spells, etc... This time I had 10 of them hang back and use the new bowmaster rules I was testing. I use SIEGE chacks to have players/monster "trigger" any special attack they want to try. Out of this 10 I was successful with 6 out of 10 of them, which was two higher than the mathematical average of the 4 we would normally see. I always target spell casters first, because any smart creature should. That first volley took out the mage and put down the Ranger by about half his HP. The mage never even go off a spell. The rest of the party was involved in direct melee, including the two clerics, with the 10 who charged.

So I did the attacks of those who charged, doing decent damage to everyone, including the Ranger.

On the next round I determined the archers had now spotted the clerics, because they were now preparing to revive the downed mage, so had their Holy Symbols out in preparation for casting spells. So I targeted 1 of them, because they were both in heavy armor, so knew they should concentrate fire. So they did. I rolled 7 successful SIEGE checks this time, and all 7 hit, because out of 7 rolls I did not roll below a 16 Kind of mind blowing. So not only did I hit the cleric, I hit him with enough damage to outright kill him, because two of the rolls were crits, which does double damage on ranged attacks in my games. So two of 6 already down or dead by round two. Then the melee attacks, they too went after spellcasters, So were able to put 2 on the Ranger and 3 on the other cleric while the other 5 occupied the Knight and fighter. I got one hit on the Ranger and 2 on the cleric, and the cleric failed his Concentration check, so was unable to revive the mage.

Round 3. The Archers concentrated their fire on the other cleric. This time only 5 succeeded on their SIEGE checks and were still able to attack (Failed SIEGE checks meant they failed to set up their "trick shot" so had to try again next round), I hit with 4 of them, on the cleric. Again with 1 Crit, so effectively hit with 5 successful attacks. Combined with the several hits he had took already, he went down. So now all the spell casters are down, and the players are panicking.

On the next round the Ranger finally goes down.

Now the Knight and Fighter had high AC's, in the 20's (Both 26), so were getting hit much less often. The clerics were AC's 21 and 23. So were hard to hit, but my dice roller was hot.

So the fighter was happy, because he was engaged in full Mass Combat Dominance, which by my house rules allows him one attack on each opponent he is engaged with, so was getting 6 attacks in per round, one per opponent. Which is awesome, but at the same time, he is only hitting each once per round, if he hits. So the war of attrition is on. The Knight starts his Inspire. This gives them each a +3 to hit.

So to make a long story short, with timely uses of Potions of Heal, the Fighter and Knight, with their tank armor and great to hit modifiers, won the day, with about 26 HP left between them. By that time they had two dead, because the mage had bled out.

Still, the bottom line lesson was clear. The Bowmaster rules were too deadly when used by larger numbers against fewer numbers, with the smaller numbers typically being the PC's. So was too unfair to the PC adventuring model, so I scrapped them.

[Lurker]

Tree

That does sound like a good nasty brutal fight.

I don't have access to my CKG so can't refer to the rules to argue one way or another.

That said, it might have been better if you’d have had only 3 of the archers with the full up bow of doom power. That would have ramped up the excitement in the combat a bit without having 10 full up snipers raining death down on the party.

[Treebore]

Tree

That does sound like a good nasty brutal fight.

I don't have access to my CKG so can't refer to the rules to argue one way or another.

That said, it might have been better if you’d have had only 3 of the archers with the full up bow of doom power. That would have ramped up the excitement in the combat a bit without having 10 full up snipers raining death down on the party.

Using the number of 10 is intentional, if there are problems it magnifies those problems by 10, to make it more glaringly obvious. So it showed me what I wanted to know, its simply too powerful. I think with the lessons learned my next attempt will be much closer to reasonable.

[Lurker]

Using the number of 10 is intentional, if there are problems it magnifies those problems by 10, to make it more glaringly obvious. So it showed me what I wanted to know, its simply too powerful. I think with the lessons learned my next attempt will be much closer to reasonable.

Rgr on that I hope you know I wasn't trying to sharp shoot * edited to say I didn't mean for it to be a double entendre , but it sure fits !!! * you on it. To me its a good mental exercise because on of my home brew classes will be an archer type.

With that, I hope you figure out a good balance for this (and are kind enough to share it

[serleran]

It is sort of part of my job.

Things that end up being too much, typically, don't make it into a published work. Or, they're entered with a warning or something crippling, like "prolonged use of this ability will kill the character. It is up to the Castle Keeper to determine the extent of duration and the precise moment to invoke its lethal aftershock."