Character Creation

Look! Dice!

I am, before I'm done, going to be running three campaigns set in my world of Altrion. Two involve resurrecting (in the meta sense :D) old parties, one a face to face group, the other play-by-email (which will probably end up play-by-Google-Docs), and the third is a new party set somewhere across the other side of the world.

I've promised at least one reader an explanation of play-by-Google-Docs, as I've been in a largely systemless campaign doing that for most of the past decade, but that'll come later. I'm also putting off converting the older face-to-face group's 2E characters, although I have reached the decision that trying to match stats and abilities exactly is not going to work, so we're going to aim for characters that feel right.

So - the new party. Great fun, as it's a brilliant way to get my head round 5E. All the players (barring my wife) are younger than most of my dice (:D) and all but one haven't played 5E, Two of them are DMs, and have said they're interested to see how an old school DM does it. Thanks. I think :D

Things I've learned so far:

• There aren't enough backgrounds for my world :D Probably inevitable, and I have managed to fit most of the characters in with existing D&D Beyond backgrounds (in a couple of cases rewriting backgrounds from the Sword Coast book).
• Having an original world with a rich background that I know well is such a blast. Being able to pull in existing story and locations into character backgrounds is really cool, especially when you can hand a player over a thousand words of backstory that his character was involved in. Amusingly, writing that gave me an idea for what the play-by-Docs party is going to be doing next.
• You need to be careful with D&D Beyond custom content - there are places where there is no error checking when you type into fields, and (for example) when you type 12 into a 'spell level' field because you mistakenly think its 'caster level', the 'spells' tab on the resulting sheet causes the site to crash!
• I wish Altrion had less than 16 gods. It's a LOT of custom subclasses, and while the forms for designing that are mostly OK, it can involve a lot of typing.
• From my early attempts at converting older characters - some things just don't translate into D&D Beyond - the classic AD&D longsword +1/+3 vs undead, for example is impossible to get into the system in such a way that both sets of to hit and damage bonuses appear separately in the attacks tab.

More later. I'm hoping to start blogging more regularly from here on in.