Baldur's Gate II (5e campaign log)

[J-H]

Will you be using this thread for your campaign log? With all those alterations and additions to the rules, I fear the first 5 pages will be discussing houserules and that it might not over by the time you start posting logs.

Yes, I will be. I decided to go ahead and put these up first, and I'm glad I did as I discovered that my changes/notes are spread among too many documents with some duplication.

It will be interesting to see how you will convert a story with an obvious main character into a narrative where the story and spotlight is shared amongst a group of players.

That's why I'm giving everyone a (possibly secret) trait/background, so they have their own spotlight moments. It won't be entirely even, but table time never is, and it's up to them to engage or not. The dhampir one of course goes with the vampire encounters, the psionic one will do something with mind flayers (it's actually pretty hard to find them under Athkatla is you don't know what you're looking for), etc. I've tried not to plan too far ahead with that, as I really don't know what they'll go for.

I have previously tried to convert Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer to a campaign. However, I realised during my preparations that these role-playing video games that takes hundreds of hours to complete, primarily are one long slogfest of combat. But judging from your previous campaign log, your campaigns seem to be quite combat heavy.

It's what the system is built for mostly. The way 5e is built, you need X encounters per day for class balance, so "dungeony combats with multiple encounters before the boss" works out. Also, that means I can do more smaller battles instead of fewer really big battles with 10+ enemies and 4+ caster types.

I do not have many comments to your new rules. I just want to remark that I hope you ask yourself in what way does the outcome of this rule elevate the game experience?.

That is a great question to ask!

I am somewhat concerned about what fun your money sinks bring, but I especially hope you carefully consider if it really brings fun to the table when you introduce and enact rules that gives permanent penalties to characters: The loss of con when you die and the loss of progress when you do not attend a session. It sucks to die. It sucks to not be able to attend like when Teador's players has to work. Why do you want to punish that further?

Money sinks
Over the years, there have been quite a few discussions of "My party has tons of gold, what good is it?" BG2 does have magic item shops with good (but not infinite) stock, but if all they are spending gold on is better gear, that's a bit boring. I'd rather have them have to make interesting choices with no clear best answer for things like "Do we equip X caster for these spells, or do we buy potions, or do we buy a better sword?" "This guy dropped a gem we can use as a material component for a spell 5 levels from now, do we hang on to it or do we sell it to buy X item we're saving for?"

It's also a way to partly balance boosted casters by making sure that they have to plan ahead and spend money to use the spells with expensive material components instead of getting free gp->component conversion like I've always done in the past (in campaigns without a dozen stores easily accessible).

These aren't true money sinks in the Diablo/MMORPG style, in that there is always value for the money they spend, not transaction fees and inefficiency losses.

Death
The main reasons on this are:
1. The Bhaalspawn characters do lose power when they die, permanently... which is better than "game over, you died and the Throne sucks up your essence." I do not want to have a game where only some characters have a permanent penalty for death.
2. In 5e, death costs 300gp and a 3rd level spell slot to fix. It's no big deal. This is too easy and cheap.
3. It fits with the older school feel.

I will have to be careful that my moves to cut HP bloat don't cut this down too much where death is too common. In my last two campaigns, I got actual character kills (not knocked to 0) very, very rarely. I will need to try to telegraph in advance what enemies might use Power Word: Kill or similar abilities, or may need to reconsider using them. Perhaps True Resurrection should negate the Con loss, giving an actual reason for it to be used?
Revivify/Raise Dead con loss
Rez make a save to avoid it
TR perfectly safe? Is it worth the price of the Robe of Vecna to keep someone from losing 1 point Constitution?

I have never seen anyone use anything other than Revivify in any of my games.
Edit to avoid Double Posting: Raise Dead and Resurrection both include a death penalty. TR doesn't, but is also as expensive as a top-tier magic item. Revivify is the only "back from the dead" spell that has no penalty. I don't want to incentivize "if you're dead, stay dead for 3 hours to avoid the worst outcome" because that's not fun.
Thoughts on deleting the Con penalty and just adding a Death Penalty effect to Revivify? I am no longer certain that my original reasoning was correct. This is why I posted these a week before the game starts :)

Leveling
It's an experiment, and I think got the idea from an article or blog post somewhere a year or two ago. For a while, I had some players who would just no-show or didn't treat it like an actual calendar commitment, and this acts as a mild counter-incentive to that behavior. I don't know if it'll actually come into play or not with the new schedule.

Looking forward to seeing your next campaign log! And if we're lucky your notes for this one on the DMGuild later too?

Thanks!
One of the reasons I picked this, aside from always wanting to run it, is that I think I can run most of it with minimal notes. Firkraag's lair for example... the only things I really need to do are scale the genies up or down a bit, and then find a couple of statblocks for "Better ogre" for Taazok, the Ruukh transmuter thing (really, it has about 80hp, middling AC, and casts Stinking Cloud), Vampiric Mists, and perhaps a Greater Werewolf block. I don't expect to end up with enough notes with enough detail to be worth publishing... and that's an upside to me currently.