Hello everyone, I've been playing with a group at my Friendly Local Gaming Store for about six months, and over the course of it I've had fun... mostly. The DM is a friendly fellow who wants everyone to have fun, but some of his house rules.. are just odd, and make me uncertain what I'd like to play when my current character bites it.
First, some background.
The campaign originated as a military-based story set in the Forgotten Realms. Our characters joined up with the military of a Law-based nation (it's between Unther and Thay... can't think of the name of it at the moment), and was initiated into the military heirarchy. We did some missions and worked our way up to Captain or so, until we went on a mission to infiltrate a Thayan Outpost. Since only a few people out of the nine or so players we had showed up, our DM had the Thayan Red Wizard make a Wish to send us 300 years into the future, after we failed. Apparently the Drow tricked Thay into created a super-deity, who killed all but a half-dozen or so of the other gods and basically destroyed everything. Long story short, the gods sent us all back to the moment the campaign started but with all our levels and a lot of equipment we found at the apocalypse. This last point is part of the problem, as I'll explain later.
So now, we're still on a mission to stop the super-deity from being created, except we no longer work for the military directly and instead now have our own guild to run and help us. The players are mostly playing evil characters, the (almost) last good character, played by me, having been killed by the rest of the party for the artifact bestowed upon him to compensate for being the only cleric of the group. I now play a focused conjurer "God"-type caster, as an initiate in the guild.
But I mentioned houserules being the issue, and so here we go. Here are but a few.
1.) Your first character starts with 32 point-buy stats, and each character after that starts with 2 less each time. This was implemented to discourage character switching.
2.) When you roll a natural one on an attack roll, your turn automatically ends, regardless of how many actions or attacks you had left. You also reroll to confirm the 1 (basically if you roll 5 or below, or something similar, it seems to change), and if you confirm it he rolls on the critical fumble chart, effects including killing yourself with your own weapon.
3.) The first diagonal square counts as 10' instead of 5'; sometimes this means you can't take 5' step diagonally, sometimes you can, it seems to change back and forth.
4.) Mounts share their movement with their riders, and their attacks get added to a full attack by the rider. Not a big deal of a change, but an example of a point I'll make in a second.
5.) Ability-enhancing items don't grant additional castings per day; the only thing they are good for is to increase the bonus to your skills that use the attribute, and to raise your DCs.
6.) You can 'back out' of the threatened range of a creature with reach, since you are devoting your attention to it and backing away instead of turning your back and leaving.
7.) Small characters can't use a weapon like a Longspear to grant reach, as they are too short to effectively carry it.
8.) Freedom of Movement effects are "too powerful" when I asked about the vest that lets a character do it 3 times a day for several rounds, but later on it was put in a potion for an NPC for a reduced duration effect during a one-on-one fight with my character.
Don't get me wrong, he crafts a good story and it's good to have a game to play in, but some of the rules he changes he doesn't seem to understand the ramifications of, such as the 10'-diagonal rule or the one regarding reach.
Some of them are just a little frustrating, like when I started the campaign with a halfling DMM-Persist cleric with no strength bonus who focused group buffs with Protection Domain and Persisted Blessed Aim, etc., then got chewed out every session (by the players, not the DM) for not focusing on healing and for playing defensively and not spending what time I wasn't healing, not attacking. Like a small character with small weapons and no strength bonus is really going to be doing enough damage to risk randomly falling on his morningstar! I honestly tried to tough it out, but by the time I said enough is enough, he wouldn't let me change him out - I had to wait until he died before I could bring in a new one. I was able to pay XP to rebuild him, but he had to keep some cleric levels and couldn't change his race.
In any case, right now I'm playing the Focused Conjurer, and I'm glad with him for the most part. However, one of the issues I mentioned about has come into play, and it's very frustrating. In "the future", the party came upon a room with tons and tons of equipment; we were told we could find almost anything equivalent to a +3 weapon or less. This means we could equip each slot (save armor or shield, since they cost half as much as a weapon) with something costing 18,000 gp or less, and we were about level 7 at the time. He said that he was giving us this so that he could challenge us a bit more with stronger encounters, which we thought was fine.
Fast forward to my halfling cleric's death at the hands of the party, who wanted to steal and sell the artifact for themselves. They were evil, after all, and he was good. Fine. I decide to give a melee character a try, and build something like Jack B. Nimble, explaining the concept and how he'd get all these attacks, which the DM was perfectly fine with. However, he mentions that he is bringing in new characters with only +3 weapons and armor, and +2 everything else - 4000 gp per slot. "Not everyone got to equip themselves at the end of time," he said.
Now, hold on a second. He gave everyone such a powerful increase in equipment as justification for throwing some tough stuff at us. How does he expect the new characters to be able to keep up? He said we'd do fine, and asked whether I need to retool his equipment. I said I'd need to do a bit more than that, then went home and threw the character out, and built the mage I play now. I was wiling to give melee a shot when it looked like I'd have enough magic gear to even things out, but now it seemed unfeasible to do anything but full caster.
That is the crux of my concern: the DM seems to change rules arbitrarily and at whim, and doesn't seem to have a grasp of the rules well enough to understand the effects it may have on the game. He's more concerned with "Story", which is fine, but I wonder if he's perhaps resenting my knowledge and level of character optimization.
One final example, then I make my plea for assistance. In the last month, the military fort we were visiting was putting on a tournament of champions, offering a 10,000 platinum piece purse for first place. Everyone in the party participated in it, with my character eventually fighting for the championship. Along the way, he won every round by using BFC and things like Greater Slide to ring-out the opponents; several times, I'd get them in an Evard's Black Tentacles, lay down a Cloud of Bewilderment while they were grappled so that they'd eventually become nauseated and unable to fight back, then use a couple Acid Breath spells to wear them down. I never succeeded in bringing them to zero HP, they'd always concede when I got the lock down.
During the last round, I fought a Barbarian, 15th level, with a portable gem of Anti-magic with a 30'-foot radius effect. I was level 9. I lost, obviously.
I take comfort in the fact that he had to resort to the equivalent of giving every thug in Metropolis a chunk of Kryptonite, as otherwise there was little means to challenge him. But it plays to my larger concern: he seems to value "story" more than game balance, and so I always wonder what kind of change he'll do next, and how will it affect my character?
Besides general advice on how to handle a DM who implements a lot of strange houserules, I'd like some help building a replacement character within his specific ruleset, that being:
1.) Forgotten Realms Races only. No monstrous races, only ones in the FR Campaign Setting.
2.) Only classes and prestige classes in the PHB, PHBII, DMG, FRCS and the "Complete X" series from WotC. No psionics, and no alternate class features or substitution levels not within those books.
3.) Unearthed Arcana is completely banned, as is BoED and BoVD.
4.) Otherwise, Feats and equipment can be from any WotC source, pending approval. Spells can be drawn from such sources, as well.
5.) +3 weapons and armor/shield, +2/4000 gp limit per item on everything else, can sell some of the items to upgrade another; I sold most of my equipment to purchase a +3 Int Tome, for instance.
6.) The new character would be starting out with 28 Point-buy, and perhaps less if I die more than once/ he changes the rules again. MAD characters are not preferred.
As for my preferred character type, I've enjoyed full casters or other characters that take a bit of smarts, and is a problem-solver type. I've not played too many non-casters recently, partly because I understand how the game balance is tilted in their favor, and every death in this campaign puts me further behind. While a good build would work whether it's magic or mundane, keep in mind that an errant 1 on an attack roll could result in automatic character death, and like with Kyle's Dad, a Resur-erection is not foreseen in the near future with this party.
