Character Creation and Advancement

[Penny Dreadful]

THE ONLY ALLOWED SOURCE MATERIALS ARE THE D&D PLAYER'S HANDBOOK AND THE RAVENLOFT PLAYER'S HANDBOOK UNLESS I SAY OTHERWISE

Character Creation

• All player characters start at level 3. The characters are still greenhorns when it comes to adventuring, I just think that level 1 characters in D&D are a little too exposed to the whims of chance, especially if your wizard with 4hp gets hit by a barbarian with a 1d12 damage greataxe.
  
  
• Standard 32 point buy system for abilities.
  
  
• All hitpoint rolls are maximum
  
  
• Any standard races are allowed, but remember there are no half-orcs (or orcs, obviously) in Ravenloft. Instead there are Calibans, who are humans that were exposed to dark and corrupting magics while in the womb. Calibans use the same racial characteristics as half-orcs. Most people in Ravenloft are humans, and non-humans are often viewed with suspicion, or sometimes even attacked on sight. Players are free to choose any race they want though, just be prepared for a potentially less than warm welcome in some areas.
  
  
• Any standard class is allowed, though if you want to play something like a Paladin you should give a lot of thought to your character's background and personality, since it is a very rare thing for people in this realm to take up the cause of righteousness and fight the forces of evil.
  
  Also, if at all possible I would like for people to realise concepts they have using the standard classes. If a person wants to play a pirate, they can roll a fighter or a rogue and then just load up on feats that help the character on a ship for instance. This is mainly due to a desire to keep things as simple as possible from a mechanics standpoint, and because I don't have a lot of the supplements for all the prestige classes.
  
  
• Any alignment is allowed, provided the player doesn't use an evil alignment to act like a psychotic lunatic and kill everyone around him. The Good/Neutral/Evil scale should be more a representation of what your character is willing to do, rather than what she or he does on a daily basis. Evil alignments in particular should have a good deal of thought put in, so that you don't end up with a typical black-clad loner deathknight type. I should also stress that, even though you might be evil, you should still create a character that can coexist and work with the other PCs, and that can be motivated to follow the main plot line. The same goes for good alignments too. If your character refuses to work with anyone that has slightly dubious morals, your character will lead a very lonely life indeed in Ravenloft.
  
  
• 2700gp starting gold, and anything up to, and including, masterwork quality. This includes mighty bows.
  
  
• Innocence: if people want to start out Innocent that's fine, but please be sure to incorporate that into your background and concept. While you can make an Innocent character of any class you like, it lends itself more to clerics or paladins, so an Innocent rogue would require a bit more thought.
  
  Also keep in mind that Innocence comes with a few drawbacks that balance out the bonuses.
  

A clarification for the point-buy system:
I just read up on it and it apparently got changed a bit in the 3.5 rules. Each score starts out at 8 and you can buy additional points on a 1-1 basis until 14. Scores higher than 14 cost more. I copied the table from the DM Guide out here so people don't need to go looking it up. So with a starting score of 8 it will cost you 16 points to raise it to 18, and so on. You still get 32 points to use, even though the DM guide recommends only 25.

Score	Point Cost
9	1
10	2
11	3
12	4
13	5
14	6
15	8
16	10
17	13
18	16

A final note concerning character creation:
Player characters in a roleplaying game should be above average, yes. They are heroes that rise above the common man and do extraordinary things. But they aren't invincible, nor are they universally good at everything. Especially in a dark romantic or gothic story, characters aren't perfect. They have flaws and other imperfections that give them perspective and make them interesting. This goes for villains too. Villains aren't perfect because an invincible villain is no fun for the players to fight. But neither is a villain that just lays down and dies at the first sight of the PCs. I won't punish anyone for not having a min/maxed character, and if someone does try to be a min/maxer I will put the kaboosh on them in a hurry. I want to tell a good story, not see how high a body count I can rack up in an evening. Please remember this when you create your characters. I would like to see 'believable' characters instead of all-powerful killing machines.

Leveling Up

• Since web-based games tend to move at a much slower pace than tabletop games, characters will gain experience at a significantly faster rate, especially at the beginning. You won't be reaching epic levels any time soon, but by the end of the first adventure a level 3 starting character will likely be around level 5, or close to it. Once characters have established themselves in the world a bit, the leveling curve will flatten out somewhat. You'll still advance faster than normal, but not quite as quickly as in the beginning.
  
• I can't be bothered with doing all the maths for multiclassing as non-favoured classes, so I'm doing away with it. Any race can multiclass as any class without an xp penalty. Any other restrictions, such as alignment requirements, and so on, still apply.
  
• When gaining a new level you automatically gain your hit die's worth in new hit points, plus any applicable modifiers.
  

[Penny Dreadful]

Character Backgrounds and Goals:

Aside from a brief bio, each character should have a few long-term and short-term goals. This is to give your characters perspective and something to strive for in life, as well as for me to build stories around. These can be virtually anything as long as they fit the setting, and can also be used to explain why your character has taken up adventuring (i.e. get rich, get revenge, etc).

Darklords and the Dark Powers:
I've mentioned it before in other places, but I'll reiterate it here because it provides a good explanation for this next bit: morality matters here. While this world is painted in shades of gray, good and evil still have consequences that can potentially be rather far-reaching. Truly good people are, of course, by and large an abberation in this world, and while evil runs rampant, there are always going to be things out there that are both bigger than you, and far more evil.

Players whose characters are either very good or very evil will eventually come to the attention of the Darklord of their domain as word of their glorious or nefarious deeds spreads. They might eventually even be noticed by the Dark Powers themselves. Characters who grow powerful enough and use that power to affect far-reaching changes, for good or ill, for the people of their domain, may eventually come to rule that domain as its new Darklord.

Good Characters:
If a good character defeats the current Darklord and takes over the rule of a domain, and uses his power as ruler for good, trying to improve life for the people of that domain and so on, that domain gets expelled from Ravenloft. The whole domain, along with everything that inhabits it, gets swallowed up by the mists, perhaps to emerge in some other world or perhaps to go on to whatever rewards there are for good deeds in the afterlife.

There are two reasons for this. Firstly, wresting control of a domain from its evil ruler and turning the domain into a beacon of goodness seems to be a suitably epic conclusion to what should be a long-running story arc. It will be a suitably dramatic end for a series of stories, and I prefer to leave stories that have run their natural course well enough alone. Too many great stories have been turned to camp, or simply become so cheesy that they become almost unbearable, because they were stretched out for seemingly countless sequels, with each sequels' plot thinner than the one that came before it. Stories, when they are done, should just be left alone, and we'll follow that rule here.

The second reason is that, once someone ascends the throne in a domain and turns it into a force for good, the story is now beyond the thematic scope of this game. We would be back at the standard D&D story of the noble heroes fighting off evil for no other reason than that that's just what they do. The overall goals in the story become much less interesting, as the heroes domain might have to defend its border against aggressive neighbours, or root out some evil-doers within its lands, and so on. While there could certainly be great stories told based upon this premise, in my opinion it wouldn't fit in a Ravenloft game.

Evil Characters:
If evil characters are evil enough, the Dark Powers may eventually grant them their own domain, or let them supplant the Darklord of an existing domain as it's new ruler. As with a good character, once an evil character comes to rule a domain, that character is no longer playable, but the reasons for this are a little different. Also, an evil character who rules a domain doesn't disappear, but gets incorporated into the setting as an NPC, though the player who originally created the character might be able to play him as a sort of cameo, if the character makes an appearance in a different story.

Again, becoming the Darklord of a domain, Darklords being generally the most powerful force in Ravenloft except for the Dark Powers, is a suitably epic conclusion to what should be an expansive storyline, where the evil character schemes, murders, or conquers his way to power. Becoming the ruler of a domain is a very reasonable life-time goal for an evil character, and achieving it should be the crowning achievement in that character's life.

The second reason is different for evil characters. In Ravenloft, the Darklords of a domain have near limitless power there, but the Dark Powers exact a heavy price for being granted a domain. Darklords have substantial power within their lands, but they can never leave them. Whatever goals or dreams or ambitions they had before, they will never be able to achieve them, or if they do, the victory will be hollow or the prize will turn against the Darklord who sought it. Strahd, for instance, continues to pursue his lost love, centuries after he lost her, but he never succeeds, his failures only driving him to even more nefarious deeds during the next attempt.

This means that Darklords make for great antagonists for a story, but aren't at all suited to be protagonists really. It isn't fun to play a character who you know will ultimately always be thwarted in his goals, and it isn't fun to write stories for a character like that either. You can have some fun initially by rampaging around your domain, terrorizing villagers and slaying do-gooders with impunity, but it won't carry any real story worth the name.