Be Totally Excellent! Help Out a New DM!

[Kaitou Kage]

One full-round will probably work. A heavy crossbow takes a full round to load, though you don't see heavy crossbows used all that much.

[DocBeard]

I think in the end you'll do what you want, but you'll probably see any ranged guy focus on bows.

Also, on removing the mideval stuff-what about armor? I was working on a house rule to make plate and scale armor a little less absolute to preserve the flavor-basically, plate armor would be a Conquistador style breastplate and optional helmet that you could wear a coat over and still look civilized. Expecting the fighter or the cleric to wear light or no armor is a little bit unfair, though.

[Nathan of the FoS]

EDIT: Well, Whistler already covered this, but what the heck. The picture is kinda groovy anyway.

Well, the standard tactics back in the day were 1) carry a sword for backup, 2) stock up on pistols. (Here is Captain Edward Teach showing us how it was done.)

This is, of course, the kind of thing you do only when you are expecting trouble, and few of us expect quite as much trouble as Captain Teach obviously did.

[Kaitou Kage]

To go with what Nathan said, both Dieter and Harris in EoA have guns, but also carry a sword.

[NeoTiamat]

Speaking as a DM who has, will he or nil he, run a few combats, there is nothing more valuable in combat than the action. Basically, if you make a gun take a full round action to load, then that reloading has to be more useful and more fun to the PC than being able to move and attack with a different weapon or use a spell. Otherwise, no one will use guns.

It's not even mechanics, not completely. It's just more fun to actually fire the gun than it is to reload it. Posting "I spend my action reloading my gun" is going to get old fast.

My advice is to make reloading a move action, which can be reduced with Rapid Reload. Keeps it simple. Alternatively, if you really love the idea of having a full-round reload, then I'd double or triple the gun's damage. Have a really big boom to make up for the dullness of having to spend your actions reloading.

[Isabella]

The gun as a first round opener has worked for my group before - we had a rogue who would open fire with a pistol, then usually switch to a dagger. So long as the PCs are aware of that, it should work out.

Rifles, on the other hand, probably won't work like that.

[The Whistler]

Yeah, I figure that they'll start as first-round openers in the first chapter or so. Then, as the PCs rack up cash and levels, if one of them wants to specialize in firearms, their solution will basically be "get Quick Draw and buy a lot more guns." That's why the relatively low price is so important--I want people to be able to fill out their arsenals with relative ease.

Moreover, since they'll be hitting Paridon and (newly industrial) Rokushima around two thirds of the way through the game, I figure that's a great time to introduce a couple high-tech weapons--effectively magic items--as treasure. Revolvers, anyone?

[The Whistler]

So, DocBeard! Items that you mentioned, and their responses! Also, you are impressively thorough, which is *exactly what I need.*

1) I'm prepping around one combat per 6-8 weeks, and I actually have a decent picture in my head of most of them: a few "take down the fleeing perp" ones, a few stronghold defenses, one or two honest-to-goodness Boss Battles, and a few "try not to die as you escape" moments. There's a decent variety there, I hope; devil's in the details, though.

2) Thing is, at least the first few antagonists are going to be straight NPCs, which perversely enough makes them a bit more difficult to draw up since I don't have templates to draw from; there're more options. If I can get those initial encounters down, then I can start drawing from the MM a bit more, but the issue will still be making sure the baddie's an appropriate fight for a larger party. As for making monsters up...I can point to two encounters that I *know* I'll need to have an original BBEG in...but that doesn't mean I'm looking forward to it. That is exactly the sort of thing that I'm uneasy about.

3) Totally! I'm trying to have no encounter just happen in a field somewhere. EoA's actually been a good touchstone for me with this--really nice variety in terms of combat locales.

4) Gotta admit, I'm curious to see how my players are going to turn out in tactical situations--it's the first time a lot of them are playing, after all, so I can't really gauge them that well ahead of time. Figure I'll learn as we go. And I'm with you on TPKs! If the party wipes, that means none of us have an excuse to write anymore.

5) Yay directorial fiat! One of the fun things about us all doing this for the first time is that I can muff things a little and nobody will notice. That goes for the players, too, of course.

Oh, and about your armor rules: I like. Cuirasses look manifestly excellent. Is swapping out the one armor type for the other just a cosmetic change, or did you have in mind that "heavy breastplates" would work differently than full plate on a mechanical level?

[The Whistler]

Crap! Well, one of my erstwhile players has (of all things) been called away to China for most of the month of May. Since my campaign's kickoff date is this coming weekend, and since he doesn't want his character to just sit around twiddling his thumbs for a lot of the introduction, he asked me to see if I could recruit an understudy to play his dude during the three or four weeks he'll be away. Since this board probably has the highest concentration of gamers-slash-excellent-writers of anywhere I know, I figured I'd ask here first.

Anyways if any of you guys would be interested in a brief guest-writing bit, feel free to PM me, and I'll hit you up with the requisite info. It'd mostly be playing a standard first-level Rogue during some neat investigative sequences, while pretending that you don't know anything about how Ravenloft works. (since my players don't ) The premise of the campaign is that the PCs are Modern-Earthers who've been Freaky Fridayed into the bodies of Ravenloft natives; most of the campaign is going to revolve around them figuring out why they're in that situation, and what those natives had been up to previously. While I'm (secretly) writing up the backgrounds of the Ravenloftians, they have free rein to design their modern guys--so if you'd like a little background on the character you'd be playing, here's what this player sent me in lieu of a character sketch.

----------

Andre Viswanathan du Montserrat... son of nephrologists, banlieu bandit, and world-class slacker.

That's what he was, and there was no fighting it--eight years of medical school and five more in a lab at the Hopital Saint-Louis, and it was clear that Andre didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of becoming the world-class researcher as his parents had hoped. So he turned to running drugs--though he didn't realize it at first.

Andre du Montserrat ran the yeast lab at Saint-Louis--that meant hours of peering through microscopes at the tiny dividing cells, freezing and refreezing, centrifuging and recentrifiuging. The process they'd been refining for those five years was perfecting a strain of yeast that would produce P57, an organic compound believed to be useful as an anticonvulsant.

And for other things as well--though it took him some time, and some getting into sticky situations, to learn what they were. He did it on a dare, at first, from his friend Peter Pond--he had a connection, a friend of a friend of a friend in the run-down immigrant suburb of Clichy sous-Bois, who was paying a high street price for this chemical which Andre collected in little tubules day after day. It was boredom, really, that drove him to it; boredom and something else perhaps, the urge that makes a small boy stamp his own sandcastle into the ground. The next evening, at beer-and-video-games at Pond's, he grinned and laid down the suitcase on the coffeetable, opened it; Pond stared at him slack-jawed.

"You didn't seriously?"

He felt like he'd found his calling. As he drove into the shattered suburb (the Algerians had been rioting again) he felt all of a sudden as if he were waking from a dream--he'd taken the magic pill, gone down the rabbit hole, and real life, if you could call it that, was about to begin. Half-Indian, indeterminably brown and anonymous-looking, he didn't raise any eyebrows as he sidled down the appointed alleyway. Up a fire-escape and into a bare-bulb back-room with a mattress on the floor and a card table; a one-eyed Algerian sat, clipping his fingernails.

"Hassan al-Hassan?"

The man looked up. He rapped a knuckle on the table wordlessly, beckoned to Andre.

And so it began.

His mother, Anjali, had been top-of-her-class in Hyderabad and went to the Institute Curie on a full scholarship. She never went back to India, hadn't taught Andre a word of Hindi; she was French through-and-through. She'd plucked his father, Renard, off the top branch, as she said--that the was way she went about doing everything--he was on his way to great things, she could tell, and, after all, so was she. Alas for their poor son Andre.

His business was thriving before too long. Hassan, the White Rabbit, paid him well for the P57. Paid in cash and hash, for which Andre had always had a passing predilection. But soon, Andre began to feel something he'd never felt before--ambition. He was determined to cut out the middleman and sell directly to whoever was buying this stuff. And thus began an adventure that would leave him bleeding, bruised, and dazed...

-----

Whew! So, if you're intrigued at all, let me know, and I'll put you in touch with the dude. Thanks a lot!

[The Whistler]

It's alive! Let me know if you're interested and I'll send you a link; in the unlikely event that you ever feel like commenting, you can register there.