r/DungeonsAndDragons35e

The DM approved my backstory, saying it's quite interesting: My PC (planning to call him Socrates) is a wizard in this wizard college. One day, he found a whole skeleton in the forest near his dorm, and decided to cast Animate Dead on it, as a fun little experiment. The skeleton came to life, and surprisingly, it can talk (pretty talkative, you might say). He doesn't remember much of the life before his death (only some fragment of it). Socrates and the skeleton become good friends. But, bringing someone who has been dead for a long time is kind of a taboo in this setting, and my PC, being young and naive, didn't know that. When the school council found out about it, they expelled him. From then on, he study magic on his own, and went on a journey to find the origin of his skeleton buddy (the skeleton like that idea too)

Yeah, so that's a draft of it, the details are subject to change. Is there a good Necromancer build for this? A build that dedicated to buffing one skeleton's stats through the roof? If not, any build that related to Animate Dead would be good enough. Thank you in advance

A couple days back I posted a sample NPC I'd been putting together to refresh myself on 3.5 building and also to sort of highlight an aspect of my campaign world. Got some handy feedback on some oversights, but I wanted to hone in on another aspect of NPC building - the equipment budget.

Since this guy's a set-piece example I figured why not try and do something more than the bare essentials. He's a scholar bureaucrat whose day job is being a clerk for his higher ups on an expedition overseas. What I've got for him so far is:

Equipment (2,500GP 3rd Lvl NPC Value)

• Backpack - 2gp / 2lb
• Masterwork Scholar's Jian (Rapier but Slashing) - 320GP / 2lb
• Musical Instrument, Common (Erhu?) - 5gp / 3lb
• Scholar's Outfit - 5gp / 6lb

So a whopping...332GP. Leaving him with the pauper's sum of 2,168GP.

This is a low-ish magic setting though his society is a fair bit more magic-forward so there's room for some stuff. He's not much of an adventurer (he has 9HP and no weapon proficiencies...) but he might fancy himself a long walk through relatively civilized lands eventually.

SO how do you guys spend that budget, if you bother, for more "story piece" characters like this? I thought about padding the kit a bit by giving his robes some AC (it's quality silk, that's gotta be worth AC1 right?) and costing it like padded armor but he's not proficent anyway.

There's no "scribes kit" or anything like that similar to what you get with the Artisan's Toolkit. Plus I figure the office supplies the paper and brushes anyway.

Lots of enchantment might be unbecoming of his status (half elf rank lower on the social totem pole) but they are allowed some in the sumptuary laws. Is it normal for level 3 characters to start having themselves some of that? Though it's an E6 setting and the SRD seems to suggest most things are out of budget - though a 1st or 0 level spell could actually be affordable (Robes of Resistance is only like 1k GP).

Characters in this sort of project like this are also kind of intended to be used in little stand-alone demo games to explore niche parts of the setting (in theory, wont happen in practice) so the stuff available might be relevant.

Anyway the question is, how do you guys spend down these budgets, if any?

considering that most of the playable things in the myriad scenarios of 2nd edition made the jump to 3E with monsters, deities and such being integrated into the edition...has anyone here made a bit of a "mixed sessions" by using the scenarios of, say...oriental adventures or greyhawk to list two examples while using the classes, monster statblocks and such from 3rd edition proper?

I'm going to DM a premade campaign (specifically Cormyr: The tearing of the Weave) but the group will be large, do I simply double the npcs/monsters and for bossfights scale hp and just a little of the damage? what would you do in this situation?

edit: I'll write more of my reasoning on why I said "double the npc/monsters and scale bosses mostly on hp and a little bit of damage": There is some disparity between players (both in their experience with the game and optimization of their character)and I fear that just scaling hp and power while keeping the same number of threats could make the players that are less capable in combat scenarios feel useless or not contributing enough and simultaneously more dangerous because the get hit harder for ther individual level... if there are more threats I feel everyone will get a chance to be impactful (but i'll risk to get combat encounters too prolonged maybe?).

The same could be applied to boss encounters and maybe add more "minions"?