Starting points for rookies in established campaign

[David Blue]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

One thing I'd like to throw open for other people is: how do you find agents work in this situation?

 

In my experience, the idea that weaker characters are agent-crunchers is wrong: agents are worse than big villains, because you get overwhelmed by numbers of guys built to fight your betters (with Improved Turtle Armour TM or whatever) and therefore over whom you cannot obtain an adequate margin of individual superiority. Also it's wall-to-wall killing attacks, often autofire, and unlike Lord Megathreat they really don’t have anything better to do with their next phase after your force-field goes down than to hose you. You'd be better off charging the big guy practically every time.

[Kirby]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

If you give the new player only enough points to be a sidekick' date=' make sure you know what you will do with a sidekick, and that the player knows that too and can wait for their programmed good bits during the long periods of play that will be frustrating. (E.g. the long fights where after the first action or two the new player's character will be "resting" face down in the dust.) And the GM had to deliver on those good bits.[/quote']

I'm not sure what your campaign entry level point was, but even in the 250 point games, we didn't have any player characters needing to rest until after the first turn of combat at the earliest. Most would need the rest by the time the second turn came around. I would think that with the extra 100 points 5E is based on, the players would create a more-efficient character if that were the case. In my opinion, if an experienced player makes an endurance deficiant character on 350 points, that is his own fault.

 

Finally for the GM' date=' if you're going to do V.O.I.C.E. or an Apocalypse style adventure where the idea is that "none but the strong will survive!", you may want to consider holding off the introduction of wimps till afterwards.[/quote']

Interesting that you bring this up. Anyway...

Having actually converted VOICE over to 5E, I'll state that most of them fall under the 350 point template, so this shouldn't be a problem, unless the GM upgrades them. However, even the module itself was somewhat designed for beginning characters.

[Kirby]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

One thing I'd like to throw open for other people is: how do you find agents work in this situation?

What is "this situation" you are referring to? I don't see how NPC villain agents would affect a new character.

 

If you're referring to the new PCs to being agents, your scenario provided wouldn't really be effective unless there were four or more and the team didn't have the problem with killing attacks. As far as a PC being an agent-styled character, there is one in most campaigns, for the person who prefers that method to others.

[David Blue]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

My best advice for the newbie in this situation is: try to find a sense that nobody else has or will soon have, and buy that. It makes it much, much easier for the GM to give you stuff to do.

 

A designated class of opponents is an idea that may be worth trying, though personally I've found the negatives outweigh the positives. The idea is, you pick a concept like "Demon-slayer", then in every mixed fight you look for your designated opponent type. If all goes well, you get a steady diet of opponents on your own weight class, with any special abilities you may have bought being relevant. Nobody questions why you always pick those guys to fight, so it looks better. The down side is that what you are likely to get instead is nothing, then an all-designated-opponent scenario, with your special opponents being built to fight your elders and betters. After 20d6 Mega-Rays have unsurprisingly proved their superiority over wimpy exorcism powers and "Demon Slayer" has once more been scraped off the ground and sent to hospital, there's no more character concept left.

 

Do stuff. Though everyone will prefer for you to wait your turn, if you do (a) it won't come, and ( you will probably die. The biggest danger to latecomer wimps is: you patiently do your (specialised and non-duplicated) job as occasion offers, like Cypher or you are cutely useless like Hellcat (or characters I've been), and you wind up dying because you've made no impact and nobody needs you. In this area, roleplaying games model the source material very well.

 

Figure on lasting about one phase in combat. Buy the biggest attack and all the OCV the law allows. Use it. That's your chance to get something to celebrate. Don't worry about END or anything like that, it won't be relevant. The GM will likely hint to you that there's a range, like 40-60 active points, and your character being junior and all . . . Ignore that hint, for if in some misguided sense of good-guyness you follow it, you will not get to be lucky even occasionally, and that will make you duller to the GM, which is death.

 

Do not bother with one-roll skills, the kind where you dog after the other players for the whole scenario and then get to make one (1) roll to decipher ancient runes or whatever. It's easy to miss that one roll. Miss it in two scenarios, and someone is likely to drop a couple of points and have that skill at 18-, so scenarios don't get held up by the wimp.

 

Do not have an origin. I'm serious. An origin is a very significant point, where the character becomes capable of capable of dealing with top-level opposition and likely accepts the responsibilities that go with that. Having all the gaudy, emotionally intense and unlikely events that attend an origin, when the character in fact has not made it to the top level and is not ever likely to make it, is dumb. It seems over-wrought and fakey because it is fakey. It's better to just say "I'm a mutant" or "I'm a gymnast and I decided to study martial arts and fight crime" until/unless you become someone whose success demands an explanation.

 

Do not have a "dark" character concept. Sooner or later, your large, grim, scarred hero is going to be shaving his legs to look good in Robin trunks. You know, "sidekick" is a game that looks better at fourteen than at forty-four.

 

Also, waste no points on Presence: it won't be wanted, and with the onlookers laughing at Looser-Boy it also won't work, the penalties from your won-lost record will kill you.

 

My best move ever: leaping to the front of the second most experienced hero, doing my Presence attack, something like "You guys had better give up because [steps aside and points] HE's the BLACK PHANTOM!" Even though I felt I was being resourceful, the GM still based the attack on my reputation, not BP's, with the usual result.

 

(But everything worked out for the best in the end, because in retrospect this was far the funniest gaming I've ever done.)

[Kirby]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

Um, David Blue, you do know that this thread is about a GM asking if he should start new players at the 350 start point that the 'veteran' players started out or should they be given bonus experience, right? It's not about what kind of new character to make. Unless I missed something.

[Kristopher]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

A possibility to consider is that there might not be anything wrong with a variance of points. Looking at the Justice League, Wonder Woman is dang powerful, but she's no Superman. Batman is not present because of his physical strength, but because of his mind. And when Blue Beetle and Booster Gold are in it, they're more of the 250-350 point characters compared to Batman's near 1,000 point. Green Lanterns just vary. Hal Jordan may be 1,000 points while Gnort is *maybe* 250 (okay, he was a joke) though Guy Gardner and Kyle would be good 350+ characters.

 

I know it would suck coming in as low man on the totem pole, but not every superhero has to be the same point level. Though, the GM could rule that a "learning curve" could be put in place if it is roleplayed well. Perhaps the first real-life year of gaming, the newbies get their XP doubled and then they gain XP as normal.

...

Just food for thought.

 

Some things work out a lot better in fiction than they do in a game.

[nexus]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

I'm not sure what your campaign entry level point was, but even in the 250 point games, we didn't have any player characters needing to rest until after the first turn of combat at the earliest. Most would need the rest by the time the second turn came around. I would think that with the extra 100 points 5E is based on, the players would create a more-efficient character if that were the case. In my opinion, if an experienced player makes an endurance deficiant character on 350 points, that is his own fault.

 

I think he's referring to the weaker sidekick character being knocked out in the first round of combat by enemies designed to be challenges for his more experienced fellows more than the character running out of Endurance and having to take recoveries.

[Kirby]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

I think he's referring to the weaker sidekick character being knocked out in the first round of combat by enemies designed to be challenges for his more experienced fellows more than the character running out of Endurance and having to take recoveries.

Yeah, but Hooligan didn't post anything about sidekicks when starting this off. Maybe David Blue is going off of someone else's comment; it just seemed like he was creating his own scenario. Oh well.

[BNakagawa]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

Certainly, giving the newcomers a rookie bonus to EXP is one way of narrowing the gap between the veterans and the rookies.

 

Another one would be to institute a veteran penalty. Theoretically, with an average 3xp per session, after two years of weekly games, a PC who hadn't been swapped out for any length of time with good attendance might have around 300 xp. Rather a lot in a game where you start at 350 or so.

 

Should such a character get the same xp for facing the same opposition as a 350 point character?

 

Perhaps not. (it also might serve to encourage some of the 650 point behemoths to move along to give a little room for the rest of the PCs)

 

$0.02

[David Blue]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

Kirby: " Um, David Blue, you do know that this thread is about a GM asking if he should start new players at the 350 start point that the 'veteran' players started out or should they be given bonus experience, right?"

 

Kirby: "Yeah, but Hooligan didn't post anything about sidekicks when starting this off. Maybe David Blue is going off of someone else's comment; it just seemed like he was creating his own scenario. Oh well."

 

Sorry if I drifted off-topic.

 

I just started with: what do you do when a player comes in late on a game where the established players have a metric load of experience points - which sounded to me like there would be a big, big, big power imbalance there.

 

My answer, which I stand by, is that you can solve this in various ways, including giving the new player no breaks at all, but - BIG idea - the GM has to work out a solution, and make sure that all the players (not just the most obviously relevant ones) know it and are working in harmony with it. And that includes the GM sticking to their own plan.

 

Going from the no-breaks option, which is the one I'm familiar with and the one requiring the most by the way of suggestions or solutions, I tossed in various ways the GM and the player can make the extreme imbalance option work. (If there are no options for the player to work with the GM on this, that might be seen as an issue.) I didn't mean to shift away from stuff that seemed on-topic (an extreme imbalance of power with a new player) and look exclusively at sidekicks.

 

Kirby: "What is "this situation" you are referring to? I don't see how NPC villain agents would affect a new character."

 

That's the "this situation". You have experienced players running characters with metric loads of experience, and an inexperienced player with much, much, much less power. Does shifting from a focus on big bad guys to floods of agents for a while make it easy to run Thor and Hellcat together? If you do this, have you in effect removed the problem of needing to give the new player unearned points?

 

And if you stick to the idea that there has to be a good combat challenge for the stronger players, built on maybe two-to-three times as many points (or active points) as the newcomer, I don't think changing the character of the (still-high) challenge from uber-monsters to floods of agents helps the wimp. If anything, it might hurt. But I might be dead wrong about that - maybe that is how you get Superman and Robin to work well together in games. I was just tossing that approach out there.

 

Nexus: "I think he's referring to the weaker sidekick character being knocked out . . ."

 

You think right of course.

[assault]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

My take would be that it would depend on the magnitude of the discrepancy in points.

 

You see, I tend to encourage characters to take lots of skills, and to broaden out their power sets, rather than to simply power up. That means that a character with up to, say, a couple of hundred points more than their starting value isn't _necessarily_ going to be all that much more formidable a combatant than a starting character. There will be a difference, but the starting character isn't going to be useless in combat.

 

More importantly, perhaps, the starting character will hopefully be of value out of combat as well...

 

There is a point where all this breaks down, of course, and it doesn't make much sense going back to square one, but I've never played a game that lasted that long.

[hooligan x]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

After running a few sessions with the 350pt newbies I am finding the point disparity to be less of a problem than I thought. It helps that one player has a mutiform habit to feed and another is banking points for his cosmic transformation.

 

Oh, and we do have a sidekick in the game but she is an NPC. Captian M has an overzealous teen fan who has named herself Kid Mysterion. Now he is trying to dissuade her from tagging along to avoid felony child endangerment charges.

[nexus]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

After running a few sessions with the 350pt newbies I am finding the point disparity to be less of a problem than I thought. It helps that one player has a mutiform habit to feed and another is banking points for his cosmic transformation.

 

Oh, and we do have a sidekick in the game but she is an NPC. Captian M has an overzealous teen fan who has named herself Kid Mysterion. Now he is trying to dissuade her from tagging along to avoid felony child endangerment charges.

 

I think you bring up a good point here. Look closely at how the other characters have spent their experience and not just how much they have before making a final choice.

[Kirby]

Re: Starting points for rookies in established campaign

 

After running a few sessions with the 350pt newbies I am finding the point disparity to be less of a problem than I thought. It helps that one player has a mutiform habit to feed and another is banking points for his cosmic transformation.

These two ideas I have in one character that I'm waiting to play... someday.

 

And even two separate ideas as well, but still.