The Fall of Thronehold is being played
with a customized D&D 3.5 ruleset. Some of the rules (especially
those relating to secondary characters) we made up mid-game to keep
the campaign from falling into anarchy. Rules are identical to
standard D&D 3.5 except as otherwise noted:
1. A natural 20 is a critical success on all rolls: Any roll,
whether a skill roll, attack roll, or something else, where a
natural 20 comes up not only was the player succesfull in what they
were trying to do but did it spectacularly. Attack rolls using
weapons with increased threat range automatically crit when they
roll within the crit range but not necessarily spectacularly.
2. A natural 1 is a critical fail: Any roll, again whether skill
roll, attack roll, or something else, where a natural 1 comes up
means not only did the character fail but did so in a devastating
way. Frequently during attack rolls a natural 1 means an ally got
hit by mistake but ultimately it's up to DM decision.
3. Sleeping heals all wounds: Unless there are special circumstances
preventing healing, all combat damage is cured after a full nights
sleep.
4. Cantrips aren't used up when cast: Spell casters need to know and
prepare cantrips like normal however they are never used up when
cast so even if a spellcaster is completely 'out of magic' they can
continue to cast cantrips.
5. Low level spells refresh faster: All non-cantrip spells lower
then a characters top spell level are cast on a per encounter basis.
Spells at a characters top spell level can only be cast once per
day.
6. Rule of awesome: Even if technically the rules won't allow it, a
'really cool or awesome idea' will at least be allowed to be
attempted and will be successful on a high enough roll (though
sometimes only on a nat20). We all agree that allowing stuff like
this makes the games more exciting and cinematic.
7. PvP is allowed but discouraged: Given that one of the characters
started evil and another started chaotic it was determined
beforehand that PvP is allowed but only for a good story based
reason. Given how the campaign has turned out, everyone playing is
currently expecting the finale battle of the campaign to be a PvP
battle between the three primary characters.
8. Characters have mild plot armor: Because we don't want to create
new characters all the time we agreed the GM wouldn't be too hard on
the characters but if the rolls really went against them then of
course they would die.
9. Secondary characters have no plot armor: After the initial
campaign plan went off the rails and the party split everyone made
secondary characters to play when the focus of the game happened to
be far enough away from their primary character that they'd be left
out otherwise. It was agreed that the GM wouldn't pull any punches
on the secondaries since the secondary characters purpose is to give
players something to do and not directly part of the story. If
they die they are simply replaced with an almost identical
character.
10. Secondary characters must be loyal to their associated primary
character: To keep the campaign from fracturing further then it has
and collapsing into chaos it was decided that no matter what a
secondary character must be allied with and completely loyal to a
primary character. If changes to the story result in scenarios where
a secondary wouldn't be loyal because of backstory reasons then
either the backstory is retconned or the secondary becomes an NPC
under GM control and the player creates a new secondary.
11. Secondary characters share levels with ally: To keep things
simple all secondary characters automatically have the same XP and
levels as the primary character they are allied.
12. Secondary character fade into the background during PvP: To
avoid potential conflicts of interest if (when) PvP occurs between
primary characters then the secondaries fade into the background so
that a player won't be forced to play a character fighting one of
his other characters.