Not many of the house rules had to be clarified. I had most everything I intended written down on handouts so it was just a matter of pointing out clauses that explain what's going on. The only issues I had with rulings were with people that weren't all that familiar with the game to begin with.
Some of the players took great advantage of the house rules, particularly the technology discount and weapon sizing revision. This produced a lot of cheese such as one player taking a class that grew him two extra arms with the intent of wielding four firearms with Multiweapon Fighting. Same player is wielding small sized firearms to make them light weapons to knock 2 off the off-hand penalty, which I allowed. A number of the players have taken to cybernetic implants as well boosting some numbers. Despite all such things, one thing that was surprising is that all the incredible numbers is in their damage capabilities. AC, saves, attack bonuses and HP is actually kind of piddly which worries me a little bit as creatures with similar advantages could easily kill them just as quickly as they can be killed, effectively making a game of rocket launcher tag at level 3.
On session 1, which is in two weeks, I'll start off with a moderately high amount of CR1 and CR2 creatures to test the waters and see how much punishment they can actually take. My guess is that they'll plow through monsters like butter but have a hard time getting hit so high amounts of appropriately powerful monsters would work out best. Luckily I have some time to sort out humanoid creatures that have the same advantages that they do because that could easily kill them.With monsters I can just modify them up to adjust to whatever's going on. I start off with a base of what's appropriate for their levels and then templates versions in case they start dying before they can do anything. The templates from the Advanced Bestiary help out a lot in this.
From my last post I eventually decided to add a weapon training feat to the game. This was popular for anyone that wanted to use a firearm but it did reveal one issue with firearms in general which was that it was a very feat intensive fighting style. This makes me less worried about too much damage coming from firearms because anyone that gets out a cheezy amount of damage out of it has to pay the feat price but no one is so hard hit by it that anyone is avoiding firearms.
As anticipated Fantastic Technology from Fat Goblin Games was a BIG hit at character creation. I wanted to use more dynamic monsters and equip the players with actual technology at level 3 despite technology being super expensive so I implemented this house rule:
For the purposes of character creation technological equipment is 10% of it’s normal cost and psionic and alchemical items are 50% their normal cost. This cost reduction is applied after changes such as masterwork, enchantment and material. Items technologically modified or made of skymetals, nanoweve, or plastic are considered technological. After buying equipment each character has 100 gp remaining regardless of how much of the 5000 gp was spent.
Plastic was from Fantastic Technology and effectively is mithril that doesn't adjust the armor category and actually makes the armor cheaper, so rather than make adjustments from Anachronistic Adventures this just made armor better and cheaper by material conversion. It also made melee combat actually possible with a higher variety of weapons which was big for everyone. The technological modifications allowed players to dip deeper into the technological while still having a foot in comfortable and familiar territory. Basically, big shout out to Fat Goblin Games.
As for other things that were popular; I'll have the full build breakdowns in two weeks as the finalized characters trickle in but I have one class from It Came from the Stars (Starseed), two psionic classes (Soulknife and Psychic Warrior), two from Anachronistic Adventures, (Enforcer and Cogiator), and one from Classes of NeoExodus (The Host).
Starting two weeks from now I'll try to make a report on each session to give details about how I'm running the campaign, but in the meantime I'll post some more about the world and the campaign including maps and plot lines.
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