Thursday, June 7, 2012

Fallout D&D: The Capitol Wasteland

So, as I was thinking of a title for this post, I almost wanted to call it "Gamma World: The Capitol Wasteland" but this character is most distinctly a D&D4E character and not one made under the Gamma World ruleset, so I decided against it.

When I crafted Anakin Skywalker, I had this idea of making an off-stat D&D character.  Later, I would repeat that effort with C-3PO.  Both of them were characters who were Strength based but neither of them utilized Strength at all based on peculiar power or feat selection.  In doing all that, one completely obvious thing seemed to slip right by me.

A Bow Slayer is RIDICULOUS.

I think I experimented with the Bow Slayer at first but was turned off by the fact that Power Strike was for melee weapon attacks only.  After doing some reading and thinking, I quickly realized that it did not matter for the Bow Slayer because he was doing an extra +2 or +3 damage with every attack, making the bonus [W] from Power Strike not worth it.

After toying around, I came up with a Bow Slayer idea that worked.  Although I have a few Star Wars themed ones sitting in the hopper, I wanted to give people something from a completely different intellectual property for a change.
He who controls his contract controls Charon.
Nice thing about Essentials: more compact card.
Fallout 3 is an interesting setting because there are a number of readily portable characters for use in D&D.  Furthermore, the existence of Gamma World provides a host of readily transferrable game content (maps, monsters, and the like).  Before Gamma World was announced, I had spent considerable time planning a Fallout: Seattle based game; that was, of course, until I learned that Gamma World was a little bit different than I had expected.

There is not a whole lot of strangeness going on with this character.  I did do a few things, though, based on the character I was trying to make.  I eliminated his Power Strike from the card completely.  As I had given him no melee attacks, having power strike on there was pointless.  The observant will notice that Charon has a peculiar ability, "Never Dying."  This was an attempt to make the Revenant ability "Undying Vitality" work in a more power-based way.  I realize some people may be bothered by this.  I just feel like it is very easy to forget things written in the "Features" section of the character sheet that have specific triggers or conditions.  Hopefully, this will allow people to remember it more easily.

Fallout purists may get upset.  Charon is listed as having a chinese assault rifle.  That's a personal preference.  I eventually gave Charon a chinese assault rifle and 5.56mm ammunition as I felt his special shotgun just was not doing it for me.  Also, as it ends up, it worked better for the character concept.

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