Allegory and I often have extremely different preferences when it comes to what is important in a game, therefore, consider what I will say as a second opinion.
I prefer 3.5
I believe NWN was 3.0 3.5 made a lot of improvements, broke some other stuff.
You can torrent most of the books, but you should buy at least the three core rulebooks for convenience. It's annoying as hell to level up on a computer screen. Definitely get the complete series if you are doing 3.5: Complete Warrior Complete Arcane etc.
The Book of Nine Swords is nice if you want to completely obsolete the melee classes, but it's nice for an overpowered game.
I've always made up words from scratch. That doesn't mean you can't steal **** from other games and change it sufficiently to where it's your own. Many times they end up as composites. Established campaigns are just amazing in terms of how much **** and lore is out there for you to do though. I like Faerun a lot simply because I'm used to it and I played Baldur's Gate before I ever PnP'd
If you want to create a world, then I'll just tell you what I do with it.
One thing I despise is when the entire world is like the size of Texas. I'll always start by imagining at least a continent and then pick a spot to start with, then make the region. There's really no reason why an adventuring group should have to explore the entire damn world. For the first world I did I took a lot of the geography from the Suikoden source material, then started the party where the Jowston Federation would have been. That gave me a lake, some mountains, a bunch of woods and plains, and a nice place to put cities.
Once you've made a map, start filling it in. Try to make geography flow naturally; don't stick a freakin desert in the middle of a forest (unless it's magical or something), and scatter landscape with a few major cities, nations or kingdoms, and some hamlets. I can't stand it when the scope of a campaign is a ton of major cities with no small towns.
Campaigns can be as linear or as open as they are designed for. I played in a campaign that took me from 1-16 once and it was an incredibly linear quest to rescue hieroniaus' daughter. I prefer to make mine pretty open though, with a generalized main plot giver existing in the world, but allowing a party time to explore cities and stuff. In terms of exploration (if you aren't doing a linera campaign) you don't need to have people play monopoly on a city map or anything. What I like to do is set out four or five points of interest in a city and tell people what locations might be happinin' Often, they will then discover -new- places to go that were previously hidden to them.
You don't need to roleplay every moment of the characters lives by the way. Some people get overboard on that ****; for example, don't make people act out setting up a camp or something. It's just silly.
Don't be paralyzed with the fact that you aren't writing the greatest fantasy novel of all time. It's a game; have fun with it.
Prepare to invest maybe 10X as much time in the game as players do.
Don't be afraid to change the rules. If you do change the rules then be consistent with it. Try to think of any general changes to rules
before you start a game. If you don't want to deal with a lot of extra rules or rule changes, then ban every sourcebook from your game except the main three, and stick to them exactly.
Don't be an *** about side talking, but don't let it's pernicious and devious influence destroy a night. Take 15 minutes to chill or something if people are getting distracted.
Quote:
As with any major change, I'm going to see those that like it and those that don't. We'll probably end up using 4.0, simply because those sourcebooks would probably be more readily available at the local comic shop (I'll have to pop down there and take a look soon).
I amazed all of 3.5 for about 10$ each.
I never got to high enough levels in 4.0 to say, but in 3.5 the most broken character I've ever played was a 10wiz/6initiate of the sevenfold viel (you know prismatic wall? it's a class based around that) You just couldn't kill the ******* guy.
Well okay I got killed once by blasphemy... but that was just cheap.