Man, 6 or 7 is pretty ambitious. The D&D PbP we've got going in Community struggles to get and stay above four players, and only two current players were in the original group.
I may be potentially interested, but I have noticed my penchant for huge wall of texts posts of storytelling and description has diminished considerably from where I started out...
I definitely want to aim high. I'm not delusional though.
I wonder what has diminished your interest in that style of posting. Obviously it would be something I would have to think about. (I'll be keeping a close eye on the current PbP game.)
Honestly I don't see the huge appeal of DND and Pathfinder. I am currently in a DND game, and there's just such a widespread disparity between the classes. We have a party monk who is useless. Absolutely useless. Meanwhile the party fighter can wreck things up. This is at low levels. At high level play so many enemies give martial classes problems. Magic also seems to become absurdly broken, especially if you take some non-core stuff and can exploit metamagic to the point where you can metamagic 9th level spells at no cost.
And in non-Pathfinder DND humans are stupidly better than the other races, unless you're running a build that requires few feats or skill points.
It also seems to require a large amount of house rules. I made a Binder (Tome of Magic class) and had an insane diplomacy score by level 3 thanks to skill synergies and a high charisma. Diplomacy is a set DC and I can practically take anyone hostile and turn them friendly in a single roll.
I assume you mean 3e DnD? Monks are like the worst class, no? There is a tier list, but I don't pay too much attention to it. It is probably the worst designed class if nothing else. Things just don't fit together. I don't think they are suppose to be completely useless at low levels though. If you are using Tome of Magic, then maybe Tome of Battle is available for your friend lol. One thing you have to realize is that additional source books will often lead to a power creep simply because they are made after the fact and may try to balance things in weird ways. It is sort of the DM's responsibility to realize which should or should not be used (after all there are probably, no joke, hundreds of thousands of d20 documents published under the OGL). One might think restricting it to Wizards products would be enough, but no.
Yeah, I love me some house rules though. Granted every game is probably better with them.
I make it (or made it, since it has been awhile) so that you can never shift disposition more than one tier with diplomacy. I like using that skill to give players a "dossier" on the character they are dealing with. Basically something that says "this is how you butter him up, this is what you don't want to say, etc" and leave it to role-playing. Depth of details (including the possibility of false information through spectacularly bad rolls) are based on the skill level of the user (knowledge skills are also thrown in). Get a 40 and you basically know the dude's favorite erogenous zones just by looking at him talk.
I simply have no interest in ever going over level 15 in DnD. I'm totally okay if epic rules just started in the early to mid teens (for NPCs too). I've seen similar rulesets for even lower levels (6-8), but personally I like to give prestige classes some breathing room.
EDIT: IIRC Binder is some potentially broken stuff, especially if people use it for multiclass dipping. Think Tome of Magic got negative reception for that.
