The Gaming Den

I like the AS approach since it allows a lot of freedom. E.g., I'd like it if any vampire can learn any discipline with enough study, but every gangrel starts with some shape shifting and every nosferatu can talk to animals.

FrankTrollman wrote:

Maxus wrote:There's traction for it. Have a vampire base class and then PrCs to represent different gimmicks--the whole Chiltren off Zer Night thing, vampire hyponisis specialists, blood-powered warriors and then some sort of Nosferatu goes-all-freaky vampire type.

Any other VtM archetypes worth doing that're classically vampiric?

4e tried to sell me on the 4 roles and badly failed in that job. But there are three supported roles. You have warriors (which include fighters and rogues), you have support (which includes clerics and bards), and you have blasters (which is wizards and everyone who plays in the wizard pond). We can take a note from 4e and call the support classes "Leaders" because it makes them feel better.
-Username17

Score!

I actually hadn't been coming up with 4 because of 4e's roles, it was because that's all the archetypes I could think of.

Gracias, this will be something to think about while I'd not up to much at work.

FrankTrollman wrote:It is deeply weird that 3rd edition never did a spooky/scary classes book right.

In a zero-to-hero game where you're meant to start as a zero and there are lvl 7 farmers, promising anything beyond Monster High as a sales pitch would be delusional.

Except that a Monster High RPG would be an amazing success. Less so now than when the franchise hit shelves a couple years back, but still.

In fact, I should really go back to working on that...

Prak wrote:Except that a Monster High RPG would be an amazing success.

No one said otherwise, the only thing PCs wouldn't be is scary. They may be stylish, they may be fun to play, they may get into all kind of wacky hijinks, but scary? Heavens, no.

You can sell sparklepyres as a z2h, you can sell Scooby Do as a z2h, you can sell Monster High as a z2h, you can sell MLP as a z2h. You can't sell Dracula and Freddy Krueger as a z2h because lvl 7 farmers are not scared of magic missile.

Fair point.

By "level 7 farmers" do you mean the NPC monsters in monster PCs' communities? Because otherwise the obvious counter to this line of argument is that there aren't any level 7 farmers (and whyever should or would there be?)

By RAW, there are totally level 7 farmers. Now, the community charts in the DMG are offensively stupid, but they do totally say that even thorpes of 20-80 people seriously have one 7th level commoner, two 3rd level commoners, and four 1st level commoners on average. They also, on average, have a 4th level expert, two 2nd level experts and four 1st level experts, and a 2nd level warrior and two 1st level warriors, and no fucking explanation of what the other 3 to 63 people in the thorp are. Except for the 4% of thorps that have level 10 druids and level 8 rangers slumming it in them with their circles of two 5/4th level, four 2nd level and eight 1st level druids/rangers.

If you get out to a hamlet, with 81-400 people, the big commoner in town is level 8, and the local druid in 4% of hamlets is 11th level.

Nothing in any 3E publication has ever been written under the assumption that those demographics are valid, so even though they are nominally RAW, since they are as you say offensively stupid I disregard them as a matter of course.

I always figured they were an attempt at an impartial determination for times when the players were seeking out a specific class/level of person.

e.g. "Hey, we need a cleric that can cast Raise Dead. Is there one in this town?"

Yes, probably. And while that is something I'd prefer to be entirely setting-spesific, there are good reasons to include default guidelines for it in the DMG.

However there are no good reasons to apply those same guidelines to NPC classes like Warriors and Commoners. (Really, those classes are a bad idea out the gate. A 20th or even 10th level commoner is a contradiction in terms.)

The entire commoner class was a mistake. The DMG should have 0 HD humanoids (in which case they should default to a d6 hp, weak saves and bab and a shit list of skills) to represent untrained yokels and youngsters.

The smith or even the experienced farmer should be Experts. And then I don't particularly care if there's a king of bakers living somewhere with 15 levels of expert that rolls to bake godly cakes with a +30 check.

Prak wrote:Now, the community charts in the DMG are offensively stupid, but they do totally say that even thorpes of 20-80 people seriously have one 7th level commoner, two 3rd level commoners, and four 1st level commoners on average. They also, on average, have a 4th level expert, two 2nd level experts and four 1st level experts, and a 2nd level warrior and two 1st level warriors, and no fucking explanation of what the other 3 to 63 people in the thorp are.

Actually, the DMG does give an explanation for the rest of those:

DMG 139 wrote:Do the same for NPC classes, but leave out the final stage that would generate the number of 1st-level individuals. Instead, take the remaining population after all other characters are generated and divide it up so that 91% are commoners, 5% are warriors, 3% are experts, and the remaining 1% is equally divided between aristocrats and adepts (0.5% each). All these characters are 1st level.

So an 80-person thorp, assuming average rolls, has 55 1st-level commoners, 3 1st-level warriors, and 2 1st-level experts after determining the 1st-level PC classes and the above-1st-level NBC classes.

Not that you'd ever use those rules, as everyone has said, but they do exist.

nockermensch wrote:The smith or even the experienced farmer should be Experts. And then I don't particularly care if there's a king of bakers living somewhere with 15 levels of expert that rolls to bake godly cakes with a +30 check.

New character idea, thanks.