Black Hammer's page

There is a Brawler Base Class. The Ninja is a Rogue, its an archetype of the class itself.

Whoops. Was having flashbacks to a different version of ninja, clearly I'm getting too old for all these rules. Time to go play those diceless narrative games where everyone else is a different supernatural creature doing a normal things and I just want to be a normal guy doing unnatural things.

I like playing casters because I like making the GM tell me I can't do things.

"You can't summon whales on land."

"You can't summon whales in rivers."

"You can't summon whales in the ocean but inside a force cube."

"You know what? I don't care what the book says. Your whale summoning privileges are revoked."

"You do not do extra damage for using Wall of Stone to build a chimney/crematorium around an enemy then dropping Flamestrikes into it."

"You can't damage the antimagic golem with disintegrate. Yes, you can use disintegrate to make a hole in the floor. No, I don't know how much falling a twenty-ton object takes when it falls fifty feet. You can't disintegrate that much with one spell, it says it right here. Oh, you knew that... wait, how are you casting it three times in one turn?"

On an unrelated note, using RAW, Sharknados do surprisingly little damage.

Mechanically, bards are awesome because:

They are insane force multipliers. Whatever the rest of the party is doing, you can make them better at it. A guy in the party is good at something? Make him even more amazing at his specialty.

They are versatile. Nobody in the party can do something? Odds are you can, and you probably aren't even bad at it.

Action economy. With lingering song, you can get crazy utility out of your bard song uses for a ridiculously long time, all while still getting your normal actions most of the time.

Spell list isn't insane, but is solid enough on utility that you'll never be bored.

Charisma based classes are the most fun to play, because your primary stat has lots of applications outside combat besides lifting things.

Roleplay-wise, bards are awesome because:

Despite initial appearances, bards offer a lot of options for characterization. Sure, the lute-strumming strumpet or yodeling fool are there. But everything from rhetoric to dance counts as bardic performance, not just music. A Polonius mumbling moral anecdotes, a fiery demagogue preaching hellfire, or an actually competent tactician providing inspiring insights.

My favorite bard was heavily inspired by Ellis from L4D2. Didn't know beans about anything in an academic sense, but Bardic Knowledge was him knowing a story about everything.

Tangent time, getting to thoughts on ninjas last.

I don't like monks.

I never liked monks. I like the idea of unarmed specialists, but calling them monks and modelling them directly after the kung fu guy always bothered me. It's a stereotype, but there's also the stereotype of the massive, brooding brawler, the lightning-quick boxer, and so forth. Unlike fighter or cleric, which leave a lot of room in their definition, monk is unpleasantly tight.

You WILL run fast. You WILL make many weak iterative attacks a turn. You WILL get these bonuses to your will, and THESE skills.

Monk should be trashcanned entirely, replaced with a brawler-type of class, and offered a "David Carradine" specialization for those who want to walk through walls.

Oddly, they don't pay me to design RPGs. Wonder why.

As for ninjas in particular, I feel similarly. We have rogues. What does ninja offer that rogue doesn't? Especially since the class revolves around the distorted Hollywood ninja who fits poorly into a RPG except as minion fodder. There is no clear "historical" ninja, so we're left with Hollywood. The best representation of a ninja in film I can think of is Shichibei in Sword of Doom, and he's arguably also a great example of a rogue in every sense of the word. (He also has a gun.)

Stripped of the Eastern theme, what's left for ninja? I don't see enough space between monk (which I've ranted about above) and rogue to fit another base class. Assuming you gut monk and expand brawler, you could fit a "ninja" specialization crossing between brawler and rogue, perhaps, but as it stands, monk already has too much speed and stealth emphasis built into it.

Black Hammer wrote:

If it were my game, nobody in that group has a good alignment anymore, and aside from the one who dissented over murdering lizardman villagers in their sleep, they are on the fast track to Eviltown, population them and some dead, charred, defenseless lizardfolk

No one is good in this campaign to begin with.

The "GMS RUNNING GOOD CAMPAIGNS" bit led us astray, then.

Murdering kids over a gambling dispute. Sounds like like a normal day in rival tribal politics.

If it were my game, nobody in that group has a good alignment anymore, and aside from the one who dissented over murdering lizardman villagers in their sleep, they are on the fast track to Eviltown, population them and some dead, charred, defenseless lizardfolk.

I like situations similar to this as a GM. It gives the players a way to let their alignments stand out a bit. All too often the only difference between a LG character and a LN one is how much they donate to the temple. Neutral characters are a lot more willing to rack up the occasional "collateral damage" than good ones.

Depends on the tone of the game. Generally speaking, the fluff for a lot of trash humanoid monsters has them maturing quickly and not taking great care of their young for long. "Orphaning" a goblin who grows up inside three years and may well not be around his parents for half of that is a different animal than if that process takes twelve years and the doting attention of his entire tribe.

That aside, I generally avoid giving players a good reason to go into a goblin village and depopulate it. Being ambushed by goblins isn't terribly loaded; sure, they may be fathers, and there's the occasional fresh-faced juvenile recruit clutching his pointy stick in his shaky green hands who gets blown away with fireball backblast or a convenient cleave, but they did pick up weapons and start a fight.

If I'm going to put players in a moral situation, it's the result of a choice, either mine to trigger a little thought about character morality, or theirs to muck about in loaded territory.

Now, you specify a "good" campaign; is this merely in contrast to the "evil" campaign, or is it as explicitly good as the evil campaign tends to be evil? If your adventurers are supposed to be strong, moral folk out to better the world, and not just mercenary murder hobos who find it more convenient to be nice for business purposes, then I would throw moral situations at them regularly.

As a player, I once had a monk (religious, not punch-punch) leave adventuring and open an orphanage to alleviate the carnage left by his comrades, recognizing that while their work was for the greater good, once that good was accomplished he still had responsibility for the side effects of their actions. Also had a kobold who recruited all the leftovers from the kobold tribes the party shattered for his own personal fief, though I'm not sure becoming a kobold pirate king with an army of orphans fits with the "good campaign" thing.

I don't think the whole RAW discussion is actually relevant here, because the rules are written around the idea of playing an adventuring character in a fantasy world, not living in one. I have nearly as many pages of material on non-market valuation as I do on any given RPG setting, and that's material on indirectly modelling just a single narrow facet of an economy. Reality is more complex than RPGs, no surprise there.

If this was the "peasant farmer simulation game," we'd have a lot more rules on using the Knowledge: Soil skill to determine how friable your fields are, specific variants of Sleight of Hand to help deliver your lambs, and feats allowing your Blacksmith to specialize in making nails Adam Smith style.

High fantasy worlds are already a "technological explosion." The technology simply happens to be magic. The application and manipulation of an energy source to ever more complex uses. People often forget just how much bulk there is to technology, though. The Iron Age didn't just happen because someone melted a rock with black metal in it. Techniques for extracting the raw material had to be developed, first taking the ore from the ground and later smelting it. Then how to best work the metal into different useful forms. Look at the gap between iron as a common material and the full iron plow.

Adding RPG-style wizards to a medieval setting is like adding Delta Force to the Battle of Kadesh. Yeah, things would change. A lot. But how productive would those wizards be without their books and notes, their apprentices and their familiar, their labs and towers? Much like the Delta Force, once they used their initial resources they'd lose a lot of effectiveness as they had to find ways to source and power their abilities.

There are any number of reasons why magic might not be as influential as the way levelled PCs/NPCs should make it.

Maybe there's only so much raw magical energy to go around; if everyone starting casting spells, even little ones, it'd gradually get harder to cast anything at all. Wizards aren't insular and protecting of their knowledge simply because they are antisocial, but because they know more wizards mean weaker wizards.

Maybe the spells-per-day mechanic better represents a character's spellpool over a larger period of time, and after casting all of those spells for a couple of days in a row, it takes a lot longer than six hours of sleep to charge it back up.

Maybe any degree of productive spellcasting requires a certain amount of natural talent. You can give real people any degree of musical training, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to play anything well enough that people want to hear it. Maybe casting that minor cleaning cantrip takes them two hours, and it turns out like crap more often than not.

Maybe Darksun, where excess magic use ends poorly.

Admittedly, I tend to view anything made using magic as either somewhat inferior or rater temporary. Magic is generally supposed to be this chaotic, dynamic energy tied as much to the caster's imagination as their will. Magical food might sustain you, but it's like the Chinese food joke; after a few hours of eating it, you're hungry again, regardless of whether it was nutritional. But that goes back to the idea of GM fiat.

Best way to get someone to act as themself is make them not think they're acting.

Yeah, but while the character is an actor in your story, the player is not a puppet in your theatre. Personally, I'd be annoyed, and I've known many players who would respond to that by walking out.

I'd feel like the time to have told them this was when it happened, not now. If you're not going to offer the player an option as to how it turns out, you've essentially forced them to play a dead end for a few weeks instead of getting into a new character.

Sundakan has some good alternatives.

I'm a little surprised at all this disinterest in save-or-die and especially the heavier status effects (dominate, stun, etc). While I certainly avoid "spamming" such things on PCs, for example using multiple petrifying monsters in a single fight to force PCs to make multiple saves per turn until they inevitably fail, I certainly don't mind throwing in the occasional one.

That being said, I houserule like a fiend. A save every round against petrify or paralysis, death spells that drop you to negatives, or sunder effects that reduce a magic item's bonus by 2 until repaired. I find these sorts of effects both flavorful and threatening, so I don't want to avoid them. At the same time, though, the story is ultimately about the PCs winning, not dying in a hole somewhere.

For save-or-die, I generally limit it to foes who are both dramatically significant and thematically relevant. Bob the Bandit Bard shouldn't have a Wand of Roll Nine Or Reroll Your Character to use every round, but a super lich is going to have his undead minions summoned ahead of time and have a couple of nasty death effects ready to go.

I'm a big fan of Sunder and item destruction. I've never particularly liked the way magic weapons work, with people casually discarding the +3 sword that carried them through a half-dozen dungeons and a nail-biting dragon fight in favor of a new one the wizard claims is better.

The golf bag problem is something that doesn't bother me too much, provided there are some limits. Spellcasters are already so much more versatile than mundanes that I don't like discouraging a fighter from carrying a few backups or tactical alternatives.