Kenny285's page

Big dumb question time, but whats wrong with the Blackguard being the iconic black knight while its fine for the paladin being the white knight. They are two sides of the same coin. One fights for good while the other sides with evil. The point most people bring up now is that paladins derive their powers from the influance of a good deity. But there are evil gods as well so why wouldnt thay have their own champions. One that can use undead minions and dosnt think about the dishonour there might be seen in using poisen, but even that can be taken differant ways. Who says making use of poisan is dishonerable? Is it not more prudent to poisan your enemy at his dinner table than fight him in open combat when you have no chance of winning. Its a fully valid tactic and has been for hundreds of years. If you want a guy that runs about being sneaky and stabbing people in the back isnt that what the assassin is for?

And back to something brought up earlier under the varient rules available in some books you could do paladins that didnt get spells so wouldnt have to pray to their god each day, they could in theory at least being watched over by a god making use of them to further their own end, its not like that is unheard of and so why couldnt the same be said for the blackguard. A dark blessed warrior who's terrible plans just so happen to suit the schemes of a particular evil god. This would mean the class could be done as a non spellcasting class so cooling the need to have him/her/it venerate a good directly to gain his class features. Would make for a nice tool for DM's as well when the player is no longer working within his patrons plans to have him begin loosing his gifts. Hence giving him the same risks that the Paladin runs when he chooses how to act in a given situation.

I'm not a big fan of adding loads of new classes to the game. If you go through all the splat books that wizards produced for 3.5 I always find the full classes to be specialised versions of the base classes and little more. What I’d prefer to see is additional feats that could be taken to make specialised versions of a class without the need to have whole new sets of class features. Examples might be a feat that allows you to add your intelligence to your damage rolls with light weapons that you have weapon finesse with a bit like the swashbuckler gets or variant class features similar to those in the Pathfinder campaign setting book (academy trained fighter or the cleric that has no domains but better BAB and HP) or like those found in Complete Champion. It be another way of having characters using the same class from being vastly different without having to produce endless new classes or gods help us the sea of prestige classes that you used to get in every book from wizards.

This said I would like to see Blackguard as a full class. If Paladins are the warriors of good and righteousness then surely there would be warriors of darker more downright unpleasant ideals.