Has anyone put some thought into converting monster classes from Savage Species int Pathfinder? Savage Species was one of my favorite 3.0/3.5 books. I wonder if monster classes would be too powerful to be converted because Pathfinder standard classes are already very powerful.
*sighs*
I have a love affair with Appendix 1 of Savage Species.
.
.
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That and the 3.0 apprentice rules.I always thought they were a good way to turn a monster with an ELC into a playable character race.
I truly agree. I had the joy of playing a bronze dragon wyrmling (from Dragon Magazine), an ogre mage and a rakshasa (for an evil campaign, not my cup of tea).
What about you, SirUrza. Have any found memories of playing monster classes?
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What about you, SirUrza. Have any found memories of playing monster classes?
Played a succubus once. Doing a high level dungeon delve so we were able to generate any kind of character we wanted. I took a few levels of succubus and the rest sorcerer. She was VERY powerful... she also turned and killed two of the other PCs.
Neither of them saw it coming because no one except the DM knew she was a succubus until she attacked and killed two them. :)
*sighs*
I have a love affair with Appendix 1 of Savage Species.
.
.
.
That and the 3.0 apprentice rules.I always thought they were a good way to turn a monster with an ELC into a playable character race.
I truly agree. I had the joy of playing a bronze dragon wyrmling (from Dragon Magazine), an ogre mage and a rakshasa (for an evil campaign, not my cup of tea).
What about you, SirUrza. Have any found memories of playing monster classes?
I had a ghale floating around as the party's healbot for a 3.5 campaign.
I just finished converting all dragons into a level progression - to get my dragon fix! It still needs some tweaks....
Have any found memories of playing monster classes?
I can never resist answering that question (even when it's not directed at me.)
I saw Savage Species as a wonderful opportunity to play all kinds of GOOD monsters, like a low-level genie, and a low-level Astra Deva (basically a "fallen angel" who was working his way back up to celestial-hood.)
Not all monsters are evil!
I had to quit that when I switched to Pathfinder RPG, alas. I was still hoping to use the winged template, or to play a hound archon. And I wonder how well an underage ogre or minotaur might have turned out...?
And even without Savage Species, I loved playing a pixie. I never enjoyed playing a rogue, except when playing a PIXIE rogue.
I just finished converting all dragons into a level progression - to get my dragon fix! It still needs some tweaks....
Could you show those dragon level progressions? I would love to see them! :)
Have any found memories of playing monster classes?I can never resist answering that question (even when it's not directed at me.)
I saw Savage Species as a wonderful opportunity to play all kinds of GOOD monsters, like a low-level genie, and a low-level Astra Deva (basically a "fallen angel" who was working his way back up to celestial-hood.)
Not all monsters are evil!
I had to quit that when I switched to Pathfinder RPG, alas. I was still hoping to use the winged template, or to play a hound archon. And I wonder how well an underage ogre or minotaur might have turned out...?
And even without Savage Species, I loved playing a pixie. I never enjoyed playing a rogue, except when playing a PIXIE rogue.
Pixie DO make excellent rogues. Here is my Ideal Monster Class Selection:
Astral Deva Monster Class/Monk Gestalt Class (from Unearthed Arcana), Full Progression (no Prestige Classes), Gain Vow of Poverty (from Book of Exalted Deeds) as soon as possible. More over He-Man, there's a new sheriff on Eterna!
I've never seen this book before but have been directed towards it for a campaign I'm trying to put together. The idea is that the players will be Blink Dogs, but I'm hitting a wall with converting the monster write-up to a racial template.
The more I read online I'm not sure if this is a good book to get at this point or if it would just confuse the process.
Any thoughts would be grand.
Also, visit here to see the conversation on it so far.
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I actually have converted a Bestiary Levels...ie Savage Species Book. Its not completed, since the Bestiary II came out and gave me more work =)
I was going to create a thread for it so people could help edit and correct any miscalculations and get input on it when I was more near completion, But here is a sample:
Go to Bestiary Levels (Sample)
I actually have converted a Bestiary Levels...ie Savage Species Book. Its not completed, since the Bestiary II came out and gave me more work =)
I was going to create a thread for it so people could help edit and correct any miscalculations and get input on it when I was more near completion, But here is a sample:
Go to Bestiary Levels (Sample)
I love the idea - Savage Species was an amazing idea, badly implemented - and your production values are awesome, but you seem to advance levels = HD, which make your levels wildly unbalanced with other races and classes. Why wouldn't you play an astral deva instead of a core book character, while the medusa seems kind of lacking in goodies in comparison. I also couldn't find weapon and armor proficiencies, but since that was a sample it may simply be in a part of the full doc not included. Keep at it though, I'd love to see the final product, even if I had to pay for the PDF. That said, it's a great way to drop the power of the existing creatures to a lower CR without taking away any flavor. You can face such a beastie at any point in its development.
Thanks for the input! Again, this being a sample – its filled with typos and unfinished pages. I’d been kicking around the idea for awhile and had originally set the levels based on the CR values. But when I mapped out the adjustments it was very very powerful compared to a core race with equivalent class levels. When I readjusted and set it to the monsters HD, everything seemed to fall into place a bit smoother and expanded the number of levels it took to reach most of the monster classes. I did a few play tests with 5th level human fighter versus 5th level Astra Deva and for the most part the fighter won. That’s not to say it will work with every monster versus every core class, but it did seem to smooth out some wrinkles.
@zerzix:
That looks pretty cool. I don't have the book, so I'm not sure of all the particulars of how that all works out, but it looks pretty cool.
Do you think you can do a Blink Dog write up and post it on here? I'm curious how they would play out with levels. I'm not sure why some pages had less than 20 levels and others had more, but could the Blink Dog page have 20?
Front loading is a great idea...but there are a few things, like dragons dex that as they age or grow in size it decreases. So in that aspect it still is a negative as you level up.
Ethermagus - My break down of a Blink Dog.
The reason some creatures have more levels than others is obviously some creatures (Take a dragon) are a lot more power than others (say a blink dog). As per Pathfinder Beastiary they suggest that the creatures CR level by the standard so that a blink dog with a CR 2 is roughly similar in level to a 2nd level character.
I found when breaking down the monsters into equal levels per CR that they tended to be a little too powerful for my taste and made a judgment call to break them down per hit dice instead. This seemed (Especially with Dragons and more powerful creatures) to smooth out a lot of number crunching and lowered the monsters effective power to sit a little behind an equal leveled core race pc(or at least not too much more powerful).
So looking at the blink dog as a CR 2 you could break it down to a 2 Level Class or according to how I have been doing things into 3 class levels. Then any xp earned after 3rd level would then go into a core class (ie fighter blink dog or ranger blink dogs and so on.)
Aah, I get it, I think. So these levels bring them up to the Bestiary description level. From there, we would use the normal advancement rules from the core book?
That makes more sense seen from that perspective.
BTW, thanks for the write-up. I may just have to go out and buy Savage Species. Is it PF optimized or converted from 3.0/3.5?
Exactly, right. So your blink after 3 creatures levels can advance as a wizard or something else. More powerful the monster the more creature levels he is broken into and therefore longer time before he can begin taking core classes and why a creature like a dragon can take up to 20+ levels to complete its progression.
Savage Species is 3.x, but has alot of nice info and some nice monster feats. Again my intent is to convert it completely into PF.
I absolutely hated the book, probably because I have a healthy respect for roleplay and game balance. I am not convinced it would be a good book for paizo if they are concerned with some kind of official balance scale, best hopes is for a 3rd party to convert it.
Thanks again, Zerzix. I really appreciate the work; keep it up!