Homebrew Tourist Class

[will_asher]

I have made a homebrew 'Tourist' character class. It was inspired by the nethack character class which was in turn inspired by Twoflower of the 1st two Discworld books (but there's no equivelent to the luggage in the character class...).
I thought I'd post it here to see what people think.

This link downloads my htm file with the Tourist class.

This link goes to my online page for the Tourist class on Google sites.
I couldn't get the internal page links to work on Google sites, so it's easier to maneuver the page if you download the htm file.

Quick summary/concept:
The tourist learns magic by making sloppy notes in a language he can understand (he can't read magical writing).
He casts arcane spells up to 6th level mostly similar to how a wizard casts (using intelligence and preparing spells).
He specializes in navagation, travel knowledge, and reliance on luck.
He's supposed to be a challenge class, a little weaker than other classes especially on early levels, but I want him to be playable alongside other player classes.
He also supposed to be unconventional. There's several aspects of the class which don't follow the usual mechanics for class features.

[Cheapy]

I loved the Tourist in nethack. This'll be interesting.

First thing I am seeing is that it's really complicated early on.

Spell Journal: Forgery doesn't exist as a skill anymore. Not a fan of rolling everytime just to see if you failed. It makes the class really fiddly, which makes it really complicated.

Luck Magic: See fiddly comments above.

These guys are split between Int and Charisma, and both are pretty important it seems. The "half Charisma modifier + 1" is really different from most abilities in the game.

I haven't read the whole class, but it seems that you're to map over the mechanics of the tourist, which I don't think is working out too well. I would focus more on the feel of the tourist class than anything else, and probably play up the "fish out of water" feel that the nethack class had.

One of the 3rd party companies has an "anachronistic adventures" line where it's all about fish-out-of-water type classes. You can find it here. The Luminary might work for a tourist type, although I haven't checked it out.

[will_asher]

I never liked it when classes seem to only have one really important ability score for all their class features, so the split between INT and CHA is intentional.

I made an exception that Forgery would still be a separate skill for the tourist. That's probably one of the most unconventional things about the tourist. Here's the reason why I did it that way:
The first draft of the character was made when I was GMing a modded 3.5 campaign and I liked the idea of the tourist learning magic by forgery because the knowledge of magic isn't meant for the likes of him, but he manages to learn some magic anyway. And when he does learn magic, he does things in a haphazard unconventional way. When I was recently updating the class for the Pathfinder system, I wasn't sure what to do with the tourist's forgery skill. I wanted to keep it separate and distinct from spellcraft, but combining it with linguistics didn't seem right because then the tourist would end up knowing a bunch of extra languages as a side effect. That didn't fit my idea for the flavor of this class, so I made it an exception. (In Discworld, the character Twoflower the tourist says he's good with langauges, but what he means is that he speaks his own langauge loud and slow thinking anyone should understand it.)

I also thought someone who learns and uses magic the way the tourist does should have less reliable spells than a normal arcane spellcaster. Maybe a lower save DC for his spells could replace the fail rate? But that wouldn't affect the spells that don't use a saving throw.

I had an alternate idea for the luck magic feature. Instead of rolling a d% every time to see if he learns a spell, I'd make it an active thing, so that when the tourist notices a spell, he can choose to try to learn it with his forgery skill. This way it would only happen when the player specifically thought about it and wanted to try to learn that spell. Not sure if that would actually be better though.

The first draft of this class was (kind of) tested once in my modded 3.5 campaign. The players got too busy and we ended up stopping that game after only a few sessions, so we didn't get much of a feel for how well the tourist mechanics worked. But the player of the tourist did really have fun with the flavor of the class. The tough part is working out mechanics which fit that flavor.

[Cheapy]

Do you have Kobold Quarterly #18? There's a class in there that gives me the vibe of the tourist: the savant. They are wanderers and story tellers that take on aspects of the stories they tell. Going off your description of Twoflower, sounds like you could user that as inspiration. They can only take on aspects they've seen though. And they can learn one aspect per day.

Maybe you could do the once per day thing too for learning magic?

That's a fair point on effectiveness of spells. I'm not sure that random is the answer though. Maybe give them casting at 4th level so they're at their level minus 3? Then a normal progression after that. If they are tourists, they won't be picking up magic so fast, after all.

Maybe instead of forgery, you use appraise? It doesn't make a ton of sense, but the nethack tourist had lots of gold and a credit card. It's tenuous but existent.