[OSSR]Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st Edition)

[Username17]

The point is your example of a peasant rising into an adventurer is all about social interactions and that can be a good story but it's not actually a thing that a system needs to emulate because you'd be better served just sitting down with your players and telling the story of their training if that is a story they what to tell.

I disagree quite strongly. The peasant adventurer often faces actual monsters. When you're Perrin, you're a craft apprentice and you fight Trollocs one at a time until you get to take a level in badass. If you're Aragorn, you have Merry and Pippin as followers and they are just a farmer and a day laborer until they take a level in badass - and you're still fighting Nazgul.

Peasant to adventurer adventures happen both with the peasants as protagonists (as the case of Perrin) and as followers (as in the case of Pippin). And the peasant adventures are quite likely to be normal D&D adventures. Especially for the peasant followers, who are literally henchmen to rangers and sorcerers.

I've wanted/hoped for something like this for quite a while, myself.

I've wondered a few times if a 5 (or so) level sub-game could be made out of NPC classes.
Across those 5 or so levels you gain skill ranks in your profession and slowly earn your target base class's Level 1 perks.

Not without a major overhaul to the way D&D works. As long as a 1st level Wizard can have 3 hit points and a 1st level Fighter can have 1 skill, there's no room for characters to be members of the non-heroic tier and be any less than that.

4e's hit point inflation actually created space for civilian tier combatants. But you'd still have to use a different skill system that accommodated such concepts.

-Username17

[darkmaster]

Okay, I'm not overly familiar with Wheel of Time so I guess I can't really talk about that one, but on the topic of Merry and Pippin. Are you taking the fucking piss? Merry and Pippin's effect on the battle field at any point in the story falls somewhere between fuck and all. They start out as incompetent burdens to the party who stumbled into shit and they end the story as exactly the same incompetent burdens to the party, but their party changes. Their single greatest contribution to the story is to get lost and remind Treebeard to stop being such a senile idiot. Literally any of the hobbits would have been a better example but they'd still be terrible examples. Bilbo wins because he found the one ring, and Frodo and Sam get through their problems through luck and plot convenience.

So I guess, yes, if you give the plebs disproportionately powerful artifacts or plot specific magic items that just happen to be the exact thing they need to get out of the situation they're in then they too can go out a stabbing.

I guess yeah Perrin could be a good example, but given that all your other examples have either been horse shit on toast or not about people going out and stabbing things I'd be willing to bet his journey from whatever he did to level one tastes suspiciously like luck and manure as well.

And let's be clear, these are not necessarily bad stories, at least the ones I'm familiar with are good stories, the hobbit is one of my favorite books, but those are also stories you do not need a system for, and in fact they're even less suited to a system than stories about the characters training for their profession because they are literally run on improbable happenstance.

[RadiantPhoenix]

All four of the hobbits of the Fellowship come back considerably more badass than when they left.

The Scouring of the Shire is just the hobbits coming back and driving Saruman out of yet another place he's taken over.

[Username17]

I'm just going to quote the Lord of the Rings wiki here:

During the Last Battle before the Morannon (Black Gate), Pippin managed to slay one of the Olog-hai, a troll-race bred by Sauron, the first hobbit ever to do so.

When Nazgûl attacked the Riders of Rohan and Théoden was injured, Merry and Éowyn faced the Witch King of Angmar alone. Here, Merry's companion revealed herself to be Éowyn. Battling both fell beast and the Nazgûl alone, Éowyn was well assisted by Merry's crucial move: his sword, built for this very purpose, was one of the few weapons able to pierce the Ringwraith's form, but at a great expense to himself.

While never getting to be as hard core as Aragorn or even Gimli, Merry and Pippin do in fact end the series as bad asses who fight and defeat major named enemies. Merry teams up with one other minor character to take down the head of the Nazguls, who is like the #3 named villain in the book.

They are a solid example of going from Civilian Tier to Heroic Tier during the course of regular D&D style adventures. And they are from the premier pieces of source material for the fantasy role playing game genre. Halfling fighters are in the game at all because of them, and they demonstrably start the adventure that they are from at civilian tier.

-Username17

[Orca]

Details aside, the farmer boy (occasionally girl) who goes on an adventure, gains some magic or martial power and becomes a badass is such a common theme in fantasy fiction that I can't believe anyone's doubting it exists. I think I've read hundreds of these. Do I have to throw tvtropes at you?

Warhammer was a pretty terrible RPG even for the time, but the idea of a RPG which really supported starting as an ordinary person and muddling thru some less than heroic adventures had enough support to keep it going. Runequest handled the same thing better IMO, but it wasn't sold to people that way.