FrankTrollman wrote:
I don't think there's much advantage in having a new set of classes pop in at level 6. At level 11, you are building a city and fighting armies and your opponents are generals and dukes. At level 6 you're fighting a Clay Golem instead of a Wood Golem or a Spectre instead of a Wraith. The enemies at level 6 are just palette swaps of the monsters at level 5, so there's no reason that a character concept that is adequate at level 5 could be inadequate at level 6.
I say to thee,
bollocks.
First, the same is true of levels 10 and 11 - you don't hit a sudden gear shift at
any point. But at some point
around level 10 you've graduated from fighting golems to overthrowing kingdoms. If anything, level 10 is a bit late given how the game is currently constructed.
At some point
around level 6, you've graduated from being a rag-tag group of murder-hobos to being a highly compensated strike force
with flunkies:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#leadership
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/charmMonster.htm
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/planarAllyLesser.htm
so it's true that you don't have to govern hexes yet but you
do have to supply your band of merry men, and you also start to have time and space adventures around this level, so I think that's a big enough transition to justify giving people the opportunity to grow into new character concepts at that point. As you've previously indicated, you shouldn't have people hop into new class rails independently, so
by your own mammal law, it makes sense to hand out the first raft of 2nd tier character concepts at level 6.
It's true that fewer concepts expire at this point compared to the number who expire when you want to rule entire hexes but I really don't think that's a sound argument. It is true that you'll want classes such as "Cavalier" (more fighter) and "Assassin" (more rogue.)
FrankTrollman wrote:The monsters have bigger numbers, but your class could just give you bigger numbers and the cheese stands alone. I could be persuaded to have people switch to advanced classes at level 6, but I don't currently see any particular reason for it.
LIES. You see perfectly well and are just being contrarian.
I don't see how that addresses peoples' desire to play monsters
The alternative is, if you want to play a Troll, you have to take all 10 levels of Bruiser? Or there is some funky variant-rogue progression that only Trolls take, and at that point why can't I jump on that bandwagon as a 5th level fighter I might legitimately ask?
or multiclassed characters.
It doesn't. For hybrid concepts you would still need hybrid classes, and you'd have people hopping onto them at level 6 instead of level 11 quite often, I'm sure.
Yes, you could imagine someone playing a Fire Giant / Shadowdancer, but what if they wanted to play a Minotaur Shaman or a Necromancer from a Drow Great House? Those seem like pretty reasonable character concepts, but since neither Minotaur nor Fiendish Drow are 5th level monsters, your breakpoints schema doesn't actually work.
The breakpoint schema
does require monsters to be pigeon-holed into slots, for which I would propose:
[*] Humans (Goblins and Kobolds?) who start with 2 kits.
[*] Dwarves, Elves, Orcs and etc., who start with 1 kit - so effectively, being a dwarf or an elf or whatever is your second kit.
[*] Fiendish Drow and Phreints who start with
0 kits.
[*] Minotaurs who start with
-1 kits which means you can't enter play until 3rd level (when you would otherwise get another kit). PC Minotaurs and other ~3HD bogguns would still have all class levels instead of 3 HD of
Monstrous HumanoidBruiser, although vanilla Minotaurs could go ahead and take the Bruiser class (the Minotaur captain could get a PC class, obviously).
[*] Fire Giants (and Ice Giants, and Hill Giants) who start with
1 heroic kit at 6th level, with 5 levels of monster classes, when you'd otherwise have 3 adventurer-tier kits and 1 heroic kit.
[*] Medusae and Trolls who have better powers than Fire Giants and who thus start with
0 heroic kits at 6th level.
and so on for Lordly kits (11-15) and Epic kits (16-20) if you want to be a Mind Flayer or something.
First off, we're going to let people play Fire Giants, Werejaguars and Medusas. Playtesting is not going to be comprehensive.
Yes we are. But we only have five monster classes: Brute, Controller, Harrier, Lurker, and Ravager.... A Fire Giant Rogue can be pretty similar to a Hill Giant Rogue who just happens to start at 9th level instead of 6th. There are a few minor changes involving being on fire instead of not, but that's relatively small potatoes considering.
I think it is
much better to have both the Hill Giant and Fire Giant start at level 6, and then take levels of Assassin (which is what "more levels of rogue" are called for levels 6-10) even though common Fire Giants are 9th level.
Making hundreds of monster classes is not practical. You make a small number of monster classes and you give them some power selections and you call it a day.
You haven't fixed the problem so much as renamed it. Yes, Ghast and Werejaguar may be
nominally the same class but if they have completely different powers it doesn't solve the balance issue. It also doesn't solve the issue of what combination of racial powers and class features a Werejaguar would actually get on entering play.
Sequential multiclassing without open-multiclassing doesn't actually let you do any of the things you'd want to do with multiclassing other than "Here's a new character concept that is level appropriate for where you are now."
Gosh is that all?
"How do I play a Drider Sorcerer?"
You don't, you play a Drider Dragonator instead.
I'm still not clear on what
your proposal is on this? The Drider would sacrifice a bunch of lower-level class features? To me, Sorcerer-6(5 Lurker substition levels) is
clearly worse and more fiddly than
DriderLurker-5 / Prism Mage-1.
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