Rich Baker
First Post
RE: 5E Birthright
Blooded scion as a race sounds interesting, but how would you handle things like blood theft? 5E races tend to give abilities that are important in low levels but less so in later ones. 2E Blooded Scions had the whole Blood Score which fed into how many blood abilities and how many Regency points a character got each domain turn. If you did a 5E Birthright today, how would you handle Blood Score if at all?
I think blood theft still works okay. I might suggest a simple system to begin with, such as "your base bloodline score equals your level." Great successes as a ruler earn you +1 bloodline score. Killing an enemy scion earns you +1 bloodline score. You'd build a small table of benefits that unlock at various score milestones for each bloodline. Yes, it might be a "better" race than standard if you're a 15th level character with a long string of successes, but if those tables are done right, then accumulating a couple of stat bumps or a handful of spell-like abilities doesn't make you a seriously better cleric, or wizard, or ranger, or whatever than your non-scion pals of the same level. After all, you're going to make that character earn his advantages by giving him a kingdom to look after.
In that system, I might go ahead and provide a feat just for scions called "Greater Bloodline" that gives you a +2 or +4 boost to your bloodline score. If someone really wants to play at the deep end of the bloodline system, it's not crazy to ask them to invest a feat. To put it another way: Scale the bloodline table benefits toward the sort of thing you might see in an "average" bloodline, and require a player who wants a better than average bloodline to pay a little something for it.
Rich