hong said:
Whereas I have a fetish for peanut butter ice cream medium-rare char-grilled steaks and peppercorn sauce.
It is impossible to tweak a non-classed creature, because...?
Mechanically, there's no problem.
*Conceptually*, there's a problem. If there's a Warcaster Academy, why can't I have a hobgoblin who graduated from it? Does it accept Drow transfer students? If I polymorph into a hobgoblin can I sneak and learn their secret arts? Are warcasters born or made? If there's 3rd level Apprentice Warcasters and 10th level Master Warcasters, each with different specific powers, what does a 5th level Moderately Skilled Warcaster look like? Etc, etc, etc.
Same with pseudo-clerics, pseudo-rogues, pseudo-bards, whatever. They exist because they fit a mechanical niche, because they 'live for five rounds', and because using 4e PC classes for most humanoids is too complex to be fun or useful. It works atomically on an encounter level. It doesn't work on a world level, unless there's a mountain of flavor text and fanwank we haven't seen yet. And on a practical level, I'm worried about interactions between monsters-built-for-encounters and a gaming style which does not assume that is the model. The warcaster is balanced for an encounter against PCs; is he balanced as an ally of the PCs? As a non-combat social enemy of the PCs?
You may have played Wizardry 8. In it, you could recruit NPCs to join your party, or sometimes fight them. If you fought them, they were total badasses who would clean your clock. If you recruited them, they were wussy low level PCs who could barely take out a leprous weasel.
This made perfect sense from a game balance perspective. It made zero sense from a world consistency perspective.
In an RPG, both matter to me, in varying proportion based on my mood.
