El Jeraldo said:
I will probably tweak it a little and add some more major drawbacks because not all of them there would be good for some characters.
That's fine, it's pretty much how we made the system in the first place, evolving every time someone came up with a new bonus they wanted to add. Originally, the Major Drawbacks only had the first three, but the later two were added by player request when they couldn't find one that fit their concepts. For instance, some of the suggested ones we had and then removed were:
> "May enter Trance involuntarily"... that is, if the DM decides you're in danger of getting too angry/scared/stressed/whatever, you have to make a Will save, and failure forces you to enter the Trance against your will (and you do get charged for its use). This one wasn't bad, and there were plenty of literary examples to draw from, but there was too much argument over the trigger, and "DM's discretion" is just too much work to deal with for 20 levels.
> "Take 50% more damage from all sources", which is actually really nasty. In fact, it was so crippling in the long run that we split it into the two others (can't defend, can't save) instead, since at least those depend on what sort of enemy you face.
As long as it's a pretty severe penalty, add whichever ones you want; as a general theme the ones we kept were all along the lines of "can't do X while in Trance", but that's not required.
Also, we originally didn't have a Table C, and Table B was much shorter; what you see in those tables are pretty much all of the abilities we used for PCs and NPCs in that campaign. (That "re-roll any one die" ability kept one cohort NPC alive practically forever.)
Sound of Azure: Glad you like it. It does sound like it'd fit pretty well with your setting, although if you're using an island culture you could add abilities like "breathe underwater" or "Swim speed equal to your land speed" to the tables. I was trying to stay as nonmagical as I could (and breathing underwater kinda defeats that, although I suppose you could change it to "hold breath for the duration of trance"), but if you're tying it to your Old Religion, that limitation no longer applies.
I'll warn that this system is, of course, MUCH more complex than the core class it replaces. Of course, I've never liked how the melee classes in the PHB could be summed up in a few paragraphs and a chart or two, while the caster classes required fifty pages of spell descriptions. One of my intentions was to raise the Berserker to the complexity of the other classes. So, while I of course like the system I posted, feel free to trim it down if you don't want players to feel overwhelmed.
Oh, and while we never got around to fleshing it out (no need), it'd be easy to come up with Trance-centric PrCs, or Feats that add extra Trance abilities.
EDIT: forgot to add, the "cannot save" Major Drawback would be really crippling in the rules-as-written, but IMC we removed all the save-or-die stuff. It's still bad to get
charmed, of course, but at least that can be dealt with in other ways; being killed by every guy with a
slay living would suck. So unless you're changing the spells like we did, you should probably remove that one for now, or at least rework it.
