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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4970740" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think we are on more the same wavelength than you seem to think.Sure.  And the courtier can summon a horde of followers, or decide to win any single skill contest, gains some bonus AD he can hand out, and a few other combat useful things I don't remember.  And with some stretching you could link an NPC experts skills to combat actions in 3.X as well.  For example, you could use bluff to fient, escape artist to get out of grapples, and balance could with a feat be used to defend against trips and is generally useful fighting in rough terrain.  And so forth.  What I'm saying is that all and all, it didn't seem like the courtier gained as much in combat as a combatant class gave up outside of it.  Or in other words, the courtier's edge over a combatant class outside of combat, didn't seem to make up for its deficiency in it unless you ran a game were combat as a whole was no more important to the game than any single skill.  That seems unlikely in most peoples games, even the one where my character only got in a fight on average every four sessions or so.Which is fine, except that it didn't seem to me on first glance as easy for a Courtier to pick up a +20 BAB, as it did for any other class to pick up Persuade or Intimidate (or whatever). My experience playing many kinds of RPGS (horror, fantasy, sci-fi) in many different systems, is that while its perfectly fine to have some characters where 'combat' is a secondary consideration, in the long run it can't be too secondary of a consideration for any character.  Even in a point based game which is heavy in investigation, you can't spend all of your points on things irrelevant to combat.  If you are playing a class based game, that means IMO that every class has to pick up some 'unnecessary' combat baggage as part of their basic build because the option to play a non-combatant just doesn't really work for 90% of games.  Brute force is a highly effective argument that just tends to invalidate everything else in a conflict situation.  Thus, it's very hard to do anything except melodrama where it doesn't matter whether you can fight.'Combatant' has to be everyone's minimum 'secondary' role IMO.  It's not clear to me that the designers of FantasyCraft thought so.I'll get my hardcopy and come back with more specific objections and questions.</blockquote>

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