Favorite actual/wished for fantasy character that wouldn't work well with D&D rules

Feh, Never heard of one knocking somebody out..or klling

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Though I might accept arguments that running in terror
can be another skinning of non lethal damage driving somebody to zero hit points

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Some how I doubt fans of 3e will accept it.

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Who said you need to have groups of 300 to combine them?

Well, the rules, but I've never been one to avoid tossing a rule out when it makes sense to do so. It just doesn't make sense in this case. If I merged the cats into a swarm of cats it gains qualities I don't really want it to have, the most salient of which is that it occupies continuous squares, does automatic damage, etc.

in to a single combatant sounds like an artificial concept why not drop it.. and make your cat lady a lot more usable.

I'm having a hard time following you. What is exactly an artificial concept? A swarm? In 4e terms, I'd make the cats into minions. That's another artificial concept. I'm not sure I understand the nature of your complaint.

By the way "cat scratch fever" could be one of the possible attacks where one/or more of the felines actually has an infection the target can catch.

Errr... yes. By all means, feel free to stat up a 4e 'Swarm of Cats' with cat scratch fever and a 4e 'Crazy Cat Lady'.

As it stands sounds like you advocate making progressively more complex rules that are exactly not newbie friendly to fix the holes (which every rpg will have) instead of using a bit of common sense and narrative ability.

Exactly how is 'extra hit points' not newbie friendly when I do it to fix the holes, but is newbie friendly when 4e does it to plus the exact same set of holes?
 

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Originally Posted by Garthanos
Feh, Never heard of one knocking somebody out..or klling
?

cat scratches in real life... nope... never heard of it having those effects even once... an incomplete litmas test does this critter do enough damage to even call it a a hit point.

Though I might accept arguments that running in terror
can be another skinning of non lethal damage driving somebody to zero hit points
?
basically I have seen people run from cats because of the stress ... of the being hissed
at and not wanting scratched.

Some how I doubt fans of 3e will accept it.
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One cant model emotional distress with hit point loss in 3e...
even if that is exactly how you might model it if severe enough in 1e, 2e and 4e.

Well, the rules, but I've never been one to avoid tossing a rule out when it makes sense to do so. It just doesn't make sense in this case. If I merged the cats into a swarm of cats it gains qualities I don't really want it to have, the most salient of which is that it occupies continuous squares, does automatic damage, etc.
In 4e I probably wouldnt go with auto damage but I wouldn't feel limited in my monster design by "the rules" especially not in that way. I might actually do something weirder hit point damage on the cats would come off of the cat lady.....scratch that they have a group hit points
and she is minion class if you defeat the cats you have done enough damage that they run off.. she will indeed swoon but will be nicely available
for roleplaying opportunity.. if you attack her directly she just dies and you still have the cats to deal with.

I'm having a hard time following you. What is exactly an artificial concept?
limiting your grouping of creatures whose attacks are treated as one clump to just 300 + that rule doesnt seem to serve your game play. I thought that was obvious I was recommending using swarming as your take off point but you are house ruling anyway so you shouldnt treat it as "the rules".
Some of the 4e batch of cats attacks might be "cloud of tooth and nails" and be auto damage like your swarm rules suggest.

Errr... yes. By all means, feel free to stat up a 4e 'Swarm of Cats' with cat scratch fever and a 4e 'Crazy Cat Lady'.

I am considering it... you have actually inspired me with this discussion... there will also be one "cats all run under foot" where some of the cats do basically trip attacks... they would be like a solo creature andl get multiple actions. I might make some attacks against relfex instead of against armor class. Because I think I agree auto damage might be too much.

Exactly how is 'extra hit points' not newbie friendly when I do it to fix the holes, but is newbie friendly when 4e does it to plus the exact same set of holes?
You have two things going on.. extra hit points so that each one means a little less is very simple.... but the other treating each cat as a distinct individual... lets see 3 dozen cats with 3 attacks each and most of them have no chance of doing damage..except on a crit? I must be missing something.

4e never had to fix presenting a single house cat as a combatant capable of taking down a human.(it doesnt have cat stats for a natural cat just a familiar)... so not sure what you are refering to.... and recomputing the combat capabilities of every animal sounds like the rule you were presenting ... along side rolling dice even for ones that arent really combat worthy? ummm yeah lets go look up the rule for handling this little non combatant *size mod for lethal damage ... when it really should just be left as a flavor element.

I guess pre stating all creatures to include there sizes modifiers in there combat values wouldn't add to complexity and would indeed be mostly newbie friendly. In general if attacking as a batch makes them in to combat worthy elements then I dont think there is any reason to have them statted up a a single combatant D2 -4 damage ummm no thanks. Note that doesnt mean I dont want stats like does this cat act like a typical cat or does it come every time its called... what color is this cat and does it have a favorite pet human and does it have distinguishing characteristics for roleplay ... it just means the combat stats are really pointless and so much less useful than roleplaying cues might be.

I think we have gone way off thread of the concept of character designs D&D doesnt do well or your variant branch probably cant do well ;-) thanks for the diversion any way.
 
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I agree - swarm rules have always bothered me, and I've found them a PITA. Would be nice if there could be some sort of generic mechanic for combining coordinated group attacks into one roll. That would also be handy to have with large NPC/monster groups.

Had a combat last session that 5 monsters with 4 attacks each were attacking, but there were a couple other larger monsters that the PCs were focusing on instead. So I ended up just saying "Heck, the avg damage they're likely to do is x, so let's say they just did (a number less than x) so I'm not rolling the die 20 times"

You get it... now picture the same issue with the Cat lady and cluster of cats with the classic claw claw bite or similar silliness you are talking 100s of dice for attack rolls alone. Without using some clumping either free form 4e style or wired down mechanically 3e style... its ridiculous.
 

cat scratches in real life... nope... never heard of it having those effects even once... an incomplete litmas test does this critter do enough damage to even call it a a hit point.

House Cat Attack

That's not an isolated incident. Cats can tear you up in a hurry. While I've never heard of a domestic cat killing an adult, a healthy house cat is quite capable of killing things that weigh several times its body weight. Most people don't think that cats can seriously injure them because most of the time a cat swats or scratches its a warning, not a serious attack. Tame cats will not generally attack people seriously, because domestication leaves them mentally stuck in kittenhood and instinctually 'respectful' to humans the way a kitten fears an adult cat. However, something that mentally breaks this model and brings out the cats adult instincts can make a cat quite dangerous.

basically I have seen people run from cats because of the stress ... of the being hissed at and not wanting scratched.

Ok... that seems like a rational response to me.

One cant model emotional distress with hit point loss in 3e...
even if that is exactly how you might model it if severe enough in 1e, 2e and 4e.

I'm not even going to take up that assertion. If you want to turn this into an edition war, you can count me out. My homebrew uses rules inspired by 1e, 3e, Pathfinder, FantasyCraft, 4e and even GURPS. I don't have a stake in your edition war thing.

You have two things going on.. extra hit points so that each one means a little less is very simple.... but the other treating each cat as a distinct individual... lets see 3 dozen cats with 3 attacks each and most of them have no chance of doing damage..except on a crit? I must be missing something.

I would very likely not run all 3 dozen cats at once under this model. Then intention is for running around a dozen cats at a time or less. If I wanted to go up to 36 combatants at once, I'd probably use some sort of simplification to reduce the dice burden. Eventually, as I went up to scores of cats, I'd probably look into a swarm template of some sort. Personally though, I think a couple of cats per PC is plenty to keep 1st level PC's busy.

4e never had to fix presenting a single house cat as a combatant capable of taking down a human.(it doesnt have cat stats for a natural cat just a familiar)... so not sure what you are refering to....

I'm referring to the reasoning behind giving 1st level characters more hit points in 4e than the standard '1st level = 1HD' model that had been in place since D&D's earliest days. 4e effectively goes with a '1st level PC = 3HD' model, but what this means among other things is that you now open up the space of 1HD and 2HD to 'things less than a 1st level PC' where previously, in terms of hit points, everything was essentially the peer of a 1st level PC. This effectually solves the house cat problem, and all that the house cat problem implies, most obviously from a gamist perspective, that designing an adventure for a first level PC which is combat heavy is now considerably easier since there are now many things not the equal of a 1st level PC.

and recomputing the combat capabilities of every animal sounds like the rule you were presenting ...

Sure, but that's a burden on me (one I gladly accept), not a burden on the newbies.

Look, my intention in bringing up the 'house cat problem' was to focus some extra attention on the part of the original poster's question that was '[does not] work well with D&D rules', where previously the whole discussion had been focusing on 'Favorite wished for fantasy character'. It was my intention to show that the best way to approach this problem was not to list things that people wanted to do, but things that people actually couldn't do by inspecting the mechanics (or at least, couldn't do in a straightfoward way). An example from my orginal post might be, 'CG Paladin' or 'LN Barbarian' or 'Civilized Urban Barbarian'. It was not my intention in bringing up the house cat problem to start an edition war or to argue in any detail over how to fix the house cat problem, or even, after introducing the idea to talk about it much at all. My expectation was that the conversation would be steered toward ideas like 'Civilized Literate LN Urban Barbarian', and not whether house cats could really inflict damage on a person.

You clearly have your own ideas on the house cat problem, and I clearly have different ones. Your ideas may not be as far from mine as you think, if you'd get off the 'there is only one answer here and it is 4e' tirade. We primarily seem to disagree over one thing, the answer to the question: "Is a single tiny cat worth having combat stats for?" My answer is somewhere between, "Yes." and "Why not?"

I think we have gone way off thread of the concept of character designs D&D doesnt do well or your variant branch probably cant do well ;-) thanks for the diversion any way.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I don't mind diversions, but it wasn't my intention to create one.
 

My expectation was that the conversation would be steered toward ideas like 'Civilized Literate LN Urban Barbarian', and not whether house cats could really inflict damage on a person.
I enjoyed the house cat discussion as well :)

IMO, one of the problems with the core rules of 3.5 is that - perhaps out of necessity - the classes make a ton of assumptions.

For example, barbarians are savage tribal near-animals, fighters always use their swords more than their wits, paladins are shining knights on white horses, and so forth. Of course, the splat books expand on that quite a bit - and, granted I don't have all the splat books memorized - but if a player came to me and said, "You know, I really want to play a zealous warrior of (insert chaotic good god here), and I really like the way Paladin looks", then I would want to work with them.

And, there are a ton of character concepts like that - very doable to keep balanced, and to houserule in without causing any problems - if you are the sort of DM that has the time and/or the proclivity to do so. But there really aren't any tools to guide you other than intuition.

So to slightly change the focus of the thread:

What sort of fantasy character concepts would you like to do or have done that seem like they would work well in D&D - but you don't have the tools to build them satisfactorally (without houseruling or digging through splat books and multiclassing more than once)?
 
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I'm not even going to take up that assertion. If you want to turn this into an edition war, you can count me out. My homebrew uses rules inspired by 1e, 3e, Pathfinder, FantasyCraft, 4e and even GURPS. I don't have a stake in your edition war thing.

Its about definitions not warring. Basically what is reasonable varies based on your core assumption about what a hp means... if it includes those elements of stress and fatigue and similar... and baseline hit points are higher .. I have much fewer problems with a cat doing abstract hp damage on a great roll when baseline hit points are higher I kind of think its going to be pointlessly infrequent even if the numbers work out.

I would very likely not run all 3 dozen cats at once under this model. Then intention is for running around a dozen cats at a time or less. If I wanted to go up to 36 combatants at once, I'd probably use some sort of simplification to reduce the dice burden. Eventually, as I went up to scores of cats, I'd probably look into a swarm template of some sort. Personally though, I think a couple of cats per PC is plenty to keep 1st level PC's busy.

Nyeah I have two cats one of which does have mouser instincts and I play
reflex games with her I dont feel slow even doing Kendo with 18 years olds and my mass is 20 x hers and my reach 5x if you dont have 6 cats against even half way competent combatants its a silly notion.... but that is just my sense of reality being different than yours.

The baseline assumptions about competence vary across the editions but this is one I think even the least case works.

I'm referring to the reasoning behind giving 1st level characters more hit points in 4e than the standard '1st level = 1HD' model that had been in place since D&D's earliest days. 4e effectively goes with a '1st level PC = 3HD' model, but what this means among other things is that you now open up the space of 1HD and 2HD to 'things less than a 1st level PC' where previously, in terms of hit points, everything was essentially the peer of a 1st level PC. This effectually solves the house cat problem, and all that the house cat problem implies, most obviously from a gamist perspective, that designing an adventure for a first level PC which is combat heavy is now considerably easier since there are now many things not the equal of a 1st level PC.
Works for me, though for some who like the gambling game ...any system increasing hit points takes some of that away.. porportionately less of the hit points you deliver are due to dice impact than ability or strategic choices in play.

You clearly have your own ideas on the house cat problem, and I clearly have different ones. Your ideas may not be as far from mine as you think, if you'd get off the 'there is only one answer here and it is 4e' tirade.
Nailed down rules could be composed derived from the swarm rules perhaps that work just fine in 3e... these would indeed be the same answer 4e provides for the issue... some people like rolling hand fulls of dice..but you were the one talking about how scale is exactly what you want to defeat.
To me you are keeping heavy unscalable mechanics instead of defeating them.

We primarily seem to disagree over one thing, the answer to the question: "Is a single tiny cat worth having combat stats for?" My answer is somewhere between, "Yes." and "Why not?"
Sure and "No, and why would we?" are indeed my answer. :lol:
 

IMO, one of the problems with the core rules of 3.5 is that - perhaps out of necessity - the classes make a ton of assumptions.

No, they don't do it out of necessity. You can look at a class like cleric as an example of how to make one generalized class extremely flexible. The reason the base flavor classes (druid, barbarian, paladin, ranger, monk) have such narrow flavor is that the designers of 3e very much wanted people to feel that WoTC was producing a 'real' version of D&D that wasn't repeating the mistakes of 2e. The designers of 3e were very much tapping into nostalga, and so they created a game that had '1e feel'. To do that, the classes had to look and feel like their 1e inspirations, and that meant carrying forward the narrow flavor of the 1e class. Cleric and thief were some of the few classes that they felt they could get away with rebuilding on a larger scale, primarily because those were the two legacy classes generally felt to have the biggest problems. But they didn't want to tinker too much with 'Paladin', 'Druid', or 'Ranger'. The result is base classes which are artificially narrow because of the baggage they are forced to carry.

They made of choice about slaying 'sacred cows', and they made the decision not to risk it. I can understand the reasoning and can't criticize much from a business perspective, even if it isn't my preference (which, is true of alot of moves WotC has done).

Oddly, this is a sacred cow I would have gladly seen roasting over an open fire and it not only persisted in to 4e, but 4e reversed the general trend in 3e and made class tropes tend to be even stronger. Fourth edition sort of completed the move from, 'Although the class has no in game existance, it is a useful abstraction of a common set of abilities from a fantasy archetype' to 'Your character actually has a class'.

None of the bases classses in my opinion needs to be narrow by definition. A base class ought to be able to encompass so many concepts that a PC has a fairly hard time telling which class(es) an NPC belongs to. If the PC can easily tell the class of an NPC, its probably too narrow.

A bit of history here, a few years after 3e came out, I started converting the 'Desert of Desolation' series to 3e, and one of the problems I ran up on was that in the module, there were these dervishes who had battle crys, went into a rage, were good at jumping, and so forth - perfect for the Barbarian class. But the Dervishes were LN, so they couldn't actually qualify for the Barbarian class. To actually do the conversion, I ended up first having to change the alignment of some of the characters, and secondly having to do something I don't normally do - create a PrC. I realized then that with very few changes to the Barbarian class, I could have avoided both things.

Those changes in a nutshell were, removing the alignment restriction (easy) and removing the 'wilderness' flavor of the barbarian (a little harder). Doing both (plus a few other changes meant to increase the self-reliance of non-spellcaster classes) created the generalized Fanatic class, which is equally at home being a primitive berserker, an initiate of a secret warrior cult, the fanatical bodygaurd of some god-king, an elite assault trooper, a pyschopathic killer, a barroom brawler, a oathsworn Templar, a heretical cultist, or any number of things. And if the class concept is slightly outside of what the Fanatic normally allows, you can modify it with traits and feats of various sorts. While it might not be a really effective adventuring build, you could play 'Conan the Fanatical Book Preservationist', a scholarly nerd obsessed with knowledge, if you really wanted to do so. I'm still thinking of ways to extend the concept even further, but the point is that some of the biggest limitations in the D&D rules set are sitting right out in the open as low hanging fruit.
 
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Those changes in a nutshell were, removing the alignment restriction (easy) and removing the 'wilderness' flavor of the barbarian (a little harder). Doing both (plus a few other changes meant to increase the self-reliance of non-spellcaster classes) created the generalized Fanatic class, ...

I think that this, then, is a key to giving someone more choices in a simpler way. A point-buy system could be used by the DM or by the players to adjust things to their taste, but if it is only point-buy there are truely too many choices to make something straightforward.

A system that uses key abilities to create generalized adaptable classes, and/or has groups of similar abilities that can be combined in different ways to create varied flavors, could provide almost limitless possibilities (within the limits of what works for the group of course) without the drawbacks of a 'point-buy' system.
 

I think that this, then, is a key to giving someone more choices in a simpler way. A point-buy system could be used by the DM or by the players to adjust things to their taste, but if it is only point-buy there are truely too many choices to make something straightforward.

That is a good summary of my current thinking.

The point buy system someone linked to earlier is a good example of why I don't think point buy works very well in general. If you have a case where all the players are more interested in creating depth, variety, and flavorful characters and effectiveness is a secondary consideration, and where the DM is not interested in putting some constraints around what types exist in the campaign, then point buy can be an effective solution. But the problem with point buy is that if you have players who have effectiveness as a primary consideration, and if you as a DM have particular ideas about what sort of abilities are common within your world, then a point buy system is going to cause difficulties. The really great thing about the published point buy system in my opinion was how open it was about how unbalancing it would be without heavy handed DM management of what was and wasn't an acceptable build. It didn't even pretend that it had created a balanced system. It just listed a bunch of options and left it up to the table to manage how those options would be used.

For my part, I'd like to be able to hand players a character creation document and say, "No character you make using these rules will be disapproved. Whatever you make under these rules, I'll find a way to make it work in my game." and yet at the same time, not have the player feel that his options are really limited or introduce into my campaign characters that create degenerate games. (Where I define the term 'degenerate games' to mean, "Games in which challenging the player's skill is made difficult by the character's ability to overpower any obstacle in his path that isn't specifically tailored to defeat him.")

My secondary goal is to make the system as terse as possible. The reason for wanting to do that is twofold. First, I want the character creation rules to be digestable, and secondly, I want the foreseeable interactions to be managable so that I don't miss something. Therefore, the number of classes in the game should be IMO relatively small with little need to add more. The goal is to provide so much flexiblity in the base classses and feat trees, that as a player that has seen it said, "You don't take a PrC, you become a PrC".

UPDATE: I read that and realized it sounded like I was disparaging 'point buy' too much as a technique. If you broaden what you mean by 'point buy', then class based systems can make really good use of point buy ideas. The cleric is a good example. The cleric gets to 'buy' two different starting abilities from a fairly large pool. The fighter class is a class which expands its point pool over time and uses it to buy feats from a preselected pool. The sorcerer is a class that does the same thing with spells. You can generalize classes alot by taking this basic approach (which some has disparaged as 'every class is a list of bonus feats', but which works for me).
 
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None of the bases classses in my opinion needs to be narrow by definition. A base class ought to be able to encompass so many concepts that a PC has a fairly hard time telling which class(es) an NPC belongs to. If the PC can easily tell the class of an NPC, its probably too narrow.

I disagree. I think players need to stop wanted to play a "Fighter who shoots a bow" and just accept the fact that they really want to play a Ranger or a Rogue. There are some trappings that might not fit your total concept, but not enough that you can't overcome them.
 

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