NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 488631" data-attributes="member: 3146">I used to play Rolemaster a bit when I was in college but not enough to tell whether survival wasn't based on levelling up. (It seemed to me like good stats played a much bigger part in survival. . . .)As far as easy to kill characters in 3e, you bet it's easy. The core classes are all fairly balanced against each other if they're well constructed but that's a big if.A non-durable PC I actually DMed through five levels--human fighter 4/wizard 3. Str 14, dex 18, con 8, Int 16, wis 10, cha 10. Weapon focus, specialization: longsword, combat casting, dodge, mobility, something or other else. He was a decent character and benefitted from some really good loot I handed out in the first adventure but he was a dead man walking the whole time. As a front line character with the 8 con and three wizard hit dice, it was only a matter of time before something got lucky. Well, one round toe to toe with a fiendish Girallon did him in.Another one I've seen: Rog/Clr/Wiz/Ftr 1. A 4th level melee character with a +3 attack bonus (total), substandard hit points, and very limited advancement capabilities. Using scrolls, he could be useful as well but as the character levels up, he'll just be a speed bump to delay a dire bear/etc for one round without sufficient capabilities to be useful in any particular area.One I haven't seen, but which could easily happen:Halfling Monk/Sorceror/Wizard/Rogue. Low dex, high strength. His plan is to use sorceror levels for shield and true strike, and wizard levels for buffs. He relies on the rogue levels for sneak attack (where he gets his damage from). Being even more foolish, the player decides to maximize the character's "survivability" by taking Dodge and Iron Will and picks Mantis Leap (the most famously worthless splatbook feat--it does nothing except sound cool). The character's saves will be great and his AC will be decent but that'll be it. With his worthwhile benefits spread out over every single stat (str=damage, dex=AC, saves, Con=HP, saves, Int=spells, Wis=AC, DCs, saves, Cha=spells), the character will require phenomenal stats to even be viable. (Don't try this on a point buy system). And the mutliclassing nerfs the characters BAB and hit points (and since monks are usually melee combatants, they can't afford to lose much of either) without giving the character high level spells (because of xp penalties, the character won't get 2nd level spells until clvl 8 at the earliest).And then there are characters who are deliberately useless--usually created by people who think that roleplaying=being a non-combatant. Sor/Ari/Brd focussed on "background skills" (the daughter of a haughty nobleman, she learned knitting and needlework as well as geography but fed up with the stiltifying life she fled to join a group of minstrels--although she had no talent), with spells like "Unseen Servant" ("A proper lady doesn't go anywhere without a servant") and "Alarm" ("Somehow she always seemed to know when someone was going to interrupt her idling"), and with no ranks in perform (remember that bit about no talent).PCs like those are certainly not equal to a single classed and/or efficiently-constructed PC of the same level in either usefulness or survival value--they're not even close.</blockquote>

Verification