Non-Core Class Survivor

[the Jester]

By the way, I find it very interesting that there's a clear front runner here... I wonder if the next round will have anything so obvious?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Simple...it is primarily a 2 weapon fighter, which SUX when compared to just having a fighter taking 2 weapon feats. Thats why it got my vote. BTW, the Oriental Adventures version is said to be pretty good.

The TWF lameness isn't it's only problem.

The Two Weapon Fighting feat has ridiculous Dex requirements. In D20 Modern, the Dex requirement is 13. In DnD, it's 15-19, depending on how high up you want to go on the chain.

Having a Dex of 19 is, quite frankly, expensive in terms of points, lucky die rolling, or magic items*, especially when you can't finesse a katana. Rangers and samurai were given TWF without the ridiculous requirements. However, TWF doesn't suit either class. In the case of the ranger, there's no such thing as a real-life ranger, and most fictional rangers don't dual-wield. In rules terms, TWF doesn't work well when your damage is low and you're stealthy.

In the case of the samurai, it's even worse. There were real life samurai, and I can only name two who ever dual-wielded, out of hundreds of named samurai who didn't. While all samurai during certain time periods carried a katana and wakizashi, many wielded spears, bows, or other weapons as their primary, and their katana was basically a symbol and back-up weapon. Certainly many couldn't even wield a katana in one hand; you didn't need to unless you wanted to fight from horseback or dual-wield which was rare. The samurai class turns you into a dual-wielder without giving you any choice in the matter and makes the exact same mistake that made the 3.0 ranger so unpopular. Even Miyamoto Musashi, the most famous of the two dual-wielding samurai, often wielded one weapon. His most famous duel did not involve him dual-wielding, or even using a katana.

You could replicate a samurai with a fighter or with the OA samurai. Both do it better. People have this unfortunate belief that most samurai wrote poetry, attended tea ceremonies, negotiated contracts and played the flute when they weren't killing people - not true. These skills can be covered by multi-classing and a well-designed leader class (which I've yet to see in DnD, unsurprisingly). People also assume most samurai were loyal even unto death - a belief so pervasive even some daimyo (samurai lords) believed this. (Seeing how many daimyo were killed by their own samurai underlings, you would think they'd figure this out.) People also tend to assume that samurai were honorable; even if we could define what honor meant, you would find plenty of examples of dishonorable samurai who weren't ronin. In many time periods, being a ronin had nothing to do with being dishonorable.

The samurai class also makes some obviously incorrect assumptions about real life samurai, to the point that you wonder if the authors did any research, and also duplicates stereotypes of Japanese people. (The stereotypes aren't always negative, but I really think Americans stereotype Japanese people more than any other ethnic group on Earth. This certainly seems true of DnD authors. Doing samurai or ninja even remotely realistically is almost guaranteed to fail without actual research, and finding actual reliable information on ninja is, of course, difficult.)

Real life human beings aren't going to follow the unclear code that the samurai class is saddled with. In real life, samurai ran from battle when they lost, like anyone with a moderate degree of intelligence would do. Individual samurai leaders might get venerated for killing themselves after losing a battle, but this was a lot less common than people think. This low rate of samurai suicide would be obvious to anyone doing actual research or who bothered to look at the fatality rates of real samurai battles. (The worst ever example involved someone losing 72% of their force, which meant many samurai survived and didn't kill themselves.) I think maybe someone read about the fate of the Aizu clan and thought all samurai acted that way, when in fact the Aizu clan mass suicide was an extreme event. Sometimes samurai were "invited" to commit suicide, as this was more honorable than being executed, but in practice it was an order to commit suicide, and failure to follow this order resulted in death, anyway. Suicide not by choice... this concept must have confused the Complete Warrior authors.

Adding even more insult to ... well, insult, OA is a WotC book. It had actual research behind it. Even when it messed up game balance in a few places it had the flavor either right or mostly right. Why didn't WotC use it's own resource for research? I have no real idea. Maybe someone assumed that, because they had read Book of Five Rings that all of sudden they were an expert on the samurai.

* Technically you can use a Dex-boosting item to meet the requirements for a feat. Boo! Fix the TWF instead!

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

(I didn't include the Dragonlance Campaign Setting classes, or the psionic artificer as a separate class).

No derailment intended, but where, exactly is the psionic artificer? I had never heard of it, but would really like to have a look.

 

[Glyfair]

No derailment intended, but where, exactly is the psionic artificer? I had never heard of it, but would really like to have a look.

Magic of Eberron. Essentially, it's the Artificer class with the psionic equivalent abilities substitued for the magical ones. Nothing anyone wouldn't have come up with on their own. I suspect they only included it because of the number of people asking for one.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

All of them.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I can only vote for classes I am very familiar with. I have had a player who ran a spellthief, and there's nothing more annoying than having to change an entire game world just so one player can use her classes primary ability more than once every three game sessions. Still, i wanted to give everyone a chance to shine...

buh-bye spellthief!

What is the spellthief's prime ability, and how often is it used?

 

[Felix]

I was reading down the list thinking,

"Ok. This might be kinda hard. I like that one. Like that one. That's ok. That's not so good, but not terrible. That's good. That's -- ah: the Samurai." Click

 

[Glyfair]

By the way, I find it very interesting that there's a clear front runner here... I wonder if the next round will have anything so obvious?

I predict a dead spot after the "hated" classes get voted off. That's when I think the lesser known classes will be voted off. In hindsight, I may have made a mistake in including the Tome of Magic and Magic of Incarnum classes, since they are very closely tied to their optional magic systems. Well, we'll see how long they last anyway.

 

[the Jester]

Hmm, lots of hate for the wilder.... why? Anyone care to explain?

 

[arwink]

Lurks. Silly names offend me more than silly mechanics.