Non-Core Class Survivor

[FireLance]

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. (plus other stuff snipped)

I look forward to your diatribe on how the historical knight was not actually a paragon of honor, nor of courtly and chivalric behavior, and how gamers who have that idea and sourcebooks who perpetrate that fiction are are portraying them incorrectly.

I think Spellthief is a decent class. One of its most overlooked abilities (and perhaps the reason why many people think it is worse than it actually is) is to borrow spells from the other spellcasters in the party and act as a secondary channel for them. A spellthief paired with a cleric, wizard or other primary spellcaster can effectively double his spell output per round in the first and second rounds of combat.

 

[Jdvn1]

Dread Necromancer.

There are too many Necromancer options, compared to the other specific character concepts.

 

[FireLance]

I voted for the Healer. It has a narrow focus on healing spells, and it has to prepare spells (like a cleric) at the start of the day? Might as well play a cleric then, in my view. If it could spontaneously cast any spell from its spell list, like the warmage, dread necromancer and beguiler, it would have been a decent class. But as written, I'd play a samurai before I play a healer.

 

[SWAT]

Y'know, I understand the ardent hate, but I've personally changed my tune on that one.

I'm just surprised it's gotten more votes than the Divine Mind. While hate was spread all around when Complete Psionic came out, I don't recall many people saying they preferred the Divine Mind to the Ardent. It was usually the opposite. I wonder how much of it has to do with the Ardent being at the top of the list...

To guarantee fairness, I demand that the poll options be presented in a new random order every time the page is refreshed!

 

[Glyfair]

I'm just surprised it's gotten more votes than the Divine Mind.

Well, when you have as lopsided a vote as this one, the second run choices are likely to have oddities. If I were just to remove the one class for the next vote you might see the classes shift wildly as everyone who voted for that class moved on to other class (of course, then finishing this would take well over a month).

However, the samurai has become the poster boy for badly designed classes. Right now it's getting about 1/3 of the votes when there are 33 choices!

 

[Hussar]

Hey, Agent Oracle, you might want to take a look at the first pic you linkied. LOL I do not think it means what you think it means. (Insert Inigo Montoya accent)

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.

Off topic - the real problem isn't with those things. The problem is, that samurai, by the time they were reading poetry and whatnot, weren't a warrior caste but a social class. Edo period Japan puts samurai on the top of the heap. However, being a samurai had little or nothing to do with your skill with weapons and everything to do with your social class. There were lots of women samurai for example, but, I'll guarantee you they were's wielding weapons of any kind.

On a similar note, far more Daimyo were killed by their own peasants and his head presented to the victor when Daimyo's clashed. And my Japanese is failing me at the moment, since Daimyo is actually the wrong term.

But, yes, romanticising history is certainly not limited to any culture.

Personally, I don't really like Wu Jen since they stick out so badly in the setting. If monks are bad, then Wu Jen just stand out like nothing else.

 

[Nonlethal Force]

I didn't vote for any class I don't own the books for. So, that means I'll only be voting for Complete, Core, UA, XPH. Although, there will reach a time when I vote for things I don't know over personal favorites - like the psion.

For now, though ... I didn't but Complete Psionic because I thought it was garbage. So ... down with the lurk, divine mind, and ardent first. Actually ... down with lurk, ardent, and divine mind. In that order.

Then we move onto spellthief and hexblade. [I'd add Samurai but it'll likely be gone by the time I'd get to vote for it.]

 

[Wik]

No, not the spellthief! That class has GOT to be my all-time favourite D&D class... while it is a bit weak in comparison to other classes, stealing spells has got to be the most fun ability EVER.

The big problem is how it fits into the campaign. Our GM made sure to include a lot of traps/magic users in the early game, and my big problem as the spellthief was killing the mage I was attacking before I was able to steal more than one of his spells. But it was still a lot of fun to make your sneak attack, get a spell like Color Spray, and trying to figure out what to do with it. Lots of fun.

As the game progressed, though, the GM started focusing on using "big bruiser" creatures, and my spellthief fell by the wayside. But that's more a GM problem than a class problem - if you put a spellthief in a game with at least a few spellcasters or monsters with spell-like abilities/energy resistances (and who DOESN'T put at least afew of those in most adventures?) the spellthief is a lot of fun. It's also a lot of fun if you're the party's main rogue. To be fair, though, I think if you gave the spellthief a 6 level spell progression, it'd do a lot to make the class more attractive.

***

I've ran a game with a samurai, although he used maces instead of katanas (nice little house-ruling, there), and he wasn't oriental in flavour. He was a hobgoblin mercenary, and the character was pretty well thought out. THe big problem was the player wasn't willing to make use of the intimidate ability, and when he did, somethine inevitably got in the way. He wound up being the weakest character in the group (human fighter, human warmage, and a half-elven scout), and most of us agreed - the Samurai is underpowered. We also agreed that hobgoblins don't deserve that +1 LA.

But, I voted for the Soulborn, for one simple reason: I really, REALLY hate the idea of Incarnum, and the name sucks. I haven't had much experience with the class, but from what I've seen - YUCK.

 

[genshou]

Aaaand the CW Samurai reaches 32. Bye, we won't miss you!

I loved the 3.0 Oriental Adventures/Rokugan Samurai.

 

[Tsillanabor]

As a DM I voted Spellthief-too much work.