Power Classes IV - Noble

[MonkeyBoy]

Forgot to sum up;

The only true metric for these products is the core of what you wnt from the review;

Is this particular product, in toto, worth paying the asking price.

Quality, nature and quantity of content are all, then, accounted for together, in much less absolutist terms.

 

[Simon Collins]

Monkey Boy/Voadam

Thanks for your comments.

I do generally mention use of colour, binding, paper quality, etc, when these vary from the norm (i.e. softcover, perfectbound, mono) and I aim to mention price per page at the same level as these other factors - points to note but not usually something that influences the overall score.

Should books that have similar production quality be compared on a price per page basis, as merely a note for the reader's information? Or is any comparison on this level essentially worthless to the reader who has not yet bought? Gaming Frontiers Volume 3 was more expensive (price and ppp) than Vol 2, and went from colour to B&W - is that sort of thing of interest to the customer. I noted it in my review but it did not influence my final score.

Your thoughts?

Simon Collins

 

[GameWyrd]

"Noble" is a class in its own right. Sure, you could encounter nobles who are also wizards, nobles who are clerics, warriors or perhaps even sorcerers but these are nobles who have found the time to learn these skills as an addition to their nobility. Grand courts, shaded diplomacy, moving armies to threaten boarders, designing a new coat of arms to mark an important wedding, discovering secret deals, royal romance, running baronies, kingdoms, dealing with would-be usurpers and spies and lots more in this line are all core fantasy plots and fun but yet none of the basic character classes in D&D are really appropriate starting points. A young sixteen year old noble who has been educated by specially appointed tutors, taught gentlemanly fencing and even the etiquette of the Grand Emperor’s Court where a poor choice of words could accidentally throw your family into a bitter feud with a rival noble line that lasts hundred years isn’t a fighter or a wizard.

Anyway. Enough. It’s clear that I think a noble core class is a good idea and an annoying absence for the basic d20 rules. If I can’t convince you that a noble class makes sense then I’m sure the fourth in Mongoose’s Power Classes series. Noble is the best in the series so far and at only $2.95 there’s no risk involved in buying it to find out. If you’ve not read any of the previous Power Classes reviews (and why not?) then I’ll quickly point out that the booklets are tall but thin and only 16 pages long. It’s a product with space only for key mechanics and it’s all about bang for your bucks.

The key to this attempt at a Noble character is the flexibility of the class abilities. It’s not really possible to come up with a set of abilities that can safely be applied to all the different social structure possibilities across different campaign worlds. It’s just as hard to get the balance between adventuring feats and those best-suited nobles in their element. Peppering the level advancement with the well-known "Bonus Feat" and also the "Social Skills" ability solves the problem here. Social Skills are somewhere between a feat and a normal skill. For example, "Comeliness" says that the character takes pride in their appearance and as also naturally well-dressed so that they receive a +2 circumstance bonus to all Charisma based skill checks in situations where appearance plays a part. There’s a long list of these social skills and as the noble advances in levels the player can pick a new social skill from a long list. There’s a great flexibility here. Players get to pick what they want. Nobles cover a much wider scope than they might otherwise have. It’s easy for GMs to add new Social Skills or take out ones that don’t fit their campaign. If in your campaign world nobles attend strange and mysterious masque balls whenever the Queen of the Whispering Sky commands it then perhaps nobles in your campaign world are particularly adept are recognising people through their body language and voice then it would be easy with this game mechanic to put together an exclusive skill that only experienced nobles can learn.

There are also noble class abilities, the most obvious one being taunt but including the likes of Taunt, Rank Hath its Privileges, Gossip, Rally and more. I don’t like all the names for these abilities but the key ideas there and that’s what matters. There’s a new feat too. In fact, one of the class abilities "Advanced Leadership" suddenly makes epic games playable again.

In the end, in just 16 pages, you’re left with a believable representation of a noble class and a class that people will actually want to play as well. If the idea of courtly drama is alien to your games then you’ll probably see the sister books "Assassin" or "Gladiator" as the front runners in the series but for me the headliner is certainly Power Classes: Noble.

* This GameWyrd was first published here.

 

[Voadam]

so what does advanced leadership do?

 

[Haplo]

How does this class compare to the Noble class in Wheel of Time?

 

[trancejeremy]

This is the fourth in a line of mini-books from Mongoose, "Power Classes", each of which introduce a new core class. By mini-book, I mean basically like the various mini-modules from AEG and FFG - an 8 page regular sized book folded in half so it's 16 small or half pages. It's priced at $2.95. This details a class covered in many other d20 products, "The Noble".

There likely is a need for a "Noble" class, since there is an NPC class for "Aristocrat" in the DMG. And as mentioned, this class has been covered in products from WOTC themselves (like in Star Wars) and in products from other companies, such as Sovereign Press and Holistic Design. Because non-WOTC companies must follow by the d20 System Trademark License, and Open Gaming License, all their game mechanic stuff must be open, and thus the latter two companies Noble classes are open content.

Mongoose decided to not completely borrow a Noble Class from either of those two companies, but they did borrow a lot from Fading Suns d20.

The Mongoose Noble in this book is actually not quite like the Aristocrat Class in the DMG (the Fading Suns and Sov. Press Noble are essentially upgraded Aristocrats), but a bit different. It has the same (average) Base Attack Bonus, has 6 skill points per level (same as the Sovereign Press and Fading Suns Noble), but only had a d6 for hit dice, unlike all the others which has a d8.

What Mongoose mostly borrowed from Holistic was many of the "Social" Feats from Fading Suns d20. Fading Suns is something of a social intensive setting, so it introduced a new category of feat, called the "Social" feat. Mongoose does not borrow them as 'feats', but instead changed them into special abilities for the Noble Class. The Mongoose Noble gets to pick some of these feats as special abilities, and has several others assigned. By contrast, the Holistic Noble class has no special abilities, but gets a bonus social feat about as often as a fighter gets a bonus fighter feat. And thus can pick from a much wider range of feats.

So, while it borrows from Holistic, you lose a lot of the flexibility from their noble. Buying this book is a hell of a lot cheaper than buying Fading Suns d20 (by $22) though, and mongoose didn't do that bad of a job of it. They couldn't fit all the social feats from FS d20 into 16 half-pages.

The Mongoose Noble also seems to borrow a bit from the Sovereign Press Noble (though not 'officially', since it's not listed in Sec. 15 like Fading Suns is), in regards to having the Leadership feat given automatically, and having that enhanced as levels are gained. Still, the Sovereign Press Noble is more of the swashbuckling type - the main feature of that is the ability to add it's charisma bonus to it's armor class (though not in all armors).

So, comparatively, this is probably my 3rd favorite Noble. I like the Sovereign Press one the best, since I like the swashbuckling sort of Noble. The Fading Suns one is great if you want a social orientated Noble. The Mongoose Noble comes off as a somewhat watered down version of the Fading Suns Noble. Not terrible, but not great, either. However, if you don't have, or don't want to buy the Fading Suns book, or the Sov. Stone Campaign Setting book, and want a cheap Noble class, it's not too bad. I would probably alter the hit dice to a d8, like it's brothers (and it's cousin, the Aristocrat NPC class).

Besides the class, you get a new feat (Well Heeled) and a rather lame artifact, a sword that gives a charisma bonus but causes a catastrophe every year. Exciting, eh?

Ultimately, while I don't think this noble is all that great, and the new feat and magic item isn't great either, it's not bad. Decent resource for someone wanting a Noble class without buying a large book.

 

[drnuncheon]

Advanced leadership basically just uses a different table than normal leadership. You get more followers sooner.

 

[John Cooper]

Power Classes IV: Noble
By Paul Tucker
Mongoose Publishing product number MGP 1104
16 half-sized pages, $2.95

The fourth booklet in Mongoose's "Power Classes" series, this book gives the d20 player the option of running a noble PC from 1st-level all the way up through 20th.

Cover art is once again by the team of Scott Clark (background) and Nathan Webb (figure, in this case a male human noble wielding a swashbuckling sword). The figure looks good - like something you'd see in an Errol Flynn movie - although I have to question the utility of wearing a monocle while sword fighting.

Nathan also provides the 4 pieces of black-and-white interior art: a male halfling (?) noble with an oversized head dressed like an old-time British Navy Admiral or Napoleon or something on page 3; a female human woman wearing a long dress and holding a sheathed sword, with her eyes closed and an expression on her face making it look like she just sneezed, on page 7; a rather barbaric-looking king on page 10 with a remarkable resemblance to the guy who was assassinated on his throne over in the pages of Power Classes I: Assassin; and a swashbuckling noble with ripped shirt swinging an unappealing naked woman off her feet on page 15. Of the bunch, I liked the sneezing noblewoman the best.

The noble class itself seems a bit like a suped-up Aristocrat (an NPC class from the Dungeon Master's Guide, although they get d8s for Hit Dice while the noble here only gets a d6 (possibly to offset the whole list of special abilities he gets throughout his 20 levels, I don't know). He gets 6 skill points per level, which makes perfect sense, as you'd expect the nobility to be dripping with skills. I like the fact that a noble character can pick and choose some of his level-dependent special abilities: not only does he get three bonus feats (selected from a pool of 7), but he also gains four "social skills" (chosen from among 8 possibilities). This goes a long way toward customization and ensuring that no two nobles of a given level are likely to be exactly alike.

One thing that does sort of bother me is that many of a noble's special abilities are completely at the whim of the DM. For instance, the Refuge social skill gives the noble a hideaway, but the DM is free to determine whether anyone else has already found out about it whenever the noble tries to hide there. The DM decides whether or not the (poorly-named, in my opinion) Do You Know Who I Am? special ability even has the possibility to work on a given individual.

The book concludes with a magic item (a sword, the blade of nobility, that increases the wielder's Charisma but causes a calamity once per year that the DM has to come up with on his own) and a feat (Well-Heeled Family, granting a +2 to Diplomacy to those knowing the family - again, DM's discretion - and a +2 to the roll to call upon the family's aid).

There were several editing and proofreading errors throughout the book (contributable to a lack of attention on the part of Matthew Sprange and William James, respectively), mostly along the lines of an extra space cutting a word in half and splitting it between two lines, a "copy and paste" error resulting in referring to the noble as "the assassin" in one instance, commas being used where semicolons are appropriate, and the lack of capitalization of skill and feat names. (The latter is not so much an "error" in the grammatical sense, but it goes against established d20 norms, and Mongoose adheres to those norms the rest of the time.) I suppose my "pickiness" level tends to increase when the book in question is only 8 normal sized pages in length and there's still so many errors to be found, though.

All in all, this is an okay book. Nobles aren't the type of character I would normally gravitate to - they're definitely more geared toward a "high society" campaign, with lots of roleplaying and the likelihood that entire game sessions would pass by without the PCs leaving their home city - but this seems to be a pretty good shot at that style of character. (I have to confess to wondering how one might make a Batman character using the noble as the "Bruce Wayne" half...)