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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Cooper" data-source="post: 2011032" data-attributes="member: 24255">Power Classes IV:  NobleBy Paul TuckerMongoose Publishing product number MGP 110416 half-sized pages, $2.95The 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...)</blockquote>

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