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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelph" data-source="post: 1918962" data-attributes="member: 12212">[Not the original poster]Info on backgrounds, organizations, and campaign material that *doesn't* involve new classes/feats/etc.Let me use an example, from a slightly different area: classes. The Player's Guide to Arcana Unearthed has the coolest, most-useful thing i've seen yet in a D20 System product, where classes is concerned. It has a section that explores the interaction of classes and roles. Classes are, for the most part, mechanical tools. Rather than give me a prestige class to make an arcane archer, how about some discussion of how to make one with the existing tools (feats, classes, skills, etc.)? Or, at least, if the classes are suitably generic/functionalist, this should be possible. For those who haven't read it, and therefore don't maybe understand what i'm talking about, it has two sections to it. First, he looks at each class in turn, and gives 3-4 examples of common archetypes that fit that class. so, frex, magister describes "doomspeaker", "priest", and "teacher", while oathsworn discusses "avenger", "the chosen one", "guardian", and "questing knight". The few that might not be self-evident from name would probably be recognizable if you read the brief description. Then he moves on to common archetypes, and how to build them. Archer, assassin, berserker, knight, sailor, thief, etc. My players took one look at that and went "damn! i wish i'd had that when i was making my character." And, while Monte prefaces this with "these are new options, and you might need a hand getting a handle on them" [paraphrased], i think it's as much that they are complex components (classes and feats). I, for one, would love a similar thing for D&D3E rules: "you wanna play a Noble Savage? do this. You wanna play a Knight in Shining Armor? do this. You wanna play an assassin? o this. you wanna play a shaman? do this." Of course, it wouldn't work as well with D&D3E. Too many of the classes are pretty specialized already--how many distinct archetypes are well-supported by a single-classed druid, frex? As an example of this, i just put together a players' handout for my Al Qadim game. I've got ~2 dozen archetypal roles (mostly swiped straight from the kit selections of the original gamebook), and for each one i discuss at least a couple different ways to represent the role in terms of class, race, feat, and skill selection. For all of these, using Arcana Unearthed as my mechanical foundation, it took me a grand total of half-a-dozen new feats--and most of those were just to support one concept, the magejackal--and 0 new classes. Tons of new options, in terms of character building, almost no new mechanical complexity.</blockquote>

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