Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vigilance" data-source="post: 1895128" data-attributes="member: 4275">That's one way to look at it.However, having done a couple hundred hours of research and counting, I came to a different conclusion based on a few major points:1. Quick question. What do you get when a Ronin has kids? Or when a 14 year old Samurai in training finds out his father has died or been disenfranchised by the Shogun? Does that young man give up his Daisho and become a merchant?Heck no (at least in most cases heck no). So he sure as heck fire doesnt want to be a peasant. But he's not a Samurai.So this would lead to a case with someone being an "ex-Samurai" before first level or at 1st level. This doesn't really sit well with me rules wise. By this logic you could make a Chaotic Neutral "ex-Monk" at 1st level with the proviso that at 2nd level you had to take a different class. 2. Ronin were men of distinctly different abilities than Samurai. In d20 I consider this a class.Was a Ronin a great swordsman like a Samurai? He sure was.But he also lived by his wits... was portrayed in tales as roguish, lying smoothly, disguising himself on occasion and so forth. Ronin also lived in bands in the hills of Japan full time overlooking roads, to prey on merchants. This sort of skill set... living off the land, tracking, bluff, disguise... its just not possible to fit within the Samurai class.3. You could say (I am sure someone will) "That sounds like a Samurai/Rogue multiclass!".Sure you could say that. You could even DO that. However Ronin were a distinct archetype. Just like you could cobble a Ranger together with the right feat and skill selection or a Barbarian, so you could cobble a Ronin together. However, in D&D major archetypes get their own class and the Ronin qualifies. Now the knee-jerk might be to say "Ronin=ex-Samurai". That was my take as well. However, there were characters in history and fiction who were Ronin for their entire careers.When Tokugawa took power he designated a set number of Daimyo and Samurai. This disenfranchised literally thousands of warriors who spent their entire career as Ronin.When they married and had children those children spent their entire LIVES as Ronin. Kurasawa's Yojimbo films are about such a man. Living by his wits and his sword, penniless, wandering the land as neither fish nor fowl...This doesn't sound like an "ex" anything to me. It sounds like something else. So that was my take.Its not the only take, but I hope you can see I put some thought into it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Chuck</blockquote>

Verification