Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kerrick" data-source="post: 5087199" data-attributes="member: 4722">Here's what I see, looking at the classes:Barbarian: savage, one-trick pony. I ditched it, gave most of its abilities to the fighter and ranger, and made the rest into a PrC.Bard: I don't see any cultural or geographical trappings on this class. Every society has entertainers who dance, sing, juggle, tell stories, etc. I agree that the need to perform is a limitation, but I'm not sure how to fix it. The Mentalist angle is interesting, but how would you go about doing it? Cleric: I completely disagree on this score, to the point where I made it a requirement that clerics have a god. Every culture has gods (one god or a pantheon; they all believe in something Up There); it's just the priest's role that changes. Druid: Protectors and caretakers of nature. Sure, the name is Celtic, but what else would you call them? "Druid" most easily carries across the image of a "protector and caretaker of nature". Wildshape is a holdover from 1E, and I don't know where Gygax got it. There are two main problems with the druid:1) They're assumed to work only in the forests, which only enhances the Celtic angle;2) They're around the wildshape ability - they're effectively Shifters, not druids. Fortunately, both of these are easy to fix: I did it by adding favored terrains and scaling wild shape way back in favor of a variety of other abilities that better typefied what druids are all about. Monk: No arguments there. The problem, again, is that a martial artist is almost always going to have Asian trappings, simply because that's where martial arts originated. They already have the ability to use weapons for their flurry attack; making them less "culture-centric" is simply a matter of letting them choose a different set of weapons they can use with their flurry.Paladins: Yeah, they're most likely based on the Knights Templar. But then, no other culture really has an analogue to "knights" or "paladins", except maybe the samurai. You could make them into knights (though that would make them little different than fighters), or just make them generic "holy warriors" with no alignment restriction and abilities based on their gods' domains.Ranger: The base concept is a good one, IMO. If you want to go bounty hunter, vampire hunter, or whatever, that's what PrCs are for. As with druids, though, they're stuck with the assumption that the only terrain type in D&D is Forest. Broadening this (adding favored terrains) will go a long way toward making rangers better able to fit into any culture. Want an Arabic/Egyptian culture? No problem - make the rangers able to walk on sand, call up a stinging wind, or infuse scorpion venom into their weapons. Underwater? Pfft. They'd have superior scent, tremorsense (can sense the presence of others via disturbances in the water) and maybe free action.</blockquote>

Verification