HALFLING
(art from the Pathfinder books because I couldn't find any other I liked)
HALFLING
(art from the Pathfinder books because I couldn't find any other I liked)
Elves are okay but they've never been my favorite. My players and I agree it wouldn't really feel like a proper dungeon-y game without Tolkien-style elves in it. I have been kicking around a version of elves that is more Fae and weird and otherworldly but that's for another day. Anyway here's these pointy-eared bastards.
ELF
(artwork by Astri Lohne and Han Peng respectively)
Elves get +1 to DEX, +1 to INT, and +1 to CHA. (1)
Elves get +2 to Reflex saves. (1)
Elves have a +1 bonus to attack rolls made with bows. (1)
Elves are immune to magical sleep and mind control effects. (1)
Elves can see in the dark as if it were daylight as long as there is any moonlight, starlight, or light produced by living things. (1)
Elves can sense invisible beings and hidden or secret doors, passages, and trails with a Wisdom roll. (1)
Elves are immune to magical charm, sleep, and paralysis effects. (1)
Elves can reroll failed rolls to resist diseases and magical aging effects. (1)
If an Elf is even slightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, or other natural conditions they will be undetectable to mundane senses as long as they don't move at more than half speed. (1)
1. All this stuff feels Elf-y and neat.
HIT DICE: D8
ATTACK BONUS: +1
Clerics get +2 to all saves. (1)
Clerics can use simple weapons and armor.
Clerics can use Bless, Cure, Heal, and Purify once a day each. (2) Each daily use after the first requires a Faith roll. (3)
Clerics can Turn or Exorcise the undead. (4)
Clerics can call down Divine Intervention. (5)
Clerics start with one random Holy Gift. (6)
THIEF
(art by Bob Kehl and Katerina Poliakova respectively)
HIT DICE: D6
ATTACK BONUS: +1
Thieves get +2 to Reflex saves.
Thieves can use all weapons and firearms. Thieves can wear leather armor. (1)
Thieves can backstab surprised or unaware enemies. They get a +2 bonus to the attack roll and the attack deals double damage (triple at level 9). (2)
Thieves can move silently at half speed, or at normal speed with a Dexterity roll. (3)
Thieves can scale sheer surfaces with a Dexterity roll. (4)
Thieves can pick non-magical locks and disarm non-magical traps given tools and time. (5)
Thieves can slip out of non-magical bonds (like ropes and manacles) given enough time. (6)
Thieves can make passable forgeries of any document given ink, paper, and time. (7)
Thieves can automatically pickpocket any unsuspecting victim if they are a lower level. (8)
1. I go back and forth on if thieves should be able to use big fuck-off martial weapons like battle axes and also firearms, but generally I let them because it seems like the kind of dirty shit a thief could do. If you're not trained in a weapon, then you can only successfully attack with it on a natural 20. If you're not trained in a piece of armor, you can still wear it, but you're over-encumbered. Then it's as though you're a number of inventory slots over your limit equal to the AC rating of the armor you're wearing. So if you were wearing armor that gave +4 AC and you weren't trained to wear it then all your rolls are at -4. (This has never come up in our games which is a shame because it's easy to remember.)
2. "Surprised or unaware" means you know they're there but they don't know you're there. I've seen some complicated methods of working out when a thief can backstab but this is an easy way that works for me.
3. Moving silently is a good way to get into position to backstab (I have to remind my players of this a lot). What is half speed and normal speed anyway? Uh, thirty feet a turn is normal? Sure, sounds good. And a turn is about five seconds, or maybe ten. Look, I don't let math get in the way of the game. Also it's a good time to mention we don't use miniatures or grid maps or stuff like that. If you do: good, cool, have fun, it's your game! I use descriptive language and maybe some hasty sketches to get the point across.
4. The difficulty of this DEX roll will be judged on the fly.
5. This is judged on the fly as well as how long it should take and if it will make any noise. It's specifically non-magical locks and traps unless you have like ZARN ZORNEO'S ALL-ENCOMPASSING DIADEM OF LOCKPICKERY or something. Or if you're an artificer (another class for another time).
6. Again adjudicated on the fly. This is the all-around escape artist feature for thieves.
7. This is more of a "gee whiz" kinda thing, it has never come up in game. My players will ignore documents and just try to bullshit their way past people.
8. Yup, auto-pickpocket without a roll. I am under no compulsion to tell you what level your target is though, and the understanding is if they are equal or higher level than you then you fail the pickpocketing and the target is aware of it. What's to stop somebody from just pickpocketing every ragged peasant in town during a game session? Nothing really, as long as you aren't dragging the game down or putting everybody else out. If that's the case then you will be punished. But otherwise yeah, go crazy, swipe those coppers, cowboy.
And that's the thief. Generally in our regular group somebody always picks the thief to play, usually my daughter (she's an adult, I'm old).
DWARF
(art by Bob Kehl)
Okay let's dig into some stuff. I'm going to throw a class down and discuss points from it instead of doing a dozen different "this is how our group plays" posts.
FIGHTER
(art by Bob Kehl and hdy9108, def not by me, i can't draw for shit)
HIT DICE: D10 (1)
ATTACK BONUS: Fighter level +1 (2)
Fighters get +1 to Fortitude and Reflex saves. (3)
Fighters can use all weapons, firearms, and armor. (4)
Fighters get a Bad-Ass Motherfucker die. Once a day they can roll a d6 and add the result to
any other dice roll they’ve made, even after they’ve already rolled. Fighters get more BAMF
dice as they level up. (5)
Second Wind: Once a day a Fighter can regain (d6 + their level) hit points for free. (6)
1. Fighters roll a d10 for their hit points at every level. We don't do "max hit die at first level" or any level because we crave death / are hard like that.
2. Every class gets an attack bonus that they add to their d20 roll when they try to hit an orc in the face with a chair. Most every class gets a plain ol' +1 but ya boy the Fighter gets that plus their level. Because fighters are good at fighting.
3. The saving throws we use are what I call the common sense saves: Fortitude, Reflex, and Willpower. I like the simplicity of the three saves. I have a soft spot for the golden oldie saves -- DEATH RAY! POLYMORPH!! PETRIFICATION!!! -- because they sound METAL AS HELL but Fort, Ref, & Will just work easier at the table for us. Also I almost called this blog BREATH WEAPON but somebody else already had that. :(
4. "All weapons" means all melee and ranged weapons, I have a simplified list of weapons that we use for our games. It's simplified because my players don't get hung up too much on the differences between different kinds of swords, I know other people do but that's not our thing. Same for armor. I use the LotFP system of "unarmored human has an AC of 12" and then armor gives a bonus to that. We don't THAC0 around here, my players are not the kind of nerds that enjoy arithmetic. Also yes, there's guns in our game. That'll get its own post.
5. This is something I have been prototyping at the table and so far it's been fun. Fighters are big flashy punch-stab-smash characters so they get a class ability that lets them land that hit on the ogre or twist the knife for extra damage or kick down the door or make that Reflex save and ride the chandelier up to the ceiling. I encourage outlandish entertaining shit at the table. Also "get more dice as they level up" is vague because I haven't set any numbers in stone, so like maybe a level 4 fighter gets 1 more die and maybe the dice change from d6s to d8s at level 7, I don't know. My only players that live to level up are the careful ones and they always play wizards and clerics. The fighters always die like pigs AS CROM INTENDED.
6. Something else I'm prototyping right now. A fighter should be able to wade into the shit and send rivers of blood to the blood god and live to do it again, so this ought to help.
So that's the fighter class we use for our games. It was one of the lesser played classes until one of my players (we'll call him Eduardo) got tired of dying all the time and realized that "more hit points means die less often" and started playing fighters a ton. You'd think that was obvious but that's Eduardo, it took him a couple years and like 6 characters before he figured it out. More on Eduardo later, including the time his character ascended to Heaven as the new Jesus after the old Jesus got trapped in a sub-dimensional void by the Devil (our games can get pretty gonzo).
First things first: this game takes place in a world I'm calling (for now) REVERSE EARTH.