Quote:
Originally Posted by Rasputin
Once upon a time, while researching a Pyramid article that still has yet to see the light of day, I went through the DF3 lenses to see what were the essential items that were always added in the lenses. Some highlights, when weighed against what you originally had:
- Barbarians always got High Pain Threshold and Outdoorsman if they didn't already have them.
- Bards always got Bardic Talent, Charisma, and Musical Ability.
- Holy Warriors always got Higher Purpose, Holiness, and Shtick.
- Knights always got Combat Reflexes and High Pain Threshold.
- Martial Artists always got Chi Talent and Trained by a Master.
- Scouts always got Heroic Archer.
- Swashbucklers always got Enhanced Parry and Weapon Master.
- Thieves always got Flexibility and High Manual Dexterity.
I'd add them back into the 125-point templates as they're always in the 50-point lenses, then take more points out of attributes and optional advantage points. These are the advantages that Kromm deemed defining of the template, so they're needed. Another analysis I did for other reasons showed the average attribute in DF1 was 12 (DX was 13) and 11 in DF15. Dropping all attributes by one level is 60 points right there. |
I think the question is how do you scale them down but keep them effective. Dropping attributes is an obvious was to scale down but I wanted to set a floor of 11 for HT and DX. For combat specialists, I decided to keep ST at least 11. I also wanted to keep variation within professions so I tried to keep at least 20 points in optional Advantages. As for characteristic advantages, you could as easily distinguish the professions by their focus - barbarians are fighters with outdoor skills, knights are all around combat experts, etc.
The other problem is that certain professions (Bard, Martial Artist) require a lot of points sunk before their esoteric abilities kick in. Trying to make a 125 point Martial Artists with Trained by a Master and Chi Talents is likely to result in a character with limited combat abilities (skills too low to really benefit from TbaM) and so not very reliable Chi abilities. Arguably that is like am AD&D 1st level monk but I wanted something more functional.
There's been some jokes about how the DFRPG is (35 years late) the Fantasy Trip revised box set. That's inspired me to try to create some 125 point DFRPG professions based on the old TFT suggested character types. I may post them at a later date.