Pyramid #3/36: Dungeon Fantasy

[Kuroshima]

PseudoFenton, you got exactly what I was intending to convey with the Mystic Knight. It's kind of my pet peeve that gish warriors are so hard to do in most systems, so when the opportunity of writing the Mystic Knight appeared, I couldn't but jump in.

[Kalzazz]

Can you explain what gish is? I don't think I'm at all familiar with it

[jblalock77]

Githyanki fighter/magic user. Old school AD&D.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by jblalock77

Githyanki fighter/magic user. Old school AD&D.

More generally, the ability to make characters as a blend of two existing classes or roles who aren't either overpowered or underpowered in comparison to "normal", more focused characters.

[mhd]

Yeah, the typical fighter/magic-user requires a level of synergy that a lot of systems and backgrounds can't handle.

[Jeffr0]

Nah, it's a piece of cake.

Just give the fighter/magic-user the abilities of both classes... then jack up the amount of experience it takes to level him up. Then put a strict level limit on him... and only allow non-human characters to do this.

What else do you need...?

[mhd]

Some super-special armor only his race can wear?

[Bruno]

Laser swords are a nice touch :)

[PseudoFenton]

Originally Posted by Jeffr0

Nah, it's a piece of cake.

I prefer the recipe where you mix a batch of multiple high cost attributes, so if this were to be a gurps cake that'd be IQ and DX, with some Will and ST required too.

Then add some solid backbone skill requirements for the layer fillings, at least two layers but normally it ends up being three. Making this a gurps cake will probably mean you need a layer of weapon skills, a layer of spell skills, and then a layer of metamagic skills and techniques to go in the middle of the weapons and spells.

You then add in some annoying artificial flavours, so say race restrictions and unusual background overheads (as everyone knows it way too powerful to just let anyone cast and wield swords, need some UB for that) and probably something entirely random and nothing to do with the original goal, like say, underwater breathing, because only the fishfolk teach these skills.

Then bake using an overly hot oven which burns off at least half of the cake leaving very little that's still edible afterwards, so for gurps lets say half the magery limit and randomly cap weapon skills to only Attribute +4.

...and then serve the cremated, foul tasting remains three weeks after its gone stale, to ensure that it's balanced against all the other cakes which are on offer.

The GM can also make this cake more attractive by adding pretty light effects (that do nothing and hardly last) by serving with candles, or adding a random $ cost for even rolling up one of these characters by sprinkling hundreds of thousands to the top of the cake.