| Kromm |
01-31-2008 12:28 AM |
Re: Wealth in DF
Nothing says you can't scrounge up points and buy Wealth for anyone, really. But as far as the templates go, it's only given to the roguish social engineers (bard and thief) because I was looking strictly at the buy/sell angle. In dungeon hacks -- as opposed to in semi-historical fantasy -- making deals is the job of roguish types. Knights are indeed just fighters with the name changed to avoid hard feelings; even knightly knights are essentially knights errant, ronin, etc., and probably stuck with the gear on their back.
I guess I'll admit that I was taking a moderately hard line on niche protection, doing things like leaving Survival off "urban" templates and only giving Wealth to "rogue" templates. As SJ himself pointed out, "Really, a party only needs one guy with Wealth, the way these rules work." Exactly. And that guy ought to be the main reseller, who will likely be the bard or thief. If the knight could do as well, he'd steal the spotlight from these other guys even in town, when he's already going to be dominating 3/4 of the action in the dungeon by hacking things to death. I wanted the weaselly town-dwellers to have some edge!
I think that a genuine knight, with social backing, horse, armor, etc., would be an interesting template -- call him "landed knight" or "knight of the realm" or something -- quite different from the generic one. I'm not certain that it would be the most useful template on a dungeon hack, but who knows? The 11 templates in Adventurers represent a considerably pared-down list. Had I infinite space, I'd have included other concepts from my original hardback outline: an artificer, an assassin distinct from the scout and thief, a beastmaster distinct from the barbarian and druid, and a scholar distinct from the cleric and wizard. Also, I wouldn't have merged what my notes called the knight and the swordsman. The former was closer to a real knight; the latter, to the classic fighter. I chose "knight" over "swordsman" (probably better called "man at arms" or something) to name the template because "swordsman" could easily be mistaken for "swashbuckler" (and "man at arms" lost for being too long).
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