An attempted implementation of a switch from our current three physical trees (warrior, wilderness, subterfuge) to a four-tree system: Heavy Fighter and Light Fighter as full trees, Wilderness and Subterfuge as supplementary trees anyone can add on.
Heavy Fighter - 15 points a level
- Lets you take Heavy Weapons (the current melee skill), Fitness, Fortitude, Dexterity, Berserker, extra rage, Heavy Armour, 2 handed.
Light Fighter - 12 points a level
- Lets you take Fitness, Dexterity, Agility, Light Armour, Light Weapons, Subdual, Backstab, Salmonleap, Improved Brawling, Blindfighting, Surefooted, Steadfast,
- Dexterity: 5 points. Gain a point of DAC for each four full levels of Dexterity and Agility you have (2 Dex + 2 Ag does grant 1 DAC, just like Health, Fitness and Fortitude).
- Agility: 5 points. Gain a point of DAC for each four full levels of Dexterity and Agility you have (2 Dex + 2 Ag does grant 1 DAC, just like Health, Fitness and Fortitude).
- Light weapons: 6 points, requires light fighter n. Cannot be used if you have AC 4 on any location.
- 1 Single by a one-handed weapon of your choice.
- 2 Single by all one-handed weapons
- 3 Use two weapons of up to 36 inches OR use 2-handed weapons
- 4 Whichever ability was not taken at level 3.
- 5 +1 unnatural damage grade on a blow, twice per fight, with weapons up to 36" long.
- 6 +1 unnatural damage grade all blows (making level 5 superfluous)
- 7 +2 unnatural damage grades on a blow, twice per fight, with weapons up to 36" long.
- 8 +3 unnatural damage grades on a blow, twice per fight, with weapons up to 36" long.
- Light armour: 5 points. Lets you use an extra two points of armour per time taken.
- Improved Brawling: Requires Light Fighter 4. You inflict an extra degree of damage while brawling.
- Blindfighting/Surefooted?/Steadfast? I-IV: Each of these skills costs 8 points a level, and requires Light Fighter 2n
- 1: Ignore 1 blind/strikedown/halt call per day
- 2: Ignore 2 of that call per day, not more than once per fight
- 3: Ignore one of that call per fight
- 4: Fully immune to that status effect.
- Improved Brawling: Requires Light Fighter 4. You inflict an extra degree of damage while brawling.
- Salmonleap (Requires light fighter 2n)
- You can salmonleap once per day per purchase: put your hand in the air, take seven steps in a straight line, and immediately put your hand down. You cannot use any abilities for 2 seconds after leaping.
Wilderness 1-4 3 points a level
Lets you take tracking 1-4, Scent 1-3, Camouflage 1-4 (as current camouflage 2n, at 15 points a level), Conceal tracks 1-4 (6 points a level, reduces the effective skill of anyone tracking you by n), Leather Hardening (2 points).
Subterfuge 1-4 6 points a level
Lets you take Alias 1-4 (for 20 points a level), improved alias at level 2 for 10 points, Forgery ( F1 needs S1, 5 XP; F2 needs S4, 15 XP), Conceal item 1-4 (5 XP a shot), Light Fingers (needs S1, 10 XP)
- Scent (1 XP per level per scent)
- 1: Call "detect $foo$ by close examination
- 2: Call "detect $foo$ at 10 metres range
- 3: Call "wide detect $foo$.
- Leather hardening (2 points, requires wilderness 1): You can use thick leather armour to physrep AC 4.
- I don't want wilderness "I don't use metal" types to be shut out of heavy warrior. --Jacob
Hm, looks quite nifty. I note you can't stack the high levels here with pretty much any weapon buffs. The other thing I'd contemplate is say natural doubles at six, add small shield use in earlier (because bucklers), and then weapon tricks instead of further damage buffs? So disarms or blinds or something by blow.
--Tea
- Possibly. I want to make Light Fighter significantly worse than heavy fighter at vanilla in-your-face tankfighting, but significantly better if it can get a tactical advantage and alphastrike. Disarms etc are stylistically right, but I'm not sure they reward skirmishfighting more than tanking. --Jacob
- The idea of making warriors more 'tank' than 'damage output' characters has been brought up a lot lately (probably with good reason). Giving the warrior high damage calls is the current system which mostly seems to result in them being seen as the best linearing class and is what several folks want to get away from. Allowing your tank the ability to call limited status effects with a successful maneuver might work well- Disarm a weapon by hitting the wielding arm, Strikedown by a shot to torso or legs etc- but restricting damage to singles would mean their opponents would definitely need to pay attention to them, but allow the glory of the high damage to other combatants. I guess what I am arguing for is that I'd let the Light Fighter be the one to get doubles, while allowing the tank heavy armour and limited status effect generation. --TimB
- This makes me sad, for a couple of reasons. One is genre emulation - I want to be able to play a Mighty Warrior or a Cunning Swashbuckler, not a tank or a DPS. The other is that if the "tank" has low damage output and the DPS is squishy, everyone will ignore the tank and chase the DPS; I don't think tanking is workable in a system where people are allowed to choose their own target rather than having mechanical threat. But that's less important than the first argument. Incidentally, what I propose would let Light Fighters have access to *much* higher damage calls than Heavy Fighters, just not sustainably. --Jacob
- So you are relegating subterfuge and wilderness to mini trees almost at that costing? Yuck. I really dislike this as it stands - CUTT is a psuedo-medieval setting, not a renaissance look and feel one, to which the light fighter options are more suited. You can swashbuckle if you wish within the current mechanics without these changes.
- No "almost" about it. Wilderness doesn't work as a tree on its own; I don't think the attempts to make it work being mooted will work; I think that making it something you take on top of something else probably would work. You certainly can swashbuckle in the current system, but it's massively mechanically suboptimal to do so. --Jacob
- The only ways in which swashbuckling is mechanically suboptimal at the moment are a) no/minimal armour, and b) certain weapon combos. The latter is less of a problem because it easily does include ambidexing and sword/buckler, both of which are very effective. The former seems to suggest that if it's really massively suboptimal, perhaps the armour skill is too cheap. On the other hand, we don't necessarily want swashbuckling to be as effective as clanky warrior. Warrior is a very powerful class, and a deliberately suboptimal warrior build is still seriously strong. TT's trope-feel is one that says "Warriors should generally be armoured", at least to me, and making swashbuckling really strong will change this, which isn't necessarily positive. --Tea
I also don't think tanking and dps roles being seperated in this way works in a game where on a linear you might have 4 or 5 of you at most; without a threat generating mechanism then there is no basis for an mmorpg style mechanic. -- Delvy
- Is that a response to me or to TimB? What I'm suggesting certainly isn't meant to be a separation into tanking and DPS - heavy fighters have higher sustainable damage than light ones (but less burst damage). I certainly agree with you that tanking isn't workable in LARP. --Jacob
There seems to be no bow skill anywhere here? Archery may not be very useful but I don't think that it is something we should do away with. That would probably fit into light warrior, i guess? Otherwise I do like this as it allows for easier building of wilderness/subterfuge multiclasses which I think is a good thing --Andrew
- Archery could be put in light warrior, or in both types of warrior, or as a general skill. --Jacob