Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Rough Draft: Soldier Base Class

Ive been working on and off on my own variant of d20, with some old school influences as well as my own ideas. One of the differences is the classes. They tend to be far more specific. Instead of having one fighter class for every kind of fighting man under the sun, there are more specific ones (though as of right now there are two very broad classes, the soldier of this post and the warrior. I've also considered an alternative scheme where there are several fighting man classes, including a militia, basically a veteran levied peasant, and a squire/knight). There is no such thing as a generalist wizard, though there is likely to be a "semi-generalist". While there isn't a cleric class for every god, clerics are broken into three main classes, the crusader (the classic "gish" cleric), the invoker (blasty clerics) and ministers (might need a better name, these guys focus on healing, buffing and protective magics. They can ward/drive off monsters, or weaken them, but don't have much in the way of damage dealing potential). A "rogue" might be a burglar, scout, mountebank, etc. In addition there are variant versions of classes and "prestige classes" or the equivalent.

Also to be noted is that while the character level cap is going to be something like 36, several classes might have considerably lower ones. The soldier has a level cap of five for instance. These classes are meant to multi-class at some point. Most often into a prestige class. While you may start as a soldier, you'll eventually become a ranger (yep, rangers might be a, or more than one, prestige class), a swordsmaster, or a shining blade of Hieroneous. Also neither skills or feats are being used. I may add them in later, replace them, or ignore them entirely.

So here is the soldier, thus far:
Hit Dice: d10
BAB: Good
Good Saves: Fort, Ref
Weapon Groups: Basic weapons, plus three of the following: axes, bows, crossbows, flails and chains, heavy blades, light blades, maces and clubs, picks and hammers, polearms, slings and thrown weapons, and spears and lances.
Veteran: Allows the soldier to call upon a fellow soldier he knew from a previous war.