Dance with me, baby.
SAMPLE CLASS IDEAS, EACH WITH AN ALTERNATIVE MODE OF COMBAT AND NAMES FOR EXTRA ABILITIES OR SOMETHING:
Aristocrat. Pay 50g or something ridiculous per point of damage automatically dealt; attack rolls are for poor people. Passive income, inheritances, “crypto”.
Antimage. You are anti-magic, in the sense that when you touch magic, most specifically magic items, you annihilate it, causing a momentary burning and flash that could scald or blind those in the immediate vicinity. How this anti-magic effect came to be is a highly intriguing mystery to the world’s leading minds. Smell the occult, phantasmism, spit anti-particle.
Improvisatori. A variation on my flyting system, as found in WWTD and Pb. Offer a CALL and time the DM for a response. The amount of time your DM gets to craft a RESPONSE is proportional to your Level. If the DM cannot, the target takes damage as proportional to your Level. Hearth-shadows, castigate, charge with myth.
Cartomancer. Play War with your DM. Winner deals damage to loser proportional to the magnitude of the victory; your loss is mitigated by a factor determined by your Level. Ace up your sleeve, up the ante, sweeten the pot, insert any number of limp-dick puns here.
Variant Cartomancer. Find a really fast strategy card game, a la Pokemon or Magic. (Extra points for making such a game yourself. I might do that, actually.) On your turn, you and the DM both play a round. When you win the game, your chosen target dies. If you lose, you immediately go unconscious in the most unstable way your game permits.
Sympath. You get extra hit points per Level. Take voluntary damage; a target you say automatically takes the same damage from that same source (so if you burned yourself with a hot poker, a fire elemental wouldn’t be affected, but an ice golem would). Take the pain, chakra-sight, messiah.
Light-Eater. You can consume torches and oil to breathe out fire. You can consume rations to belch out toxic gas. You can eat hireling’s brains to reanimate them as skeletons. Waste not, want not, but at what cost to your party, and your humanity? Bones to steel, red harvest, lights out.
The Light-Eater in particular seems like an Oblid vibe; I think he could do something interesting with that class design. I'm overall more pleased with the classes that inflict alternate violence through the diegesis instead of through changing the external mechanics, but I of course had to give my main man Phlox what he asked for.
ReplyDeleteI also forgot to say thanks for reading, and happy gaming.
The Aristocrat class could work pretty well, I think. Just cutting out the middleman of the "earn gold -> buy magic items/better sword/level up in a gold-to-xp system -> kill monsters better" process.
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