I had slapped together the "Lackey" class a week or two ago using the custom class making system. That wasn't too bad, if a little more labor intensive than just making up a class off the cuff for regular old school D&D versions.
This weekend I delved deeper into the process. I made up the custom races of Halflings and Orkin (half-orcs, and all the varieties of those with some orc and human ancestry to various degrees). Now that was a lot more time consuming still.
Then I used my new races to make a few classes. The halfling scout (similar to the orginal Basic D&D halfling), the halfling burglar (a more or less straight halfling thief) and the Orkin Bandit (a bushwhacker with a small amount of orcish ancestry).
I also adapted the Gnome Titan from Hackmaster as a Gnome fighter type with Groin stomping powers, but at least the gnome racial template was already in the ACKS rules.
I must say that I'm not sure whether the system where each class is tied to the race so tightly is really worth all the hair-pulling and jumping about. Just having separate race and class rules would be simpler. I suppose the payout is that the class combinations should be a lot more easy to deal with during play than the clunky D&D multi-class system. But, just saying that each race could be a straight class fighter or thief at least would have saved a lot of effort.
Having played quite a bit of the old D&D, I liked the races as class idea. I like the specific classes for races in ACKS, but it makes my head hurt trying to work out the class building/race building stuff.
ReplyDeleteI've been looking for stuff on infravision, and found that they pulled it from dwarves and elves in order to balance out their character class costs. See, to me it seems really silly to have gnomes and lizardmen with infravision, but not dwarves or elves. I know we rarely play things so tight we let light sources become a serious issue.
You can add Dwarf 0 for 250XP, Elf 0 for 125XP, etc. to any of the human classes. Make them all go up to level 13 only, and increase the XP needed each level after 8th by the rules in the Player's Companion. Dwarf Fighter 10,000XP; Dwarf Cleric of Thief 30,000XP. Elf 50,000XP.
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