Knight (Custom Class)

The second class for my Custom Players Handbook is the Knight.

A few complaint's I have seen about fighters and knights is a lack of versatility and the overall weakness at higher levels. Keeping that in mind I designed this class quite differently than standard.

This is not a specialized weapon expert nor is this a mounted knight (even though a mounted knight is more historically accurate.)

Instead of getting powerful spells like a wizard or lots of choice like a fighter, this knight gets lots of  preselected feats and abilities. Faced with fighting many different situations the traveling man at arms has developed these many different talents and only slightly specializes with a sword and shield.

Boosted by a higher Hit Die more Skills and later Spell Resistance I hope that he will come across as a powerful warrior who doesn't need tons of planning before play and stays tough at higher levels. Of course, it hasn't been playtested at all at this point so I look forward to feedback.  

Knight

Alignment: Lawful (Good, Neutral or Evil)

Hit Die: d12

Skill Points: 4 + Int modifier

Minimum Str & Int: 13

Proficiency:

Good Base Attack

Two Saving Throws (Three if Attribute based.)

Weapon Groups Heavy Blades, Spears & Lances

Light, Medium & Heavy Armor & Shields

Level	Abilities
1	Fitted Armor,
2	Shield Expert, Improved Initiative +4
3	Sword Play, Endurance
4	Power Attack, Cleave
5	Mobility, Spring Attack
6	Improved Bull Rush, Improved Over Run
7	Leadership, Call to Arms
8	Hold the Line, Throw Anything
9	Blind-Fight, Run
10	Spell Resistance 1 per every 2 levels
11	Improved Fitted Armor
12	Improved Shield Bash
13	Weapon Play, Die Hard
14	Great Cleave, Exertion
15	Combat Expertise, Whirlwind Attack
16	Move Aside
17	Indomitable Will +4 vs Enchantments
18	Dangerous Reach
19	Improved Initiative +8
20	Great Fortitude, Lightning Reflexes, Iron will, Leadership x2

Fitted Armor: With any armor that is the right size for its wearer, you can spend time adjusting and fitting the armor properly resulting in ½ check penalty, or guiding a squire to do. This takes 1 minute for light armor 2 minutes for medium armor and 4 minutes for heavy armor. At 6^th level the check penalty is completely eliminated.

Shield Expert: x2 AC bonus from your shield

Sword Play: When Fighting with a sword you are proficient in you automatically count as having the feats; Improved Disarm, Improved Feint, Improved Trip, Improved Sunder and Quick Draw and Combat Reflexes. This applies to any weapon you are proficient in at level 13.

Call to Arms: As a standard action you can shout and rally all allies within 10ft per level. Granting them an additional save against fear effects with a +4 bonus vs fear for 1 round per level.

Hold The Line: Make an attack of opportunity against a charging foe.

Throw Anything: Any Melee weapon can be thrown with a range increment of 10ft at no penalty.

Exertion: Lose up to 1 hp per base attack and deal +1 damage per hp lost this way. Stacks with power attack.

Move Aside: Walk right through enemy squares with no skill check spending one attack of opportunity to negate two attacks of opportunity from opponents.

Dangerous Reach: Make an attack of opportunity against anyone who engages you in melee without flanking you. Stacks with Hold the Line and reach weapons.

Patronage: As a soldier in the military, a sellsword, or servant to a noble, most knights will receive large gifts of money or land. Each time you gain a feat at levels; 1, 3, 5, 7, & 9, you may choose to forgo the feat or extra training and instead spend time earning your patronage and receive 2000gp x your level and 3000gp x your level at levels 11, 13, 15, & 18. (This should be above normal wealth by level progression.)

The DM may allow you to spend feats gained in other ways on patronage if he feels it's fair.

Assassin (Custom Class)

I am putting together a custom players handbook for basically a 3rd edition D&D game and this is the first class that I created for it. 

Unlike similar classes, this assassin is not pigeon holed into using poison or a specific weapon or even being forced to hide in shadows or watch their victim. Instead, almost every ability is set up to allow him to simply strike. In or out of combat noticed or not noticed, sneaking or not sneaking the Assassin will score a critical hit after critical hit killing you for good. 

Assassin

Alignment: Any

Hit Die: d8

Skill Points: 4 + Int modifier

Proficiency:

Average Base Attack

One Good Saving Throw (Two if Attribute based.)

Two Weapon Groups

Light Armor and Shields

Level	Ability
1	Weapon Finesse, Vital Strike +1
2	Alertness
3	Vital Strike +2
4	Skill Focus Bluff +3
5	Vital Strike +3
6	Evasion
7	Vital Strike +4
8	Stealth Kill
9	Vital Strike +5
10	Quite Kill
11	Vital Strike +6, Extra Critical Damage Die
12	Improved Alertness
13	Vital Strike +7
14	Improved Evasion
15	Vital Strike +8
16	Amblyopia
17	Vital Strike +9
18	Coup de Grace
19	Vital Strike +10
20	Angle of Death

Vital Strike: Increase critical hit range by 1 per bonus and deal one extra damage per damage die during a critical hit. This is during any finesse weapon based attack. (If using multipliers for critical hits then multiply this as well.)

Do not add the bonus from Vital Strike onto dice added from sneak attacks or death attacks.

A flaming burst dagger deals 1d4 weapon dmg + 1d6 fire dmg
+ 1d10 burst dmg on a crit. It criticals on 19-20 for x2

With Vital Strike 4 it would crit on 16-20 dealing (1d4+4)x2 +1d6 +1d10+4

This one would work as it is a finesse weapon.

(IDK maybe I should cut the 1d10+4 but it sounds fun)

Enable to judge if this is two weak or not we need to keep in mind
a similar level rouge would be adding +4d6 to any hit critical or not if he is flanking.
Using the Multiple dice crit method it would deal
2d4+8(two dice +4 each) + 1d6 + 1d10+4

Alertness: Gain+2 on perception checks such as listen and spot even while sleeping.

Evasion: Anytime you succeed a Dex based saving throw and take half damage or miss damage, instead take zero damage. Only if not helpless and wearing armor you are proficient in. If you already have Evasion you automatically gain Improved Evasion instead.

Improved Alertness: Retain your Dex bonus to AC even if caught flat-footed. You still lose your bonus to AC if immobilized or helpless.

Improved Evasion: You only take half damage on a failed Dex based Saving Throw.

Stealth Kill: While not being directly observed you can make a Sleight of Hand or Stealth check (whichever is more appropriate) opposed by Perception checks from those in line-of-sight to prevent them from identifying him as the attacker.

Quite Kill: Upon killing a target in melee with a finesse weapon or with a quiet ranged weapon that uses dexterity to hit at one-half range, the kill is silent and may go unnoticed if not being directly observed. This includes making discrete wounds so those nearby might not even notice that the target is dead for a few moments.

Amblyopia: (EX) Rolling Bluff vs Perception allows you to simply appear like you belong where ever you are at even in an enemy stronghold or hidden in a crowd without the need for a disguise. Essentially allowing you to hide in plain sight.

Coup de Grace: If in one hit you bring an unsuspecting target to wounded or bloodied status (one-half hp) he is instead killed.

Angel of Death: (SU) Cha vs Will; Targets you kill at your choice cannot be resurrected.

As you can tell his style is to strike unexpectedly but will you train him to be a spy who disguises himself and gathers information to get in or a rogue who uses sneaking and hiding to come out of the shadows and attack? Or perhaps a bandit with a bow or crossbow who sits in a tree aiming for your vital organs?

Funny Story. To me anyway,

    Originally I was going to share part of this as a passing comment on my patreon account but decided that it was too long so I cut it while thinking "But I kinda want to share this story." Then I remembered what Anthony Hargis said in a comment,

"Do what makes you happy. I haven't had a gaming group in years. If that's all I wanted to write about, I'd really have nothing to say. Write what you feel, you'll be happier for it and your blog will be all the better for it too."

I took this mean blog about whatever I want to so I decided to bring the Story over here,

     So at the moment I am switching computers again after recently having had my macbook power cable burn out for the idk 3rd-5th time something like that. But I did get another computer running just this last week and so now I am using that,

     How I got the computer started when my wife was leaving to go shopping and called me outside and told me there was a shopping cart in the dumpster down the street. She could see it sticking out of the dumpster from our yard. I figured buying a cart like that can cost between 1-3 hundred dollars last I knew so no harm in checking it out. Turned out to be a shorter one with two baskets and a bottom shelf all metal but the kind of style you might see at a dollar store. All the company logo's had been removed by who ever likely stole it but since it was in the trash why not take it out.

     That's when I saw underneath it was a busted up looking computer. Since we were down to one barely functioning laptop that can't run most games without overheating even using 2-3 fans and its internal cooling fan. I decided to take a look at this dumpster computer.

     One second my wife is driving by in the car thinking I'm pulling a cart out of a dumpster, the next second I have jumped inside the dumpster and am shouting "Yes! Yes!"

     I could tell from the sticker on the case that it was a windows vista computer and based on how nice the outside metal and plastic was I could tell it was likely new enough to be dual core. Not only that but the case had been opened and the removable panel was missing, telling me two things."

    One; someone tried to repair it and threw it away. Meaning it wasn't thrown out just from being to old. Two; I could see two ram chips, a dvd drive, a hard drive, power supply, cooling fan, motherboard. This would be worth taking just for the parts alone.

     After having sailed across the sea with my victorious bounty of pirate treasure. I was now in my living room with my old broken vista computer I always thought I could fix and this new one I had acquired.

    Using a CD I got form college with windows 7 on it and about an hour of fighting with the new computer I got it to boot with a new operating system. Unfortunately the product key on my CD seems to no longer be valid so I am left with windows saying it is not genuine until I buy a new key, but now that I could look at the computer properties it indeed was dual core, and 64 bit with 2 GB of RAM.

     So from my broken computer I pulled out two 1.5 GB RAM sticks and the old hard drive and dvd drive and added the ram to the new computer, mounted and connected the hard drive and lazily left the dvd drive lying around.

     Booting back up the new computer it was now running smoothly and showing 5 GB of RAM and an unknown device which is likely the hard drive I need to find a way to make work. Maybe it needs drivers or something something about a IDE switch needing to be set to slave idk.

     But this desktop was running great, turned out it has no real capability to play 3d games, hopefully a graphics card can be added, but with 5 GB of RAM and no over heating problems it was amzing to be able to surf the internet while installing steam and running slim drivers and even netflix worked very well. Oh yeah, we did have an old windows XP desktop we inherited but it takes it 5 mins to load chrome and can't play netflix at all.

     Also from the dumpster a nice looking keyboard, not sticky or anything, but a quarter of the keys don't seam to register. No mouse, but it did come with a nice monitor with built in speakers so all I had to down was track down an old audio cable and now I have a desktop with sound. The XP desktop's speakers weren't working for some reason.

     So there is my family excited to be having some good luck and now we have two working computers and a crumby shopping cart when my wife decides to go do her homework on her laptop. I had been using it to play The Binding of Isaac so she logs me out and logs into her account but nothing seams to be working. She can't launch chrome or firefox and eventually realizes nothing will run.

     So she does her home work on our new dumpster computer while I power off her lap top and find it now won't boot back up, startup repairs gets stuck on a black screen, booting windows gets stuck on the starting windows screen and booting from my CD goes to a black screen with a curser.

     Safe mode doesn't work, low resolution mode doesn't work. Idk, I guess something is broken with the graphics driver based on my google research but anyway it's not working at all and only one or two days after I finally got the motivation to get back to working on my making video games.

     So for better or worse we are back to only one working computer and although it is working faster and nicer then the laptop it has a non valid copy of windows and can't play 3d video games.

     Kinda funny, Kinda sucky, Long Post.

If you read clear to here then cheers mate.

heromedel (Blue Jester needs new computer, badly)

Retro-Pixel Castles: Game Review

An interesting game I got on Steam awhile back ago and still find my self occasionally interested in. Despite the generic name the designer is making a game not quite like most games that I would consider it similar to.

It is fairly simple in some ways, you basically command a group of settlers to work and build a settlement while also worrying about food, resources and eventual attacks from monsters such as zombies and skeletons.

But unlike most settlement games this one allows you to use your godly powers to scoop up settlers and/or resources and take them to another part of a much larger map. I find this makes the game more immersive as each settler provides you with power and the fruits of his work as well as gaining levels and think skill types are being added to the game.

So I could take my people from map to map building new homes and having new children and defending from enemies until the monsters became overwhelming and then scoop up as many of people as I could and head out to new land with my higher level settlers doing better each time.

The only snag I really hit was that eventually my settlement got too big for my computer to handle and everything slowed way down. However the designer is still hard at work improving the games features and performance. I recently spoke with him over steam and it seams he has plans to remove some of the load off the CPU to the GPU by something something particle physics. That sounds nice.

But no really this is a fun game and the designer seams capable and personable. It's currently 10 dollars on steam, I don't remember if I got it on sale or not but I have played it for 16 hours and could easily see me putting in another 16.

Also there isn't really castles just fun to build walls around your various settlement buildns. It would be more aptly described as Non-Retro Pixel Rouge-Lite Settlement Sim. just sayin.


Graphics: Can't comment as they were changed in the update right after I took a break from playing.

Sound: Seemed fine to me enjoyable catchy music and no issues.

Gameplay: Great, this what I'll will be going back for someday.

Performances: I'd say 4/5 stars here I have heard of mostly only minor issues other the cpu heavy performance which the designer is aware of and working on. (Early Access and all)

Over All Score: 16 hours of fun for 10 bucks or less easily and will likely put in another 16 or more. So although it may not be the next CK2 or Terraria for me it has lots of potential and I think it could teach some other designers about innovation and game play.

Final Decision: Buy it. Hell if you got the money don't even wait for a sale just go ahead and support the developer and maybe ask him to start plans on one day making a sequel.

Link to it's website.

Thought's on Blogging

When I first made this blog it was originally intended to be about role-playing games, mostly pen and paper games but also by extension video games and projects I was working on. However it's primary success (at least back in the day) seemed to be doing reviews. Ah, there was time when I spoke directly to other authors and game designers and they were happy to be featured on my blog. I largely stopped blogging when my gaming group split up and to this day I don't have strong group of people to game with.

However it wasn't my adventure logs and gaming ideas that spurred the most interest, although those are very fun to write about.

So I think I may attempt to get back into blogging but this time instead of being worried about D&D posts or the like I will go back to writing about what ever I feel like, perhaps with an emphasis on game reviews.

One of the best decisions I made was naming the blog after my username and not naming it after it's implied content. As such I can change the direction of the blog as much as I see fit, hopefully not too much though.

But first just to clarify my own thoughts I want to go over a few things. First, I admit I tend to jump from project to project sometimes to quickly and not always finishing what I intended. Second, I do sometimes get to caught up in wanting to make things perfect or focusing to much on success. But it is despite or because of those reasons that I am surprisingly happy with this blog. At this point it has survived many abandoned projects and waves of popularity and spans of emptiness, yet I still find myself coming back.

I don't think I could ever delete this blog or completely abandon it. Not without at least having a much better replacement. I am amazed having amassed the amount of posts and traffic that I did at the time whether it is seen as alot or alittle in the vastness of the internet, I am just happy to have contributed something.

So thank you to my readers and thank you to my fellow bloggers who showed an interest in working together and also thank you to the RPGBA who I just think are awesome to know is there especially in times when not much else is going on in my viewership.

One last thing, I'm not currently planning on sharing my short stories or fiction writing on this blog as I think I will begin making better use of my writing blog for that.