LogFAQs > #905325632

shadowsword87 posted...

My biggest problem is that it feels like you're just missing out on so much by predefining how the party will go around punching badguys

Not really. At least no more than a group of players saying they want to play a Rogue, a Wizard, a Paladin, and a Cleric lock a group into a predefined system of hitting bad guys.

Yes, you can ASSUME certain things about such a group, but if they wind up having a tendency to use the Rogue as some sort of Dex tank while the Paladin does more healing than the Cleric (who mostly uses attack magic), and the Wizard focuses almost exclusively on support and utility spells and is mostly useless in combat, then your preconceived assumptions don't mean much at all. Especially if they all dump everything they have into Stealth and Charisma abilities and either sneak or talk their way through literally every encounter (or just immediately retire and open an inn right outside the mouth of a famous dungeon, and charge other adventurers for admission/supplies/healing/etc).

I'm more handing a player a collection of tools that are analogous to a Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, and/or Wizard and letting them use them however they want.



shadowsword87 posted...

Instead you could say that the Druid had various animal friends (bear for tank, wolf for stabby, squirrel for healer) who can get sweet new magic items to buff them up.

To be fair, that's not entirely different from what I was thinking of (which was actually an idea spurred in the first place by listening to a video of Jeremy Crawford talking about giving animal companions levels in PC classes, and how he thinks that's actually a better solution than trying to bake animal companion abilities into classes like the Beastmaster Ranger does). I just went with ancient robots rather than pets.

That being said, I have a hard time thinking of animals as anything other than either melee combat builds or stealth attackers (ie, how they're mostly used in games like Far Cry), or as bird recon units (like in Far Cry or the new Assassin's Creed games). Very few animals seem intelligent enough or thematically appropriate to serve as spellcasters or healers for me.

Sure, you could kind of go the Disney princess route with animal companions, and have them all magic and sparkles and painting with all the colors of the wind, but I'm not enough of a hippie to play (or run) that as anything other than camp as fuck parody. Which probably isn't the sort of game most players would want in that scenario. It starts tripping the same warning bells that helped make Werewolf my least favorite White Wolf game ever (which is why, ironically, when playing the game about eco-warrior nature-loving werewolves, I always picked the technology obsessed clan with laptops and cyborg parts - because fuck nature).


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