Saturday, April 4, 2015

A sidetrack into archetypes

I had tackled implementing two of the systems things, the overland map and overland goodies. That got me going on another systems type thing I had been thinking about for some time, namely how to allow the player to make a lore appropriate pc. The Bedine are nomadic fighters, who according to sourcebooks use little/no armor and have particular traditional weapons. Kaedrin's pack offered one solution, as some of Kaedrin's classes like the Scout and Thug base classes seemed like a fair fit, and the Dervish and Tempest prestige classes. While pondering this and working out how to handle some companion's classes, I developed the idea that these are all basically fighters, just with different sets of feats.

This gave me the idea that it wasn't so much the lack of appropriate classes, but the lack of flexibility of existing classes. A dexterity based fighter is still a fighter, but why did he bother to learn to wear heavy armor (it is an automatically given feat after all) when he knew he would be best fighting in light armor. I also wanted to represent fighters from a society that has specific weapon preferences and likely would not ever have the option of taking training in. The martial weapon proficiency is automatic and gives the fighter proficiency in a bundle of weapons that the Bedine nomad will generally never see, much less learn how to use effectively.

So I decided to rethink what the fighter class gets automatically. A nomadic fighter wouldn't get training in heavy armor, and his society doesn't use many of the nwn2 martial weapons, instead his weapons of choice are more in line with what say a spirit shaman would normally be proficient in. Our hypothetical nomad fighter has had just as much fighting training as a fighter from civilization, but instead of spending the time on heavy armor or even any armor at all, that time is available for our nomad to be more focused on weapons or tactics.

So I got into the feats.2das, looking into how to remove the automatic feats and add them back in other ways. I came up with what for lack of a better term I called the "archetype" system, remove all the feats automatically given simply by achieving level x, and adding the feats back as bonus feat options, while increasing the bonus feats to match the normal amount of feats. As I developed it further, I decided some otherwise class restricted feats were representative of particular types of training every character could theoretically choose to take, training in flanking during combat (represented by sneak attack), basic tracking (hunting, a thief following his mark, etc). So I made many of the basic "class" feats available across class. They represent the types of feats that you might find in various sourcebooks as options, and allow a player to add some game effect to their role playing choices.

End result
http://neverwintervault.org/project/nwn2/hakpak/original-hakpak/kamals-archetype-characters