Aetrimonde

Today, I’ll reveal the next part of a character: class. Ragnvald has been a Fighter in all his incarnations, so that’s the class I’ll show off today.

Meanwhile, the polls continue! This week, tell me what class you want to see next: I’m leaving open last week’s poll on the next ancestry I’ll cover, but as of my last look, Elf and Ghoul were in the lead. If you haven’t already voted there, now’s the time: I’m interested to see what kind of ancestry/class combination you give me to work with for the next example character!

Class

An Aetrimonde character class is a collection of related features that gives a character the tools to fill a certain role: frontline combatant, deadly assassin, magical savant, pious healer, and so on. This is the core of a character, especially at low levels.

Class: Fighter

Although he was raised to be a lawyer, now that he’s been forced to get his hands dirty adventuring Ragnvald comports himself in the manner of a traditional Dwarven warrior: that means wearing proper armor, carrying a proper weapon, and facing his enemies in proper honorable combat. This is best represented by the Fighter class (left).

Basics

First off, Fighters are tough. With 28 base hit points, 1d12 healing die, and 4 base resurgences, they can not only take a beating, but recover from one too. This is only amplified by their armor proficiencies, which give them access to scale armor and shields: this can let Ragnvald get a high AC (with good armor resistance!) despite his lack of Dexterity and Grace.

The Fighter’s class defense bonus is +1 to both Brawn and Wit, making them harder to shove around, and also harder to trick or deceive.

Fighters are proficient with all weapons, although fighters will get the most mileage out of melee weapons, since they want to be in the thick of things.

And finally, Fighters are trained in Athletics and can add that and five other skills to their preferred skill list. More on this in the next post…

Features

Next up, the actual class features. The big ones are Battlefield Challenge and Battlefield Superiority: together, these two features mean that Ragnvald can:

• Challenge any enemy he attacks (not hits, attacks!) with weapons, shields, or fists, causing them to suffer disfavor on attack rolls unless they are attacking Ragnvald or have already attacked him this turn.
• Make an opportune strike against a challenged creature when it attacks someone other than him.
• Gain a bonus to opportune strike attack rolls, including for attacks like the one described above.
• Stop creatures hit by his opportune strikes from moving any further.

All told, this makes Ragnvald (like any Fighter) incredibly “sticky:” creatures he attacks will have trouble attacking any of his allies or getting away from him.

The other of the Fighter’s class features is Martial Endurance, giving him an additional use of his greater powers (for four total). While not flashy, getting an extra greater power in a fight can make a big difference. All Martial classes have this feature.

Abilities

The last thing we’ll pick today will be Ragnvald’s abilities. As we saw in the Heritage section, Ragnvald’s heritage gives him Constitution, Wisdom, and Charisma as favored abilities. This means he can boost two of those by +1 after buying his abilities, or boost any one other ability. Let’s keep that in mind as we make our choices…

As a fighter, Ragnvald will want high Strength (to make attacks with), followed by high Constitution (to survive the attacks he will hopefully be drawing). Cunning will also be useful (to improve Battlefield Superiority and many Martial powers) but not as high a priority.

We have no points left, but we should try to get some other abilities above 0. Ragnvald doesn’t particularly need Dexterity or Grace, since he’ll be wearing heavy armor; we can drop one to -1 and raise the other to +1. I’ll pick Grace as the high ability, attributing it to comportment lessons his clan subjected him to. The same goes for Cunning and Intelligence, where we’ll raise Cunning and drop Intelligence (Ragnvald is full of clever legal strategies that don’t work, because he doesn’t actually know the law that well), and Wisdom and Charisma, where we’ll raise Charisma and drop Wisdom, then boost Charisma to +2 (Ragnvald lacks the wisdom to see the futility of his family’s litigation, but is fairly convincing when he talks about it).

The finalized ability array for Ragnvald is:

+4 STR	-1 DEX	+1 CUN	-1 WIS
+3 CON	+1 GRA	-1 INT	+2 CHA

Up Next

In the next post of this series, we’ll give Ragnvald some things he can use these abilities for. And if you want to see a specific class in the next sample character, remember to vote above!