I was looking at the Scout template in DF, and in DFRPG. Here are a few things I found odd:
- you can choose a sword, staff, or spear, but not an axe, as your melee weapon. So I can't do a woodsman with a trusty hatchet, but I can do a hunter with a trusty falchion.
- I'm kind of curious why you need to choose disads from two pools on the scout. It makes a lot of sense on templates that have a required subset of disads to make the template work - martial artist, cleric, holy warrior - but seems odd here. Admittedly it's hard to do, but I can see making a scout who is a Loner with No Sense of Humor, with a Soldier's Code of Honor, a Phobia of crowds, and a vow to own no more than what can be carried. That's -50. Are the seperate -15 worth really that mission critical? If you take Bloodlust or Sense of Duty as part of those -15, do you really need some of the rest to make up the points? It just seems arbitrary in a way that forcing a cleric or martial artist to take specific disads doesn't.
- It amuses me that you spent 4x as many points on Shadowing as Stealth. Maybe because I don't run games with Shadowing but it feels less mission critical for any of the suggested types of scouts.
So, obviously I'm making a Scout.
I feel like axe/mace skill is the kind of thing where you can go off-template. Kind of like how Knights don't have two-handed axe/mace on theirs... I would allow that for Clerics also so they can wield the combat shovel. Shadowing...we've never used that, right? Maybe those get spent elsewhere?
ReplyDeleteI also go with this on p.14: "Some disadvantages are mandatory,
ReplyDeletebut those chosen from tables aren’t. If you feel adventurous, you can replace any of those suggestions with whatever traits from Chapter 5 suit your fancy and come to the right number of (negative!) points." I always feel adventurous during CharGen!
I removed Shadowing from my games, the skill never made sense to me. It's basically a Stealth + Observation skill, used in a specialized fashion, and I get in 3e someone thought it made sense. But in 4e it's basically saying that if you take Shadowing over Stealth and Observation that you can be Stealthy, but only when following someone in an urban environment (and not to sneak up on them), and Observant only when following someone in an urban environment...
ReplyDeleteAnd the skill implies that it's harder to be Stealthy (-4) in an urban environment while following someone (rather than when sneaking up on them in a dungeon tunnel) and somehow also harder to pay attention to a foe while follow them with Observation (I get the implication that default penalties apply if you only have one of those skills*, but it isn't made clear). And the defaulted skill to follow someone in a vehicle/on a mount should be the lesser of Driving/Piloting/Riding or your other two skills (which is something GURPS already does in a few places, but for some reason skips here)... and Area Knowledge should play a big part in Shadowing, but has been completely neglected... as should teamwork...
So I dumped it. * And I make it harder if you only have one of the needed skills by just having the Player roll the off skill at it's default, but honestly, it's very rare someone has only one or the other skill and also wants to shadow a target. In fact back when I used Shadowing, often the PCs would have all three skills at high level or have Shadowing at a Trained from Default from Stealth or Observation.
I think that the trick with Shadowing is that in an urban environment, it is less about not being seen or heard by your quarry, as it is about being ignored as a random pedestrian, not just by the quarry but also by everyone else. Walking on tiptoe or constantly ducking behind objects to hide from your quarry, might cause bystanders to pay more attention to you; and if other people are looking at you, then your quarry may become aware of that even if they don't initially see you directly.
ReplyDeleteI can see that it might be a subtle enough distinction that it's not worth it for a game about hitting things in a dungeon, and in that case Shadowing can probably be safely merged into Stealth. But for an urban campaign with investigation being the default action rather than violence, then a separate Shadow skill would seem a reasonable distinction to me.