D&D

Tabletop Highlight: D&D 3.5 and Knights

Chris Leave a comment

One of my favorite classes to play in Dungeons and Dragons is the 3.5 edition’s Knight. This class is listed in the Player’s Handbook II and is probably the best class to use for the “Tank” role based on class abilities alone. Almost all of their abilities are geared toward grabbing enemy focus, surviving, or protecting their comrades. All of this comes at the cost of a lot of more the damage-oriented abilities or skills you might associate with fighter or barbarian tank builds. So often, a front-line tank fighter or barbarian’s skill set is focused around the idea of “if it is dead, it can’t hurt me or anyone else.” Yes, you can build a fighter’s AC (Armor Class: it determines how difficult it is to hurt you character with an attack) super high while still focusing on damage and you can get a Barbarian enough HP to tank a few disintegrate spells (which are as dangerous as the name implies) without healing, but Knights are focused on both of those things.

As one of the few classes with a d12 hit die (the die used to determine how many hit points the character gains each level), they can have almost as much HP as a barbarian before they start raging. Since their primary focus is staying alive and taking damage so other characters do not, putting the highest attribute score in Constitution is almost a requirement. The second-highest attribute score can work as well, but raising it with magic items as soon as possible is a must because a Knight can never have too many hit points. The alternative attribute for the highest attribute score is actually charisma. A lot of a Knight’s abilities are based on Charisma. Charisma can help a Knight challenge the boss to fight them and only them, grant them and their allies bonuses based on the Knight’s inspirational battle cries, and can help Knights come up with clever challenges to cause all enemies to charge them. Outside of battle, a Knight’s charisma can help them move through the social circles graced by royalty and nobility as they further their knightly cause.

As they progress through their levels, Knights enjoy a full Base Attack Bonus progression (one point per level) but, oddly, have only Will as a primary save. If you look through their abilities, you will find that Knights have abilities that can help them save allies who are being mind-controlled or mind-affected (made afraid, under the power of suggestion, etc), so having a high Will save means they are more likely to remain free long enough to save their companions. Other interesting abilities include being able to prevent enemies from easily moving past you (or using the common rogue trick of tumbling past the tank in order to attack the squishier characters behind them) by causing the space around them to be treated as rough terrain. This means that people cannot simply run past them or tumble past them thanks to the knight’s defensive capabilities. Other abilities include a boost to their AC as a result of using a shield and the ability to take part (and eventually all) of the damage dealt to an adjacent ally. If you’re protecting a spellcaster who gets shot by an arrow or stabbed by a rogue, you can opt to take some of that damage in order to mitigate what might have otherwise been a killing blow.

As far as combat goes, Knights get access to mounted combat feats, along with a lot of technical combat feats through a “bonus” feat system ever few levels. While a Knight may never do a lot of damage, compared to other martial classes, they can still dominate a battlefield riding about on a well-trained mount using a Lance in order to maximize their damage. They also have an ability called “Fighting Challenge” that gives them bonuses against a specific target they’ve challenged to a fight. The Fighting Challenge is a type of “Knight’s Challenge” which also includes things like the “Test of Mettle” which causes all enemies in earshot to focus on attacking you, the “Daunting Challenge” which causes weak enemies to flee in terror, and the “Bond of Loyalty” which allows a Knight to continue making will saves against mind-affecting spells or abilities until the Knight is free or out of Knight’s Challenges.

The most interesting use of the Knight’s Challenge, and what makes them the ultimate tank, is what they earn at 20th level: “Loyalty Beyond Death.” This allows a Knight to spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to literally continue moving after they’ve functionally died. At 20th level, a Knight will have over 200 hit points. A character typically dies once they pass -10 hit points. A 20th level Knight can spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to continue moving and acting once their hit points pass below 0 until their body is completely destroyed or they run out of Knight’s Challenges to use. This means they can still be healed back to the point of being alive or just sacrifice their live in one last glorious charge as they face down an ancient, all-powerful dragon or lich in order to buy a village or their allies time to flee.

There any number of other feats that can greatly benefit a Knight as well. Shieldmate lets you provide adjacent allies with an AC bonus based on the shield you use. Heavy Armor Specialization, a feat with dovetails in with a Knight’s ability to ignore movement penalties resulting from wearing Heavy armor, provides you with a permanent reduction to the damage you take as a result of wearing Heavy armor. The proficiency feat for Tower Shields also benefits a Knight because it increases the bonus provided by Shieldmate, increases your AC even more, and lets a Knight use their shield as protection from arrows or AoE (Area of Effect) attacks for anyone who isn’t tough enough to survive them. There is even a feat or a type of enhancement magic for armor and shields that lets your AC bonus from your armor and shield apply against certain magical attacks that normally just need to make contact with a character, rather than break through their armor. With the right builds, a Knight can because an almost unstoppable tanking machine.

I wouldn’t recommend using a Knight as the primary front-line combatant because their damage output is lower than most other martial characters, so they’re not always great picks for 4-person groups, but they work amazingly in larger groups, even if there are no other front-line martial characters. Especially if there are no other front-line martial characters. Next time you need a tank and don’t want to play the lawful good paladin, play a night! They can be lawful anything and their emphasis is more on their knightly oaths than obeying the rules of the land.

NaNoWriMo Day 8 (11/08)

Chris Leave a comment

I’ve got this song stuck in my head, “Older” by They Might Be Giants. Except, instead of the lyrics going “You’re older than you’ve ever been and now you’re even older,” they’re going “You’re further than you’ve ever been and now you’re even further.” I didn’t write much again. D&D ran a little late and things were going so well I was unwilling to end things early. 6:30 to 11 isn’t super late, but it’s definitely later than we’ve played most days. Usually we’d play from about 6:30 or 7 until 9 or 9:30. The longer sessions are definitely nicer as a the DM, but they’re also harder to incorporate into what is a rather busy month for me…

I shouldn’t be complaining. I had a lot of fun, my players had a lot of fun, and one of the characters almost died because he got kissed by a demon (not the first time it has happened to him). I’d like to spill some more details about what they’ve been doing compared to what I’ve been planning, but all my players could theoretically read this blog post and I don’t want to tempt them with meta-gaming knowledge.

Tomorrow night, after my bills are paid, checks deposited, and laundry is folded, I will sit down and write until at least midnight. I should be able to pick up some decent progress there. I will also attempt to do the same thing Thursday night and Friday night. If I can do that, I might be able to recover my numbers to the point where I’m no longer floating around the 50% mark (pretty sure I’m below even that right now…).

I know I can do this. I wonder if that knowledge is making me over-confident? I suppose we’ll see.

 

Daily Prompt

Every character has strengths and some of them are even fully aware of these strengths. Today, write a scene in which a character not only knows and relies on their strengths, but also gets over-confident and fails because they took their ability for granted. Show them failing when they should have succeeded, not because the task was simple but because they approached it without due care.

 

Sharing Inspiration

If you’re having a hard time coming up with interesting characters, one of the best places to find inspiration (and make sure it stays only at inspiration) is on forums of table top RPGs. My personal favorite, for use as both a DM and a writer, is ENworld.org.  There are just so many wonderful resources for world building and so many well-crafted NPCs and characters lying around that it is almost impossible to browse the forums without being inspired to take your character creation to the next level.

 

Helpful Tips

 

One of the keys to “originality” is to take stuff that already exists and combine it in new and interesting ways. Find five characters you like and mash them all together, trimming off the extra bits and filling in the gaps until you have one fully solid and new character. You can even do this with plots, cultures, and even entire worlds. Mix and match until you’ve got something wonderful and new. There’s nothing wrong with taking notes from existing works or creators, just make sure that all you’re taking is notes and not entire characters or places.

Dungeons and Dragons: What’s the Story?

Chris Leave a comment

As you might be able to infer from other parts of my blog (or perhaps just remember from a previous post), my favorite part of playing Dungeons and Dragons is the storytelling. DMs developing worlds and spooling out stories in every direction. Players and their characters taking the reins of the DMs stories and telling smaller ones through the way their characters develop. The stories we see at the end of a campaign as we look back and admire all we’ve done since we started. I love them all.

The stories I prefer most are the ones I can tell as a DM. Unfortunately, telling a story as a DM can be a bit of tricky business. If the DM is too forceful in their storytelling, the players can wind up feeling railroaded–which means that they feel like their characters have been placed on a track and they have no options or choices that really make a difference. Sometimes, with certain players, a bit of railroading is necessary if you want them to actually be doing anything. Sometimes, the players don’t mind a little firm direction, if you’ve set it up correctly. If a DM tells the story right, it’s possible the players won’t even notice that it’s happening.

Different DMs come at storytelling from different angles, but most fall into one of a few categories. There’s the adversarial DM, who is trying their best to kill the players’ characters and the players need to use all their wiles and skills to escape the DM’s traps and narrative sticky spots. There’s the supportive DM who just wants to ensure their players are having fun, bending the rules so they don’t get in the way of the players reaching their goals. Finally, there’s the DM who just lets the dice decide, setting up situations that they players can get through with luck and/or skill but could still include lethal consequences if they’re foolish or really unlucky. Personally, I tend to flip-flop between the last two categories.

I like the supportive style for fun-oriented campaigns. It is generally more fun if the players are successful (and death isn’t NEARLY as funny as some kind of persistent negative consequence), and I’m not one to let a mere rule get in the way of a good joke. Plus, one of the keys to good humor is subversion of the expected. If a player opens a chest expecting a monster, trap, or treasure, one of the best things to put inside it is a series of slightly smaller chests. Top the whole thing off with a “goblin punch” aimed at someone’s vulnerables and you’ve got yourself a hilarious setup for humor.

For my more narrative campaigns, I prefer the “let the dice decide” style. The best way to involve the players, to get them to suspend their disbelief and emotionally invest in the campaign, is to make them feel like their actions matter, like their decisions have consequences. You have to balance risk and reward so that they have the opportunity to fail and succeed on a smaller scale on a regular basis, so they never develop a god complex. Then mix in opportunities for them to fail or succeed beyond the scope of the situation and you can really hook them. Reward them when they’re clever and punish them when they’re making poor decisions. The exact nuances of how to do exactly that are a blog post of their own.

Situational railroading has a place in the narrative campaigns. Sometimes, because of the past choices a player has made, the entire party winds up in a situation they can’t escape from. Sometimes you need to move them from one city to another, so you “railroad” them by provide a reason they would NEED to move. On the flip side, that level of guidance can absolutely kill the fun in a more relaxed campaign. The whole point of the relaxed style is to let the humor and feel of the room guide your choices as a DM, so you can keep people laughing and the funny moments rolling out. Dictating anything at that point can sour someone’s fun.

So far, in my narrative campaign, I’d like to think I’ve only engaged in the permissible kind of railroading. The only time I think that it could have been a little too heavy-handed was in order to help my players remake their characters. One wanted to change pretty much everything and another needed a way to be introduced to a prestige class, along with make a few changes to the way his current class worked. So I laid out the path for them, knowing they’d take the bait, and then forced them to keeping walking down it.

In my opinion, the key to building ANY kind of narrative structure in a D&D campaign (and this includes permissible railroading), is to make sure the players never feel like their choices don’t matter or that they don’t have any choices. They should always have the option to just turn around and walk away. They should always be able to make decisions about how their character acts in a situation or how their character plays it all out, even if they don’t have a choice about what that situation is. In short, never take away ALL of their agency. Unless they’re being mind-controlled. That’s a whole different story, though.

I’m writing all of this up as I’m preparing for a D&D session with my narrative campaign. I hope none of them see this and read too deeply into it. Today, I just want to gather my friends around a table and help them tell the story we’ve been working on for almost a year and a half. No railroading, no narrative traps, just a lot of fun with my friends.