Skip to main content

B/X Character Class: The Innocent Abroad

The Squire from The Canterbury Tales
The character who appears in every fantasy novel ever, and yet isn't modeled in B/X D&D is the wide-eyed innocent: the assistant pig-keeper who dreams of glory, or the merchant's daughter who gets swept up in adventure.

Characters like this often get framed as fighters, as if fighters were just the default human adventurer. This dilutes the concept of the fighter as a trained specialist in arms and armament. 

You could also play the character as level 0. This works if everyone else is also staring at level 0 and your walking into a funnel. But the level 0 characters are supposed to be what B/X calls Normal Humans. Normal Humans are explicitly not adventuring types. And the assistant pig-keepers of the world may be naive and unskilled, but they are still definitely adventurers.

Let's take a look at the Normal Human.

Normal Human
Hit Points: 1-4
Save: Death Ray 14; Wands 15; Paralysis 16; Breath 17; Spells 17 (that is, worse by a lot than any classed character)
To Hit/AC: 11/9; 12/8; 13/7; 14/6; 15/5; 16/4; 17/3; 18/2; 19/1; 20/0 (worse than any 1st level classed character)
Weapons: 1 weapon, presumably any type
Armor: Unarmored

Normal humans are non-adventurers: Peasants, laborers, artisans, scholars, nobles, whatever.

Hit points represent how hardy a normal human is. The very young, sickly, or elderly has 1, a blacksmith has 4.

Normal humans have skills, and these skills increase with life experience, but there is no need for this to have a game effect. There is no mechanical difference between an apprentice baker and a master baker.

If a normal human finds themselves in adventurous circumstances, they might accrue adventuring experience, represented by Experience Points. Once a normal human has Experience Points, they should be assigned a class.

Between the improved To Hit, Saves, and the ability to increase hit points through advancement, it's clear that Adventurers are made of heartier stuff than the rest of us. During chargen, we often think of MU's and thieves as frail, but it's important to realize that a first-level MU is still better in a brawl than the average town blacksmith. 

So, let's look at an adventurer class without any specific class benefits.

Innocent Abroad
Requirements: None
Prime Requisite: None
Hit Points: 1d4
Save as Thief
Weapons: Any
Armor: Shields; Any armor except Plate Mail

1          Naif               1d4     0
2          Tourist           2d4     800
3          Traveler        3d4     1600  

At level 3, an Innocent Abroad is no longer so innocent, and must select a class, proceeding as either a Level One Fighter, Level One Magic User, Level Two Thief, or Level Two Cleric. All of their XP transfer over to their new class. They keep the hit points generated from 3d4, but roll their new classes hit die next time they advance a level.

The mechanical advantage of playing an Innocent Abroad and surviving is slight increase in hit points over a classed character with 1600 XP.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch