I am finishing up my 0th level half-orc aristocrat who is going to take his first level in paladin (despite that not normally being allowed---I OK'ed this with the DM) once he has enough experience points.
This half-orc is lawful good and in fact is modeled a bit after a lizardfolk paladin I played for a couple of sessions in a game that was unfortunately quickly-aborted (the DM had too much classwork).
Well, I'll need a name before anybody responds to this blog entry because the game starts in about 15 minutes, but I figured I'd ask anyway for good ideas even though it will be too late for me to use any of them for this character. :) Sawtooth was such a memorable character and I'm writing this entry partially because he came to mind. :) Definitely one of my favorites...
24 minutes ago
8 comments:
How can you be 0th level, and yet also be an aristocrat? Is this game giving you a free level in an NPC class and not counting it? Aristocrat is actually good enough to be a viable PC class, as I recall...
More context would help with names. For example, I named my half-orc (a distinct race in that world, just used the PHB stats) Fermit, since his nationality was Krog. As one may have heard, being green is not easy. Or if the regional culture is pseudo-Japanese, go heavy on Ls and Rs, as one of my current characters did.
Choosing a name that's wildly different from the actual character can also be fun. Since this guy will be a paladin (and why wouldn't that normally be allowed?), a gratuitously CE-sounding name like Skullcrusher might be fun. Or play on half-orc stereotypes and call yourself Sir Binky, something like that.
Feel free to use this advice for a character nickname if you like.
I guess I am technically a first level aristocrat. I am Gruul Spinebreaker, so I did follow one of the ideas above. :) I remember your telling me about Fermit the Krog, though I didn't remember that he was a half orc.
I think it says somewhere in the PHB or something. Certainly, half-orcs aren't the usual ones (which is why I am doing it).
OK, I just got healed so I am no longer -3 and stabilized (we found a cure light wounds). Now it's time to go back to action.
Cool!
Yeah, half-orc (greenskin) was key to getting the Fermit joke to work.
Sounds like you're thinking of the old 2e class restrictions (or was that 1e?), when only humans could be paladins. It's quite true that half-orc paladins are uncommon, but it's no more forbidden (by the book) than a dwarven sorcerer or halfling barbarian. Racial stat penalties to one of your class's major stats will do that... As you know I find the latter concept very amusing even so, though I suspect that character would be better (but less humorously) built as a straight Scout rather than a Rgr/Ftr/Barb/Rog mish-mash.
Ah, low level characters, when CLW actually means something...
Is the Magic Item Compendium usable in your game? There's good stuff in there, a fair bit of which is deliberately designed at a low price level so low level characters have interesting things to buy. Augment crystals are particularly handy - my duskblade would have died seven times instead of five (only Raised once, though!) without the Ironward Diamond I started with. Granted this is a 14th level character who started at 9th, but the basic DR 1/- diamond is only 500ish gp. Later on, make sure the party's arcane caster(s) know about the Twilight armor enhancement - a Twilight Mithril chain shirt has neither arcane spell failure nor armor check penalty, so there's no reason not to wear it (nonproficiency is irrelevant with zero armor check penalty). IIRC those start around 5000gp.
There's some stuff specific to paladins, knights, and marshals which I haven't looked at since I never expect to play those classes.
It was true in both 1e and 2e that only humans can be paladins, but that's not what I had in mind. I was looking at the 3.5 book and I read something that I thought discounted orcs even though I had thought that weird (and potentially statistically very disadvantageous) combinations were essentially always allowed. Well, I apparently misread it, because now I can only find all the expected sentences amounting to 'it basically never happens' (which says nothing about my not being able to do it if I want to).
We have a knight in our party as well, which is interesting because of our somewhat different views of honor. I believe in defense and mercy, and he believes in righteous war ("Yeah, well the best defense is a good offense. Do you know who said that?") and that certain melee weapons are dishonorable essentially because they are not swords. (My character attempted to explain that the honor lies solely in how the weapon is used, but I don't think he was very convinced.)
Basically, one of the major purposes of my character (as with the lizardfolk in the aborted game) is to play an utterly honorable character from a (deservedly) disreputed race and to have to make up for that. My lizardfolk was also a diplomat in terms of skills and vocation, but my half-orc doesn't have the abilities or skill points to do that. So there will be some substantial differences, but I am definitely borrowing a heavy chunk of the leading-order idea (in large part because the other game never lasted long enough for me to have a chance to pursue it).
Goodness, Mason.
All of the respect I have for you as a mathematician gets jeopardized when I read posts like this... Then again, I suppose I only avoided D&D by luck in high school. I do have quite a tendency to obsess over RPGs of various types from time to time; I bought a computer for my wife (now ex-) just so we could play Diablo-II together.
G: Wouldn't this pertain more to respect for me as a person rather than as a mathematician?
Alright, alright, you want a grammar war, you've got it.
All of the respect I have for you as a human due to your prowess as a mathematician is in jeopardy as a result of my renewed awareness of your obsession to various types of fantastical games.
Now, when is the fantasy baseball draft? ;)
I wasn't being a grammar nazi. I actually just misparsed your sentence.
Also, my level of interest in fantasy games is hardly an obsession.
Ah, baseball. Now there's an excellent obsession. I actually sent myself a reminder e-mail last night to see whether TSN has posted its fantasy baseball stuff for this year already. I would guess that they have. I've certainly been starting to think about who might be underpriced (relative to expected production). The fact that I am planning to read all the way through Keith Law's 100 top prospects article certainly qualifies as much more of an obsession than fantasy.
Anyway, I've just finished over an hour of fighting graphics converting software (I could no longer open my versions of appropriate packages after a recent OS 10.4 update, and I only found out today when I needed to convert a file). Now I can actually go back to working on the text of my article.
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