New Tricks for the Old Dog

I've been considering companions of the animal kind.  I'm not talking about familiars.  Never been a huge fan of those, but never disallowed it.  Although they tend to have a short life span in most of my campaigns.  I'm talking about significant animal companions that have followed an adventurer for a significant amount of time.  I'm plan on adding these companions to my ranger and druid classes. 

When someone gets a familiar it is very useful in the first few levels, but then after that (if it lives) it becomes less helpful and sort of an after thought.  I can't remember in my experience, when anyone used one past the first levels. 

Here's my plan.  Animal companions level up with their master.  Makes record keeping much simpler.  So when a ranger reaches a new level, here's what he can do with his animal buddy.  He can chose one of the following:
Roll for extra hit points

• Add 1d4 hit points
• Add +1 to hit 
• Add +1 to damage
• Add +1 to AC
• Add a new task it can perform

This way the companion can improve with the character without becoming overpowering.  The new task that the companion can perform can be different depending on the animal type.  If the companion has some magical ability maybe they acquire a new one, or improve an existing ability.

Say the ranger loses his companion in a fight.  It's going to happen, adventurers live dangerous lives.  What would happen then is the player could eventually get a new companion, maybe with a little RPing involved, and the new companion would start as a newb.  Base template stats, and then move up from there.  Or of the almighty GM has been plied enough with praise and pizza, a different, more powerful companion could be found.

Anyway, I like the idea of it. 

Gods and Classes

I was going to write a post about gaming complexity balance.  I should say, I did write it, but deleted it cause it sucked and a little too pedantic.  So I wrote this instead.  It's your fault for reading.

This campaign I'm opening a couple things up, classes and gods.  I'm opening up the classes because they're are so many available and the variety is a lot of fun.  While there will be a lot of choices the classes a fairly straight forward.  I've added a few culture based classes to reflect the region and what they hold valuable.  You won't find any race class stuff.  I've never been a fan of elf or dwarf being a class.  I'm beg, borrowing and stealing ideas out of my gaming books and all your blogs out there.  Once I have a collection of them I'll edit them for the region, but I won't put limitations on the PCs.  They like to feel special.

Gods.  I normally run a 10 god pantheon with a long back history, tales and lore that go along with it, but being inspired by the Petty Gods project I've been creating a lot of nook and cranky gods.  It's been a blast creating them.  I like the weirdness that infuses into a world.  The clerics will reflect their god instead of being cookie cutter clerics.  I'm going to leave the interpretation up to the player to figure out and then we'll role-play it out.  Example, if a cleric of Lavinia, a goddess of Mercy and Healing tried to cause light wounds its not going to work and the cleric will lose his spell for that day.  But if they are healing someone they'll get a bonus to their roll.  And the gods are fickle, I'll roll reaction rolls each month to determine the god's mood.

What do you do to differentiate your religions and/or clerical abilities from one another?

The Guard Class: Updated

UPDATED: I've redone the Guard class with the assistance of some very good suggestions.   Should you have any more thought please add them.

Last night I was at the bookstore, not writing my campaign, but came up with something else.  I created a Guard class.  I placed it in my Dropbox for you to take a look at.  Class design is not my strength.  I always tend to make them too powerful.  I did a short write up.  I gave the class a few special perks/abilities to give it its own flair.  I plan on using this for my own campaign for the city guards/caravan guards and so on.

Please take a look and if you have an suggestions please let me know.  I'd like to add this to my class arsenal.  Thanks ahead of time.

I'm a guard and now I've got class, but not until after this nap.

Allowing Class Abilities to Leak into Other Classes

Last night was our usual game night and Rusty's character went through trails so he could finally reach 5th level. Which is good because now I don't have to carry his slacker ass any longer. Anyways, his class of mage has this ability to deflect magic. Being a different class of mage I want to learn that ability.

The discussion that followed was that I would need to switch classes and become a dual class character. Or they would put my character on the higher xp chart. Or as I suggested allow me to learn this ability at a lower level.

I'm not interested in switching classes. If this is the price I would chose not to learn the ability. Being placed on a higher xp chart would be doable, but I would want to learn the ability at the same level then. Or if the Gm decided to allow me to learn this magic shield at a lesser ability then I would be cool with that also. Anything Rob decided will be fine by me. We will discuss it later on this week on how to approach this.

This is some of the things I like to do to push the class abilities a little and in turn it helps Rob develop his campaign world. He always listens to suggestions. I don't want to do anything that will screw up the balance of his world. I just like to see what areas I can expand my character into.

Curious to hear what others have done in this situation.