Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 rjtrotter Aug 06, 2006 8:53:37	Just woundering if anyone knows where I can find the Brute class? Thanks
#2 xlorepdarkhelm_dup Aug 06, 2006 9:15:13	Just woundering if anyone knows where I can find the Brute class? Thanks That was a name for the Barbarian class in previous incarnations of DS3.
#3 rjtrotter Aug 06, 2006 9:18:35	That was a name for the Barbarian class in previous incarnations of DS3. Thanks.
#4 jon_oracle_of_athas Aug 06, 2006 10:57:20	Why did you ask, Robert? Have you come across an out-of-date reference?
#5 Pennarin Aug 06, 2006 11:46:59	Why did you ask, Robert? Have you come across an out-of-date reference? I have, can't remember where though. I think outside DS3. I suggest taking the original docs and running a search through them.
#6 rjtrotter Aug 06, 2006 12:01:48	Why did you ask, Robert? Have you come across an out-of-date reference? I'm helping Brax/Peter write the stats for some of the NPC's in the Trembling plains project for 3.5 and a few he asked me to make had levels in the "Brute" class. I've been looking thru out all the books and PDF's I have but I couldn't find it. Right now he is doing / getting ready for his law school finals, so I thought I would ask about it on the boards. I remember see it here on the boards some time last year I think when I started back up with DS after not playing it since the mid 90's. I don't have any of the older DS 3.0 stuff so that would be why I can't find it!
#7 jon_oracle_of_athas Aug 06, 2006 13:20:47	It´s in City-State of Draj (thanks, Brax).
#8 rjtrotter Aug 06, 2006 14:04:22	It´s in City-State of Draj (thanks, Brax). K. found it, I should have seen that one. The only file I didn't look through! :D Thanks....
#9 jackmojo Aug 06, 2006 21:46:49	DS3 rev6 still has it on following pages: Pg 20: as a class on the age table Pg 22: as the class of the mul being quoted describing barbarians Pg 22: as an alternate name for barbarian (this one is obviously ok ) Jack
#10 thebrax Aug 06, 2006 22:05:03	The Barbarian class is grossly inconsistent with the way that most wilderness humanoids in Dark Sun had been described, with the possible exception of slave tribes or Tareks. OTOH, the PHB Barbarian is a excellent class for the sort of typical thugs that you might run into in a Dark Sun city. The solution seemed to be keep the class, but rename it Brute to avoid confusion with the Athasian barbarians, who tend towards the Ranger class, and would have been enslaved or captured for the Dragon long ago if their battle tactics were charge into battle full of rage, rather than hiding in the wilderness and picking off enemies. We didn't exactly forsee WotC creating an alternate official version of Dark Sun, and affirming the Barbarian class. Apparently some enormous changes occur in Athasian wilderness societies. Anyway, after that came out, it seemed odd to have the same class with two different names in the same world during different time periods, so we changed it back.
#11 eric_anondson Aug 06, 2006 22:37:39	Anyway, after that came out, it seemed odd to have the same class with two different names in the same world during different time periods, so we changed it back. I think that is unfortunate but understandable. I am fond of the Brute as a distinct class so I basically adopted the PHB2 barbarian alternate class ability, called Berserker Strength. Something that has long bothered me about the Core barbarian class is the rage ability. There are few things that bother me about class design that front loading a class so that someone doesn't have much incentive to stick with the class for more levels. The barbarian, as is, is one of the most dipped into classes. Too many characters are designed with taking a single level of barbarian for the rage ability. The PHB2 berserker strength fixes that. So I ditched the Barbarian class for the brute. My Brute is essentially the core Barbarian without rage, but with berserker strength instead. What is berserker strength? Adapted straight from the PHB2, berserker strength for Brutes works like this. Whenever your current hit point total is less than 5 x your Brute level, your berserker strength kicks in (yes, for my Brute, I call this brute strength, instead). • Gain +4 Str, +2 bonus to all saves, DR 2/—, and –2 penalty to AC. The DR stacks with all similar DR #/—. No limit to the number of times this can activate per day. It cannot be voluntarily ended, although you drop out when unconscious, helpless or when healing brings your hp above the threshold. • At 11th level, berserker strength improves to +6 Str, +3 to all saves, DR 3/—, and keeps a –2 to AC. • At 20th level, berserker strength improves to +8 Str, +4 to all saves, DR 4/—, and still keeps a –2 to AC. Berserker strength has the same limitations on actions that rage does. To me, this is much less attractive to take a dip of a single level than a class with rage. So, as I said, I use Brute with this class feature in place of the Barbarian with rage. There is a lot of cultural baggage that comes with the name "barbarian" that I am just unhappy with. The name "brute" was an improvement. As I said, I understand the desire to keep similarity with both 3e DS versions... So I simply gave the Brute class a distinctive (and improved!) class feature and brought it out of retirement and gave the Barbarian class the heave ho! ... again! ;) When the going gets tough, the Brute gets tougher!
#12 thebrax Aug 06, 2006 22:50:44	I did think that the Brute was a cool and appropriate class name. IIRC someone on this board thought it was absurd because the term had appeared in the movie Princess Bride. I asked him exactly what he found unAthasian about the idea of forming a "brute squad," and he had no answer, other than anything that's in Princess Bride could not possibly be in Dark Sun. So much for Humans and Giants. ;) I've actually seen people take a level of B. for the 10 feet speed, and then never use the Rage power. An elf with a level of B. and the Speed of Thought Feat can move at 60 ft/round, which is a pretty nice clip. Give him a potion of expeditious retreat, and the spring attack feat, and things start to get funny.
#13 jon_oracle_of_athas Aug 07, 2006 12:12:25	The flavor text remains unchanged, even if we did change the brute name to barbarian.
#14 thebrax Aug 07, 2006 13:16:06	That's right. Athas' feral halflings are scary. They hide among the trees and shoot poison darts at you from concealment. (See Jon's marvelous halfling sniper prestige class). While there are individual exceptions, your typical halfling encounter does not envolve little people charging at you across an open field like idiots. That's not scary; it's a joke. The word "brute" is an attempt to protect us from that kind of "Dark Smurf." Hopefully our story description is clear and emphatic enough that DMs who populate the Forest Ridge with little berzerker halflings have no one but themselves to blame for the goofy consequences. Where we can still screw up, though, is in the modules and other products, where story might either conflict with the mechnics, or end up telling a Dark Smurf story. It's hard to avoid referring to the halfling cannibals as "barbarians," for example, in the story. The only way I've seen to avoid confusion is to make sure that the word (barbarian) only appears inside parentheses or in a stat block. It's kind of a toss-up -- confuse the story, or confuse the mechanics. Some mechanoids say just change the "fluff" to fit the mechanics, but if we all believed that, we'd have just stopped playing Dark Sun when third edition came out. Hmm. I called them "mechanoids;" I guess they could respond by calling me a "fluffhead." :D Sure there are times that we have to make story alterations to avoid inconsistency or a broken mechanic, and we all, reasonably, draw the line in different places. Athas.org, fortunately, has chosen to draw the line at berzerker halflings.
#15 xlorepdarkhelm_dup Aug 07, 2006 13:39:54	Personally, for my campaigns, I took the old non-spellcasting version of the Athasian Ranger, retrofitted it with some good 3.5e mechanics love, and I use that for the Ranger in my campaigns (a lone predator, hunter & tracker who uses knowledge of a species or a terrain to better take out his or her prey; I envision how a sniper in the real world more or less functions). As such, I make my Halflings have Ranger as their preferred class, rather than Barbarian.
#16 thebrax Aug 07, 2006 14:55:14	[INDENT]As such, I make my Halflings have Ranger as their preferred class, rather than Barbarian.[/INDENT] [*starts!* checks DS3 Core, just in case] Phew. "Favored Class: Ranger" Don't scare me like that :D Yes, I like the idea of a nonspellcasting ranger better too. But a core class is exquisitely hard to playtest and balance out from scratch; the bard and the gladiator ate up a lot of development time. Much easier to go the PrC route and let WotC do the heavy lifting. I've been told that the 5-level minimum for PrCs is a flexible rule, not hard anymore. If that's true, then maybe we could create a PrC ranger that only requires 3 levels of ranger, and then exchanges animal companion and spellcasting for accelerated progression through the Ranger abilities? Is this a viable idea? Say like this: Prereqs: Favored Enemy or Terrain, +3 BAB. Class Features: 1st +1 +2 +2 +0 2nd favored enemy or terrain, wild empathy 2nd +2 +3 +3 +0 Improved combat style 3rd +3 +3 +3 +1 Evasion, Terrain Stride 4th +4 +4 +4 +1 3rd favored enemy or terrain 5th +5 +4 +4 +1 Swift tracker 6th +6/+1 +5 +5 +2 Hide in plain sight 7th +7/+2 +5 +5 +2 4th favored enemy or terrain 8th +8/+3 +6 +6 +2 Combat style mastery 9th +9/+4 +6 +6 +3 Camouflage 10th +10/+5 +7 +7 +3 5th favored enemy or terrain The only ability that's changed slightly is Woodland Stride>>>"Terrain Stride." Favored terrain is a tad weak compared to favored enemy, so I thought maybe we can say at 3rd level of the PrC (5th level character) that you get some improved movement in whatever favored terrain that you've picked, if any. Seems weired to have a Athasian class that's specialized in woodlands specifically, anyway, and some of the alternate adventurer books have made mountain warrior versions of the ranger that have Mountain stride rather than woodlands stride. Thoughts?
#17 xlorepdarkhelm_dup Aug 07, 2006 15:05:13	[INDENT]As such, I make my Halflings have Ranger as their preferred class, rather than Barbarian.[/INDENT] [*starts!* checks DS3 Core, just in case] Phew. "Favored Class: Ranger" Don't scare me like that :D See what happens when I don't have my bokks & PDF's with me? :P Yes, I like the idea of a nonspellcasting ranger better too. But a core class is exquisitely hard to playtest and balance out from scratch; the bard and the gladiator ate up a lot of development time. Much easier to go the PrC route and let WotC do the heavy lifting. I can understand that for Athas.org's policies -- mind you, the non-spellcasting ranger was already worked out, as much as the Bard and the Gladiator were, up until 3.5e came in, with some improvements to the Ranger class, which then the non-spellcasting version was ditched. That's fine, but I wanted to keep the non-spellcasting version. What I did was take the 3.5e version, and then use the non-spellcasting Ranger variant from Complete Warrior. From there, I started tweaking it by adding and subtracting things I felt would make more sense for Dark Sun, using the older non-spellcasting Ranger from an older version of DS3 as my guide. DS3 might not use it, but that is the Ranger I use for my personal games. Gah.... maybe I should put my class writeups on my site (including the 3 I used to have), so people can see them, if they want... I've been told that the 5-level minimum for PrCs is a flexible rule, not hard anymore. If that's true, then maybe we could create a PrC ranger that only requires 3 levels of ranger, and then exchanges animal companion and spellcasting for accelerated progression through the Ranger abilities? Is this a viable idea?
#18 thebrax Aug 07, 2006 15:27:59	I guess it doesn't have to cap with the same level of favored enemy/terrain. Perhaps this version is safer: Prereqs: Favored Enemy or Terrain, +3 BAB. Class Features: 1st +1 +2 +2 +0 Evasion, wild empathy 2nd +2 +3 +3 +0 2nd favored enemy or terrain 3rd +3 +3 +3 +1 Improved combat style 4th +4 +4 +4 +1 Terrain Stride 5th +5 +4 +4 +1 3rd favored enemy or terrain 6th +6/+1 +5 +5 +2 Swift tracker 7th +7/+2 +5 +5 +2 Combat style mastery 8th +8/+3 +6 +6 +2 Camouflage 9th +9/+4 +6 +6 +3 Hide in plain sight 10th +10/+5 +7 +7 +3 4th favored enemy or terrain Compare ranger core to this PRC for character level where he gets the ability Evasion: Core: 9, PrC 4 2nd Favored enemy: Core 5, PrC 5 Improved combat style: Core 6, PrC 6 [] Stride: Core 7, PrC maybe at 7 3rd Favored enemy: Core 8, PrC 8 Swift Tracker: Core 8, PrC 9 Combat Style Mastery: Core 11, PrC 10 Camouflage: Core 13, PrC 11 4th favored enemy: Core 15, PrC 13 Hide in plain sight: Core 17, PrC 12 Hmm. Looks like this version is too weak, especially at the lower levels, not compensating enough for loss of spells and animal companions. Anyone else want a shot?
#19 thebrax Aug 07, 2006 15:44:36	Robert pointed out to me, a "Scout" class, from "The Complete adventurer." This is the IDEAL Athasian ranger. Unfortunately, IIRC it's not open game content.
#20 xlorepdarkhelm_dup Aug 07, 2006 16:26:48	Robert pointed out to me, a "Scout" class, from "The Complete adventurer." This is the IDEAL Athasian ranger. Unfortunately, IIRC it's not open game content. I forget the details of that class, I'm going to have to look it up again.
#21 rjtrotter Aug 07, 2006 17:35:27	Robert pointed out to me, a "Scout" class, from "The Complete adventurer." This is the IDEAL Athasian ranger. Unfortunately, IIRC it's not open game content. Personaly I think it works great for Elves in particular in the fast movement (up to +20ft per round at level 11, who needs to take levels in barbarian just for the fast movement) and the skirmish ability were you can add damage to ether melee or ranged attacks(upto 5d6 bonus at level 20) when you are moving at least 10ft per round. The hide in plain sight and free movement are good as well.