"Jefferson" Project Forum News

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(Originally posted by Veldrin)

Here are today's "Jefferson" project forum highlights. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context.

J.E. Sawyer, Lead Designer

Jefferson Size: Well, right now Jefferson has five "regions", each with about five areas. Each area has anywhere between two to five maps. In towns, this rises to about twenty to over one hundred maps. The areas are pretty evenly balanced between critical-path and side-path.

Quote: Well, regardless of whether it was done the way you wanted it or not, it does make sense for folks to make references to your earlier work. I'm not saying that I disagree with your assessment, just that the circumstances are irrelevant.

One might argue that if you made an octegenarin crippled asthmatic swim the English Channel, his failure would be a good indication that efforts towards swimming across the English Channel are hopeless and pointless. I would not be one of those people.

Quote: A logical counterargument. My question then is this. Taking balance into account, will fighters who choose to play evil be given access to feats ect which allow them in effect to become the negative counterpart of the paladin without mucking up the game. If I read your argument correctly, adding the blackguard would skew the imbalance in frontloading of powers even more. Is there a way to correct this in game without penalizing one style over another?

If I were to make a D&D game with a level range that fell within the baby steps of PrCs, I would prefer to do the following:

* Not implement PrCs.
* Based on the organizations/fighting orders/groups of cool dudes in the game, create a number of specialized "buddy feats" that can be taken by a variety of character types.
* Hide those feats from the player until his or her character becomes a trusted friend of organization/fighting order/group of cool dudes x.
* When the PC becomes a member of that group, the group tells him or her, "Dude, you will now have access to secret things that only we can teach you!"
* When selecting feats on level up, put those special suckaz at the top of the list and show that "member of organization x" is one of the pre-reqs. for the feat.

This would be in addition to general role-playing benefits that the player/character might enjoy. For example, let's use the Zhentarim, a nice well-known FR evil group. You become buddies with the Zhents. They say, "Hey, dude, join the Black Network and become cool." and you say, "Okay."

The Good:
* Access to the Poison Use feat (adapted from the assassin ability), Black Network Guile feat (+1 bonus to Innuendo and Bluff, +2 to Intimidate), Discerning Eye feat (+2 to Appraise, +2 to Sense Motive), and the Paranoid Agent feat (+2 to Initiative, +1 to Spot, Listen). Nothing dramatic, but things that are definitely geared towards the flavor of the Zhentarim, or, more specifically, the Black Network.
* Ability to sell stolen goods and buy poison or drugs through Zhentarim agents in cities throughout the game without fear of discovery from the local authorities.
* Can influence the direction of the Zhentarim organzation within the confines of the game through growing reputation and character abilities.

The Bad:
* Though local authorities don't necessarily know for whom you work, a lot of other fancy people do. They may dislike you, not associate with you, or even attempt to kill you for your membership in the Zhentarim. Even other evil organizations distrust the Zhentarim, so widely are they loathed and mistrusted.
* The Zhents are a back-biting lot, and unless you take no sides at all in their bickering, someone will eventually hate you and attempt to crush your skull in/spray a barrel of poison down your throat.

That sort of thing would be what I would go for.

Quote: Furthermore, looking at a supposedly "balanced" game such as IWD2, I can comfortably say that all the effort spent on "balancing" it was thoroughly wasted.

When people try to use IWD2 as anecdotal evidence for or against a particular aspect of 3E, it honestly makes me laugh. IWD2's 3E implementation was done under bad, bad conditions in terms of time and technology. We did as much as we could, but it's still fairly far away from 3E "for realz". And you know that not everything was implemented the way that I would have liked it to be (if at all). Pick pocketing, wizard spell access, cleric domains, some of the races and many of the feats wound up contrary to how I would have liked them to be in the game (if at all). Why use IWD2 as anecdotal evidence for or against something in 3E, when it's so obviously out of kink with both core 3E rules and the desires of the game's lead designer?

Quote: It is proposed that evil is more a "role-playing" choice than a class choice, and therefore the PrC blackguard is twink and out.

Never written, nor implied. Evil is a role-playing choice, end of statement and implication. Whether blackguards are "twinkish" or not is irrelevant. There are tons of good-aligned PrCs, access to which makes no difference in whether a player can role-play a good-aligned character or not.

Quote: I remark that this is an excellent idea and look forward to the removal of paladin as a class, since it allows "good character" players more choices while providing no comperable options to the "evil character" player who is expected to make do with dialogue options to express his vile naughtyness.

There just aren't enough evil deities to make up for access to the paladin class? I'd like to see a poll on which was liked more in IWD2: paladin-specific dialogue responses or Dreadmaster/Stormlord dialogue responses. People on our boards certainly seemed to get more satisfaction out of the evil cleric responses.

Quote: It is posited that the paladin isn't really that good anyway, and a decent fighter/clerk should fulfill the role just fine.
I say "yes" and wonder aloud at the notion that the paladin is considered CORE while a similiar choice for the evil player character is considered twink.

A paladin is core because it's one of the core character classes. Blackguards are not core because they are not one of the core character classes. If you want to subjectively wonder in writing about this, the place to do it would be the WotC boards. If the blackguard were simply a twelfth character class, that would be preferrable to having it as a PrC, IMO.