The dwarven Fury

General ACKS Forums House Rules
1

So I’ve run my nearly-all-dwarven campaign for closer up to 3 years now. We’ve had many classes go by, created several new ones too and all that jazz. One class we have been struggling with is the dwarven Fury. Now, your mileage may vary greatly, but the experience we’ve had is that the class is more than a little underwhelming, bad even. With the lack of AC he really has to bank on those mortal wounds rolls going his way, but eventually luck will run out. While many players have loved the idea, the fury in practice has been found very unsatisfactory.

So I’ve set out to fix the Fury all properlike. BTA tried doing this via getting him back up to broad weapons (he was also missing a power in 1e if I’m not mistaken) and putting in spears and polearms, allowing fighting from the second rank to keep him alive. This is somewhat unsatisfactory for a class that’s even named fury, one would hope to go up in the opponents face and second rank spear-poky action feels a little off. I don’t think that’s the correct way to be going about it at all.

So far, what we’ve tried out is:

  1. Switching up to medium armors by reducing the AC-increasing bit of Flesh Runes to zero
  2. Switching out one rank of the AC-increase in favor of very light armor
    And finally,
  3. Switching weapons back to narrow, axes and bludgeons, and with the two powers that are gained this way making Flesh Runes resist extraordinary damage and putting in very light armor proficiency. One could put in a third rank of +AC, too, but I believe this would be a mistake for several reasons. This increases base XP to level 2 to 2700, with corresponding increases later on.

Number three I think is a winner. It adds a little bit of AC, which is crucial to survive level 1 and even greater and has definitely been the Furys great weak point in our games, making him very unliked. Having the AC come from very light armor (of course, modifying the power to allow that, changing wording to non-proficient armor instead of armor) is perhaps better than a third rank of AC bonus because it then does not increase AC to the clouds if one finds bracers of armor. If one had a third rank of +AC, for 3/6/9, with bracers +7 one would be at 16+ at 13th level. With very light armors, one is at 10 with hide armor +3 or 13+ with the same bracers +7.

Resisting extraordinary damage as well is a real improvement, too. The base-fury suffers a lot not just from bad AC, but also from not being that great against big monsters. With resistance to extraordinary damage as well as mundane, he has a lot more of survivability against 5+HD things, which is very fitting, and can survive dragon breaths and all better too. Personally, I think that all fits the class fantasy a lot better than the base version.

2 Likes
2

Some further ramblings. Arguably, the resistance to both types of damage and bigger AC makes him a very tough nut to crack. Cleaves, damage bonus, survivability too, then. To this, I’d reply “So?”. Going by description, he is supposed to be something of an alternative to Machinist. Now, the Machinist is a class capable of Very Big Bonk, to use exact scientific terms. Damage, range, unkillable SHP-machinery, all that and a bag of potato chips with all the bells and whistles and utility you can do as a machinist, too. So, as an alternative to him, having an absolute chonk of a nigh-unkillable ball of death, droppable in midst of enemies small or large, is not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all in my mind. That it is not perfectly balanced against all options and situations is not a bad thing, seeking perfect balance just leads to a boring game where everything is one and the same. Mind you, the proper unkillability only comes online at 13th level anyway, and on the 7th to a much lesser degree. The -1 on damage per die is very nice, but it’s hardly that powerful is my experience in-game.