I am planning out my Wylderland campaign and I had a couple of classes I wanted to build. I sat down with my books this evening and tried to give it a go. The class is not based on any of the races in the players companion, so I am going free-form and this is where I am getting lost. The race is pretty much a Half Orc, in the setting the evil empire crossbred humans with the mountain orcs and eventually abandoned the project. The children eventually grew up hating the empire and became this world’s version of the Mongols.
The first difficulty was I wanted them to have a D10 hit die and the fighter ability. This comes out to 5 build points. As I read further even demi humans can still only have 4 points for hit die and fighting ability. As I went further the demi human builds were based on the established races. I know I am over thinking this as I have built races for DCC and basic D&D. I want to stay to the guidelines, but it is not letting build what I need. I am not trying to build a munchkin class, but I am confused at where to go with this. Any help would be great.
You could base it on the Thrassian, which boosts fighting value based on Thrassian value. If you did something like Fighting 1, HD 3, Thrassian 2, that would get you an effective fighting of 2 with HD of 3.
I was thinking of trying that, but I was hoping that there might be a way to create classes without having to re-skin the standard races. The Other race are trolls inspired by Earthdawn… So far i am thinking that might be difficult. Thank you for the quick response… I am finding I am like ACKS more and more these days. It can’t replace my passion for DCC, but I want to use this over my beloved B/X in my next campaign.
I don’t understand what you mean about re-skinning the standard races: having points of race X translate to points in build category Y is perfectly normal, and you can use that trick without feeling like it’s just “re-skinning” the lizardmen.
I guess what I am trying to say is I had hoped there was rules for designing unique races. It is not a difficult task to just make assumptions and get creative, but since the authors took the time to create a system I wanted to use it. The book has given me a lot of tools to work with, i just need to be creative. I looked at this method as a “Balanced” way to design classes, so this is why I wanted to be sure I was not misreading the rules.
If you search the forum, there is a place where Alex talks about the math involved in making a race. It’s not in the book itself, but it does exist. The short form is that you figure out the races perks that they get at Race-0. Each ‘custom power’ or Prof is added together, minus any negatives the race has. Subtract one. Multiply by 40 then round to nearest 50 (or so, slightly more to it than that). This is your base Race-0 cost. Add this + Build Bonuses to get Race 1, 2, etc costs.
For example…if your race had like 5 points of custom abilities their Race-0 would end up being 5-1=4*40=160 rounded down to 150.
Orc 0=150
Orc 1 (as above + Fighting 1)=650
Orc 2 (as above + Fighting 2)=1150
etc, etc.