March 29, 2012

One Ring: And then there's tweaking the default archetypes...

In my last post about One Ring, I discussed about how I could tweak the fluff without modifying the crunch-parts one bit.

Well, seems that at least one player in our group convinced the GM to allow him to tweak a bit of the crunch to. Figures it was the bloody elf :D

Now rather than come up with a new background or racial skill set or anything like that, what Caranlas' player did was ask the GM if he could reduce one of the ranks of his starting skills, citing that while Silven Elves start off with a pretty good grasp of battle-tactics, he really didn't see his character has having that kind of battle-savvy, being more of a book-worm and his knowledge of warfare largely limited to a "I studied something about this once" compared to Brander having a practical grasp of such things due to his psuedo-Ranger training. So instead, Caranlas spent the extra points gained to pick up a single rank in other skills that he'd at least have some passing ability with.

I was talking with my friend, and discussed my post on building Brander, and was surprised when he asked me why I didn't ask the GM if I could drop his skill level in Spear and replace it with a skill level in Bow. In retrospect, I almost did, but opted that I wanted the option of a cool spear toss like Eomer pulled in the Return of the King during the Battle of Pelennor Fields when he took down two Mumikul with one spear throw (suck on that, foofy elf-boy!).

Moral of the Post? If you're not entirely happy with the sort of character the default character creation method provides, ask your GM if you do some minor tweaks to better fit your concept. Then again, there can be a fine line between "a slight tweak" and "just re-write the whole thing from scratch," so I'd suggest Loremasters be a tad wary as to just how much "tweaking" they should allow.

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