What do the three creatures in the title of this post have in common, apart from alliteration?
OK, they're all awesome. What ELSE do they have in common?
They're all in the advanced "add-on"s to Pathfinder, that's what. Today, the good people at Paizo released the free "playtest" version of the "Ultimate Combat" guide, which includes a bunch of new archetypes for existing character classes, as well as three new classes. I will talk briefly about this in a moment.
Lets start with the drunken dwarves though - they appear all the time in fantasy. Seriously, if you don't know about dwarves, then you probably shouldn't be reading this post, since it will reach levels of geek that you won't be able to handle, and I'd rather not have you injure yourself on my account.
Anyway, I've never played anything from the add-ons of Pathfinder - instead focusing on the core rules. This is due to being new to the whole tabletop thing, and I'd rather get used to it before trying to add crazy stuff into it.
I kind of regret this decision, because of the utterly insane and hilarious stuff that is in the add-ons. Including the aforementioned drunks.
In the Advanced Player's Guide, there is an archetype of the Monk class, called the "Drunken Master". If you are imagining the Jackie Chan film, mayhaps the drunken master attacks of that guy from Dead or Alive, you'd be right.
Once my current PF campaign is over, and Andrew relieves me of the GMing duties, I will be playing a Dwarven Drunken Master.
At level 19, the Drunken Master has the ability to breathe fire. On the condition that they have recently drunk some booze. A task which is likely to not be difficult for a dwarf.
And said fire deals ridiculous amounts of damage. 20d6, to be exact. For the layman here, take a regular dice, the one you use to play Monopoly. That is a d6 (named so for the fact that it is a die, and has 6 sides). Roll that 20 times. That is how many hit points of damage I have just dealt, by breathing fire.
Fire breathing dwarf - GO!
The new classes in the "Ultimate Combat" guide are the Gunslinger, Ninja and Samurai. Admittedly, I have not had much of an opportunity to read these properly, due to, you know, having a job, but I have had a brief glance (couldn't resist), and they seem hilarious.
Gunslingers have guns. In a fantasy world, this is rare and expensive. And not particularly reliable. The gun can, actually, if you fail badly enough EXPLODE on you. This does take multiple failures, but it can happen.
The gunslinger's main power comes through a mechanic called "Grit" - they earn grit daily, and expend it to perform special attacks. They also regenerate grit by being crazy buggers.
If a gunslinger decides to slide down a banister, shooting at enemies while facing certain death, and more importantly SUCCEEDS, they regain grit points which allow them to do more crazy things. So I imagine the gunslinger to be a fantasy based version of Dante, out of Devil May Cry.
As for ninjas, well, they're ninjas. What can I say? They share the ki pool mechanic of the Monk... and that's about all I've read. I had no time to look at the Samurai, but it could be interesting.
I suddenly want to play much more Pathfinder. Maybe I should kidnap Mark so that we can play...
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