Short one today - a goofy broken class for all of your campaign-ruining needs.
I've been occasionally running an open table Barrowmaze game for my friends (mostly 5e players) using a kitbashed Black Hack ruleset. I'm going to speak more on this campaign in another post, because our struggles and successes are actually kind of revealing regarding clashing play cultures and the potential for crossover, I think.
I picked TBH for a few reasons - the mechanics were broadly familiar to people whose main experience with RPGs was 5e. The conversion was also really simple, which was one of the things I was most worried about when prepping the game. And finally, it was modular, and that made it very easy to add and remove bits so I could experiment with customizing the game. I'm usually really shy about pulling apart systems, and I wanted to nip that in the bud. (Again, more on the results of my efforts in a future post).
One of the bits I was most excited about hacking was classes. I love tinkering with classes, customizable ones, or weird, specific, esoteric ones. I don't know what it is, why I get so worked up over character archetypes, but it scratches some weird obsessive categorization itch in my brain. I'm also not great at it - I know balance is not the end all be all, but I don't want to make things that are absolutely fucking broken. I want my players to feel cool, not godlike. But still, I came up with some things - mostly adaptations and conversions into TBH of other stuff, including Skerples' Many Goblins. If there's an interest, I'll share those sheets. But I did completely homebrew one class - the Fool.
Simulated image of my clown-loving sicko boyfriend <3
My fiancé loves clowns, and there's nothing wrong with that (send help). I knew if I was going to convince him to play in the campaign, I was going to need to incentivize him with Serious Hijinks. So the Fool was born.
TBH classes are pretty strictly templated, which gives you a lot to work off of when you're homebrewing your own. I did find it hard to limit the amount of abilities to match those of the base game. This is a personal failing, mind you - I think my classes ended up kind of overwhelming the player in a supposedly rules light game. But I really wanted to throw together abilities that had the potential to interact with one another, and that actively incentivized a certain playstyle, certain tactics specific to the class.
So here's the Fool, a class all about doing some killer pranks and stunts and likely getting killed yourself in the process. It's very feast or famine by design, and extremely powerful as long as you're in your element. As soon as you're out of your element (or restricted from dancing around like a jackass in any way) you're basically on death's door.
Like I said, probably unbalanced - 3 AV is a lot, even with the caveat that you've got to be at full health and ready to dodge at a moment's notice to use it (to those not familiar with TBH's armor system, every Armor Value you have lets you ignore any instance of damage once). And essentially getting to use your advantaged attribute tests to stunt in place of an attack roll is probably way out of line, but I would hope in practice the inevitable stumble leading to also-inevitable annihilation would fix that up a bit. Unfortunately, the class hasn't seen much play in my game yet, but I may update this post once I have a better idea how it actually works.
What do you think? Is there another way to go about encouraging the reckless, do-or-die playstyle I'm after without making the rewards so juicy?
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