With all this talk and research into the various nuances of sword & sorcery (S&S) gaming I have come to appreciate Castles & Crusades more now than I ever have before. It occurred to me that Troll Lords Games took everything I loved about Dungeons & Dragons and they tweaked it just the way I like it, which is to say that they took a decidedly S&S approach when designing the character classes and their ability to cast spells.
Looking closer at the Bard, Ranger and Paladin as they are presented in C&C it becomes apparent that there was a different design philosophy than that found in D&D. Gone are the spellcasting abilities we have all become accustomed to when playing these classes. In C&C spells are where they need to be – in the capable hands of Wizards, Illusionists, Clerics and Druids.
This low-magic approach to the game design instills a long lost sense of wonder in the player's minds as they interact with arcane and divine magic during their adventures. It also makes C&C the perfect platform for S&S gaming. I have had to do little in the way of system tweaking for my current game, which allows me to concentrate more on storytelling and world building.
2 comments:
I can't add much more than "my thoughts exactly". Oddball half-spellcaster classes are always a little finicky and smack of players who just want to be able to do a little bit of everything with their PC and not make any hard choices. I prefer the idea that magic is something that really does require a LOT of your time and effort to understand and isn't something for a dilettante to pick up "on the fly".
And, to be fair, if that's what you're after, digging around on Dragonsfoot.org you can find the "netbook of C&C classes" or whatever it's called; this has a number of classes that do this a la the old 2nd Edition D&D Bard.
I know most old schoolers seem to dislike rangers eventually getting spells, but I never had a problem with it. As far as ranger characters, in my games that for around 20 year were mostly monthly, the rangers never got high enough level for it to matter that much (my players always had two or three favored PC's, so they got lots of rotation).
But for high level ranger NPC's, I liked them to get druid and MU spell use. To me, rangers are a non-spell class that, in the same vane as monks or paladins and whatnot, that it is easy to imagine them gaining a higher level of conciousness and spirituality as the years roll by, and such attunment to nature or whatever would grant spell use.
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