TSR-East Classes: Ninja

Ah, the ninja. Staple of many 80's* cheesy movies, video games, and comic books! Oh, how we love thee! The question with the ninja is not one of describing what a ninja IS to the player. It's capturing what a ninja DOES in game mechanics. And the fact that ninja can be masters of stealth and martial arts, hordes of faceless and easily dispatch-able mooks, mystical badasses, or even in an earlier age of the internet guitar-shredding decapitating madmen.

*and 70's, 90's, 00's, 10's...

For my take on the ninja (round 5 since I've already done four versions in Chanbara!), I modified the Halfling class. It's a bit of a power-up over the traditional Halfling. No weapon restrictions, they can rise above 8th level, I increased their indoor hide chance a bit, gave them Dwarf trap/sliding wall detection and Elf secret door detection, and Thief's backstab! What do they give up for that? Heavy armor (plate equivalent) and shields, bonuses to hit with ranged weapons and AC vs larger than man-sized creatures. Oh, and their saving throws don't improve quite as fast, but they're still good (equal to the Dwarf/Hwarang). Actually, I might change that, and put them back at Thief saves since they do have some nice extra powers over the Halfling. I'll think about it.

Here is the Ninja:

Ninja (Spy) AKA Cìkè, Amsalja, Shinobi

Requirement: Con 9

Prime Requisite: Dex [13 +5%, 16 +10%]

Hit Die: d6 to 9^th level, +2/level after

Arms: all weapons, medium armor

Special Abilities: stealth, perception, backstab

Ninja Advancement
Level	XP	BAB	Abilities
1	0	+1	Stealth, Perception, Backstab
2	2000	+1
3	4000	+1
4	8000	+3
5	16,000	+3	Backstab x3
6	32,000	+3
7	64,000	+5
8	120,000	+5
9	240,000	+5
10	360,000	+7	Backstab x4
11	480,000	+7
12	600,000	+7
13	720,000	+9
14	840,000	+9
15	960,000	+9	Backstab x5

Stealth: A ninja can conceal themselves when out of doors 1-9/d10. Indoors, they can hide 1-3/d6. They may not move while hiding without giving away their position.

Perception: A ninja has a chance to detect traps 1-3/d6, secret doors or sliding passages 1-2/d6, and hear faint noises 1-2/d6.

Backstab: A ninja that surprises an opponent or attacks from hiding gets a +4 bonus to the attack, and deals double damage if successful. The damage increases at 5^th, 10^th, and 15^th level as shown on the Ninja Advancement chart.

	Hwarang, Ninja
Save Level:	1-3	4-6	7-9	10-12	13-15
Death Ray/Poison	10	8	6	4	2
Magic Wand	11	9	7	5	3
Paralysis/Turn to Stone	12	10	8	6	4
Dragon Breath	15	13	11	9	7
Rod/Staff/Spell	13	12	10	8	6

Mentzer Basic Cover to Cover: The Halfling

How terrible I am, making you all wait over a month to hear my thoughts on the Halfling class as presented in Frank Mentzer's red box Basic Set!  Hopefully you found at least some of my posts about non-D&D RPGs interesting.  I know a few were duds since I didn't have much to post about for a couple of questions, but c'est la vie.  Anyway, on with the show, this is it!

What do we learn about Halflings?  First of all, we're given a very Hobbit-y description of the little guys.  Outgoing but not especially brave, love creature comforts, friendly with Elves.  Interesting how Dragonlance Kender, being immune to fear, have influenced Halflings in more recent editions to be less prone to fear effects than other races.

As for advice on how to play the class, we're told to act like a Fighter (so read up on that class for advice), and remember to use the special abilities as often as possible.  We're also explicitly told here that Halflings get good saving throws so they're more likely to survive spells, poison, etc.  Actually, looking back to check, Dwarves are explicitly listed as being "resistant" to special effects as reflected in their saving throws.  I think I missed that in my Dwarf post. 

Touchberry.  Name ring a bell?  It's the sample character name in the little description of using your level title.  "I'm Touchberry the Warrior."  Sounds scary, huh?  Maybe if you're playing "Perverts and Penthouses."  Ever since I first saw that name as an 11-year old, I've always giggled at it.  New challenge for myself - play a Halfling named Touchberry while keeping a straight face about the name at all times.

Something that's been hidden in the rules that I never really noticed before.  Halflings are more likely to advance faster than Fighters.  If you roll 3d6 in order or roll and place, either way, you are more likely to get a Prime Requisite bonus as a Halfling, and they advance on the same numbers.  Fighters must have a 13 Strength for a 5% bonus, 16 Str for a 10% bonus.  Not so hard to get if you roll and place as desired, at least for the 5% bonus, but especially if you roll down the line that 16 Str can be elusive.  For Halflings, they need EITHER 13 Str or 13 Dex to get a 5% bonus, and if both are 13+ they get a 10% bonus.  Much easier to roll a pair of 13s or higher than to roll a single 16 on a 3d6 roll or a 4d6-L roll.  Halflings are the only class in Basic that doesn't need a 16 to get a 10% PR bonus.

For weapon restrictions, we get a fairly vague set of limits.  We're told of a few weapons they definitely can use (dagger, short sword, short bow) and a few they definitely can't (two-handed swords, battle axes, pole arms, longbows) and just a vague "and other large weapons."  What about the normal sword?  Is it in or out?  How about a spear?  If 6' humans can wield 14' long pikes, surely a 3' Halfling could use a 5' spear?  It's up to DM judgment, but at this stage, we're assuming the DM doesn't have much experience on which to make that judgment.  As we played it back in the day, Halflings were fairly limited in weaponry.

Halfling special abilities are pretty cool.  They get some nice combat bonuses (AC bonus vs. large creatures, bonus with missile weapons of all sorts, individual initiative bonus).  The AC bonus is very nice considering Halflings can wear plate & shield for armor.  The slightly lower hit die compared to Fighters and Dwarves, however, makes them slightly less optimal as giant-killers, though. 

Hiding is an awesome ability.  In the wilds, you are basically always wearing an elven cloak.  Even in dungeons, Halflings can Hide in Shadows better than a low level Thief, although Halflings suffer the restriction of not being able to move, and having magical light sources spoil the chance.

Basically, Halflings are the Ranger class of Basic D&D.

Movie Review - The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

My wife and I dropped off our son at his grandparents' house this morning and went to an early showing of The Hobbit.  We saw it in 48fps (no choice, a buddy in Japan told me it's only available in standard 24fps there) 2D.  We considered IMAX, but it was IMAX 3D and we are not (as you'd probably guess if you read most of my movie reviews) not fans of 3D, especially for a three hour movie. 

Standard Warning:  Due to the title of this blog, I get lots of web search hits from people wanting to know if there are "curse words" in movies I've reviewed.  Rest assured, parental unit types, this is from Tolkien so there are no curse words in the movie.  That said, this is also from Peter Jackson so there are plenty of lopped off body parts (the reason our 4-year-old stayed behind).

Now on to the review.  I doubt this will be spoiler free, because I assume most of my readership has read the book.  But we'll see.  If I get to the end and didn't spoil anything, I'll delete these sentences.

Did you like Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies?  I sure did.  Yes, they don't follow the books as closely as they could even considering the liberties that need to be taken to transfer a book to film.  If you liked LotR, you'll get more of the same from The Hobbit (at least from this first part). 

Technical stuff first.  The 48fps took a bit of adjusting to.  At first, there were lots of fast camera sweeps and the high frame rate made them very blurry, but my eyes seemed to adjust after a little while.  The images were - how to best describe it? - crisper than a normal 24fps movie.  I wonder if this will indeed become the new standard or not.  It might require higher CGI budgets for romantic comedies to hide all the little blemishes on the actors and actresses! 

The cinematography was gorgeous.  Again, very similar to LotR.  A few locations "in the wild" even seemed like some of the locations from LotR (of course The Shire, Rivendell, and the road between did cover the same path).  The amazing New Zealand landscapes alone make it worth the price of admission IMO.  The fact that we're getting Professor Tolkien's works put up on the big screen in a loving manner is just icing on the cake (OK, hyperbole there, the landscapes are the icing on the Tolkien cake).

Some people have complained that there are too many dwarves and that they aren't all distinguishable.  Well, I say read the book.  Ask me to tell you about the dwarves in The Hobbit (the book) and I can tell you off the top of my head on any given day:
Thorin is the pompous ass
Balin is the resourceful and sensible one
Filli and Killi are the young brash ones who seem to do all the work
Bombur is the fat one
Gloin is... um, Gimli's dad
The rest are there...
Now, as for the fact that many of the dwarves don't look like typical dwarves, this is a good thing!  These dwarves seemed more real by not all having long ZZ Top style beards.  Just like the actors playing hobbits were more or less as varied as typical humans (counting all the extras in Hobbiton in LotR), we see that dwarves are "people" even if they aren't human. 

Now, on to the story.  It's good.  It more or less sticks to the book, and I can see why certain changes were made for the screen.  The pacing was good for an action movie, but this is one of the movie's failings, I think.  The Hobbit is not an action story, it's an adventure story.  PJ added in lots of extra fighting to make it "more exciting" but that's not the sort of story Tokien told.  The Hobbit (the book) really shows JRRT's fondness for Haggard's Alan Quatermain stories.  The basic pacing is travel-explore-action.  By splitting the story into three parts, they felt the need to ramp up the action.  Likely they would have ramped up the action anyway, but if they'd kept it to one or two movies, they could have condensed to just the action scenes if that's the way they wanted it played out.  Oh well, the movie's not perfect, but it was still pretty good.

One good thing about stretching the movie out was that they were able to include some unnecessary but cool scenes, like for instance the Stone Giants.  Of course, PJ kinda overdid it, but it was fun to watch.  Reminiscent of the Moria staircase. 

Another thing they could have done away with was the frame story, with old Bilbo telling Frodo about how Smaug came to Erebor, which is of course shown with Bilbo's narration over it.  Cool, and they kept Smaug mostly off camera - gotta build up excitement for the next installment! - but since we learn all of that stuff in the story as Bilbo learns it, it was kinda unnecessary. 

Some of the other additions, like making Azog the Orc actively hunting down Thorin and Co. and the scenes involving Radagast the Brown and his jack rabbit sled adds more of a sense of continuity for those unfamiliar with the book, I suppose.  It also allows for more fight scenes.  I'm sure that when we get to The Battle of Five Armies and the White Council's battle with the Necromancer, these now apparently extraneous set-ups will pay off.

Despite the flaws, the movie was exciting, beautiful, funny, and moving.  And it's not even a complete story!  While it ended at a fairly good place to end action-wise, with the party just past the Misty Mountains on the borders of Wilderland, as far as the emotional development/character arcs go, it was sort of a lukewarm ending. 

I really enjoyed this first chapter of The Hobbit.  And as I said above, if you enjoyed PJ's take on Middle-Earth in the Lord of the Rings movies, you should enjoy this.  If you didn't like PJ's LotR, you likely won't enjoy this one either.  As for me, Dec. 2013 and "The Desolation of Smaug" can't come soon enough!

Black Hobbits for Jeff

Jeff Rients has another awesome post about his recent gaming here. The title of his post immediately made me think of this...



Even though the post is about something a bit different, I still felt like whipping up this nifty pic in The Gimp and sharing.