[Class] Dwarven Hammerer

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I made this dwarven hammerer class, inspired by both Pathfinder and Warhammer’s dwarves. It’s similar to the fury in that it’s very heavily offensive-focused, but it has some stuff that I find interesting.

I’m not certain about the balance, especially regarding Tempo, but if anyone would like to critique it I may change it.

If I’m reading it correctly, you are allowing the Hammerer to attack a second time on a hit, rather than attack on a kill a kill (cleave).

I waiver between whether this should count as 1 class power or 2 class powers. It’s definitely a reasonable power but it’s a bit more powerful than a 1-slot class power like “laying on hands” or somesuch. Since it cannot cleave, however, the Tempo attack is mostly useful against strong foes against whom the Hammerer would be unlikely to cleave.

Let us know how it plays in test!

Hammerlord? Martial Trance?

I THINK SOMEONE HERE PLAYS DWARF FORTRESS.

That’s correct.

I’m uncertain myself. I had it as two powers before I cut down on the amount of powers the class had (XP cost was ludicrous). I might drop martial trance and count it as being added to Tempo.

I admit nothing!

I like the idea of it, but I have found from allowing a Thrassian in play, that anything that allows extra attacks (especially with full modifiers) quickly overpowers characters who lack such abilities. When a character is 4th+ level and stops fighting low hp enemies very often, this ability will be far more useful than Cleave is. My party is between 7th-9th and Cleave rarely grants more than a single bonus attack.

So that would be my hesitation.

Frankly, I wish Fighters did get bonus attacks at higher level.

I’ll bet if you more or less directly lifted multi-attack from 3.x, fighter-types still wouldn’t overshadow magic users at high levels.

  1. No moving, you have to dedicate the full action to attacking. This may or may not preclude the 5’ per cleave that you’re entitled to.

  2. One extra attack for every 6 points your attack throw is improved by. fighting types would get an extra attack at 9, thief/cleric types at 12, mage-types never.

alternate 2) since fighting types in 3.x get +1 BAB every level, you could instead give an extra attack for every 2 full progressions of attack throw improvement (so 6 levels for fighters, 8 for cleric/thieves, 12 for mages). This would result in the fighter-types getting 3 attacks at level 12.

Ostensibly, the damage bonus fighting types get is suppose to help close the gap against powerful foes, but generally speaking +1 damage every 3 levels is going to get quickly outstripped by the 3HD (average 13.5 HP) and additional 15% chance to hit a similarly rated foe would gain. Then again, said foe is also worth substantially more XP, so maybe it balances out.

No they certainly wouldn’t. Interestingly, while I’m not a big fan of the no multi-attack and move in 3.x, I think it might be a better fit here.

I’d be tempted to give fighters an extra attack at 4th (hero) and 8th (super-hero) and maybe none to clerics or thieves. Cleric’s have spells and thieves, with acrobatics plus a spell or the right magic item essentially do 5-30+ mods every swing (thanks to back stab). I’m not sure they need an extra attack! :smiley:

the problem with backstab is that it’s very situational and dependant on the GM how often the thief gets to do it, and often they have to put themselves at great risk to pull it off. In my games, I tend to run a lot of adventures other people have written with adapted ACKs stats, and run the stealth rules as written. The end result is that after about 3 years of play by post we’ve seen maybe 2 or 3 total backstabs employed. Even when I’ve tried to use NPC thieves/assassins, it tends to backfire more often than work.

I like the look of the class, I might add it to the list for the setting/ hex crawl I’m working up for my group. There’s a formatting/text error in the paragraph where you talk about the vault building. You forgot to switch out fury for hammerer in the last sentence.

Interesting… In my campaigns our Thieves and Assassins are crazy backstabbing murder machines.

I suspect this has a lot to do with the sort of opponents that you put against your party.

When I run I typically have higher-level parties encountering a mix of higher-level monsters and literal HORDES of low-level monsters, often in mixed groups. So the fighter ability to cleave is impressively awesome.

But if as fighters advance in level they fight small numbers of high-HD monsters than the cleave becomes much less valuable.

it may have been the people who were playing the thieves/assassins, they were generally afraid of reprisal if they were to get caught out of position.

Still, even using NPCs it didn’t go well. I sent a band of thieves to ambush the party while they set up camp. I rolled for distance, then rolled hide-in-shadows/move-silenty/surprise where appropriate according to the rules . In almost every instance, the party’s watch was alerted due to a failed roll long before the thieves were even close.

In our party, our assassin hench just wears full plate and is a fighter for all intents, and our thief carries an arbalest and generally fights start when he leaps out of his hiding place to annihilate something. In one instance the party fought an orc village and he popped their pet ogre and their shaman with one shot. (We’ve been playing that cleave-attacks are made with all the same bonuses and penalties as the original, which makes lances and sneak attacks very nasty)