Playable Character Types

[Videopete]

Pendragon is one of the best fantasy RPGs available as mentioned by every one who has played it.  With 6th edition coming down the pipe line there is often a point of contention that gets brought up.  That is "what if I don't want to play a Knight?"  4th edition from what I could see had many options.  Saxons, Irish pagans, Picts, Magicians, and of course Ladies.  5th edition had Knights and Ladies.  It alluded to possible magicians but no published material ever came about.  So what will 6th Edition bring.  Ready we know that Passions and traits are being over.hauled. and a possible magic system for players that's more than "magic" spooky fingers.

 

So what do you hope for?

[TrippyHippy]

Well, Greg Stafford went to great pains to re-establish the focus of the game towards playing Knights and Ladies when he did the 5th edition. In interviews at the time, he felt that 4th Edition had lost its focus as a game because it tried to expand into other options. 

I think that the core of the game should remain focussed on playing Knights and Ladies, and will most likely do so as they expand the GPC as the main supplemental support. After that point, they could expand into other options. There has already been suggested that there could be a spinoff game for playing Arthurian magicians for example. 

 

[Morien]

13 minutes ago, TrippyHippy said:

There has already been suggested that there could be a spinoff game for playing Arthurian magicians for example. 

An actual spinoff game? You are not just talking about Codex Mirabilis that allows for magician player characters?

4 hours ago, Videopete said:

4th edition from what I could see had many options.  Saxons, Irish pagans, Picts, Magicians, and of course Ladies.  5th edition had Knights and Ladies.

Slightly misleading. 4th edition did allow Saxons, Irish and Picts (and Occitan and Romans, in addition to the Cymric default), however all of those were still knights (or ladies). The 5th edition Book of Knights and Ladies not only has all of those but more besides, all the way from the darkest North (Danes) to the easternly east (Byzantines and Zazamancs/Saracens/Persians). Not only that, unlike 4th edition that has those different nationalities for 531 start, BoK&L has different starting skills for early periods and late periods for the 'Big Six': Cymri, Roman, Irish, Saxon, Pict and Aquitanian (formerly Occitan).

 

[TrippyHippy]

2 hours ago, Morien said:

An actual spinoff game? You are not just talking about Codex Mirabilis that allows for magician player characters?

Could be that. I cannot recall the name, just that it was mentioned that there would be some upcoming book that was based on playing magician characters. Considering that the core game doesn’t allow magician games currently, I’d regard it as a spinoff game.

[Morien]

I would not consider Codex Mirabilis a spinoff game, more of an add-on.

[TrippyHippy]

9 hours ago, Morien said:

I would not consider Codex Mirabilis a spinoff game, more of an add-on.

Well, it's a point of semantics really. I think to get it right, and authentic feeling, any game involving playing magicians in the Pendragon world is going to quite different to playing Knights.

Edited April 30, 2021 by TrippyHippy

[Voord 99]

When one talks about default Pendragon only having one type of character, that’s true in a sense, but I think sometimes people perhaps look at it from  the perspective of other games, and treat knight as a sort of character class, or template, or playbook, or whatever the game calls it.  

That’s not quite right — knight is a secular social position, not just a set of competencies.  It’s a position that (especially early on) is filled by heavily-armoured cavalry warriors, but not all people who are heavily-armoured cavalry warriors are knights, even those who are of noble birth.  (In the later Middle Ages, an awful lot of professional cavalry soldiers of noble birth chose to spend their entire military careers as esquires, in Pendragon terms, because knighting was horribly expensive.  Militarily, the main distinction of a knight at that point was that only knights could be commanders.)   Pendragon is a game about a certain level of society, and it does not accommodate all that easily people who do not move in knightly circles.

That can be expanded readily enough — ladies, esquires, clergy all rub shoulders with knights.  If one reoriented the game towards court intrigue, one could have a game with a wide range of different types of people, and I think even a default game could benefit from having more detailed support for such familiar figures in a knight’s world.  You could also have esquires as PCs in a fairly normal Pendragon game without changing too much except for the romance assumption that only knights are heroes.  Alternatively, a very combat-oriented game about gritty medieval warfare could break with the default assumption that the game is about noble society, and feature not only esquires but commoner professional soldiers.

However,I think one might wonder whether, if taken beyond a certain point, such options would really benefit from the Arthurian setting — realistically, the romance tradition is not about those sorts of things very much, and one of the great things about Pendragon is that it mixes a realistic-ish medieval English knight simulator with non-realistic romance material, meaning that there’s a lot of variety in the game experience.

 

Edited May 1, 2021 by Voord 99

[Morien]

10 hours ago, TrippyHippy said:

Well, it's a point of semantics really. I think to get it right, and authentic feeling, any game involving playing magicians in the Pendragon world is going to quite different to playing Knights.

Depends. Sure, if all the player-characters are magicians, it will by necessity have a very different feel from the default KAP. But if it is more of a case of a single magician player-character acting more as a quest-guide role (a role also often filled by ladies) or as a support character (ditto), then the campaign would play out almost the same. Perhaps a bit more supernatural adventures, but those already exist in the published adventures, as does magic, for instance the Tournament of Dreams.

However, if you play, say, Paladin, you are not going to be playing the GPC, full stop. That is the difference in my mind. It is not the same setting, the same period of the game world. Hence Paladin is a spinoff, but something like Beyond the Wall, Saxons!, Land of Giants or Pagan Shores are add-ons. All those four introduce different societies and settings from the default rulebook, but they co-exist in the GPC world, and while you can run a regional campaign that is pretty much totally divorced from the Arthurian saga, you don't have to. Now if someone were to come up with, say, Beowulf (Land of Giants gets close) or Nibelungenlied that would focus solely on those stories and societies and would have a campaign set there, without any connection to the Arthurian world, then I would call them spin-off games. Or if you take Saxons! and fast-forward it to 9th century with the Vikings (the new "Saxons") and Alfred the Great (the new "Arthur" stand-in), then yes, that is a spin-off game. As it is, though, Saxons! is so connected to the KAP timeline and happenings that it is not its own separate GAME, it is simply looking at the same setting from the different side. Just like in the Old D&D, you had Mystara with its Gazetteer series detailing one country after another, with their own little quirks and societies, and those didn't make them spin-off games. Hmm. Maybe a good definition is if the characters made in one supplement interact and crossover with characters from another supplement, it is an add-on. Whereas if they cannot (without invoking magic or time-travel or dimensional hopping), then they are separate games. Although in AD&D you had the same game and simply different campaign worlds. Same thing is true with GURPS: same ruleset, just multiple different campaign settings.

Anyway, just wanted to explain where I was coming from with these definitions. 🙂

[Tizun Thane]

On 4/30/2021 at 5:32 AM, Videopete said:

That is "what if I don't want to play a Knight?"  4th edition from what I could see had many options. 

To be honest, I never understood this specific question. When you are playing a game about super-heroes, you play a super-hero. When you are playing a game about cops, you are playing... cops. Not criminals. Not civilians. cops. You get my point.

KAP is a game about knights during arthurian's times. There is no room for a cunning thief, a bard, a barbarian for the frozen wastes, a wizard and only one knight. It is not a D&D game (happily).

[SirUkpyr]

Pendragon is about playing a Knight (or a Lady) in the time of King Arthur.

Had a player who wanted to be a Hun. Introduced the PC (note not "PK") as a captive from the Roman Campaign, who served one of the PKs as a warrior, and who eventually became knighted.

Another player wanted to be a Viking, and introduced that PC when he arrived at Badon after escaping being a slave to the Saxons - and was knighted for his valour at that battle.

It is a game about playing a Knight (or a Lady) in the time of King Arthur. If you want to play something else, then play a different game.