Dusk Raven
2017-12-07, 02:57 AM
While 3.5 has a Samurai class, presented in Complete Warrior, it's terrible. As I once read, likely on TVTropes, "A Fighter can do all things a Samurai can do, while simultaneously doing a lot of other things the Samurai can't."
However, if I am to run a 3.5 Oriental Adventures campaign, I'd like to be able to have a class for samurai to be, especially since the party would benefit greatly from having a member of the setting's nobility. To that end, I got an idea - what if the Knight class could be tweaked and reflavored as a Samurai?
Now, I realize the Knight doesn't rank much more highly in terms of Tiers -- martial melee classes seem to end up rather low on the Tier list, sadly -- so I don't actually know what it does well or what it does poorly. I can only go off of what I can glean from reading the class abilities -- and I at least appreciate what they were going for with the Knight, unlike CW's Samurai.
The reason I put this thread here instead of, say, the general 3.X forum is because I'd like to tweak and rebalance it a little, both to fit an Oriental Adventures setting and to make it a little better and more appealing, rather than just calling a Knight a Samurai and then calling it good. My suggestions so far:
-Change Fort saves from poor to good. Seriously, how does a class have d12 hit dice and poor Fort saves?
-Swap out Mounted Combat as a given feat, but add it to the list of bonus feats a Samurai can choose to take (more on that later). Instead, Samurai get Ancestral Relic as a bonus feat at 2nd level, Ancestral Relic being essentially the 3.5 version of an ability OA Samurai got -- which was an idea I really liked.
-Remove the Shield Block ability, and replace it with something else - possibly the Kiai Smite ability, which was the one ability the CW Samurai had that I thought was interesting.
-For the bonus feats that Samurai can choose from, add Mounted Combat. Also replace Weapon Focus (lance) with Weapon Focus (bastard sword), the bastard sword being what a katana counts as in D&D terms. One could probably pull a list of other feats to add to that list as well, given how many sourcebooks there are. Alternatively, one could come up with a series of feat lists divided into different clans like how the Samurai bonus feats worked in OA, or simply have it so that the bonus feats the Knight chooses are from the list of Fighter bonus feats.
That's all I've got for now, a few tweaks to some of the existing features I felt were more appropriate for western knights and not Japanese samurai. Agreements, disagreements? Any tweaks to the Knight's Code or other abilities that might make it fit better?
However, if I am to run a 3.5 Oriental Adventures campaign, I'd like to be able to have a class for samurai to be, especially since the party would benefit greatly from having a member of the setting's nobility. To that end, I got an idea - what if the Knight class could be tweaked and reflavored as a Samurai?
Now, I realize the Knight doesn't rank much more highly in terms of Tiers -- martial melee classes seem to end up rather low on the Tier list, sadly -- so I don't actually know what it does well or what it does poorly. I can only go off of what I can glean from reading the class abilities -- and I at least appreciate what they were going for with the Knight, unlike CW's Samurai.
The reason I put this thread here instead of, say, the general 3.X forum is because I'd like to tweak and rebalance it a little, both to fit an Oriental Adventures setting and to make it a little better and more appealing, rather than just calling a Knight a Samurai and then calling it good. My suggestions so far:
-Change Fort saves from poor to good. Seriously, how does a class have d12 hit dice and poor Fort saves?
-Swap out Mounted Combat as a given feat, but add it to the list of bonus feats a Samurai can choose to take (more on that later). Instead, Samurai get Ancestral Relic as a bonus feat at 2nd level, Ancestral Relic being essentially the 3.5 version of an ability OA Samurai got -- which was an idea I really liked.
-Remove the Shield Block ability, and replace it with something else - possibly the Kiai Smite ability, which was the one ability the CW Samurai had that I thought was interesting.
-For the bonus feats that Samurai can choose from, add Mounted Combat. Also replace Weapon Focus (lance) with Weapon Focus (bastard sword), the bastard sword being what a katana counts as in D&D terms. One could probably pull a list of other feats to add to that list as well, given how many sourcebooks there are. Alternatively, one could come up with a series of feat lists divided into different clans like how the Samurai bonus feats worked in OA, or simply have it so that the bonus feats the Knight chooses are from the list of Fighter bonus feats.
That's all I've got for now, a few tweaks to some of the existing features I felt were more appropriate for western knights and not Japanese samurai. Agreements, disagreements? Any tweaks to the Knight's Code or other abilities that might make it fit better?