No Assassin profession?

[midway]

Hey, I have the MRQ Elric main book, been a fan of the Moorcock books and the old Chaosium game for some time (esp. SB1).

I love the enthusiasm and the obvious care that Loz has used to write the MRQ Elric. He clearly loves the source material and does his best to hew close to it. His presence in these forums has been very helpful too.

However, there have been a few little things that have struck me as odd about MRQ Elric. I'll post about each separately for brevity's sake, and ask for the thoughts of any here as to where I may be off-base.

No Assassin profession?
In one of the novels, I think Bane of the Black Sword, in which Elric is hired to kill Nikorn, at one point he and Moonglum are set upon by assassins, identifiable as such by their black hoods. That is sword and sorcery type awesomeness.

Yet in MRQ Elric there is no assassin profession for the player? There's "Spy," though to me it's not quite the same thing.

And in MRQ Elric you can be something called a "Ranger." I don't recall any Aragorn type dudes in the Saga. Is it in Skrayling Tree or something? You can play a "Ranger," armed with "Throwing Stars" (honest to God this is in the equipment list)!

What do you folks think? Am I missing the point?

 

[Loz]

Assasins are being fully dealt with in Cults of the Young Kingdoms. Assassins are simply very good killers; its quite possible to design such a character without any profession template. But as Bakshaan's Mereghn are getting full coverage in the Cults book, there'll be detailed stuff on assasins to be found there.

A Ranger is any kind of scout/tracker/woodsmen type. I didn't design that character profession; it featured in Hawkmoon and got carried across.

Those are the answers; they're not deliberate oversights - just anomalies, neither of which are very hard to circumvent.

 

[havercake lad]

A Ranger isn't necessarily a heroic warrior of Arnor !!
Outside fantasy fiction and 19th Century Texas lawmen and military specialists the word once meant a keeper of a Royal forest or Park.
I would imagine many of the Young Kingdoms would have such an institution. Given the draconian laws criminals would be desperate men and rangers would need to be hardbitten and woodwise to successfully apprehend them.

 

[midway]

I like this idea of assassins being part of a cult. I'll check out that cults book when it comes out.

Thank you!

 

[Loz]

More a society than a cult, but you get my drift...!

 

[GbajiTheDeceiver]

It might have been more helpful if they hadn't been called "Professions" - in RQ your "profession" (lower-case P) is what you did before becoming an adventurer, and nothing more. It has no bearing on development post-chargen.

 

[soltakss]

It might have been more helpful if they hadn't been called "Professions" - in RQ your "profession" (lower-case P) is what you did before becoming an adventurer, and nothing more. It has no bearing on development post-chargen.

I'm sick and tired of hearing that one sometimes.

Sure, your profession may have been something you did before you became an adventurer, but a lot of the times it is still what you do. A soldier is still a soldier, a priest is still a priest, a scholar is still a scholar.

You can still retain your profession with no problem at all, most of the time.

The itinerant adventurer is definitely in the minority, culturally if not from a gaming point of view.

So, let us play doctors, scholars and even assassins if we want to . They are honourable professions after all.

 

[Magistus]

I'm sick and tired of hearing that one sometimes.

Sure, your profession may have been something you did before you became an adventurer, but a lot of the times it is still what you do. A soldier is still a soldier, a priest is still a priest, a scholar is still a scholar.

You can still retain your profession with no problem at all, most of the time.

The itinerant adventurer is definitely in the minority, culturally if not from a gaming point of view.

So, let us play doctors, scholars and even assassins if we want to . They are honourable professions after all.

Honestly not everyone started out even as a soldier. I always liked to think of the professions as, what was it your parents did and were having you did before your adult adventuring life.

 

[GbajiTheDeceiver]

It might have been more helpful if they hadn't been called "Professions" - in RQ your "profession" (lower-case P) is what you did before becoming an adventurer, and nothing more. It has no bearing on development post-chargen.

I'm sick and tired of hearing that one sometimes.

Sure, your profession may have been something you did before you became an adventurer, but a lot of the times it is still what you do. A soldier is still a soldier, a priest is still a priest, a scholar is still a scholar.

You can still retain your profession with no problem at all, most of the time.

The itinerant adventurer is definitely in the minority, culturally if not from a gaming point of view.

So, let us play doctors, scholars and even assassins if we want to . They are honourable professions after all.

I would tend to both agree and disagree. Maintaining a profession requires a degree of responsibility and commitment. It would certainly be possible to construct a very enjoyable game around that, but my original point was that it's by no means a hard and fast requirement. The archetypal wandering vagabond would certainly not be in any position to maintain a "profession" of Soldier (I believe "desertion" is the term here) and could certainly make a very functional assassin if developed along the right lines.

 

[DirkD]

Luckily it's so easy to design new professions, that this isn't a big issue in my opinion. It's not D&D where you have to carefully calculate powers for 20 levels and where it's hard to see all the combinations of feats, spells and class-powers.

If you want to have an assassin profession, just make one yourself. Look what other similar professions get and tweak it a little bit. You can divide 50% on your skills (an advanced skill counts as 10).

If I would make an assassin it would be like this: Look what spy, thief and soldier get and tweak it a little bit. I think perception, stealth and one weapon are important and so I would give them 10%. If you want to be an assassin, you probably need a way to get to your target - either by breaking in, disguising yourself or finding to best place to get to him - so I would give the choice of an advanced skill Disguise, Mechanisms or Streetwise. That leaves room for two 5% skills that seem appropriate - I chose Acrobatics and persistence. The complete profession looks like this:

Assassin
Basic: Acrobatics +5%, Perception +10%, Persistence +5%, Stealth +10%, Pick one at 10% from: Bow, Crossbow, Dagger, 1H Sword
Advanced: Pick One: Disguise, Mechanisms, Streetwise

That may not be exactly what you want, so just pick a different skill or tweak the percentages a little. If you don't go extremely high, there is not a big chance that you will upset any game-balance or create an Uber-profession.

 

[midway]

Nice, DirkD -

That's highly appropriate. Pretty much what I'd expected to see when I skimmed through the core book.